A Note to Readers from The Porch editor Gareth Higgins: George Viney is one of my dearest and most trusted friends. He is trusting us with these words, whose starting point is a horrifying and tragic event. I think this essay is one of the most profound we have ever published at The Porch, and we want you to know before reading that it deals with extremely challenging themes, but with tender intent.
Today, June 19, 2022, is the 37th anniversary of my father's murder in the Zona Rosa massacre that took place in the Zona Rosa restaurant district of San Salvador, El Salvador in 1985 during the Salvadoran Civil War. The attack was conducted by gunmen dressed and disguised as Salvadoran soldiers, and in total twelve people were killed: four United States Marines, two United States businessmen (my father being one of these), a Guatemalan, a Chilean, and four Salvadorans. A left-wing guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, and its armed wing, the Mardoqueo Cruz Urban Commando claimed responsibility for the attack.
On this Juneteenth and during these polarized times, here at just before midnight, I decided to write and post some psychological reflections and the following poem, feeling that perhaps my father's loving spirit would want me to convey these to help lift us out of the crises erupting in our country and in so many other countries in the world.
There isn't sufficient space here to describe the tremendous complexity of the historical dynamics that created the situation that my father's fate found himself a victim of. Essentially, though, in El Salvador there were groups opposed to each other, vying for power, and all together creating the conditions in which projection, scapegoating, blaming, seeing others as "the enemy," provoked a tragic descending into inhumanity and possession by power which created the conditions for the perpetration of terrible violence.
A writer, professor, and colleague, Craig Chalquist, defines evil this way with great subtlety:
"Evil is an unnecessary and self-divisive parasitism whose goal is to enhance the perpetrator's sense of self by diminishing the selfhood of other beings. This takes evil out of the untouchable position of a metaphysical substance and locates it where it always resides: in relational misuses of human consciousness. Animals can behave with unbelievable ferocity, but they are incapable of real evil. A landslide that buries a home is a tragedy but is not an example of evil. Genuine accidents aren't evil, nor is causing harm unintentionally. Evil comes into being in destructive interactions that cause harm either consciously or are lied about to oneself, as when cheery neighborhoods ignore the concentration camp standing next door. At bottom its intent, whether conscious or not, is to benefit oneself or one's group by diminishing someone or something else.
In the natural world, parasitism serves useful ecological purposes. The parasitism of evil does not. It is malignant, destructive, jarringly unnatural, and inherently self-splitting, substituting as it does a harmful psychological dependency on its victims for the felt realization that hurting someone hurts oneself as well. Evil externalizes one's unowned, wounded victimhood by seeking to recreate it in helpless victims. Perpetrators need victims to avoid facing their buried victimization. The more helpless suffering they create, the more powerful and significant they feel. Deep down they really feel neither."
A Jungian Analyst who lived in El Salvador from 1977 to 1980, James Wakefield, has written about his time there. In his private practice, he had clients who were members of all sides of the conflict, including revolutionary students and professors, deeply conservative members of the wealthy classes, and many other individuals from all levels of society and position. By the time he and his wife fled the country, "over half of my analysands had been kidnapped, murdered, had their businesses burned or their homes bombed, received death threats or had to flee the country. As the killing increased, so did each side's rage against the other....It was difficult to watch family and friends harden their hearts towards whom they considered enemies. Once I was told by friends of their satisfaction on learning that a supposed revolutionary had been found tortured to death 'as he deserved.' I walked away, not knowing how to tell them that the murdered man was also my analysand."
The various opposing groups, often descending into the most base of actions, participated in death squads, often disguised in the clothing of the "enemy" so that the enemy would be blamed, creating much confusion and the inability to easily identify who was the perpetrator and who was the victim and justifying all sorts of action under the cloak of justice, retaliation, and the need to defend or protect the group one was identified with. Once the death squads developed, in the early 80's approximately 50 people would disappear per day. Wakefield writes: "Many, many more disappeared in the countryside. Sometimes their mutilated bodies would be found, fingers cut off, eyes gouged out, castrated, with "traidor a la patria" [traitor to the fatherland] carved into their skin. Most of these desaparecidos [the disappeared] were not politically active at all. It did not matter. There were no trials, only executions."
Clearly this is truly unspeakable horror and yet here, after the death of my father, and in light of how these recurring realities of terrible actions and happenings continue to take place with such traumatic wounding and unbelievable cruelty, I find the necessity to be one who seeks to imagine what is so unimaginable and help speak, help others speak, what has nearly annihilated or destroyed their psyches, their lives, their loved ones, and their communities and nations.
