Linda Carter, MSN, CS, IAAP

Linda Carter is a Jungian analyst and psychiatric-mental health nurse clinical specialist in private practice in Carpinteria, California. A third-generation nurse from a medical family, she regards the two vocations as a single identity: her work as an analyst is, in her own words, “inseparable from identity as a psychiatric-mental health nurse.” She has been in clinical practice since 1978, working with children, adolescents and adults, and continues to write, teach, supervise and present internationally.

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What’s Important Will Emerge

A Spotlight Interview with Linda Carter

IAAP News Bulletin — in conversation with Stephen Garratt

Linda Carter has been practising for forty-six years, and before she is a Jungian analyst, she says, she is a nurse — a third-generation one, following a grandmother who trained as a nurse during the 1919 influenza pandemic. She came to nursing early, working in hospitals from the age of fifteen or sixteen, and studied at a progressive, federally funded programme at Georgetown that had her, at nineteen, helping design some of the country’s first HMOs. From there she trained as a child therapist at the Yale Child Study Center, and moved gradually into adult work as her own son was born.

For decades her home and practice were in Providence, Rhode Island. Eleven years ago she and her husband, Joe Cambray, left New England’s winters for a small house near the ocean in Carpinteria, California — a garden that is now, she says, “my pride and joy,” with a tree outside her window that has become, for some patients, an analytic object in its own right.

In an earlier, informal conversation held in preparation for the interview below, Carter reached for an image to describe how her thinking has moved over the decades. She and Cambray have followed a classical guitarist, Otmar Liebert, for some thirty years; hearing him play live again recently, after knowing his records for so long, she found the same pieces “deeper and richer” than before. “When I look back at the different things I’ve written,” she said, “I’m actually circling around a lot of the same stuff, but expanded and deepened for me.” What follows traces that circling — from a paper on Matisse and Picasso written not long after she began working with the infant researcher Beatrice Beebe, through to the three-tiered systems model at the centre of the book she is writing now.

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Stephen Garratt: I’ve been looking at the papers you sent me, and going over the notes from our last conversation, and my head is full. I’m glad to know — to borrow your own thought from last time — that what’s important will emerge. But I thought that perhaps we could begin with the three main papers, that those could serve as a kind of scaffold for our conversation. The early paper on the bidirectionality of influence comes at a crucial moment, I think. In our first conversation we covered the background — your grounding in nursing, and your family in nursing — so we don’t need to go over that. Perhaps we could begin with what was happening for you at the time of writing that paper. A little about what you were thinking, what you were feeling.

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Matisse, Picasso and the bidirectionality of influence¹

[04:27]

Linda Carter: And the Matisse/Picasso one. That was a really important paper for me. I wrote it — I don’t know what year it was, honestly; it was a long time ago. I was moving more into teaching and professional life. I mean, I was a mom all the way through, but I was doing more professionally at that point. We were travelling, my husband and I, and we were in London. Friends of ours got tickets for the Matisse Picasso show at Tate Modern, which was wonderful — an incredible show. So it must have been 2002 or something like that.

And by the way, today is 9/11, which is really significant for us here in the US. It’s a big day.

Let’s see. Yes — I first met Beatrice Beebe in October 2001, just after 9/11. I travelled to New York to hear her give a talk, and I called her up. I made a cold call. Beatrice Beebe — your readers might not know who she is — is an infant researcher and a psychoanalyst at Columbia. She does empirical infant research, and her research is really centred on communication patterns, particularly in the nonverbal domain. We’re all influenced all the time by nonverbal communication: voice tone, facial expression, rhythm, body movement, and so on. I’d been interested in that for a very, very long time.

I’d finished training in ’97, and I’d been following Dan Stern since 1978. Beatrice had been trained by Dan Stern, who is also a psychoanalyst, and they had worked with Louis Sander, the grandfather of contemporary infant research. Sander, Stern, Tronick and others are part of the Boston Change Process Study Group. So I’d been reading Stern since ’78, and when I finished training I really felt ready for something different. I wanted to learn more about the nonverbal domain, and about applications of infant research to adult treatment, which is what she studies.

So I cold-called her and she said, sure — which amazed me. I felt incredibly lucky. She had known my psychoanalyst, Andrew Morrison, who had a big influence on my life, and we had people in common. So we agreed, and we started meeting in August or September of that year, 2001.

I went to hear her speak and I was fascinated by her work — by how much gets conveyed through facial expression, nonverbally. How much nonverbal communication sits outside conscious awareness, and yet shapes all verbal content, including transference and countertransference dynamics. That’s really relevant. And as time has gone by I’ve worked out ways to teach students to read nonverbal communication.

