‘All the world’s a stage’. The famous line from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is a reminder that we are all many things to many people and a challenge to the idea of a core self. Can there be such a thing?
In my well read recent copy of Sofia I was struck by the number of times that strange thing known as the ‘self’ seemed to be under some scrutiny and rather led me to reflect, hopefully for the last time you may be saying, on the mysterious self I have found myself to be.
Perhaps my most embarrassing moments were spent eating dinner in the company of Richard Gombrich at a conference in Oxford’s Manchester College. I suppose I was, at the time, trying to discover more about my strange experiences and personality traits. I think he was politely asking me what I thought about the conference and I said something garbled about trying to find out who I was. He responded immediately in telling me that he would never bother about this but only ask what he might do.
I felt very in awe of this great scholar of Buddhism and quite ashamed that I seemed unable to drop my quest for answers to what I have come to define as a borderline personality disorder. His words made me want to be a ‘doer’ rather than a thinker. That very year, 1997, and just a few months prior, I had been to my first SOF conference and been surrounded by some wonderful ‘doers’ who I will not mention by name for fear only of forgetting someone significant who gave me a place where I felt I could truly belong.
In the end I felt saved by the words of the late analyst D.W Winnicott whose maxim was that one must be in order to do. That ‘be’ is always behind ‘do’. Winnicott’s expertise is more generally recognised for his work with children and child development from a psychoanalytic perspective. I don’t have a particular memory of losing my sense of self as a child but I have, on the other hand, very powerful and disturbing memories of losing my sense of self as an adult.
It is a fact that my thoughts about the so-called ‘supernatural’ have radically changed over time. You will understand that to make the transition to avid SOF member from medium in the Spiritualist Church is quite a radical move. Already it may have become clear that there is more than one version of Bobbie apparent. I welcomed, some years ago, the idea of Bundle Theory, which suggested that there is not one core self. The theory seems to contravene the idea that the self is an unchanging steady state affair and that to experience oneself any other way may be considered the road to madness. Some years ago I pointed out to Dinah, that if one managed always to maintain a sense of self throughout life then one was very fortunate but this had not, unfortunately, been my own experience.
So when did I begin to lose my sense of self? An incident when I was 12 years old and a pupil at our local Grammar School, should show the way in which low self esteem may seriously affect behaviour. As my mother worked shifts at a hospital it became my habit, on Saturdays, to take lunch with my Aunt and Uncle. One Saturday I was running late. I did not care to be looked at, so elected to pass along less busy streets. My habit, as someone with low esteem was to walk along looking at my feet and never at other folk.
Suddenly a pair of feet planted themselves in front of mine and I slowly lifted my head to see a man whom I did not know barring my path. He said: ‘Hello sweetie,’ and I replied, ‘I do not know you’. He then continued to say that he knew my father who was waiting in his car around the corner for me. I knew that this could not be true and swiftly lifted my knee to hit where I hoped it would hurt. He tried to restrain me but I managed to free myself and ran for the full 15 minutes it took to reach my Aunt’s house.
She opened the door immediately wanting to know why I was 10 minutes late and I looked at her face and said nothing but sorry. There was a dangerous man out on the street but, so convinced was I that the way I presented had caused the problem that I kept my silence. As a teenager, there were to be other incidents but again I was convinced that I caused the problem and stayed silent. I first told the story from the platform of the Spiritualist Church with my horrified mother sitting in the congregation.
My mother, aware of my struggles with a chronic form of arthritis, came to know a lady who described herself as a spiritual healer. Without my knowledge mother made an appointment to visit the healer at her home in 1982. I was very unhappy about this as, though my mother, in her retirement, began to attend the Spiritualist Church, I was suspicious of Spiritualists and quite afraid of them. There was no rational reason for my fear, as I was no kind of believer, and yet I still remember my discomfort on that night.
On my rather late and very reluctant arrival I soon appeared to succumb to the suggestions of the healer. My anxieties were not allayed by the fact that the room was dimly lit and that another person was lying prostrate on the sofa close to my reclining chair. I felt very aggravated that I had been coerced by my mother to attend. This must have been obvious when I irritably asked the healer if she thought it might be a good idea if I at least told her the name of my illness. She was very calm in replying that she did not need to know as she would not be doing the work; this simply increased my anxiety levels.
After 10 minutes of polite small talk she said that she would like to come over to me and place her hand on my head. At the same time she asked if it would be alright if her husband briefly held my ankles. I quite reluctantly gave my assent as, after my long day at work, I could no longer present any resistance. As she touched my forehead, it was as though I had been pushed back in the chair. From the moment she touched my head I felt no desire to communicate with anyone, including my husband who sat next to me.
A conversation was taking place with elements with which I could have argued but my desire to speak, probably for the first time in my life, was suspended. From anxiety and stress I had become calm and relaxed. This lasted for about 20 minutes until my feet, though suspended, involuntarily began to tap up and down on the chair. As normally my movements were stiff and painful, there is no credible way to describe the joy of involuntary movement. Later I would come to describe the experience as ecstatic. After some minutes of painless movement I felt that some part of me had moved slightly forward in the room and that I was bathed in light. I said thank you dozens of times as I experienced a great peace within me.