What is moving and significant for me about the many memories, reflections, and insights Wakefield shares about his experiences in El Salvador is that he had unique and remarkable access to the inner psychological life of individuals caught up in the conflict. Usually, we hear and seek to understand outer facts and historical events/actions, but to be able to contemplate the inner psychological imagination, experiences, and forces shaping the outer happenings is of tremendous importance and value if we are to consider the soul-roots and inner psychological individual and collective conditions out of which outer violence arises.
One woman, a member of the guerrilla, who was in analysis with Wakefield, shared this dream:
"I am asleep. I hear the sound of gunfire. I go to my window and see armed men dressed in olive green shooting at other armed men also dressed in olive green. Peasants are in between, being killed. Both sides call for me to join them. I awake in horror, realizing both sides are the same."
For me, having worked with survivors of torture from El Salvador, Guatemala, Bosnia, Mexico, and Vietnam, I have heard experiences of individuals and families having survived such terrible experiences of evil and inhumanity as individuals/groups descend into this mix of polarizing, blaming, scapegoating, and justifying one's supposedly noble position and reason for horrible actions. But the woman's dream is a communication from the depths of the psyche: "both sides are the same." At the deepest level, we are all one yet for millennia and eons humanity has fallen into the same psychological dynamics: individuals and groups polarize, stop listening with an open-heart and with loving compassion, and act out subtle and almost-invisible acts of conscious or unconscious evil or the greatest and most blatant heinous inhumanity. It is also often in the most banal moments that such coldness and evil can sneak in and cause great damage to bodies, hearts, souls, spirits, individuals, groups, nations, and the very world.
Wakefield offers these thoughts worthy of reflection amidst these current polarized times and this roiling collective upheaval on so many fronts:
1. “In an environment of widespread violence, recognition of shadow projections is extremely difficult. Participants on both sides could see the evil done by the other side. But after all their opponents were trying to destroy them. And so one's own violence didn't really seem evil, only a reaction to a threat."
2. “Violence generates violence. The shedding of blood calls for revenge" [in the minds of the perpetrators]. The memory of this call can last for generations."
3. The participants on each side were completely human. Wakefield's analysands on both sides "were intelligent, sensitive, persons deserving of respect and compassion. This was not obvious to the participants themselves. Depending on their side, they would use such terms as ‘oligarch,’ ‘militar,’ ‘class enemy’ or ‘communist’ to describe their opponents. These terms somehow dehumanized the opponents and made them fair targets for violence."
4. “Everyone was a victim. Some victims are obvious--the kidnapped, killed, those who families were shattered, livelihoods destroyed, those who went into exile. Less obvious are the victims whose hearts were hardened, who lost their capacity for empathy, who participated in violence. Victims of violence would identify with the aggressors and then have to struggle with the impulse to do unto others what had been done to them.”
5. In an ambience of violence, participants should be evaluated not by the words they say, but by their overt actions:
"Participants on the right spoke of 'defending freedom' and of 'defending the homeland against foreign subversion.' Participants on the left spoke of 'liberating the people' and of 'bringing a just society into being.' Advocates of the 'theology of liberation' spoke of 'fulfilling the gospel, protecting the poor.' Now who could be against defending the homeland, defending freedom, liberating the people, bringing a just society into being, fulfilling the gospel or protecting the poor?
Sigmund Freud said an act should be judged not by its stated intent but by its results. In the gospels Jesus warns of false prophets speaking in his name. When asked how the false prophets would be recognized, he replies, 'by their fruits ye shall know them.'
The fruits of El Salvador's revolution to date [as of 1987] are over sixty thousand known dead (many more missing), over five hundred thousand refugees having fled the country, a shattered economy..., and emotional scars which do not heal."
6. “In revolutionary violence, participants are possessed by an archetypal image...” Jungian/Archetypal Psychology seeks to discern and know the archetypal agencies of the psyche which grip and possess a person's or a collective's perspective, thinking, experiencing and acting. When in the grips of the activated archetype, there is a great risk that the individual and the human/ethical position will be swept aside and here is when all sorts of "evil" as we have defined it can sweep in causing great inhumanity and destruction.
Can you see parallels between these described dynamics found within the content of events and unfoldings in El Salvador and similar dynamics unfolding here within our precious and beloved country? Although contents and contexts change across situations and cultures, these dynamics are archetypal and keep reappearing to our great suffering because we are, more often than not, repeatedly not becoming conscious of these very dynamics within ourselves. And Jung famously pointed out: What we don't make conscious happens to us as fate.