So I go to New York. I was very anxious on the train. We were all afraid at that time. I lived only three hours north; we knew people whose relatives had been killed. It was terrible, and I was anxious going to New York. But her talk was just amazing. And then that autumn we went to London, and our friends took us to the show at Tate Modern.

Working with Beatrice was like having the best graduate education ever. This was before she published her major books, and I’d get weekly manila envelopes like this, packed with her papers and other people’s papers with her underlining on them. I just ate it up. I was utterly fascinated. The arrangement was case consultation, so we worked on applications of her findings and those theories to my clinical work.

Stephen Garratt: You were working with adult patients, or with children?

Linda Carter: I was originally trained as a child therapist at the Yale Child Study Center — I started there in 1976. Beatrice also trained at Yale, by the way, just before I was there.

I stopped seeing children about forty years ago, when my son was born. I just felt I couldn’t deal with children hopping out of windows in extreme crises when I had a child at home. And I’d started training when I was twenty-two, so I was indeed a child therapist; I think it took a while for me to grow up enough to see adults. By 1997 I’d finished analytic training. I was taking classes and seminars with the Boston Change Process Study Group, and I decided I wanted to work with Beatrice — and so to New York, and then to London.

The papers I’d been reading were all about bidirectional influence — not just that parents influence children, but that children influence parents. That made complete sense to me. And of course Jung’s famous ideas about the bidirectionality of influence between the doctor, the analyst and the patient made a lot of sense too.

So we went to Tate Modern, and immediately I was so excited to look at the side-by-side paintings of Matisse and Picasso that were similar and resonant — not the same, but resonant. It felt as though her ideas, theoretically and clinically, came alive in their artwork. I bought a pile of books, which I lugged home; we didn’t have Amazon then.

And then, for reasons I’ve never understood, there was a national conference in the US, in Montreal, which Tom Kelly was running — and, for reasons I’ve never understood, he asked me to give a two-hour presentation the day before the conference. I was utterly terrified. Really, really scared. I’d presented before, but this felt like a big deal. The other presenter that afternoon — it was a Thursday or something — was Don Kalsched. So I thought, oh my God, there will be three people here.

Well, it turned out they had to close the room. There were people sitting on the floor and out the door. It was well attended, and it went well, and I worked on the paper some more and developed it. That was a real turning point for me.

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Complex adaptive systems

[12:21]

Stephen Garratt: Could you explain what a complex adaptive system is?

Linda Carter: That’s a complex question, isn’t it? A very simple way of describing it — I was talking with a patient yesterday who had a dream of bees. Complex adaptive systems are self-organising systems. If you think of a beehive: the queen bee doesn’t tell all the other bees what to do. They’re self-organising. They have their own patterns of behaviour, instinctually, and they self-organise. So complex systems have to do with concentric circles, systems within systems within systems. If you think of Matryoshka dolls — what you’re seeing are similar patterns at differing scales.

Stephen Garratt: Yes.

Linda Carter: That’s complex adaptive systems. You see a similar pattern, but at a different scale.

Stephen Garratt: In the way that two individuals might interact with each other, the different elements or different scales in these systems interact with each other.

Linda Carter: That’s right. What I learned from Beatrice’s work — she also collaborated with Frank Lachmann, who had been her supervisor in analytic training — is that it’s nested systems, so you’re seeing similar patterns at different scales. For example, with a patient there might be a certain pattern that we’re enacting; it may relate to both of our histories, and we might find an amplification at a large scale that resonates with it.

But Frank Lachmann and Beatrice came up with a very important idea, which is about co-creation and co-construction. An important aspect of complex adaptive systems has to do with emergence, and theories of emergence, which come through interaction. Something new is born. Father and baby interact: the attachment relationship is co-created. Analyst and patient interact: the analytic relationship is co-created.

A long time ago I wrote a paper looking at the similarity between Dan Stern’s moments of meeting and Tronick’s idea about the dyadic expansion of consciousness — which means that when there’s that kind of interaction, the consciousness of both people is expanded. It can be in a positive way; but if there’s a depressed mother, you end up with a depressed baby, so you have an extension of consciousness in a negative way, in depression. So emergence has to do with interaction: something new comes into being. And that’s very resonant, for me, with Jung’s ideas about the transcendent function. So I wrote a paper about that, looking at infant research and the transcendent function.

Stephen Garratt: Which paper was that? Was that “Amazing Grace”?

Linda Carter: No, that was a separate paper. It was called “Moments of Meeting, Dyadic Consciousness and the Transcendent Function”, something like that.

