liminal identity to wholeness
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [Queensland University of Technology]On: 01 November 2014, At: 15:24Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Jung Journal: Culture & PsychePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujun20
Liminal Identity to WholenessRuth Cobb Hill Ph.D. aa 1 Ajax Place, Berkeley , CA , 94708Published online: 01 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Ruth Cobb Hill Ph.D. (2010) Liminal Identity to Wholeness, Jung Journal: Culture &Psyche, 4:2, 16-30, DOI: 10.1525/jung.2010.4.2.16
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jung.2010.4.2.16
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Liminal Identity to WholenessA “Biracial” Path to the Practice of Cross-Cultural,
Jungian Psychotherapy
ru th cobb hill
All of us who do the work of psychotherapy bring to it our entire personal develop-ment. In this article, I describe my coming to a particular way of working cross-culturallythrough the unique factors in my background and the development of my identity. �e �rst part of the article is autobiographical, and in the second part, I present three case vignettes that illustrate speci�cally how I use my own identity in the work. In order to talk about my path to becoming a cross-cultural psychotherapist, I bring together “biracialism,” liminal identity, East-West psychology, and Jungian psychology.
I was born a white child to parents who were both half Anglo-American and half Filipino (with a little Chinese and Spanish mixed in). Both grandfathers were Anglo- Americans and both grandmothers were Filipinas. I was “given” by my parents to my maternal grandparents as a gi�, the greatest gesture my parents could o�er in exchange for being given to in large measure, a not-uncommon custom in the Philippines among upper-class families. �is custom was still practiced when I was born in the early 1930s.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was from Northern California and became a very wealthy industrialist in the Philippines who upheld a belief in human rights and equality. His beliefs and actions led to his being characterized as a friend of the Philippines and the Filipino people. He went to the Philippines as a young civilian volunteer during the Spanish American War in 1898. He had grown up on a northern California ranch, where he learned to make boots and saddles, and he mastered the cra� of shoemaking for the army. He stayed in the Philippines a�er the Spanish American War ended and eventually became the largest manufacturer of shoes in all of Southeast
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 16–30, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. © 2010 Virginia Allan Detlo� Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2010.4.2.16.
JUNG4002_02.indd 16 4/13/10 4:00:59 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 17
Asia—and possibly all of Asia—prior to World War II. He was a master of his cra� and gave me glimpses of the cra�smanship necessary to change a small thing into a fortune. Imbued with the philosophy of the Scot-tish Masons, he became a Grand Master of the high-est-ranking Masonic Lodge in the Philippines, to which some of the most powerful people of his time belonged, including the �rst president of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, and General Douglas MacArthur. His being a Mason later drew me to the alchemical allegories underlying their rites and rituals, the same mysterious tradition that C. G. Jung used to amplify his under-standing of psychological development. I was in awe of my grandfather’s personality. He was a humanist with powerful and heroic masculine energies. He was fearless and honorable, indomitable in defense, unchanged in the midst of changes. He taught me the principles of justice, integrity, and equal rights. He was my tie to the West and its brand of ego consciousness.
My grandmother was the daughter of revolutionary Filipino parents, who died �ghting in a skirmish with Spanish colonial soldiers who had forced them to give up their land, leave their town, and walk into the jungle. Orphaned at a very young age and respon-sible for the care of a younger brother, she learned to survive, with the help of a child-less aunt and uncle but mostly with her instincts. Gathering all she could from what she heard from the elders, she learned to read the signs in the heavens—for instance, whether the Big Dipper was empty or full1—and she developed a wisdom and capacity to see born of this relation to nature. She was able to heal the soil, heal the sick, and create beauty and bounty. She was a strong, gentle woman of the land, and through her, I participated in her worldview. As the only white child in an entire collec-tive, mostly isolated from people who looked like me for many years, I devel-oped a relationship to my grandmoth-er’s world, with her being the shaman who protected me.
