ANIMAL GUIDES: IN LIFE, MYTH AND DREAM
AN ANALYST'S NOTEBOOK
by Neil Russack
Inner City Books. Toronto: 2002
Foreword by Joseph Henderson
Mi taku oyasin
'We are all related…'
From Animal Guides.
This is a book of secrets.
Veiled in wry, understated, self-deprecating humour the narrator reveals why he comes to be a psychiatrist and why, to elude or overcome the dehumanising mechanics of psychiatry, he practises psychoanalysis. Immersion in psychoanalysis helps and fails his project to become human. He begins to practise a form of exile and a method of seclusion. He takes a risk. He discovers a secret. He reveals the accumulated secret in this intimate and also veiled 'analyst's notebook'.
The Russack tale is a contemporary folk tale of maternal depression overcome and libretto on the way by which life returns to a constrained, psychically shredded outcast boy; a boy who inherits a now familiar transgenerational trauma.
A European Jewish family flees to mid west America, seeking refuge. They find a bleak life of constraint and alienation - not an heroic American salvation tale but a cold comfort saga. But then little by little one realises that Neil is telling us a gently compassionate escape story woven on the loom of a classic pattern. I might refrain from disclosing too much and leave the joy of discovering that intricate pattern to the reader.
The book is a demonstration that one becomes the therapist in order to find the way to cure one's own particular psychic malady. Neil admits to and diagnoses his disorder. He camouflages himself as a doctor but does not fall for the disguise. He resists collusion with the psychiatric/ psychoanalytic horde. He hunts his cure. Or the cure hunts him? He avoids, defends and resists it of course. Finally Neil, the broken 'alienist' is broken out of hiding. The shredded human is restored - by what means?
Well to be honest, Lets be absolutely up front. His book of secrets reveals that the restoration of this boy of Yiddish, German, Polish origin was mostly initiated by the pastoral care of the heartful healing qualities of the American land and the American animal. The heroes of the book are animals, domestic and wild, who quietly enter the physical and psychic spaces of the human beings about whom Neil writes. And he details how such presences make something alive and connected of him and of disoriented patients, associates and colleagues whom he introduces to the reader as illustration.
It is the chronicle of the animal which makes this a unique, insurgent and unconventional psychotherapeutic notebook.
Of course animals do not exist in a limbo. And the biographic threads reveal much about the healing qualities of good-enough traditional American community spirit – the small town local dentist, the drugstore. But perhaps most of all there is a debt acknowledged to Russack's wife's family and a kinship circle. Acknowledged are many generations of American family which kept custody of natural country while Russack instinctively, blindly struggled to lift a life of his own out of the tortured legacy of a family, which was displaced, mid-European and alien. I think there is a point to be made here about the custodial lineage kept up by indigenous American and early settler families who helped keep the country together as refuge for folk like the Russacks and the émigré psychoanalysts. From time to time you get a glimpse of these patient conservative people who accompany Neil, not in consulting rooms as such, but on long walks in the company of fauna and flora. This is a very, very significant point implicit in the book and about which much more could and should be said.
In my opinion, an over emphasis of credit is given to the Viennese, the Berliners and the citified Swiss etc., for the invention of psychotherapy. Maybe the contemporary practice began there and spread inter-regionally, as John Kerr and Tom Kirsch show, for instance, in their histories of the foundation of this helpful and dangerous method, but Russack is subtly bringing out another aspect and another debt. A debt to be paid directly to the natural plant and animal life, which, by its very continuity, despite war and the savagery of humans has preserved in act, in quiet presence and in symbol, a mysterious and potent humanising balm.
This surprising book reveals an antidote for the problem of psychotherapeutic institutions, which become cages. Let the animals in.
You have to think about how you are going to read this book. There are several ways to take it. I read it as a long letter from Neil to people such as myself, telling me what was really going on in his periods of intense silence and absence. I have met him a couple of times and have been to some of the places he describes. Pt Reyes beach, California, for instance, so the book has the reality of real places visited in body .You have to have known Neil a bit and been perplexed by him, probably, in order to appreciate the book as deeply as I have. I don’t know how it will read to colleagues in San Francisco exasperated by his iconoclastic eccentricities/honesty; but patients might get some reassurance that working oneself up to becoming a human being is long job and that the therapist is an animal after all.
