“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had had thoughts of death when she came into the hospital a year ago. She was on morphine and had hallucinations, too. Frank Longwell’s father had just died, and she feared she might take the same road. She really did dislike women when she was younger. She’d been afraid of her body, and sex. Took it as a compliment when told she had a mind like a man. Also thought women disliked her — feared that she was after their men, and all kinds of things.

(We talked about her home environment, and how in 1965 the young psychologist at Dr. Instream’s hypnosis symposium had rearoused her fears, and my own upsets. Jane recalled being called a fraud by a fellow student in college, and by my mother. We talked about religion. All of this engendered some emotional reactions, but no tears. I kept trying to go back to what had happened before Jane got her symptoms, before she became well-known, and so forth. I told her I remembered Seth saying once that her symptoms “were amazingly stubborn.” Many things spoke of a great fear of spontaneity, reinforced again and again after the sessions had started, and the symptoms.

(Jane began to cry when she recounted the time at home a few years ago when she couldn’t get up and on her feet — finally reaching that point of helplessness. I got mad at her and yelled, saying I’d leave her sitting there if she didn’t get up — thus displaying my own deep fears that we had reached a sad and desperate point in the course of the symptoms. She remembered my crying at times. I told her I’d cried at times when she hadn’t known it.

(“Years ago in the 1960’s,” Jane said, “I thought I loved you a lot more than you loved me, and that you could get along very well all by yourself.” I said that was a total misconception on her part, that I’d never had such ideas, nor wanted to do any such thing. It had never entered my head. I knew things bugged me — working, being an artist, or trying to, and so forth — but not anything to do with her. I didn’t even fear fatherhood as much as she feared becoming pregnant. Not that I wanted fatherhood.

(Jane said she thought that if I’d had to choose between painting and her, I’d have chosen painting. Not so, I said — after all, I worked at commercial art four years full time at one stretch, and part time a number of other times. She agreed that she needed much approval — something I hadn’t fully understood at the time we married. I added that I’d always been proud of her as my wife, and considered myself very lucky to have her. I’d never once questioned her loyalty or love, and I’d taken it that she felt the same way. I discovered today that I could have been wrong at times — strange.

(When Jane spoke for Seth her voice was rather quiet, since it was still sort of raspy from yesterday’s laryngitis, or whatever she’d had. She thought the loss of voice volume was due to free-association material. A strong wind — very strong at times — had sprung up this afternoon, and at times I had trouble hearing Jane above its noise. Her eyes were often closed, and she took many long pauses. The day was alternately bright and sunny, and very gloomy and cloudy.)

(4:24. Jane had also said today that she’d felt that she had to be careful how she approached me so I wouldn’t get mad and leave her. Those feelings gradually dissipated over the years, yet they must have had a part to play in the onset of symptoms.)

(Hear that, Jane?)

(4:33. “I did pretty good,” Jane said as I lit a smoke for her. “I didn’t know whether I could do it or not. I almost came out of it a couple of times, but I did it.” I’d noticed the instances she meant. I read the session to her. She had a couple of thoughts as she listened to me. One: She transferred stuff about excommunication into the loss of companionship — that nobody would want anything to do with you if you crossed them up. Two: She’d tried to be more like me — cooler, not expressing so many emotions, more in control. And that had been a mistake on her part, a serious one, born, I said, out of her desire for protection and love.

(4:50 p.m. Jane had been interrupted once during her second delivery. “That was very good,” I told her. “It contains excellent suggestions in itself.” I’ve already planned to read it to her every day for a while. It can serve well as a basis for self-hypnosis, but I also plan to help my wife here, and we can see what we can accomplish in the afternoons.

(I hardly had time to discuss it with her, but I think the session is a breakthrough one that’s most valuable. It also showed me that even Jane’s poetry was suspect, where I’d been under the impression that the poetry was the one aspect of her creative abilities that was essentially free, or uncontaminated by fears or doubts. For years I’d thought that if Jane had done only poetry, she’d have had minimal troubles, if any.)