Stephen Garratt: Where was that published? You might have sent it to me.

Linda Carter: Maybe, or maybe not.² It’s interesting — Dan Stern’s wife… he died a while ago, sadly. I had the great opportunity to meet him a number of times, and I met his wife, and she asked me for the paper through ResearchGate, and I never sent it. I didn’t think it was good enough. Which is really daft. Anyway, I read it again recently and thought, well, that’s a pretty good paper. It’s a clinical paper looking at infant researchers’ ideas about moments of meeting, and the transcendent function, and dyadic consciousness. They’re different, but they’re resonant, and there are similarities.

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“Amazing Grace”³

[17:15]

Stephen Garratt: Maybe we could talk about “Amazing Grace”, because that’s the next paper I had — you described it as being almost the graduation from your work with Beatrice Beebe.

Linda Carter: Yes. I have to say, working with Beatrice was like another kind of analysis for me. We focused very much on countertransference. I had a son, now forty, who had a lot of disabilities and difficulties, and it was really hard. With her background in child development she was very supportive of all that. But we worked a lot on countertransference, and it was deeply meaningful — because really, when you work with patients, if you’re truly engaged, all kinds of things from your own life begin to come up. That’s fine. The important thing is that those things don’t stay in the unconscious.

Stephen Garratt: Yes.

Linda Carter: If you think about Sol and Luna — you do your work, to pay attention to what’s happening, to what’s being communicated at that level.

Beatrice was always very supportive of my Jungian interests and my interest in art. Her husband, Ted, died just last year. He was a good bit older — a professor of literature at Providence College, a poet, and he translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. A very bright man, but a poet. So she was interested in the arts, not in terms of her own writing, but through her husband. She was always interested in art and psyche, and always very encouraging about that. She saw it as relevant and related and resonant, but also different — as having to do with my own path, differentiated from hers.⁴

So years went by, lots of things happened, and then it got to the election, when Donald Trump was running. It was a very dark October day. [Almost certainly October 2020, when Trump was seeking re-election — “Amazing Grace” appeared in Jung Journal 15:3 in 2021.] I had made a commitment to write a paper — the paper that became “Amazing Grace” — and I was getting low on time and wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I watched the news and I felt very low, and sad, and worried for our country. I was in Washington during the Vietnam War, at Georgetown, at university, so I was very much involved in all that. I was very worried about the country.

So I met with a patient I’d been working with for quite a long time on the East Coast — I’d continued with her on Zoom. She talked; the hour was about nostalgia, really. She talked about the death of her mother, and about her sister and her mother praying together near the time of her mother’s death. It’s really quite profound. Very moving. I have a deep affection for this woman. She has three children, and two of them have difficulties. I’ve never told her directly, but I know that she intuits the similarities and the resonances. There isn’t always a need to put these things into words. I think it’s fine to let them move along in their own way.

At the end of the hour she suggested — she asked — she had a PhD in English literature from a major Ivy League university and taught in a girls’ school, and she knew I liked art and literature. She said, there’s a beautiful piece of music I would really like you to hear. Could we screen share? Neither of us — she’s about my age — is great with tech, but we got it to work. It was a song called “The President Sang Amazing Grace”. The singer was Meklit, an Ethiopian-American young woman, big hair, slight, with a very, very expressive face. It was during COVID, and she was backed by the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco-based classical group. They were wearing masks, and they were faded into the background, so that Meklit was really the main feature.⁵

And the song was about Barack Obama, in 2015, going to South Carolina for the memorial — because parishioners and the minister of that church had been shot during a prayer service. And to this day, by the way, that church still supports the man who is in prison, who shot all those people in the church. That is something else.⁶

I feel tearful saying that.

Stephen Garratt: I feel tearful hearing it.

Linda Carter: They stay in touch with him. It’s very profound. So at that memorial, Barack Obama — no one really knew it was coming — with all these Black ministers behind him in their beautiful robes, Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella. And the ministers stood up and started singing, and then the whole church went into singing. That in itself is worth watching on YouTube.

But what came out of it was that a woman named Zoe Mulford wrote this song, “The President Sang Amazing Grace” — a kind of folk ballad about the whole thing. I still cannot look at that Meklit video, or the Barack Obama footage, without really just sobbing. I can only do it every once in a while, because it’s such a peak experience and yet so exquisitely painful at the same time.

I’ve thought about that moment. It’s like a wave cresting, when you see a little of the white at the top as it just begins, just a little, and it begins to crumble. That’s the feeling. The stunning beauty of a moment. And we get those clinically —

Stephen Garratt: Yes.