Animal Guides may also be read as a companion volume to Thomas Kirsch's account of the emergence of the Jungian analytic profession. (The Jungians. Routledge, 2000) and perhaps also as companion to John Kerr's thought provoking account of the historics of the menage of 'alpha males' and 'alpha females' of the Freud /Jung primary horde. (A Most Dangerous Method. Knopf, 1993)
Kirsch and Kerr describe the almost operatic and sometimes tragic dramas of the tapestry of modernist peoples who formed the analytic profession into an investigative and therapeutic tool. Dr. Russack gives one (apparently diminutive) case history within that grand narrative, but it is because he keeps it modest and simple that one can see through to the fundamentally good nature of this ambiguous profession. He begins his take on the history of the making of analysis with a scene of himself as a small child trying to figure out a life or death solution for an injured baby rabbit shredded by a domesticated machine - the lawn mower. This single domesticated animal (and its death) awakens compassion and the problem of what to do with a wounded human life, his mother's, his fathers, his neighbours, his own.
In attempting to solve this baby rabbit's problem Russack begins his career as a therapist; and from that point he builds his tale, offering a subtle, astounding, accumulative case history of a cure. A cure not by analysis alone but by openness to the nuances of communication with fish, frog, snake, bird, dog, horse, elephant, bear, cougar whale and feral company, located in living and active environments. He demonstrates how 'we are all related' in a very particular way. He does this by describing actual interactions and then places them exquisitely in a setting of the cultured or artistic context and symbolic presentations of this animal and that. He details in myth, in symbol and event how the members of the animal kingdom have been very busy for ages helping people out. He does it sympathetically and with erudition. Very rarely does he succumb to the esotericist's trick of converting animals into 'symbols' for anthropocentric purposes.
However, in a sense, Neil is acknowledging the reality of 'animism' or perhaps what the Australian philosopher Freya Mathews and her circle are calling 'Panpsychism'. A sensitive effort to acknowledge the interactive interpenetration of human psyche with animal and nature. Animism, rather than being sniffed at by educated rationalists ought to have another chance at being invested with value.
I live in a remote area of arid central Australia. I have been exposed for many years and in many ways to animal life, indigenous Aboriginal Australian realities and the animistic attitude. I appreciate the ruthlessness and the goodness of 'nature' and the surprise of finding animals inside one's body. I am completely at home with the therapeutic method that acknowledges animal presence and rides on the back of Dionysos' panther and I have drawn much of my current therapeutic attitude from that experience and much could be said about it. Lopez Pedraza in Dionysos in Exile urges professional guardians of psychoanalysis to give up the persona of the 'normal'; to eschew the neat domesticated practice of a therapy chained in the service of the ordered state. Pedraza calls for the recall of animated Dionysian sensibility from exile. Quietly, Neil is serving that cause.
Quite simply, Neil's notebook is about animals saving humans from fates worse than death, and animals teaching a shrink how to work properly and in acknowledgement of this so he tracks how a dessicated childhood becomes dampened and animated, slowly, drop by drop, cell by cell, through the cats of mysterious compassionate theriomorphic presences. He reveals self healing links in the great chain of being. Evolution working within itself.
Now it is this process that I suggest we ought to turn our attention to. And I have done so at the university where I teach a master's program on Analytical psychology. ( University of Western Sydney). Inspired by Russack I set an essay subject asking students to describe an incident which indicated the possibility of how animals had been psychologically useful at some point in their lives. I urge the reader to conduct the same review. "Don't", I said, "give me some drivel about the symbolic and archetypal significance of 'serpents', 'Athenian owls' and Egyptian crocodiles. I want real encounters with the domestic, the wild or if you insist; the dream…" And the thirty essays came back. With some surprise, every single person discovered and acknowledged ( when they actually stopped to take such transactions seriously) the simple, profound and entrancing moments of individuation which had been brought about by inter action with or ministration from the animal world.
I don't want to say any more for fear of overworking the theme, and better to let Russack do it. However this is a book that will appeal to farmers, cattlemen, hunters and gatherers, to zookeepers, pet owners, environmentalists, symbolists, animists and, most of all, to psychoanalysts strapped in their cages. This book is against the cage.
