ELINED PRYS KOTSCHNIG:

A Profile

LUCILLE EDDINGER¹

 

 

In her room in Pennswood Village, Elined Kotschnig was surrounded by cherished objects from her home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Over her bed was the print of Botticelli’s newborn Venus standing on her scallop shell. Elsewhere were the signed photograph of Carl Jung, her print of early Quaker women in tall Welsh hats seated in Meeting, and the painting of her husband, Walter. A few of the beautiful teacups that had graced the sideboard in her dining room were there, too.

They brought to mind the room where she had done so much of her work over the years. I often did typing for her there on an old portable typewriter set up on the dining room table. As she dictated an Inward Light editorial, I felt privileged to be part of her process. The table usually was laden with work in progress—correspondence from all over the world, manuscripts she was editing, and a book or two open and well marked with questions in the margins.

She took delight in showing the Inward Light files kept in a lower drawer in a kitchen cabinet near the sink, casually mingling business with domesticity. The most precious time came when we paused for tea as the shadows lengthened into late afternoon and played on the silver tea pot and glowing ivory cups. It was then that I learned about the power of silence and what it meant to be centered.

Elined was a strong mother figure. She could take you protectively in her arms after a stormy analytic session and help you to go back into the world. Or she could tell you very directly to shape up, speaking, as she described it “like a Dutch uncle.” Her logos side was formidable. She did not shrink from challenging. Try harder, get moving, unblock, she urged. She started a “woman’s group” before women’s consciousness raising became fashionable. This was a special place where many of us who had been in analysis with her could come together and share our intellectual striving and spiritual journeys. The men, who came to her, found a safe place to discover their feminine side. Through her wide-ranging knowledge of mythology, philosophy, language and literature, she was a fearless guide to the often perilous country of the unconscious. Anima and animus, archetype and shadow became not mere words but living forces. She was not afraid as she helped us to confront the dark side.

During our last visit at Pennswood Village she spoke eloquently of the need to confront the dark side. In describing the genesis of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology she referred to the “manifesto” she had written. It was sent as part of the invitation to the first conference in 1943. “Four years of World War II lay behind us and the darkness was growing deeper. After the shock of the explosion and the first efforts to keep our feet, to parry and adjust, we had settled into the long pull and strain, with all the forces mobilized to the utmost. Gradually, out of the very extremity of the darkness, pinpoints of light and understanding were seen glimmering here and there in a counter movement to the vortex of a devastation and degradation we had been sucked down into.”

In the Manifesto she wrote as an introduction to that first conference, she challenged Friends to share their way of worship with a wider community. “Even now are we not falling short of our full efficacy in commending it (Quaker worship) to the harassed contemporary world, which sorely needs to learn how to live with itself and how to be quiet and know that God Is?”

In relating the early struggles to bring together the two seemingly disparate worlds of religion and psychology, she noted that it was not easy to persuade Friends to take on such a challenge.

“On the one hand it has been the tendency of Friends, from the beginning, to stress the Light rather than the Dark, to the point where they tended not to be aware of the dark within themselves. They’ve been good people, there is no doubt about it. In their gentleness, which is so different from Puritan severity and intolerance, they have evinced less shadow side. But I’ve always been so struck by the remark of John Wesley’s after he had read a life of William Penn’s wife: ‘Had the woman then no sense of sin!’ The idea of a deeper level of unconscious darkness and badness was something which seemed to them deliberately and completely unnecessary, morbid therefore.”

She explained that Friends felt that psychological counseling was “impertinent,” and that to explore the Inner Light with another person would be “prurient curiosity.”

It was only when a Meeting was faced with deep personal problems in the lives of its members that it could begin to see the value in such an approach. There were instances, she noted, when a member had committed suicide or a long-married couple had filed for divorce. “No one had guessed that there was anything wrong, and it never occurred to anyone that help from the Meeting could have avoided this. People were so helpless. They didn’t know what to do, even if they had known what was going on.”

At that time Elined was living in Northampton, Massachusetts, and her husband Walter was teaching at Smith College. The Connecticut Valley Association “encouraged the concern” of the Northampton Monthly Meeting for a small study conference on “The Nature and Laws of Our Spiritual Life” which developed into the first Conference at Haddonfield, New Jersey. The idea for such a meeting was encouraged by Mary Champney, who had done refugee work in Europe in 1939 for the American Friends Service Committee. “She was very keen on the whole idea. She and I used to discuss it together.”