Linda Carter: — if we keep our eyes open and our hearts open. We get those with our friends and family members, if we can get over ourselves and get past our narcissism and our injuries. All of that is possible. The bottom line is: love is the answer. Love is the feeling. That’s what heals people.

So — “Amazing Grace”. I listened to it with this patient; it was the end of the hour, and I just sat and cried, and I was on fire as I’ve never been. And oddly, I had nothing else that day. Nothing. Unheard of. So I spent the next three days and pretty much wrote it — did all the research and the reading and wrote it in three days.⁷ And then I didn’t quite know what to do with it. It was long. I asked a couple of people; Dyane Sherwood said she loved it and thought it should be a book.

I sent it to Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, who was the Jung Journal editor at the time, and I said: Jeffrey, I know you’re really busy, I’m just asking, I don’t know what to do with this, can you advise me? Two days later he wrote back — he had presented it to the board, and they said, we have to see the finished copy, but we really want to proceed with publishing it. And I said, okay. Good.

So that was “Amazing Grace”. You can’t make that stuff happen. I feel like crying now. It was such a gift. It was a gift — from the Self.

Stephen Garratt: I’m thinking about what you were saying earlier, about the dyadic expansion of consciousness, and at the same time thinking of the Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, in some ways connecting at the same time. It is like an expansion of consciousness.

Linda Carter: It is. It’s an expansion of consciousness, and that’s what you’ve so well understood. Jung really understood pattern matching, he understood emotion, and he understood the importance of matching and resonance — of seeing personal history, but seeing it at cultural levels, and collective levels, and mythological levels. They can all be profoundly meaningful.

However, amplification is a waste of time if it’s not connected to emotion, from my point of view. It becomes an intellectual exercise, and it usually has to do with the narcissism of the analyst. Amplification, in my mind, works best when the patient brings it — as my patient did.

So that heralded the ending with Beatrice. I wrote the paper and I thought, I think I’m ready to finish. It felt like commencement — commencement means you’re ready to begin — and like graduation. We’d been moving in that direction.

She and I — she did her homework with her father every night until she went to college. Her father was a researcher in Japan right before World War II; a brilliant man. She had a very close relationship with him. So with “Amazing Grace” we went through it together, and we tweaked some things. She didn’t change any ideas — she’s grammatical, she’s a good editor. I felt as though we had a parent-child repeat. I did not have that. I had awful experiences with my father. But here I got nothing but positive support.

And it got published. I’m grateful to Jeffrey and to the Jung Journal for standing behind it. Not only did they not want it cut — I had tried to get the JAP to look at it, and they said, nope, it’s too long, we won’t even look at it. And I said: I was the editor, and you won’t even look at it? (Linda was JAP’s US Editor-in-Chief, 2010–2015.) Nope. So Jeffrey and the board gave me, I don’t know, twice the usual word count for the journal, in two parts. Very grateful.

Stephen Garratt: There’s an example of how some things just need the space.

Linda Carter: And some things are better when they’re reduced.

Stephen Garratt: That’s true as well.

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Play, slowing down, and doing nothing⁸

[30:04]

Stephen Garratt: But there’s a real sense of the expansion of the moment — and I’m segueing into the next paper here, because I think there’s a connection between allowing the space, and amplification being grounded rather than manic. That leads into your consideration of Bill Viola’s video art: “The Emergence of Play and Creative Imagination through Slowing Down and Doing Nothing.”

Linda Carter: Yes, doing nothing.

Well, I’ve been writing about play for a really long time. In 2015 I was in China, and one of my patients, a young woman, had just had a baby. They had just lifted the one-child policy, and she had a new baby, and she wept in a session. When I’m in China I see my patients — then I was seeing them two hours a day, every day, for a month, because at that point the IAAP was requiring a certain number of face-to-face hours. This was pre-COVID.

So she had just had this baby, and she wept, saying: I don’t know how to play with my baby. And I became very interested in play. I came back, and the American Academy of Pediatrics had just published, in 2015, a position paper on the diminishment of free play globally, to the detriment of everyone. Everyone. The children who had more free play, more recess, more arts, more unstructured time had better grades, better test scores, better colleges. They were happier, less depressed.

So I’ve been writing; I have a number of papers about free play. And I love to play. It’s August, and that was the vacation time at my family’s beach house, and I grew up with the same children — so I’ve been talking all August with my old playmates, whom I’m still in touch with. It’s been great fun.