As I was entirely surrounded by religious believers, it became the case that my behaviour was described in religious language. God had smiled kindly upon me and spiritual beings were in attendance on his behalf. I had not believed in God for years and so I was baffled at the interpretation of what had happened that night. The healer and her husband later told me that she knew that it would lead me to become a medium in the Spiritualist Church. I was very uneasy about what had happened and the interpretation but the allure of involuntary and painless movement compelled me to return on many occasions.
I found my voice and would spontaneously begin to speak to the folk assembled there for healing. I had a responsible job and found myself making remarks that were titillating to listeners but entirely inappropriate in a workplace. Therefore I found myself returning to the healer just weeks later to ask if this behaviour could be stopped. I was told that it could be closed down and so it would remain dormant for a few years.
Apart from still seeking a ‘cure’ for chronic illness, I had no will or wish to be associated with Spiritualism. The religious interpretation of my experience did not easily resonate within me. To tell the truth, I was not remotely interested in religion, having more closely the ideas of my atheist father than my Spiritualist mother. Despite the fact that I attended Methodist Sunday School and enjoyed the stories of the historical Jesus, by High School I had come to think of religion as irrelevant. However, long ago, Susanne Langer observed that the most frightening thing that we can be confronted with is what she described as the ‘uncanny’ and that the encounter of such would demand us to conceptualise and interpret any occurrence.
At the time of my ecstatic experience my mind had to turn a corner to accept the religious interpretation. Don Cupitt himself has noted in his work (The Revelation of Being) the difficulty of describing ecstasy. I was ill-prepared to formulate any other interpretation than the religious one in those days and so I accepted, in part, for some years the explanation I had been given.
My life path was to lead me through various difficulties, including that of my marriage. As I struggled along it was rather easy to look for magical answers to my problems. My mother suffered a stroke and, in the early days her eyesight disappeared. I was advised that she probably would not survive and, as I worked full time while battling my own chronic illness, life was very tough. Part of the pressure of hospital visits every evening was relieved by the fact that my mother had re-joined the Spiritualist Church during her retirement and had made lots of friends. I came to realise that I could entirely rely on these new friends to visit my mother while I was at work.
I silently vowed that if my mother recovered, and chose to attend church, I would accompany her. This was my way of thanking the people who had supported us through my mother’s illness. So it came to pass, that against my better judgement, I duly accompanied my mother to the Spiritualist Church. Despite my previous experience I was entirely unconvinced that the mediums were actually connecting with the departed. I sat in various churches through a period of approximately 2 years trying to discern what was actually happening.
I might have remained in ignorance forever were it not that a medium visited mother’s church who had worked internationally. It was obvious that she had a rather special talent. After 2 hours of no contact with the departed, she waited till the very end of the evening to inform us that she had identified me as a very able medium. I was invited, immediately, by the president of the church to be present at private séances. The other side of this was that I was beginning to lose my sense of myself. I was out many nights of the week concentrating on every person in the congregation without any sense of myself.
By the day following any séance, I would come to know the experience of depersonalisation, in which I could not discern whether I was awake or dreaming. Whether the world before me was real or illusory. It was worrying and yet I persisted because I needed to know why and how I was behaving in this way. Eventually it transpired that I was invited to the HQ of The Spiritualists’ National Union to demonstrate to an international audience.
I presented a rather threatening personage to the hierarchy by my refusal to accept guides and my clear problem with god and spirits. I was regarded with suspicion and thought of as arrogant to suggest that the person demonstrating was me without any other influence present whatsoever. I fervently wished that I had not been invited to Stansted Hall and I vowed never to return. My good fortune was to meet someone who would see that I lost my sense of self in the demonstration and vow that she would get to know me to research her book about the occult.
My connection with this psychoanalyst would enable me to be able to interpret my experiences through the use of psychoanalytic theory. Through our meeting she could research her book, which was published in 2001, and I would be restored without requiring any further connection with Spiritualism.
The language of psychoanalysis presented me with a different interpretation of my strange behavioural traits and allow me to leave behind Spiritualism. Not because I had found the definitive answer to mediumship but because I had a new frame of reference in which to understand myself. This began when my analyst and friend would ask me how it felt when I began to demonstrate on the platform and I told her it felt like me but not me. I had used in my cloud of unknowing the words of Winnicott from his work Home is Where We Start From.
As you can imagine, my friend was keen that I would see my words in print. We took a bus to Newcastle and paid a visit to a popular bookshop. I can see her sitting on the floor raking through the W’s of the sparse Psychology section. It was both her luck and mine that there was one copy of the book. She thumbed rapidly through the pages and jubilantly pointed to the words ‘me but not me’. It was the moment when I knew at last I could leave behind my association with the Spiritualist Church without regret.
Bobbie Stephens-Wright is a long-standing member of the SOF Network and ran the North East SOF Group.