�ough forced by the Spanish to become Catholic, my grandmother never identi�ed with religion. �is was a point of connection between
Frank Harm Hale, Ruth Cobb Hill’s maternal grandfather
Teodora Elazegui Hale, Ruth Cobb Hill’s maternal grand-mother
JUNG4002_02.indd 17 4/13/10 4:00:59 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
18 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
my grandparents, as my grandfather was openly critical of the Church, particularly a�er cleaning a Spanish dungeon when he was a young volunteer. My grandmother saw Christ only as a symbol, just as a tree might be a symbol of the Self. From her, I learned to humble myself to nature and to have an open attitude about those whose natures were unknown to me. She found what was right from examining the in�nite heavens and observing nature at its deepest core, bringing herself close to an understanding of the souls and fates of people, animals, plants, insects, and children. She o�en said that I pulsated in a di�erent rhythm, and she questioned how it was that I came into her life—perhaps by chance—but mostly as a gi�. She reected upon the meaning of my outer and inner experiences, including my dreams. She examined how her pagkatao (her Self ) a�ected me, and she corrected her movements in accordance with what was light and dark within us and in the universe.
Living with my grandmother was not always easy. Sometimes it was an endurance test; on occasions she dressed me as a kind of fertility goddess, shrouding me in cloth, and had me plant corn in the noonday sun to insure the spirit of the corn would pro-duce large kernels. I deeply valued being in attunement with her and listening to her stories, but I also stood on the limen between her animistic world of magic and omens and my grandfather’s patriarchal, Western sensibility. Even our linguistic lives were an expression of this liminality: my grandparents spoke only Spanish to each other, and she spoke only Tagalog to me and he only English. Beside her, I was preoccupied with giving quiet voice to my own authentic perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, my own psychic space. I knew her power impacted many, and because people were drawn to her, my grandfather became protective of her. Together, they were dynamic and inuenced people from all walks of life, from the sick and very poor to the rich and powerful. �ey gave to social causes and established and funded projects, even experimenting with what would now be called “green products.” With social workers and nurses, they prepared for the coming of World War II, setting up emergency centers, converting four factory buildings into a Red Cross supply center to serve the southern part of Manila. With their spirit in me, I became a nat-ural volunteer.
My grandfather on my father’s side was a mining engineer who was sent to map the Philippine Seas for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Sur-vey before the Spanish American War spread to the Philippines in 1898. A gentle and introverted intellectual, he educated my father in mining engineering, and together they lived in the jungles in di�erent parts of the Islands for extended periods, survey-ing untouched lands for the Bureau of Lands, an American agency that was ultimately
Ira Dee Cobb, Ruth Cobb Hill’s paternal grandfather, a mining engineer
JUNG4002_02.indd 18 4/13/10 4:00:59 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 19
turned over to the Philippine government. He taught at the University of the Philippines in Baguio City, where he was a sought-a�er pro-fessor. From him, my father learned scienti�c methodology, but his interests were in anthro-pology, and he became friends with a number of tribal groups, one of which gave him a gi� of the largest pearl in the world, a story true to my father’s romantic nature. I knew my father only as a very young child and then later as an adult, yet both of us thought like anthropologists. We not only spoke di�erent languages but also studied them. He wrote a dictionary of Cuyono, the dialect of a tiny island in the Sulu Sea where he was born. He also wrote a book on Dyak life (these works are unpublished). His mother, my
Wilburn Dowell Cobb, Ruth Cobb Hill’s father, was interested in anthropology and became friends with a number of tribal groups.
Pasquala Tejada del Rosario Cobb, Ruth Cobb Hill’s paternal grandmother, the descendant of a Spanish count who married the daughter of a Philippine Island Chie�ain
JUNG4002_02.indd 19 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
20 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
Ruth Cobb Hill’s mother, Engracia Hale Cobb, with her seven children, 1940. From le� to right: Rosemarie, Willy, Jenny, Grace, Ruth, Frankie, and Elmer.
paternal grandmother, was the grandchild of a Spanish count who married the daughter of an island chie�ain. From her roots owed traditional social roles and manners.
