In Midlife: A Jungian Perspective by Murray Stein
pages 49-53
“At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster’s Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is ''the condition of excessive rolling obtaining where a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period or to one hall the wave period." When these two motions collide in this pattern of cooperation, the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling that can reach excessive proportions. In this excessive rolling, through an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, the Hermetic attitude and the presence of Hermes are particularly welcome and valuable...
Like the unconscious itself, which in part resists being boxed into fixed temporal contexts and causal sequences but always keeps to itself a measure of freedom to float and to drift, to pass though the keyholes of the psychological shelters we construct' Hermes and liminality appear surprisingly and unexpectedly in the forms of dreams, fantasies, and synchronistic events. While Chronos-controlled consciousness seeks to fix these and box them in, Hermes and the world of liminality slip past its control Points and hasten away, remaining elusive.
Is there a more Hermetic method, then, that might be up to the job of elucidating midlife liminality, and conveying its quality and meaning? Perhaps we should free our method, like liminality frees the soul, from the strictures of systematic order and diachronic progression and move Hermetically instead by floating freely, by associative wandering, by apercu, by backtracking and rhetorical repetition, by stealth add thievery. Brainstorms, insights, lucky finds, intuitions, the play of dreams – if these are threaded together and held somewhat loosely in hand, will we not have a style that belongs to Hermes rather then to grandfather Chronos (or to brother Apollo)? But will this method 'produce,' or will it like Hermes who ''beguiles endlessly the tribes of mortal men throughout the night” (Hymn 577-78) deceive us into thinking we have a result, some thing to hold on to, to take away and apply, when in fact the gain is liable to evaporate with the turning of a page or the closing of this book, leaving us empty-handed and confused? If we are deceived in this way, however, it is a taste of liminality itself and also authentically Hermetic. To be beguiled into thinking there is something solid where there are actually only mirages and insubstantial vapors resembles the experience we are trying to explore and depict. So if this is the result, it will be a true picture of liminality. When people come out of midlife liminality and think back on it, they may not believe it really happened. It has the quality of dreams.”
pages 49-53
“At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster’s Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is ''the condition of excessive rolling obtaining where a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period or to one hall the wave period." When these two motions collide in this pattern of cooperation, the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling that can reach excessive proportions. In this excessive rolling, through an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, the Hermetic attitude and the presence of Hermes are particularly welcome and valuable...
Like the unconscious itself, which in part resists being boxed into fixed temporal contexts and causal sequences but always keeps to itself a measure of freedom to float and to drift, to pass though the keyholes of the psychological shelters we construct' Hermes and liminality appear surprisingly and unexpectedly in the forms of dreams, fantasies, and synchronistic events. While Chronos-controlled consciousness seeks to fix these and box them in, Hermes and the world of liminality slip past its control Points and hasten away, remaining elusive.
Is there a more Hermetic method, then, that might be up to the job of elucidating midlife liminality, and conveying its quality and meaning? Perhaps we should free our method, like liminality frees the soul, from the strictures of systematic order and diachronic progression and move Hermetically instead by floating freely, by associative wandering, by apercu, by backtracking and rhetorical repetition, by stealth add thievery. Brainstorms, insights, lucky finds, intuitions, the play of dreams – if these are threaded together and held somewhat loosely in hand, will we not have a style that belongs to Hermes rather then to grandfather Chronos (or to brother Apollo)? But will this method 'produce,' or will it like Hermes who ''beguiles endlessly the tribes of mortal men throughout the night” (Hymn 577-78) deceive us into thinking we have a result, some thing to hold on to, to take away and apply, when in fact the gain is liable to evaporate with the turning of a page or the closing of this book, leaving us empty-handed and confused? If we are deceived in this way, however, it is a taste of liminality itself and also authentically Hermetic. To be beguiled into thinking there is something solid where there are actually only mirages and insubstantial vapors resembles the experience we are trying to explore and depict. So if this is the result, it will be a true picture of liminality. When people come out of midlife liminality and think back on it, they may not believe it really happened. It has the quality of dreams.”