Elined’s children were in George School near Philadelphia, and she had Jungian activities in Philadelphia and New York. “So I was able to keep in touch with, and was constantly discussing these ideas with friends in both places.”

In New York, Martha Yeager, a Friend and Jungian analyst, held discussion groups at her home, which were attended by Paul Tillich and Eric Fromm. “They wanted to have a chance to discuss more with each other, one from the theological and the other from the psychological point of view.”

Dora Willson was at Pendle Hill at that time, and Irene Pickard, an English Friend, was in Philadelphia. Through the latter, Elined met Joseph and Agnes Myers, members of a study group in Chestnut Hill Meeting. Another group in Montclair Meeting in New Jersey was led by Dr. Thayer Smith. She was also in touch with Rachel Cadbury, who had started a meditation group at Arch Street in Philadelphia. These people were deeply interested in the Jungian understanding of the relationship of psychology and religion. It was through their work with Elined Kotschnig and others, such as Dr. Miriam Brailey of Baltimore and Susan Yarnall of Coulter Street Meeting in Germantown, that the conference evolved.

In an account of the first years of the conference, Elined wrote that the Haddonfield conference had begun a process by which many Friends were “convinced of the contribution of modern psychology to religious rediscovery, and the fear of its secularizing influence was allayed. Meetings for worship of unusual vitality and depth, showed that psychological interest leads deeper into the spirit rather than away from the true center. A second conference, held at Pendle Hill the following year, reflected, like the first, the external urges of war-time as well as the inward reaction to them. While the Peace Testimony and conscientious objection occupied us (earlier), the mental hospitals and the problems of C.O.’s detached for service in them occupied us now. By the third year the need to probe deeper and to release an intenser heart-power for action was drawing and driving us all. Our theme, Prayer and Modern Man, well nigh opened a gulf beneath our feet. On the one hand we found ourselves led, both in our thinking and in action then and there, up ‘Twelve Steps’ of concentrated spiritual exercises: on the other hand, in the course of panel and general discussions ‘The Dark Side’ of the human psyche was pinned quite specifically on each of us, and not allowed to be projected onto the war makers, or the mentally sick, nor yet on to weaker brethren in need of counsel! We were the weak and the difficult, we the bearers of neurotic trends, we the haters and despisers, the makers of war. Our chickens had come home to roost and tucked their heads under their wings in deep and sober introversion. We took to heart what we had learned, that we need to lose our fear of ‘morbid introspection’ so-called, for our fear of this had itself become morbid. We must recognize the fact of our inner life and be prepared to examine and cultivate it.”

Although those who attended the early conferences freely accepted the marriage of religion and psychology, this linking was not then widely approved by other Quaker groups. “At that time,” Elined Kotschnig recalled, “one couldn’t mention the word psychology. It was suspect. It would queer the pitch.” For example, at a meeting for business the Clerk of the Connecticut Valley Association questioned whether psychology wasn’t “dangerous.” Elined Kotschnig immediately countered, “So is religion.”

On being reminded of this she replied, “Everybody knows that if you take religion seriously, you may go crazy, or you may start a religious war. Any number of things can happen… Even at our fifth conference when Clarence Pickett was one of our speakers, he expressed surprise when he looked around the room and saw… weighty Friends like Rachel Cadbury. He had obviously expected to find the outer fringe.”

Elined recalled that it was Jung’s concern with religion that attracted her to his psychology. “Jung took religion seriously. His psychology was relevant to the life of any religious group.” She began to see this possibility when she was living in Geneva during the early years of her marriage. A group at the Friends Meeting was studying the mystics. “I offered a paper on the mystical element in Jungian psychology. There was so much interest in it that they asked to have another session. Then a few members decided to spend the next season studying Jung and his relation to our Quaker faith. My analyst, Dr. Tina Keller, participated. That spring she arranged for us to go to Zurich and meet with Dr. Jung. He invited us to his home. Three cars full of us drove over. We had tea in the Jungs’ garden with strawberries from the garden and for three or four hours he discussed with us the relationship of Quakerism and Jungian psychology. Jung agreed that the Quaker idea of the Inner Light was real. I remember his saying that if he had had an early choice of Christian communities, he probably would have picked Quakerism.” Although it happened many years later and in America, she noted, the whole idea for the Conference sprang from that experience.