And laughter — the value of laughter in analysis is hugely important. I once had a patient, a woman I saw for seventeen years before I moved out here. She was a child of Holocaust survivors. She was on an SSRI antidepressant that was getting in the way of her sexual life with her husband, who was an artist, and that wasn’t a good thing. So I sent her to a young psychiatrist who seemed quite bright; I liked him. But when he tried to decrease her SSRI she would become profoundly depressed — falling into an archetypal Holocaust kind of state. So we all had to work it out together, and he worked out a cocktail of several medications, and it worked, and she got better.

But one time she went to see him, and she was talking about how she was feeling better, and how much she enjoyed laughing with me. She was very smart and had a wonderful sense of humour, and we had a lot of that. And he was horrified. When she came into the next session and told me the story, we didn’t say anything about him — we both liked him. We just burst out laughing, because we knew he just didn’t… well, what can you say? He’d probably never been in therapy himself, I don’t know. It’s funny. So laughter and play are important.

You were asking, though — that was a sidetrack, but it was important, because there’s a whole background of play. The most recent paper is about neuroscience and play, and —

Stephen Garratt: It built on the moments of meeting, and how play and doing nothing allow the space for that, perhaps?

Linda Carter: Doing nothing, and play — for children and for adults too. What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do? And then you pick up a ball, and you go, well, let’s do this. It’s spontaneous. It’s an emergent experience. There’s co-creation, co-construction. Jung says: follow the way of the snake, the unconscious. You don’t plan it, you just open the space and see. I don’t know. You don’t know. Let’s see. I’m curious. And then things begin to happen. It’s playful.

But if you’re working too hard all the time — too much cognitive thinking, too much ego orientation, too much ambition, too much drivenness, too many lists, and I can get right into that, I must tell you — it gets in the way of creative imagination. So it’s very important to take time. These last two weeks I really did nothing. I worked in my garden. Worked with my hands. It’s a wonderful way of doing something and doing nothing.

Doing nothing creates free and open space — like what Dora Kalff talked about for sandplay. Safe, free, open space for the unconscious to present itself, for things to emerge. To notice nature, to notice something: a poem, a piece of literature, or just sitting on the beach, which I’ve been doing these last weeks too, not thinking about anything. And then a poem will come, or not. I get ideas in the middle of the night.

Stephen Garratt: I’m thinking about how this relates to complex adaptive systems — that if the systems need to connect and influence each other, they need the space. That’s what play is.

Linda Carter: That’s right. We’re influenced all the time from the top down, by systems and hierarchies, and we need those; those structures are important. But complex adaptive systems are really about bottom-up, emergent systems. The bees self-organising, or you and I talking — ideas come together and we co-create something. We’re co-creating this conversation, co-creating attachment. Something larger happens. Hopefully, by voting, we can change the government. So bottom-up systems are incredibly important.

I first started learning about complex systems in graduate school. It was called General Systems then — von Bertalanffy. I had a great psychopathology teacher, a psychiatrist, Dr Greenberg, who began every class of psychopathology for a year with a circle and a dot. That was the beginning of my getting interested in complex systems and theories of emergence. We’re always living within multiple levels of concentric systems — including the infinite. The religious function of the psyche.

Stephen Garratt: Yes.

Linda Carter: I really do agree with you. I don’t think true healing happens unless there can be an acceptance of something larger than oneself, something with a sense of mystery to it. Not a particular religious system, although that can be someone’s pathway.⁹

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Sandplay

[38:40]

Stephen Garratt: You mentioned sandplay — I know it’s one of your interests and passions, and I thought that might be a good place to take the conversation.

Linda Carter: Well, as you can see, I have a small office, which is also our guest room. In California the prices are so crazy that everybody lives in small places — and we live near the ocean, thank God. So this is a little two-bedroom ranch house. It works quite well. There’s a bathroom here, and a patio through the French doors. But this is also our guest room.

When we moved here eleven years ago, we had a huge sandplay collection, thirty-five years’ worth — we’d been collecting pieces for thirty-five years, a long time. And I was rather done with it. But I do supervise a lot of sandplay; the Chinese especially love sandplay, so I supervise a great deal of it.

What we did was donate our collection to Pacifica. They had cabinets made — beautiful cabinets with glass fronts — and it took up twice as many cabinets as we’d had, because we had everything.

I had doors on my cabinets, and I had a separate sandplay room, because the sandplay room also doubled as a waiting room and I feel all those figures can be too stimulating for people. People shouldn’t feel they have to do a sandplay. When someone started with me, in the first hour or two I’d say: this is an option, it’s a mode of expression, but so is artwork, drawing, writing, play, music. Whatever you want to do — this is one option.

Sandplay works well for me. It worked very well with trauma survivors, because it was three-dimensional, and it was a way of being in a story together.

Stephen Garratt: And because it’s spatial, it’s outside time.

