Introduction
This website describes in pictures and poetry one woman’s analytic journey. It is the work of the late Beth Miller, a Jungian analyst, who first went into therapy ‘driven by depression and despair’. Born in Scotland in 1913, the middle of five children, she was troubled by upper middle class neglect, incestuous childhood sexual abuse and lengthy adult depression. Her first analysis with the late Ruth Strauss enabled her application to train at Society of Analytical Psychology where she was the first woman without a medical background, to be accepted. An analytic granddaughter of Dr Carl GustavJung it would be many years before a creative supervisory period with the late Dr Joseph Redfearn enabled her to flourish. Psyche's Journey, her analytic diary, makes no claim to literary or artistic excellence but it touches the reader in unexpected ways. As she put it, it describes how in the early days of therapy, she felt ashamed of her longing for love, and the erotic passion she felt for her analyst. She tried to fight her feelings with mockery, rage and cynicism. But with increasing trust, joint exploration of her dreams and phantasies became possible. Her creativity emerged spontaneously between sessions as an outlet for feeling and, interestingly, followed the unconscious rythmn of the alchemical metaphor described by Dr Jung. In her eighties, Beth worked tirelessly to reproduce her personal experience of the analytic encounter: drawing, painting, and recording her dreams with an urgency that anticipated the end. Although in the history of the SAP and in the wider field of psychoanalysis, Beth Miller’ s contribution forms no part of the academic discourse, her legacy is on-going: she was a dedicated recruiter of patients and therapists-in-the-making: her personal contribution private, passionate and committed .