My mother, the beautiful younger daughter of my grandparents, grew up rich, privileged, and socially sought a�er. She married my father, had six children, and was pregnant with the seventh when my father le� for the United States to show the pearl he had been given at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Soon a�er, World War II broke out, and he was unable to return to the Philippines (a�er the war, he chose not to return, and my mother chose not to join him in the United States). Because my mother was alone now, she joined her parents and, during the war, heroically supported nurses and underground guerillas. She once saved my six siblings and myself from being killed by standing up to a Japanese soldier who was threatening to bayonet us, catching him totally by surprise and e�ectively altering his consciousness. And as she was a mezzo-soprano, she enlivened our lives during the occupation through her music.
�e two families, both maternal and paternal, were gracious to each other, but certain remnants of the American Civil War still created friction between my grand-fathers. My maternal grandfather was a Lincoln Republican, whereas my paternal grandfather was a descendant of Samuel Adams who married into a well-known and powerful Southern Confederate family. However liberal he was, his pre–Civil War politics were dicult for my maternal grandfather to abide. Both families were politi-cally astute and very well connected. In light of this, I learned to be politic.
I was sent to Bordner School, an American school that accepted children of “international” backgrounds in order to accommodate children of diplomats. When I was nine and in the fourth grade, World War II broke out, and the school was closed.
JUNG4002_02.indd 20 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 21
It was the end of my American schooling and of friendships with other children from the United States and many other countries.
At the outbreak of the war, we were informed that we would be evacuated with General Douglas MacArthur. In the end, we weren’t evacuated; I was crushed and scared. �is was my �rst exposure to government duplicity. During the Japanese occu-pation, my grandfather was forced to sign all his properties and enterprises over to the Japanese military forces. Our home was con�scated, and he was taken to Santo �omas concentration camp. He trusted my grandmother’s ability to survive in nature, and so they planned that she would “hide” the children. I was camouaged as a Filipina.
Hiding meant isolation, fear, and constant vigilance to any dangers lurking. We underwent all the horrors of war—bombings, atrocities, and exposure to the evil of collaborators—along with heroic gestures. During this period, my modus operandi was service—constantly helping. I was only nine, but I volunteered at the Philippine General Hospital and, supervised by a nurse and social worker, helped burn victims who lined the walls of the wards by the dozens. Toward the end of the war, when many people were dying of starvation, I volunteered at the Gota de Leche, an international institute whose goal then was to breast-feed babies who could not be fed by their own mothers.
�e goal of the Japanese military was clear—to take all Asia and place all Asiatic peoples under the rule of one Emperor, who was seen as a god. Because I was not in a concentration camp with other Americans, I spent all four years of the war as the only white-skinned person in my entire surroundings, from urban Manila to the rice �elds of Pampanga, our last hiding place. Bombings and atrocities occurred everywhere. I nearly died three times. Evil was rampant. At the outbreak of the war, when we were being strafed by aerial machine guns, we ed to an Australian monastery at Binango-nan on the shores of Laguna de Bay. In the quiet of this place, I had a numinous expe-rience and decided to become Catholic. I found safety in the church and comfort from the priests, but underneath it all, I wondered what was ahead for my mind, as the world was turning mad.
I turned to a little book, an introduction to yoga that I had taken from my grand-father’s library before we le� our con�scated home, and I read it word for word. �e book comforted me, providing a sense of balance in my outlook. I felt so attuned to it that it felt like a prayer book—more so than the Catholic prayer book I had seen, for it helped my body as well. As I look back, I can see that this little exposure to yoga, with its emphasis on harmony, gave me a framework for appreciating my grandmother’s teach-ings and her ways—a childish apprehension that at the bottom of all of nature is the interweaving of the opposites of masculine and feminine. I saw this interweaving in the nature of the soil, in plants, in animals, in people, and in the cosmos in general.
JUNG4002_02.indd 21 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
22 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
�e ideas I developed about it made the yoga as well as my grandmother’s teachings more conscious. �e war gave me an awareness of the light as well as the dark—the good as well as the reality of evil, and, as we had to hide alone without my grandfather’s presence, I consciously feared that I was losing something—my capacity for a Western mode of thought and sense of individual identity.