Linda Carter: Yes, that’s right.

Stephen Garratt: And time is one of the activating things in trauma.

Linda Carter: Harriet Friedman and Ruth Ammann were the first two Jungian analysts to teach sandplay in China, and I was friends with both of them. I had the honour of editing Ruth’s last sandplay paper, in the JAP‘s child issue a couple of years ago, just before she died.¹⁰ And Harriet has just turned ninety-seven; she’s in Los Angeles, and I still see her. She and Ruth were both thrilled to hear that their photographs are up in the Beijing sandplay centre,¹¹ along with Jung’s and James Hillman’s.

I presented a sandplay paper in China a very long time ago, and I didn’t know Ruth before that. She came up to me and said, well, who are you? I’ve never heard of you. And she said, how come you don’t belong to ISST? And I said, I don’t want to jump through one more hoop — what would I have to do? And she said, you have to write a paper. I said, Ruth, I’m interested in sandplay; I’m not doing that. No, thank you.

But I also do sandplay very differently from how it’s traditionally taught, and I teach it differently, in that I use it more like child play therapy. So I don’t just sit back in the same silent way — with children, and sometimes with adults too, because sometimes people need assistance.

So: there’s a wicked witch, and there’s a terrified baby with the wicked witch. This is an actual case. And there’s Glinda, the good witch. I sat back too much on that case — this is thirty years ago now. Today I would say: well, do you think Glinda could walk over and peek over the wall and see what’s going on? What does this baby need, to deal with this witch? She’s scary. It’s really scary. That’s a lot for a baby. I would shape it. As it was, the lady repeats it over and over.

My worry, with trauma and sandplay, is that you can further instantiate the trauma if there isn’t a movement towards some sort of resolution, or towards other options. What are the other options here? So I’m much more hands-on in the way I think about sandplay.

Stephen Garratt: Bringing systems into interaction with each other, rather than just leaving them.

Linda Carter: Yes. And if there are other options in the world, you don’t have to be locked in the trauma story. The trauma story is important. It needs to be felt, appreciated, heard; the person needs companionship in facing it. But the goal of good trauma therapy is to help attenuate the intensity of the affect and bring somebody into a more regulated state — which can happen if I’m in a regulated state. Very often this is not consciously intended — it’s Allan Schore’s work, the patient comes… But the patient needs help with that, and needs other parts of themselves besides the trauma.

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Pat Lovejoy, and waking up the other muscles

[45:08]

Linda Carter: I’ll tell you another story. I had trouble getting pregnant, and I had to have surgery forty-one years ago — I have a scar from one hip to the other. The doctors said, get pregnant right away. And I did, amazingly. But as the baby began to grow it was excruciatingly painful. Unbearable. I had a wonderful obstetrician, and he wrote a prescription for physical therapy twice a week. And by chance I ended up with a woman named — get this name — Pat Lovejoy. She was wonderful. She was funny, a really nice woman, and she did Feldenkrais bodywork. Do you know what Feldenkrais is?

Stephen Garratt: No.

Linda Carter: It’s very interesting, and it’s very gentle. You can hardly feel it. And what I realised was that she never, ever touched the areas that were acutely painful. Within a month or two — of course, the surgery was healing, that was part of it, but the baby was getting bigger — I was 85% better. I’m convinced it was because of Pat Lovejoy and Feldenkrais. In retrospect, and actually she and I talked about it eventually, I think she was waking up the other ligaments, tendons and muscles, to help carry what was acutely painful.

So sometimes young students, young therapists, want to go right to the heart of the pain.

Stephen Garratt: Yes, exactly.

Linda Carter: You want to shore things up a little first. You want to find the helpers in the dreams, or the helpers on the outside — friends — and the helpers in the body, the healthy parts that can help carry it.

Stephen Garratt: That’s a powerful image.

Linda Carter: That’s how I think about analysis: always keeping in the Dao. I’ve learned so much from the Chinese about bidirectional influence — my God, I’ve learned so much from them. Being in balance. I’m not a Pollyanna who says, but you’re really good at music — that’s ridiculous, that doesn’t do anything for anybody. But maybe you need the helper that was in the dream last time. Let’s bring that person in. Is that person around, in that way?

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The three-tiered systems model

[48:12]

Stephen Garratt: We’re almost at the end of the hour, but I thought we could talk about the three-tiered systems model of interaction and mutual influence.

