May 2010
I went into a bookshop
the other day and a display consisting of discounted tarot cards caught my eye.
I am rather fond of beautiful objects and these were definitely attractive.
Just as I was about to pick a deck up, a man I didn’t know asked me whether I
believed in these things. I replied I don’t believe in the cards per se, but am
intrigued by the stories they tell and the meanings I make of them. I don’t
believe in newspapers or telephone directories or street signs, for that
matter. All these are merely means of communication.
The man then asked me
was it true that people commit suicide after using tarot cards. I replied,
people who try to commit suicide are just as likely to do so after assuming a
voice on the radio is telling them this is what they must do; in other words it
is the psychosis that makes the difference, not what the person blames for
suggesting they act in this way. A person who hears voices coming from a
toaster cannot convince me that toasters are intrinsically evil.
The fellow understood
my drift, for he then spoke about the Tom Hanks movie, The Castaway. Hanks portrays a fictional FedEx employee, Chuck, who
is stranded alone on a deserted island after the plane he was in crashes over
the South Pacific. He manages to survive using remnants of the plane’s cargo.
He finds a volleyball on which he
marks a face, gives it the name Wilson and talks to as a friend. Though this is
“crazy” stuff to those of us thinking about it now, the making meaning by
making “alive” an inanimate object kept Chuck sane and allowed him eventually
to get off the island. The making of meaning is essential for human life, but
the medium for it is only a stimulus to this process.
The capacity to make
not only sense of something, but to allow this to enliven and empower us is
essential for human life itself. Viktor Frankl, a remarkable Jewish
psychiatrist who has deeply influenced me, developed a branch of psychotherapy
known as logotherapy in response to his experiences in Nazi death camps. There
he noticed that those who used the experience of being there as an opportunity
for self growth as well as discovering how to be present for others (see Man’s Search for Meaning), lived, while
those who found it all meaningless and closed their eyes and lived in the past,
weakened and died. The attitude of nihilism is already a death and a
disconnection from life.
We are much more than
our biology, social and psychological conditions, heredity and upbringing. We
are selves in relation to other selves and in relation to our time and place
and the meanings we make are carried in some form across generations, yet all
these enable us to interpret something. Subject to time, space and place, and
coming from our particular psychological and bodily state (alert, tired, moody,
psychotic, grief stricken, buoyant, sick, hunger, satiation, etc), as well as
our belief systems, family conditioning, education, and how influenced we are
by our peers also shapes how meaning is made. Every meaning we attach to
something is in a process of becoming something more and is always open to
interpretation. Interpretations
that are especially nurturing and full of meaning for us personally inspire
choice-full behaviour. Inspired by the meaning we have made about something we
can then choose to live in creative and empowering ways. This is one very
important purpose of psychotherapy and counselling. Such therapy opens up,
client and therapist together, innovative, soul consoling, self-nurturing ways
of understanding present circumstances and enables the client to move in
directions that really matter to him/her.
The symbols
represented in the tarot deck allow for creative meaning making and are neither
intrinsically evil nor good (whatever these terms mean), nor can be blamed as
an inspiration to suicide – despite what some religious groups claim. The
outright rejection of tarot cards on the grounds of hokus pokus, also, misses
the point. The cards are a stimulus to self-examination and awareness of inner
processes. As such a trigger, the cards are very useful as much as any book
that touches, challengers, and inspires us. And, of course, they are often very
beautiful items to look at.