A�er the war, I was sent to a very exclusive girl’s school, Assumption Convent in Manila, run by French nuns, which promoted social consciousness. I was thrust into the company of rich women from philanthropic families, which supported my ser-vice giving. A�er graduation, I came to the United States to attend the University of California at Los Angeles. �ere, I found myself lacking in sucient Western con-sciousness. I became disoriented and went into deep culture shock. I had my �rst experiences with racial prejudice. For the �rst time, I was socially isolated and unpro-tected, and I felt lost and frightened. My familiarity with living on the limen between divergent inuences was a help, but, as I look back, I feared that my Filipina soul was being murdered.
A friend informed me that Carl Rogers was giving a seminar on campus, and I cut classes to attend. One of the many precepts of his client-centered therapy hit home—that the structure of the self results from interaction with one’s environment, partic-ularly one’s evaluative interactions with others. His seminar was the beginning of my psychological awareness and my conscious search for identity. I remembered that, immediately a�er liberation in World War II, I devoured dictionaries and discovered the world limen—the limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible. To me, this meant that within me was a threshold beneath which my grandfather’s Anglo- ness and my grandmother’s Filipina-ness ceased to be perceptible. I realized that I was phenotypically di�erent; I was on my own, forming a new identity. Furthermore, limen as threshold could also mean gateway—the beginning of a state or action. I liked the idea of being on the threshold; it gave me permission to strive. I began to refer to myself as “liminal” and to watch movements within and outside of myself in reaction to aspirations that might be part of my future. �e word liminal has never really le� me. Forty-nine years later, I wrote a paper (Hill 1994) about this discovery, in relation to which I found Victor Turner’s use of the word liminal (Turner 1969). At that point, I stopped identifying myself as “biracial.”
I decided to leave school and return to the Philippines. In the meantime, my grandfather had died, and the sociocultural situation in the Philippines was chang-ing in relation to its new independence, and in the absence of my grandfather’s American inuence, my entire family was assimilating to the new Philippine cul-ture. I determined it wasn’t where I wanted to be and returned to the United States. I moved to San Francisco, where my long-lost father, whom I hardly knew, lived, and I went to work.
JUNG4002_02.indd 22 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 23
I soon met the man I married, and we had children while we both worked to sup-port him through his education. Being married to a very verbal Anglo-American awak-ened memories of the linguistic issues in my family and the di�erences between the consciousnesses of my grandparents. I began to think about linguistic analysis, and I came to the realization that my English and Tagalog came from di�erent perspectives and worldviews. Closeness to my husband pulled me toward a Western perspective and forced a more conscious integration of the opposing views within me. It was a good pro-cess, and I sometimes felt whole. On the other hand, I o�en felt shamed and ridiculed because of my diculties expressing what I was experiencing. �is made me angry, and I grieved the past. Fortunately, my husband was interested in Tagalog and its perspec-tive and struggled to understand me. �is mutual commitment to consciousness was the glue between us.
I felt whole and functioned well as a mother. �en, when our younger child was about �ve, it was my turn to return to school and to ground my search for myself through education. �is was encouraged by two Rogerian therapists who thought I needed to formalize my linguistic insights through education and supported my di�er-entiating my own views and values from my husband’s. Later, I went into Jungian anal-ysis, where I found receptivity to the conict and interplay between my Eastern and Western sides. Being able to discuss East and West in an understanding temenos (one of those Jungian words for analytic container) supported a gradual bringing together of the opposites within me.
I felt shy about further education, so I began by enrolling in a Mandarin course at Oakland Community College. Soon I gained enough con�dence to enroll at U. C. Berkeley in the Oriental Languages Department, where I plunged further into Man-darin and earned commendations for the sensitivity of my translations of modern and ancient poetry. I also studied Bahasa Indonesia and classical Malay, spending a summer session at the University of Illinois translating the Sejarah Melayu, a classical Malayan chronicle of the lives of pre-��eenth-century kings, part of my search for the archetypal underpinnings of my heritage. (My translation has not been published.) While I was an undergraduate, I was tapped by the Anthropology Department to teach Tagalog lan-guage and culture to graduate students who planned to do �eld work in the Philippines.