Linda Carter: That model goes back a long way. I can’t remember what year it was; my mother was dying. Andrew Samuels asked me and another analyst, David Sedgwick, from Virginia, to present at the International Relational Conference — the group that Stephen Mitchell started, and that his wife continued — to talk about Jungian analysis and intersubjectivity.¹² So I wrote a paper about Jung as a proto-intersubjectivist, and I looked at Sol and Luna, and I looked at a diagram from Colwyn Trevarthen, the Scots infant researcher. The similarity was dramatic. The picture of the mother and baby — the arrows are the same. But it’s at a microscopic level.

Jung’s Sol and Luna is a story, a myth, alchemical — at a large scale, a mythopoetic level. And then in between is the transference–countertransference relationship. So you get the same thing in the transference and countertransference, behind the schematised version of Sol and Luna that you see in Mario Jacoby’s book, for example.

So that’s how I think about the three tiers. It developed over time. And Murray Stein — I’ve always felt not good enough. My father was a genius, a physician, and I’ve always felt not good enough. Murray has always invited me to write papers, thank God, because otherwise I would have been too afraid. He’s supported me so many times, and he invited me to present at a conference at Eranos a couple of years ago.

In fact, when I got up to give it, my friend Billy Brennan — a writing partner; he and I are working on active imagination together, he’s an Irish psychoanalyst — I was at the podium and I said, I can’t do this, I’m not good enough. And he looked me in the eye and said, you’re good enough. And I said, okay, I can do this. So: bless Billy Brennan, and bless Murray Stein.

Murray invited me to do that Eranos talk, and I was a wreck over it. Billy and I were in Zurich for a week working on other things during the day, and I was up all night trying to finish that paper. It came together finally, and I feel really good about it.¹³

What I’ve come to about it is that it’s really the central axis of the book I’m working on. I’m writing a clinical book, using clinical examples and art examples for amplification. And what I’ve come to is that it’s all about emergent systems: concentric circles, resonant levels, different scales.

You can move up and down. The portal of entry doesn’t matter. You can enter at a micro level: I say something, and your face looks very sad, and I might say — I’ve just said this, but your face looks upset. What’s happening? Oh, nothing. And then it comes. That’s the micro loop; that’s the nonverbal. Then there’s the transference and countertransference, which is another level — the projection, my countertransference, how those get navigated and discussed. And then there’s the mythopoetic level.

So I see the immediate microscopic level of interaction in the here and now as the present moment. Dan Stern actually wrote a wonderful book called The Present Moment. It’s really well done. He wrote it shortly before he died, and he also wrote a book on vitality affects, which is awesome.¹⁴

The main goal of analysis is not the history and not the future: it’s the present moment.

Stephen Garratt: Yes.

Linda Carter: Because it all comes forward anyway. If you stay with this moment, it will unfold. That’s what I try to teach, and what I try to help supervisees with. Don’t worry. Just stay open, and present, and notice your body, your emotions, your feelings, the patient.

So: the present moment, Dan Stern, micro-level; then transference and countertransference. Thomas Ogden’s work I’m very interested in, and Bion. I’m working on Ogden right now — Ogden, Bion, Jung and Rothko. The experience is the whole thing. It’s the experience right now. That’s the analysis.

You can enter through the transference; you can enter through this moment; you can enter through the patient hating me because my hair looks like her mother’s that day, I don’t know. Or we can enter through an archetypal story the patient is interested in, or a film they’ve seen. It doesn’t matter. You follow the way of the snake through. It’s like the caduceus, in a way — you have the axis, with Hermes and Hestia holding it together.

Something I want to say: the present moment, Dan Stern; and “the present moment of the past”, which is Thomas Ogden, using a line from T. S. Eliot. That’s how he thinks about the transference. It’s alive. It’s the past, but it’s alive here, now. And that includes the negative countertransference — you want that too.

Stephen Garratt: Yes, absolutely.

Linda Carter: And then the mythopoetic level of amplification and active imagination is more about the present moment of the mythic past: the present moment of universals, gods and goddesses, that kind of time.

And I hold the system together in my imagination with Hermes and Hestia. I was writing the Eranos paper on a Sunday morning. A dear friend of ours had died on the East Coast, and we’re on the West Coast, and we couldn’t get into the Zoom, and I felt terrible. I went into the garage and looked at Greek myth books, about Hermes, and I came across the Hermes–Hestia connection. They’re paired. They’re the only two of the Greek gods who are not married, but they are paired. And she is hearth and home — circumscribed, contained — but she has portals above and below. She midwifes people into death and into life. And Hermes is everywhere. He transcends boundaries. He’s the god of communication. And we need both of them in analysis. She’s the secure base, and he’s the movement — flow is the word I’m looking for. He’s the flow.

So that’s the three-tiered systems model in a nutshell. In a nutty little shell.

