CRITICA

The Wake Up Project (Or How Carol Woke Us Up)
by Bruce Weitzman, Psy.D., M.F.T

Carol was in her fourth year of seminar when I began training at PINC. My cohort was the last to start in the cramped quarters on Fillmore Street before the big move to PINC’s current location on Bush Street. Ginny Pizzardi and I used to arrive early for our Tuesday night class, just so that we could meet up with Carol at Starbucks a few doors down the block. We knew she would beat us there. She used to sit regally in a club chair against the south wall of the store, holding court, playing welcome wagon for whoever would show up early. Her laughter would fill the café just as surely as her presence lit up the room. My initial impressions of PINC are still refracted through the lens of these welcoming weekly encounters with Carol at Starbucks.

I got to know Carol through the Wakeup Project, a group that grew out of the 2012 PINC Retreat. That year’s retreat theme concerned the question of how to represent the benefits of psychoanalysis to people who had not had the experience. A small group of us concluded that psychoanalysis is itself an experience that cannot be summed up through a description of its process or an inventory of its results. The idea emerged to make a YouTube video with a group of us speaking openly and powerfully about our experiences as analysands.

Five of us, those who constitute the Wakeup Project—Carol Cleland, Luca Di Donna, Cheryl Jacques, Scott Perna, and me—met monthly for a year to engage one another in detailed discussions about our analyses. We met at my house on Sunday mornings, each member bearing pastries, fresh fruit or cheese. I usually had a frittata in the oven for the group, sometimes an Italian sausage strata. My husband played the role of barista, making espressos or lattes for the group, bringing to mind my initial encounters with Carol at Starbucks. Our group was warm and earnest in speaking with one another about the intimacies and upsets within our analytic processes. We built trust with one another, and some of us struggled greatly with the idea of taking such intimate stories beyond the protective enclosure of our small group.

The following year, at the 2013 PINC Retreat, we presented the Wakeup Project video consisting of a series of interviews, whereby each of us told the stories of our analyses—our successes and failures, gains and losses—as well as described the arc of who we had become, and were becoming, as a result of this most personal investment of years on the couch. I was surprised to learn that most of us had had more than one analyst; most of us struggled to find our voices in our analyses; we all had traumas that impaired our capacities to speak. After viewing the video, many retreat participants complimented our efforts and expressed to us that they were moved by our testimonies. It was clear, however, that we had shattered a wall, transgressed an unspoken taboo in the psychoanalytic world: one’s analysis is a private matter. Not everyone felt comfortable with our sharing such intimacies.

The Wakeup Project continued to meet monthly. After making our video, the group struggled with the question of what next? What should be the work of the group? We read and studied together. We debated initiating various projects. Three of us wrote graduation papers and became analysts during this time. Nothing specific took shape immediately to replace our project of creating this film. Yet, our monthly meetings felt vital, personal, and deeply relational. So, we just kept going.

Eventually, life intervened. Several of our members struggled with significant life-threatening illnesses. We met sporadically, though our connection through these painful life experiences seemed to deepen. Bad news does that. Paradoxically, it has the potential to hide us from one another and bring us together more closely at the same time.

When Carol shared her diagnosis with us—Multiple System Atrophy—a rare degenerative disorder, she knew she was dying. Our group doubled down to be involved in her process, meeting monthly at her Palo Alto home, talking with one another about aging, illness and death. Our group expanded to include my husband, Steve, who had over the years become a dear friend to each of the members of the group, as well as Carol’s husband Alan. Steve and Alan folded seamlessly into the batter of our group, as necessary ingredients to the clan we were becoming. Carol began to write about her life and share these vignettes with us, intimate reflections of her earlier self.

Carol’s health deteriorated more rapidly than any of us would have wanted. Immediately after one of our meetings at her house, a bad spill left Carol in chronic pain for three months and limited her ability to have us over. We continued to meet on ZOOM. We added Scott’s husband, Jonathan, to our tribe, who brought with him a dear love of literature, a deeply reflective mind, and warmth. Once again, a new ingredient, renewing our bonds as a family. We, as a group, now eight of us, have spent time this past year reading poetry and prose, discussing our newly reordered lives under COVID, and more and more, taking in the approach of Carol’s mortality, our own frailties in aging, and contemplation of our own life limits.

For nearly a decade, the Wakeup Project has been what I hoped psychoanalysis and PINC would be: an open and deeply rooted soul-connection. While the potential for such a meaningful connection seems always to be present, especially in environments such as PINC, so committed to psychoanalytic exploration and group process, it is nonetheless a rare experience for such connections to become so deeply personal. Carol’s initial arms-wide-open greetings at Starbucks 11 years ago presaged a continuing motif: a joyful, welcoming invitation exuding wisdom and safety. Carol now offers the members of our group a new experience, one that tests the depth of our capacities to stay in contact with and alive to profound loss and approaching death.