With all this said, the poem that follows is a living account of my painful and abrupt, terrible and shattering, encounter with evil in the murder of my father. I had a dream the night he was killed (and I had not yet been informed) that men in a white pickup truck drove up outside my bedroom window, got out and came in through my window into my bedroom firing away coldly and callously. In the newspaper the next morning, I read that a white pickup truck had driven up to the cafe where my dad had been sitting and the men got out with machineguns and began firing. The fateful, deeply unfortunate, heart-breaking, and profoundly sorrowful death of my most-kind and loving father was the occasion of the arrival into the interior bedroom of my soul the very real reality of evil and the recurring dynamics that ever-lead to such actions. No longer far away and happening to others I don't know, what was occurring so darkly in the world was now up close and gut-punchingly personal.
The impact of that terrible happening led to my later working directly with survivors of torture because I had both a deep need and a psychological gift of being able to descend into the experiences of terrible trauma and witness, stand by, and facilitate the healing and humanization of victims of violence through love, patience, consciousness, and compassion. These individuals and families with whom I have worked, along with so many others who have experienced violence and trauma, have enabled me to approach such darkness, become better able to detect it and address it when it is becoming the parasitic bringer of evil into the psyche that breeds hatred and the conditions in which inhuman harmful acts and atrocities large and small can occur.
The following poem is a testament to my descent into these realities, into the very painful heart of what happened to my beautiful and noble father, and the epiphanic creation of a heart and imagination that can withstand this aspect of human experience, that cannot wall it off by repression, denial, and forgetting, and that can birth a heart-consciousness which can rise fully into such realities and meet them with Love. The love of which I write is the Love that conquereth all by transforming all from the inside through a discerning love that is not naïve, but deeply acquainted with evil, iniquities, suffering, and grief, and through the initiatory and felt wound can become the generous outpouring and overflowing of heart-feeling, be it deeply shared sorrow, lamentation, and grief, or courageous compassion, searing soul-vision, and sustained effort to acknowledge and address the heretofore often unrecognized and unacknowledged shadow in oneself and in others.
This poem is my most heartfelt effort to enter the events that took out my father and that forever present in endlessly changing guises within families, groups, communities, cultures, nations, religions, political parties, companies, and a whole host of systems, industries, places, ethnicities, histories and more...The poem was not a conscious, planned, and controlled manifestation of my ego; rather, it was the result of a streaming in of images, ideas, and feelings, as well as a felt-flood of suffering, spirit, and love. All of these entered into a deep conversation between me and the realities that palpably and inescapably appeared to me at the death of my father, into this alchemical vessel which is my heart and being, and through the heat of such intense and agonizing feeling and loving and persevering, this little appearance of heart-and-psyche-and-body-and-spirit gold occurred in my soul and left these winged word-traces as fierce angelic beings testifying to affirm, point the way, and help me carry on.
Ever since then, this vulnerable and valiant heart of mine has become a knight of sorts, serving from within and through the wound out of which love witnesses, heals, accompanies others, bears the unbearable, resurrects, and transforms.
This is a deeply inward calling, one that first and foremost seeks this inward consciousness and transformation before any outer action or activism, a transformed and transformational consciousness that continues and permeates throughout any ongoing outer efforts at radical/cultural/systemic change, that can awaken and open the heart to compassion instead of hardening it into blaming and scapegoating and all that follows such projections and so quickly descends into coldhearted actions and acts.
May we each in our own timing and way discover that exclusively wielding the blunt club of postured strength and prideful, self-protecting, self-serving aggressive force and power is not the called-for path nor does its proposed strength truly serve the common good, humanity, the world and all and who are to be found in it.
The poem is sacred to me. It is a shamanistic and magical incantation of my spirit that seeks to honor my father, remember all those who have lost their lives to violence, and become a living soul-agency of peace and healing. Hence, I chose the images that accompany the poem because of their ability to evoke profound and sacred feeling and imagination. I offer the poem and these words so that perhaps they will elicit your own reflections, feelings, insights and efforts to contemplate and understand/imagine your way into the reality of evil and the inhumanity of such acts of violence in our lives and times.
We each must create and cultivate a heart consciousness, create it in and through the images--be they spiritual, mythological, cultural, personal, or a combination of the above--that are appearing and are meaningful in our experience and in our own unique psyches, if we are to each humbly contribute some modicum of healing and transformational eros-consciousness to the urgent needs of our times and our world.
