Florida Scott-Maxwell, aging, endings & "neatening the stars"

“If one is going to be truthful one has to be very tender.” —Florida Scott-Maxwell

Not until page fifty-six of The Measure of My Days, the book for which Florida Scott-Maxwell is best known, does the author introduce herself other than to indicate she is an old woman.

“For over twenty-five years I was a Jungian analyst,” she wrote. “It is this experience, those long years of observation that force on me the idea that modernity is like an analysis in reverse. Instead of gathering oneself together, it is a dispersal of oneself.”

She goes on to describe psychoanalysis, a process opaque with mystery to most of us, with notable directness:

In analysis, as I have known it, you are confronted by your qualities and cannot disown them, though you try to. The animal, the primitive, the child, the crowd, the hero, the criminal, both sexes, the initiate, they are all in you. They appear in your dreams, you cannot deny them. By becoming responsible for them, in as far as you do, you know the pain of becoming conscious. This is made endurable and creative by figures beyond the personal, wisdom greater than yours, mysteries inspiring awe, all formed, one has to presume, by the endless generations whom life has presented with the same problems we all share.…In analysis, while not forgetting the degree of one’s own incurability, one experiences eternal truths that give dignity to man. Is that a frequent experience today?

No, I would say dignity by way of everlasting truth is not an especially common experience for humanity these days, perhaps even a less common occurrence than in 1968, when The Measure of My Days was published.

Is a 50-minute session the surest route to such an experience? What about art? Isn’t this why we read?