Carol Cleland’s Eulogy
by Cheryl Jacques

Carol Cleland has generously provided a living and legacy trust to PINC. For those of you who do not know her or remember her, allow us to introduce her again to you. In April 2016, Carol Cleland graduated from PINC. She established a full analytic practice in Palo Alto from which she just recently retired as her health is in decline.

Carol was an original member of the WakeUp Project established in 2019, a group of then candidates and one analyst, all of whom continue to meet some eight years later. We wanted to “break the rules,” we wanted to talk together about our personal experiences in psychoanalysis, we wanted to transcend the barrier of what we now realize was an implicit monoculture of psychoanalysis. We unconsciously resisted assimilation. We produced a film that challenged psychoanalytic thinking. Half of PINC liked it, the other half not too much. The WakeUp Project members were Carol Cleland, Bruce Weitzman, Scott Perna, Luca diDonna, and Cheryl Jacques.

The title of Carol’s paper was, USING INTUITION: “A nurse, a priest, and a psychoanalyst walk into a bar together, and….” 

I, Cheryl, had the honor of introducing Carol and her graduation paper. What follows is my introduction and Carol’s paper. We want all senior members of PINC to know that we see them, we thank them, we remember them and we value their time, history and presence in our lives.

It’s my great pleasure to introduce Carol Cleland on her graduation day. It’s been a privilege to know Carol, to learn more about her, to see her devotion and feel her reverence for psychoanalysis, her patients, her friends, and most of all, for Alan, her husband of 50 years. 

A nurse, a priest and an analyst go into a bar together and…the world rotates, shudders, shifts. Carol says: “As a priest, who am I to say? There’s lots of room for people to come from their direction and then arrive at their own intuition – which is the unconscious. The activities of daily life – chores, changing baby’s diaper – become deeply resonant. There’s mutuality: you bring yourself to an experience and the experience brings itself to you. Something new, like a 3rd, like a birth – a moment of transcendence happens. It’s bigger than we are.”

In the bar…across the bar is Carol: highly accomplished, deeply sourced, and quietly radical. A woman who moves fearlessly to those who need her, whether known to her or not.

Allow me tell you about Carol’s journeys in nursing and priesthood. Using facts from her life and in her words: her journey, her impact in the bar, in the hospital & clinic, in the church, and in her office.

Carol is a Boston native. She lived with her parents and her severely disabled sister, Marsha. While resources were directed toward Marsha’s care, Carol went on to earn a bachelor in science from BU, a Masters in English language and literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, a Master of Divinity from The Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, and an MA in psychology at USF. 

While at Fairleigh-Dickinson, Carol was the head of student health services and on the board of Planned Parenthood in NJ. In the early 70s, in a conservative Catholic community, Carol fearlessly taught college students about sexuality.

This quiet radical went about her business, integrating who she was and what she stood for. Carol might have appeared conservative, with a Wall St. husband, living in a posh part of town, but in retrospect, she considers that she was a radical feminist. At that time she did not put herself forward as a radical, she just quietly was unafraid and talked openly with students about their sexuality and sexual practice, whether heterosexual, homosexual, transexual. As Carol says, “I was not an overt trailblazer but I got the job done.” Alan was supportive of her radicalism and also tried to warn her: He said, “you’re going to get into trouble!” She said, ‘How can you live in this world today and not put condoms in the waiting room?” Looking conservative she turned conservatism on its head.

Continuing in nursing, Carol worked at McLean hospital as an assistant head nurse for inpatient adolescents and adults. At that time McLean had psychoanalytic tenure and was part of Harvard medical school. Alan’s work took him and Carol to Texas for a year and a half. There, Carol worked in community mental health: she ran groups as the head of day treatment programs at a hospital community center. 

Carol and Alan moved to the Bay Area in 1984, after living in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Texas, & Minnesota. Carol decided to enter the priesthood, in an evolution of desire from 11 years of age. Confirmed as Episcopalian at age 11, she had an early sense of wanting to be a minister. As she thinks about it now, Carol says she had an unconscious knowing, a psychic sense of holding, and a natural presence as in a laying on of hands. As a nurse, Carol had dealt with the body and mind. Now she knew that the psychological and the spiritual were inseparable. Being and practice are the continuum of intuition, of Unconscious life. As Carol says, there is no split between religious/spiritual and being. How can you take an experience apart by doing, she asks? It’s all spiritual.