About the Poet: George Viney, Psy.D., MFT, is a writer, storyteller, magician, poet, and Jungian/Archetypal therapist living in Los Angeles and has his psychotherapy private practice in Pasadena, California. He has worked with at- risk youth and families, the chronically mentally ill, university students, and survivors of torture (at the Heartland Alliance Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment Survivors of Torture in Chicago). He is the great grandson of the Venezuelan poet and writer, Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. George Viney holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Theater from Northwestern University and both a Master's and a Doctorate Degree in Clinical Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
***
Wound-Warriors
dedicated to all those who have tragically died in mass shootings…and those of us who survive them
Roman Spear thrust into One-Sidedness:
we need to see if He is really dead in us!
Blood and Water of the God-Man Embodied
pour over literal event: my father run through
by those who could not see his unique face,
their cold point made
straight into my heart.
The Angels sent the calling
on their breath as trumpet-glory:
what reached me were machine-gun reports
that healing-destiny is to be found
in crime scenes.
Violence—No! Please, No!—
is a way the di-vine enters!
Crying, ourselves we gather,
slowly recover,
sudden-plucked grapes
so terribly torn and trampled,
and we begin to make wine, an altar,
become ready to drink His Bloodshed, restore
the explosion-loosed, dismembered God
who needs us to witness and not look away.
Yes, we must make wine from it!
We must become the vessel to hold it!
This involves surrender
into lamentations so deeply sung,
we hurl them upwards all the way back
to those terrible angels,
Spirit-Messengers who finally meet us,
arms wide open,
right in the heart of the Wound!
Out of the Christ-Pierce,
this pouring becomes a fountain
in the Standing Mary who witnesses,
and weeps, and weeps,
and does not fall down,
or die,
but springs forth Her tears
that wash our faces!
Fallen stones, petrified people, turned by violence
into bitterness and projectiles of revenge,
are transformed in Her water.
They, tumbled and polished,
cared for and not forgotten in Her tears,
we place one-by-one
around Her spring, Christ's wound,
and they become well again!
This well is in our cup, holy,
and in it we must carry the fallen-remembered
like a lance thrust through and through
the world's warring sides.
My father's death fathers now:
we are becoming different warriors.
We carry both heart and consciousness!
We are
both Spear and Cup,
Friend and Enemy!
In separateness,
we are oneness!
We are Jesus and Mary and Roman Soldier
and those who are not strong, fierce, or courageous,
those who were innocent, caught off-guard, unprepared,
or overwhelmed,
bleeding in the Wound;
we are fire-water and the sword-steel tempered
in the suffered mystery!
We are resurrected and released, yet we remain in the world:
compassion so strong
we can be wounded...and bleed
into the deadened body you see lying there
with my father's face, with all their faces,
all our faces,
in a pool of blood so dark and opaque,
people, fearing, kneejerk-see only their hurt and hatred,
but, surrendering into the mystery of the wound,
hearing Jesus groan for us,
We all become Lazarus…
His Voice lances through all of this!
Through everything!
Through everyone!
“Lazarus, Come forth!”
…and…
…silently…
so-slightly registering,
crescendoing,
in one’s soul,
NOW!
Jesus is returning with wings!
Look! We are gathered!
We are this pure-communing!
Our shrouds are falling, our faces, uniquely witnessed, radiant,
are transfigured
in His gentle, loving, healing smile
and held so gingerly, so firmly,
with such profound kindness
in his wounded-healing heart!
He was never gone! They are never gone! Our loved ones are never gone!
We all are ever HERE! HEAR!
You and I, all of us called,
taken down, taken up, taken in, opened,
transformed, transfigured, arising; fiercely, tenderly loving,
we stand here
in these places so concretely in the soul
where such things take place,
where it all happens,
these Golgothas,
where our world turns inside out
and through our piercing hurt,
we emerge as Sacred Hearts!
We are standing with this One Heart!
We are the anointing flickers
of this encircling, never-ending Halo-Flame!
We are now ever-conducting this Holy Vigil!
We are dedicated
to holding and being and pouring
Love!
With this Healing-Heart in our cupped hands,
NOW
we are Wound-Warriors!
Poem excerpted from “The Wedding of Eros and Psyche,” unpublished manuscript, 2009
Bibliography
Chalquist, Craig. 2005. "The Four Pillars of Evil." Craig Chalquist PhD. Accessed October 16, 2017. https://www.chalquist.com/.
Wakefield, Joseph. 1987. "Analysis in Revolution." Spring: An Annual of Jungian Psychology and Jungian Thought 1-16.
