“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This evening we sat waiting for a session, or whatever else might develop. Jane heard her mother’s deprecating, scathing voice, quoted it to me, and said she felt quite uneasy. She felt as though “different parts of me are casting about for the best way to give the material tonight—Seth, or some other part of me, whatever we decided. I even got the idea: Now here we have the body ‘kind of thing,’” she said.

His mother’s scorn told him this was a part of a bad blood heritage, an inevitable part of his condition. Ruburt felt that his mother only liked him because of his writing. In the early novels his repressed feelings could be expressed. They were creative, but also safety valves. I made art out of them.

You must understand that for nearly 20 years he lived in an environment in which expression of dissent brought instant retaliation of the most frightening kind. Outright punishment—hair-pulling or cursing. Verbal humiliation was easiest to bear, but his mother would immediately show all kinds of extremely serious symptoms, for which Ruburt would be adamantly blamed.

His mother would pretend suicide just to punish him. He felt therefore that he caused your illness, that in a way you were punishing him for the frivolousness that made him suggest you leave a conventional background and your parents, and go with his father in Florida.

When you became sick he thought “Aha, mother was right, I do destroy everyone I touch, and now I have made my husband sick.” There is a great division of energy, as there is in all creators, but in his case between the need for spontaneity and discipline, safety and freedom, and these are clearly seen in the body’s condition right now.

When you became ill then the repressive state reasserted itself. You follow me there: because of the mother situation it was not safe to speak of illness at all. He could not bear to be responsible for your condition.

After that he feared deeply that all adverse comment of his, or negative remarks, would make you worse. Your illness frightened him more than anything else since his life with his mother, because he could not allow you of all people to be ill because of him, as explained.

He felt his success put you in a poor light in your mother’s eyes, and the eyes of society. An impoverished artist as a husband he could take with great pride. Once the part-time job continued and kept continuing however, once you had a job steadily, then he felt that others compared you, not with other artists but with other ordinary men who had jobs. And there, under those conditions, you made poor showing.

He felt these feelings extremely disloyal. He felt your mother was silently accusing him of putting you in a poor light whenever he succeeded. He wanted you to state your position, and say “I am an artist” to her and to the world, but he deeply feared that you considered that attitude irresponsible, frivolous, not practical; and worse, that you felt it negated the sacrifice you made by keeping the job for so long. (Not so, etc.)