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This is the story, which inner necessity compelled her to write, of a 70—year-old woman whose second half of life had been changed by a Jungian analysis.
At the age of about forty she was apparently cheerful and smiling, leading a fulfilled life with husband, children, and involvement with her community. Inwardly, although terrified of expressing it or even of allowing herself fully to feel it, she was becoming increasingly crippled by an abyss of dread, by fears of social engagement and even of going outdoors, and by a profound sense of having failed to obtain from life anything she had set out hoping for. The abyss had always been there, but now time was running out and she was more and more aware of failing to keep it at bay with family, friends, good works, politics, or endless cigarette smoking. The life mapped out for her by mother was collapsing.
When she courageously allowed herself to sink down she felt deep relief; real for the first time, in the dark, where nothing moves, part of the detritus of humanity, subject to strange images and inexplicable thoughts and fears.
She says very little about how she found herself in analysis with the woman she is calling ‘Doctor Penny’, but she took a liking to her from the start even though she