Inward Light had a similar unorthodox beginning. It started in 1937, five years before the Conference. Elined recalled that its birth came about at a Pendle Hill summer session a year after she came to this country. “There was a young Chinese who fascinated us with accounts of how he had been taught to meditate by his father. Some of us met several times with him to discuss meditation and felt something had started which we didn’t want to drop. Some of us were going to be at the Friends World Conference at Swarthmore in August and thought we might pursue the matter there. Just before the Conference ended we gathered with Howard Brinton under a tree to discuss how we might continue what had been started. We decided we would send any contributions we might have to Howard Brinton who agreed to edit them and get them out in mimeographed form. When the bell rang for the final meeting of the Conference, we leapt to our feet and ran to the meeting hall and never met again. But Howard Brinton did receive sufficient items to produce one number. A year later, when Gerald Heard was the speaker at Pendle Hill, some of us, who had been in a meditation group, met with him several times and decided to revive the idea of a written exchange, again with Howard Brinton editing and I as secretary, and Gerald Heard and an English Friend as the committee behind it.

“Erminie Huntress Lantero was going to be at Pendle Hill that year and was willing to do the actual editing with Howard Brinton serving as chairman of the committee. We brought out eight issues in mimeographed form, and Erminie continued to edit it as long as she was at Pendle Hill. We paid $1.00 for each issue. At one point I, at least, felt the need to know more about our readers because the number of people we actually knew were very few. So we decided to have a retreat on the subject of meditation. We hadn’t quite ventured to bring psychology to the fore. Meditation was pretty new at the time. Howard Brinton did not like the word retreat. It was the first retreat ever held at Pendle Hill and attracted about 30 people. The idea of the Conference was brewing, in my mind at least. We had another retreat. Part of it was a day of silence. Out of these meetings developed the idea for the first conference at Haddonfield. Inward Light was still a separate entity. I was keen to bring it together with the ongoing organization of the Conference, but the committee was wary of taking on the financial responsibility.”

Elined explained that the existence of Inward Light in those early years was always “a little precarious.” It was not until the Conference had become established for three years and had officially changed its name from “Conference on the Nature and Laws of our Spiritual Life” to “Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology” that Inward Light was officially adopted as the Conference publication.

Elined Kotschnig took on the job of editor of Inward Light in 1950. “It was my major preoccupation aside from my profession. It was very much a labor of love. Such interesting materials continued to come in.” She noted that Inward Light provided an opportunity for many to publish poetry and articles that otherwise would not have been printed. She likened Inward Light to the vessel in the Biblical story of Elijah and the widow’s cruse. “It might drop to the lowest ebb but it never dropped below that.” She gradually gained confidence that it would continue that way. “I learned that one need not lie awake at night. I did, of course, right at the beginning until I learned the ropes.” At that time, she explained she was doing the whole job of editing, and keeping the accounts along with her house-keeping and her analytical practice.

The poem “Like Unto Trees ” written by Elined and published in Inward Light, No. 78, Fall-Winter 1970-71, sums up her philosophy and her life more than any biographical information. She truly was a “great tree” whose roots went deep and whose embracing branches became a widespread network stretching far beyond her immediate surroundings. She had a genius for organizing communities of like-minded people. As interest in Jungian psychology grew, she was always there to provide encouragement and support to an ever growing number of people. It was her enthusiasm and prodding that encouraged members of the Conference to plant off-shoots which later became “mini-conferences” in California, New York, Washington, D.C. and New England. For many years she was the only Jungian analyst in the Washington area, and it was her leadership that first brought together ministers, therapists and concerned lay persons who now form the Jung Working Group, a strong and thriving organization.

It is the example of her own life that is her enriching and lasting contribution. In the Manifesto she wrote for the Haddonfield Conference she challenged Quakers to show the “harassed, contemporary world” how to learn to “live with itself, and how to be quiet and know that God Is.” In her silent faith and strength she truly was a model for her own words.

 

NOTES

1. Lucy Eddinger, a long time member of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, was formerly in analysis with Elined Kotschnig.