The Corpse

What is this dead criminal we must carry on our back for an entire night? What is this graveyard in which we must find him? This is Dante's Inferno and Faust's romp with Mephostopheles. This is the time in our life when we must unearth the dead and decaying parts of ourselves so that we may come to terms with them. They hang about us like strange fruit from the tree of death rather than the tree of life and they offer as much surpise as the fruit which bore the gem.

Rose as an 85 year old patient who had cancer. She was a woman whose feeling function had been repressed and who appeared very critical and cranky. She hated her life in a nursing home and did not wish to die there. She would toss doctors and other staff out of her room if they did not listen to her instructions. Everyone was afraid to go into her room. She trusted me and togther we started to unearth the dead parts of her self. One such part involved her best friend when she was in high school. She told her best friend who she was going to ask to the prom. Rose always felt insecure about not having a boyfriend. She did not feel attractive and because her friends had boyfriends she felt she was missing out on life. Her girlfriend asked the boy out behind Rose's back and that betrayal destoyed their friendship but also caused Rose to mistrust her feeling function and relegated it to the baggage she carried with her the rest of her life. Her thinking function took over and she secretly vowed never to be betrayed again. In the course of our sessions her feeling function become activated again and this lost part of her emerged. In fact, this young person part of her seemed to dominate her life towards the end and instead of appearing the critical old woman she became full of life and open to those around her. In some ways I became the boyfriend she left behind and our final words to each other were a declaration of love. So Rose unearthed one of many corpses she needed to come to terms with in order to become a complete person just as the king must carry the corpse on this dark journey through the graveyard in order to fulfill his role as hero.

Why is this corpse a criminal? We banish these parts of ourselves to our unconscious as if to prison, as if they were criminals. Secondly it is the realm of criminality we must go to get them, that is outside the rules we normally follow in life. The criminal is banished from society and it is this place of banishment we must go to find them.