At this time, Berkeley was in a state of huge political upheaval, and I was asked to participate in a movement to establish an Ethnic Studies Division on the Berke-ley campus. I wanted to include a Tagalog course that would be open to all interested students, not just graduate anthropology students. �is was politically very dicult in relation to the Oriental Languages Department, which resisted the establishment of an Ethnic Studies Division, but the department ultimately endorsed my e�orts and recommended me to teach the course, which was approved by the Chancellor. How-ever, the department would not give me a degree in Oriental Languages unless I learned
JUNG4002_02.indd 23 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
24 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
Japanese—something I could not bring myself to do—so my bachelor’s degree was granted in Southeast Asian Languages and Literature.
My degree was a crowning achievement in my search for myself, raising to a higher level my East-West liminal identity. I immediately went into graduate school in the Group in Asian Studies, where I specialized in medical and psychological anthropol-ogy. My master’s study was of Filipino attitudes toward Western medical services in which I pioneered a linguistic methodology in a comparative study of the use of med-ical services by geriatric Filipinos within and without structured healthcare settings (Hill 1975). I also researched Philippine folk-healing systems in urban Manila and the rural Philippines, and under the supervision of my faculty advisors, I consulted the sta� of a psychiatric ward of a Central Valley hospital about a provincial Filipina mental patient and her family. At this time, I established a private practice as a “cross-cultural consultant” and worked with many Asian clients and organizations in this capacity.
By now it was clear to me that my future lay in the practice of psychotherapy, how-ever, and I applied to the Wright Institute for a Ph.D. in Social/Clinical Psychology. My application led to a bizarre situation that illustrates the dilemmas that liminals o�en face. �e Wright Institute admissions committee was comprised of whites and minority members, and they split along color lines because they couldn’t get along. At �rst, I was not admitted because, in my view, each group saw me as belonging to the other. I appealed to the president of the Institute and was �nally accepted.
I have meant this long—and I hope not-too-tiresome—recounting of my story to give you a basis for understanding how my past contributed to my developing a way of working—that is, a use of myself—in cross-cultural psychotherapy. �e consultation I did for the Central Valley hospital when I was a student illustrates the unique position of the liminal in doing cross-cultural work.
A seventeen-year-old Filipina girl who lived in a close-knit Filipino farming com-munity had apparently become psychotic, trashed her parents’ entire home, and then ran screaming into the �elds. She was taken to the hospital for observation, but the sta� did not know what to make of this girl whose English was very limited. �ey con-tacted the University Anthropology Department in an e�ort to �nd someone who could help, and I was asked by my professor to go see what I could do. �e police took me to the parents’ home, where I found them clinging to one another in a frightened and defensive state. I spoke to them in Tagalog in an e�ort to make them feel comfort-able enough to open to me. �ey were suspicious, I think, because I am white and had come with the police, but gradually they told me the story of their daughter becoming possessed by a demon and that they could not get a priest to exorcise the demon.
In the meantime, as I was relating to her parents, the girl had been suciently calmed by the hospital personnel that they felt it was safe for the police to bring her
JUNG4002_02.indd 24 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 25
home to meet with me, and we spent the next several hours together in a room in the house. She was very nervous but realized I was there to help her, and because I was talking to her gently in Tagalog and English, she seemed to trust me fairly quickly and began to open up about having fallen in love with a young Anglo-American dea-con or lay priest who came to their parish to lead the mass in the absence of sucient priests in the diocese to cover this small community. It was not clear from her tell-ing just how much of a connection, if any, there actually was between her and the lay priest, but one Sunday, he announced to the parish that he was going to bring his wife with him the next time he came. She was shattered by this news, which led to her vio-lent upset.