Carol already had a deep synchrony beyond understanding. In facing the pain of the world, she simply asked, “How can I help?” And, “How could that have happened to Marsha or anybody who suffers to that degree. It’s an aberration, this degree of suffering. How could God let that happen?”

In 1990, Carol earned a Master of Divinity. This quiet dissident with a deep questioning mind waited for the right time for ordination. As usual it was a struggle for women’s equal rights; most divinity students were men and few were women. From her class, 86 men were hired as heads of churches, while only two of six women were hired. Out of seminary Carol walked into a rector job at 2 consecutive churches, an exemplary accomplishment at that time. But she discovered that when you are a woman rector, more than 50% of the congregation doesn’t want you precisely because you are a woman. Carol experienced tremendous resistance, even a fight to get rid of her, as a first woman rector. She insisted that she and her congregation face these dynamics together with respect and care. This painful experience was turned around and the community became a caring spiritual one under Carol’s guidance.

Do you hear the themes? a quiet activist, firm, honest, caring, fair, a visionary. Carol placed herself into dissent. This capacity is linked to intuition. She asked, how do you go into the unknown mess, see something bigger, intuit what could be? There’s a kind of disruptive growth good for the human soul, leading to a greater sense of community wholeness. She said that people could be more than they thought they could be, could grow toward a shared vision of community. Carol was an extraordinary pastor and priest for 25 years. She retired at age 65.

Here’s another thing to know about Carol that won’t surprise some of you: her humor, her irreverence, her ribald jokes. She startles and delights her listener. She says, it’s like swimming in the deep and then coming up for air to have a chuckle. The flip into humor follows a manifestation of some awareness, some insight, an unexpected commentary – and then she is funny, startles, is irreverent. Carol says, “I can do that since it is all of one whole…emotionally and spiritually integrated, like the Eucharist and the Seder.”

Carol will tell you she’s an atheist. She’s never the authority. She does not take position of the one who knows. She does not cure, and would never lie. She tells it to you straight and direct. She is a rare friend and comrade, uniquely compassionate, and tuned in to the entire range of human experience.

Carol became a therapist at age 65, and went straight to PINC. She currently has a full analytic practice in Palo Alto. She is a consultant to other therapists. 

A nurse, a priest and a psychoanalyst went into a bar….to share stories, ponder her intuitive development, and have a few laughs in the presence of a painful world. Carol, the psychoanalyst, in full possession of her gift of intuitive knowing, stands before us, to share with us her beautiful paper about her psychoanalytic journey and the meaning of her arrival here today.

Losing farther, losing faster…

The poet Elizabeth Bishop intuits the heart of trauma and loss (in One Art). A nurse, a priest and an analyst live it. Carol Cleland brings us the evolution of her intuitive gift. As Carol says, the evolution of her intuition is founded in life and death – from a childhood with Marcia who could not be comforted, from a dying child’s confidence in her, from a priest circling children around her, creating space for their true voice. From a psychoanalyst deeply compassionate and offering unreserved full range of intuitive knowing to her patients, friends, acquaintances. Carol seizes moments, breaks rules, moves nimbly toward the intuitive edge of the unspeakable, the heart, the core, the center.

Not only in death but life. Bion writes about embryonic intuitive knowing that lives in us and persists throughout life. In the working of intuition, of dreaming, of sensual unsymbolized experience, Carol embodies deep sustained attention, repeatedly lost and repeatedly found, thereby never missing a moment. Hearing Carol, watching her, her softening and broadening moments, we feel the shift from duality into her unity of container as thinker, as sensory bearer of unspokenness, of sorrow, of loss, the moment of darkness after a spark in the air. 

Losing harder…

Carol is dying. Losing her is a disaster. Her impending death reminds us that what can be taken from us, will be taken from us. The poet John Murillo adds, “This you can bet on without losing” (in Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop).

The WakeUp Project has met for nine years. We became fast friends, sharing talks, opera, tears, laughs, and psychoanalytic writing and thinking. We are losing her. We cannot master this. We want you to know who she is, that she is unforgettable, that she is a rare friend, nurse, priest, psychoanalyst.

By Cheryl
March 29, 2021

To Carol Cleland
by Luca Di Donna, Ph.D.

It is very sad to say goodbye to a friend: a friend who for a long time was part of my life.

Carol was part of the Wake Up Project; I liked her from the start of our relationship. She was lively, outspoken, a music lover who also loved poetry, literature and psychoanalysis. Carol had many careers: she was first a nurse, a priest, then a psychoanalyst.