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The book, and the garden

[57:13]

Stephen Garratt: So you’re actively working on the book at the moment?

Linda Carter: Yes. Well, I was supposed to do that these two weeks off, but I was just too tired. Last summer, getting ready for the Zurich paper, I had COVID for three months, and all I could do was make my kokedama. I had no energy. But I was thinking about it all summer, so I wrote that paper right at the very end, and it came together. With Bill Viola and so forth. It was enjoyable.

I was going to start writing. But I got involved in the yard, and then the closets, and then we had guests — and I knew what I was doing. I knew, because once I start to write, Joe¹⁵ will call me for dinner five times. Five more minutes. So I know what’s going to happen. I’m excited about it. But it was fun being in the yard.

When I’m doing all my yard work — doing nothing — I think of Jung doing all that woodwork and carving. It’s almost like EMDR: you’re regulating yourself. You’re not conscious of it, but you’re working. So I’ve been working on things these two weeks, in that sense — Rothko, Ogden, and so on.

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Closing

[58:50]

Stephen Garratt: Linda, thank you so much for this conversation. We’ve gone from feeling quite tearful about “Amazing Grace” to my chuckling now. It’s been lovely.

Linda Carter: It’s a great combination. Stephen, I’m ever so grateful for this interview. Honestly, when that email came I almost deleted it, because we get all these odd emails — and then I thought, well, I’d better check it. And it was such a lovely invitation. My initial reaction was, why me? I felt quite thin about it. I feel so honoured by this opportunity — that you’re interested, and that you think other people might be interested in my life’s work.

I was talking recently to Beverley Zabriskie, and we agreed — this is forty-six years of practice for me this year. A long time. And you know what? I’m still passionate. I love the work. It’s so interesting. And now it’s really fun, because I don’t worry so much any more. A big thing from the researchers is disruption and repair; I can’t tell you how valuable that is. I have a lot more flexibility and freedom. I’ll say something, and the patient will say, I was just thinking about that. In the past I would have been afraid to do that. So it’s nice to get older. I make mistakes, but that’s okay. It’s part of the deal.

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Notes

1. Carter, L. (2009). Matisse, Picasso, and Intertwined Psyches. ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype, 2009(1). ↩
2. Carter, L. (2010). The transcendent function, moments of meeting and dyadic consciousness: Constructive and destructive co-creation in the analytic dyad. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 55(2), 217–227. First given at the JAP’s IX International Conference, San Francisco, 2009. ↩
3. Carter, L. (2021). Amazing Grace. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 15(3), 6–35. Nominated for the Gradiva Award (best article), 2022. ↩
4. Edward McCrorie (1936–2025), Professor Emeritus of English at Providence College, poet, and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. ↩
5. “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” written by Zoe Mulford (2016); recorded by Meklit (Meklit Hadero) with the Kronos Quartet on Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger (2020). ↩
6. Nine people were killed at Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, on 17 June 2015, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Dylann Roof was sentenced to death in 2017 and remains on federal death row. ↩
7. Linda’s own overview document, and an earlier conversation with Stephen Garratt, both give four days. ↩
8. Carter, L. (2026). The emergence of play and creative imagination through slowing down and doing nothing: From neuroscience to the arts. In E. Brodersen (Ed.), Zürich 2025 — Experiences of the Non-Understandable: Jungian Explorations and Contributions: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (pp. 1053–1081). Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag. ↩
9. Linda is a practising Quaker; her CV describes Meeting as “an emergent process of spiritual flow within the group.” ↩
10. Ruth Ammann (also spelled Amann) died on 3 August 2023, aged 89. ↩
11. The Beijing Sandplay Game Centre. ↩
12. Carter, L., Samuels, A. & Sedgwick, D. (2012). “The Analyst is as Much ‘in the Analysis’ as the Patient.” International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), 10th International Conference, New York. Stephen Mitchell, who died in 2000, founded the IARPP. ↩
13. The Eranos talk, later given again at the 2025 IAAP Zurich Congress with a focus on Bill Viola’s video art (see note 8, a different paper), was published as: Carter, L. (2023). “Going the Full Circle: Pattern Resonance from Microcosmic Interactions to Macrocosmic Amplifications.” In Jung’s Red Book for Our Time, Vol. V, eds. M. Stein & T. Arzt. Asheville: Chiron. A companion piece: Carter, L. (2022). “The flux and flow of free-play and paradox.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, 67(4), 1045–1069. ↩
14. Daniel Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004); Forms of Vitality (2010). Stern died in 2012. ↩
15. Joe Cambray, Linda’s husband, with whom she co-edited Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis (Routledge, 2004). ↩

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Further Reading