She was still in the remnants of her rage with this man, who had betrayed her fan-tasy relationship. Since she was not yet experiencing her grief, only her rage, I told her that she might �nd herself being better o� without such a man, the spirit of my remarks about this being informed by the Feminist movement, which was at an early crest at that time. She seemed to understand this, and we bonded as women, and she soon felt ready to ask her parents for forgiveness. Her parents were socially conserva-tive and would not have approved of her being with a white man, even if he were appro-priately her age. She went to them, and in the tradition of mano po, she touched each of their hands to her forehead, and they understood that this was her return to solidari-dad ng pamilya, to the family and community fold. She and I then continued to talk alone for many hours into the night as she continued to release her a�ect and gradually returned to what I imagined was her more normal state, at which point the consulta-tion ended. In the meantime, the police had long since withdrawn a�er assuring them-selves that I was going to be okay and that she probably was, too.
So let’s reect on the salient elements in this story. First, I am white but can speak a so-called deep, national Tagalog with which the parents and the girl would all feel very much at home, making me part of them. �is put me in the position of the anak puti, the white o�spring, a �gure of veneration who brings good luck. �e role of the white one or albino who is a member of the family and community has this value in many cul-tures around the world. No doubt this archetype was behind my grandmother making me into a little fertility goddess, though my grandmother did not consciously believe I was an anak puti. I am also painfully aware that because I am white, I am o�en given a kind of authority, which is very useful to me in this work, that the family could relate to, still unconsciously caught as they were in a colonial culture complex.
Second, this child is �rst-generation American born, so she is a kind of liminal herself insofar as she is having to bridge between her parents’ traditional outlook and modern American society. I represented to her a successful liminality, bringing to her a modern, Western feminist perspective and yet also a deep understanding of her par-ent’s cultural reality. �eir cultural reality was that they had lost amor propio, that is, self
JUNG4002_02.indd 25 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
26 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
esteem, and were su�ering hiya, a deep, socially determined shame in relation to their community. In Philippine culture, identity is taken from the solidaridad na pamilya, so it is all for one and one for all; this girl’s shame was their shame, which could only be healed by her return to solidaridad, and their return to amor propio would include their telling others that she had returned to a humble and obedient state. �erefore, we might hypothesize that my liminality was a factor in the family’s healing.
�e next example I will tell you about is Anna. Anna was a thirty-four-year-old Philippine-born Filipina who had come to the United States in her late twenties. She decided to seek a consultation with me at the time that her very traditional Filipina mother had just arrived for a visit of several months. And Anna was clear that she was seeking consultation, not therapy. Anna appeared to be quite westernized in the way she dressed and conducted herself, and she spoke only excellent English. She said, “Dr. Hill, we women of the Philippines are not satis�ed with what we have. We always want more and more and to get to higher places faster and faster. But sometimes I get stuck for a long time. �at’s why I’m here. I chose to come to you because I think you can elaborate and structure how a Filipina like me can function as a desirable person.” She was a community worker in a local public health department, competing with Amer-icans in her e�ort to get ahead. She sensed there was a di�erence in the way she com-peted and the way an American would, and she couldn’t understand it. She did not think her problem was a function of racial prejudice. On the surface, she looked as if she was functioning very well.
During our conversation, it emerged that her strategy of “getting ahead” took the form of giving gi�s to her bosses and superiors—gi�s that were entirely inappropri-ate in a typical American workplace, though they did reect the recipients’ interests. �is giving of gi�s is the Philippine cultural strategy of pakikisama—that is, smooth interpersonal relations, an ethic involved in the attainment and preservation of social acceptance. She thought this was a way she could establish friendships and inuence people, but it wasn’t working and le� her feeling stuck. She su�ered extreme loneliness and social isolation, and her mother’s visit wasn’t helping because she saw her mother as such a traditional Filipina and very di�erent from herself.
In our hours, she spoke only English, but I dropped an occasional Tagalog phrase, to which she didn’t respond, so I stopped. �en, one day she referred to “we” in refer-ence to herself, which I understood to be a breaking through of her Filipina sensibility and an unconscious joining with me in solidaridad. In Kohutian terms, we might think of this as an expression of twinship transference—an inability to tolerate thinking of us as di�erent from one another—but in this cultural context, its meaning was quite di�erent—that is, the capacity to �nally tolerate joining me. A�er this, she gradually began to speak Tagalog, and this enabled me to see her worldview, which was caught in solidaridad. �e reason she couldn’t stand her mother was that this unconscious
JUNG4002_02.indd 26 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 27
cultural identity was the opposite of what she now valued and wanted to be identi-�ed with. Her mother demanded of her an utang na loob—a feeling of obligation to be grateful to her for her very being—and she hated it.