I would like to write about Carol’s work as a psychoanalyst, especially her interest in the concept of intuition in the psychoanalytic process. I hope to capture some of Carol’s fascinating ideas on this topic.Carol believed in the unconscious and she tried to understand the dark aspects of our mind, which produced suffering and pain. Intuition for her was the royal road to the unconscious. Intuition was not a mystical concept or a form of wild analysis. For Carol it was a creative process, a challenge, to bring to life aspects of our internal life that were unreachable or untranslatable.She embraced the gift of intuition from her early life helping her very sick sister. . Later on, she applied her intuitive aspect in working with children and lastly, in her psychoanalytic practice, she refined and elaborated her views of this concept.

Carol’s graduation paper clarified many perspectives on intuition summarizing elegantly the work of Bion, Reik and the contemporary analysts. Her artistry was her ability to convey her emotional intuition while linking it to theoretical models in a fluid and moving manner. I liked Carol’s idea which I call, “The Working of the Intuition. “ For her, that state of mind developed gradually in analysis. The mind of the analyst combined many ideas and feelings in a form of gestalt that would emerge in an intuitive moment opening up the analytic work. She felt that intuition was not only a mental phenomenon but also was activated in the body and in silent communications. She followed Bion’s later work in which he used intuition as an impetus to bring to life new psychic ideas.

Bion wrote a great deal on the concept of intuition. It is very difficult to follow his work. It is a bit mystical, especially his concept of O, the supreme unconscious. In Nicola Able Hirsh’s book, “Bion’s 315 Quotes”, the author found 24 references on intuition in his collected work. Bion, however, did not write a single paper on intuition and, in Freud’s work, the word ”intuition” is cited only once.

In the current literature, I found a paper by Dr Maria Eugenia Cid Rodriquez, from Spain, that can be linked to Carol’s ideas. Dr Rodriquez pointed out that intuition appears in both the patient and analysts in catastrophic states of the mind and in the depressive position. It is suggested also by Dr Rodriguez that intuition is a process that takes place in the mind of the patient and analyst.

Carol’s work is innovative and original. She introduced an analyst who creates, who can contain his wish and desire and has faith to use intuition without fear. Carol presented a psychoanalytic “viva,” (alive) human, daring and passionate.Carol’s death is a big loss for us all. It was an imperfect separation, but there are no perfect separations in life or in psychoanalysis. Perhaps, we, the psychoanalytic community, can mourn and internalize Carol, thus keeping her spirit alive. She was inspirational and she will be in our hearts for a long time. She will not be forgotten.

Addio. Carol. Luca

For Carol Cleland
by Scott Perna, Psy.D.

The following was written on March, 24, 2021: 

Death is ordinary, natural, and generally unexpected. It is present all around us in leaves underfoot, in the butcher’s display case, in newspapers, in the dramas we watch and read, in the traps we leave for the critters we don’t want in our homes. It resides in metaphor and exaggeration: our hopes die, our love dies, the car dies, we die from embarrassment, our feet kill us. We personify it and make light of it. We even make it into a drive. It happens all around us, dwelling in everyday language, without notice or concern, until it happens to someone close to us. Metaphors dissolve and fracture in the face of facts. Startled, we wake up to death’s reality.

Carol revealed to our Wake Up group in January 2019 that she was suffering from a disease of the autonomic nervous system, the course of which was “rapid and fatal”. At each subsequent meeting, she detailed the increasing debilitation of her symptoms candidly, straightforwardly, and not without humor. As all of us in the group have reached middle age, we have all experienced the deterioration of our aging bodies. Some of us have had scary diagnoses ourselves. But Carol was the first in our group to receive the definitive pronouncement of the end of life. For the most part, we don’t get to pick how or when or by what manner we die. Often enough, we don’t even get a warning. But Carol did get advance notice and she has demonstrated to us how one can prepare for death forthrightly, and can face death directly. But facing death directly is a complicated affair: it doesn’t exclude pain, dread, sadness, despair, fear, regret, but encompasses all of them. You are born alone and you die alone, goes the cliche. But in between, you discover (hopefully) that your life doesn’t just belong to you, but belongs also, and just as much, to the people who love you. This is one of the things I’ve learned from Carol about dying: in the midst of the great losses you experience as you die, it is vital to remember how much of you lives in the people you love and who love you in return. In our meetings, I watch Carol light up the room with her warmth and humor, even as her body betrays her. Her liveliness wakes us up with the delight she expresses in the complexities of living. 

She passionately embodies the core of this group: the belief that understanding (understanding others, understanding ourselves) is messy and complicated, never really settled, but remains the greatest of endeavors. She radiates life and it is our group’s great fortune to be hit with the force of that radiation, imbuing our lives with her tenderness, wit, and grace, gifts that now live inside us, too.