You can see that Anna hated aspects of and wanted to deny her cultural identity, while, at the same time, she acted out of that identity on the job with her pakikisama approach to competing for advancement. When Anna selected me for a “consultation,” because in the community I was known as a white person who was also Filipina, she was unconsciously looking for a bridge. She would never have sought a Filipina ther-apist because she didn’t want to be identi�ed with Philippine culture, nor would she have sought an Anglo-American therapist because it would force more of a split than she could tolerate. So my liminality was a key factor.
I was there to create with her a temenos in which she could hold the tension of opposites and di�erentiate herself within solidaridad so she could participate in each culture without being identi�ed with either. �at is, I was there to help her clarify the ambiguities of being a liminal, which she was becoming. �is helped her modify her expectations in the work place as she realized that her use of gi�s was in a Philippine cultural tradition that was out of place and even alienating people from her at work.
�e last case I’d like to tell you about is of a thirty-year-old Ethiopian man who was referred by the University Health Center. He was not doing well in his studies and was on probation, and he was afraid he would not pass his courses and would have to leave the University. He had been in the United States for four years, had gone to junior college, and was able to transfer to U.C. Berkeley. In his �rst few sessions, he spoke of his problems at school and of not knowing how to study. He felt that all he needed was someone who could point out to him what he needed to study and who could coach him on how to pass his exams. He said he did not need anything else. Soon our sessions became static. He was very tense and could not relax enough from his rigid position about what he needed, to be able to really get anything from the ther-apy. I worried that he would give up on it. A�er demonstrating to me how frustrated he was during one session, he asked me if I was from Holland in an e�ort to identify my accent. I said, “No.” His face nevertheless lit up, and he said he was delighted to meet me and that, though he had been ready to give up on the therapy, I was di�erent from other counselors he had seen, and he wanted to stick around because of that. He then began to relate as though he were a di�erent man, relaxing more and more as sessions went along.
He talked about how dicult it had been for him to get into this country, how his parents could barely a�ord to send him here. One day, he said he had always wanted to meet someone white—a white woman. He had met many white people, but he was not satis�ed with them. He said he was not happy with Ethiopians either and had only
JUNG4002_02.indd 27 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
28 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
two Ethiopian male friends here. He said his interest in me was not sexual, but he could not �gure out what it was. It seemed clear that love had awakened.
I noticed that he had been wearing a chain with a Coptic cross hanging from it. I remembered that the Coptic Church dated back to earliest Christianity—it was estab-lished by Saint Mark. I imagined that he had a deeply spiritual side that he kept hid-den from me. In the following session, he assured me that he was not a sexual man and that I should not be afraid of him. He told me that his grandmother was a white woman, and she and his grandfather lived in Ethiopia, where they belonged to a group that discussed history and religion. �ey discussed what had been projected onto the “Ethiopian” throughout history, that it was the “Ethiopian” who was the black sinful man whom St. Hilary of Poitiers had compared to the raven, which symbolizes a black man’s soul. In the course of the following sessions, he tried to put together the story of the black sinful man, or the “Moor,” calling his grandparents back in Ethiopia when he needed to. �ey were very happy he had become interested in the story.
�ey advised him not to become literally identi�ed with the black sinful man but to see what it symbolized philosophically. �ey further said that, while he was in a melancholic state because he did not know how to study, he should see himself as being in a state of “pregnancy” similar to the blackening that Christ went through between Easter and Ascension and the forty-year wandering of the Jews in the desert. He understood what they said. �en he asked them about the “white woman” in the deep recesses of his mind. His grandparents said that I was the white woman and that he should continue to work with me. In the meantime, he passed his exams, relieving him of his worry.
He recalled from his grandparents’ stories the story of the Raven’s or Ethiopian’s head being decapitated and boiled, producing a golden ball. To him, this meant a freeing of the soul. Of the “white woman,” he said, looking at me intensely, “I am your opposite, a black man. Why am I with you? Who are you to me? Am I your slave or are you my slave (laughing)? But right now, you are certainly mediatrix of my whitening.”
As I recall this, I have associations to my relationship with my own grandparents and all that I learned by listening to them. And the intensely alchemical imagery of his stories and his process was a point of connection between his grandparents and my Masonic grandfather and my animistic grandmother. To the alchemists, the Ethio-pian and the raven were symbols of the dark prima materia that was to be transformed into gold, and for some people, the �rst step in this process of transformation is the whitening—what the alchemists called the albedo, a process of puri�cation that comes through �re—what the alchemists called the calcinatio. In alchemy, Jung found a met-aphor for the process of psychological development toward the integration of mascu-line and feminine and the achievement of wholeness, which took on the image of gold. �e process of going through the purifying �re is especially important for people who
JUNG4002_02.indd 28 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
Ruth Cobb Hill, Liminal Identity 29
are adapting to the demands of the outer world, as he was in learning to be successful in school.
Along with my being the white woman, we shared a mysterious synchronicity in each being raised by grandparents of di�erent races who told us life-orienting sto-ries, in each being immigrants who had to �nd our way through culture shock to �nd success in school, in each being opposites coming into a loving relationship with one another, a relationship in which his capacity for relatedness was awakening.
He had been totally in the masculine, and the idea he had of himself was being as fully identi�ed as possible with ego consciousness. My being a liminal, as was he, made me the perfect mediatrix for his process of �nding himself and the feeling function. Over the four years of our work, during which he graduated from the University and went to work, we shared his tears, sorrows, and disappointments, and in all this, I car-ried the nature of woman, supporting the awakening of his capacity for love and wis-dom. When we ended, we acknowledged the bittersweet nature of our relationship in which I was both mother and spiritual lover. About four years a�er we terminated, he called and came for two sessions to introduce me to his wife, a white woman. I could see that the work was continuing.
As a liminal, I have been blessed to be able to help patients hold the tension of opposites with compassion toward their su�ering, whether that tension is viewed through a personal or cultural lens. I watch them transform toward the goal, which is wholeness, an integration of all aspects of human nature: physical, intellectual, cul-tural, and spiritual development. For an immigrant or refugee, part of coming to wholeness constitutes transformation into a liminal a�er su�ering in ambiguity for a long time.
endnote1. Whether the Big Dipper was empty or full was a way of predicting the harvest.
bibliographyHill, Ruth C. 1994. Liminal identity. Journal of the American Association of Filipino Psychology
1:1 (Summer).Hill, Ruth C. 1975. Filipino attitudes toward health care. Master’s thesis. University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley.Turner, Victor. 1969. �e ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publish-
ing, 1969.
ruth cobb hill received her Ph.D. from the Wright Institute in Social/Clinical Psychology and is a practicing MFT in Berkeley, a member of the Clinical Consulting Faculty at the Sanville Institute, and formerly Adjunct Faculty in Global Research at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto. She is a clinical consultant specializing in cross-cultural psychotherapy, integrating her education in East-West psychology, medical and psychological
JUNG4002_02.indd 29 4/13/10 4:01:00 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014
30 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010
anthropology, Eastern languages, literature, linguistics, and the depth psychology of C. G. Jung. She is half Filipina and half Anglo-American and has spent a quarter of her life in the Philippines and three quarters in the United States. Correspondence: 1 Ajax Place, Berkeley, CA 94708.
abstract�is article is a memoir of the author’s family background, her education, and her development as a “liminal” person—that is, a person living on the threshold between two worlds and two racial identities—and how this life experience informs her work as a Jungian-oriented cross-cultural psychotherapist.
key words“biracial,” cross-cultural Jungian therapy, Filipino psychology, identity, liminal/liminality, Philippines
JUNG4002_02.indd 30 4/13/10 4:01:01 PM
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Que
ensl
and
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
echn
olog
y] a
t 15:
24 0
1 N
ovem
ber
2014