The Search for Paradise

Alize Timmerman brings to homeopathy knowledge and inspiration she draws from many disciplines, including art and literature as well as the natural and social sciences. Among the sources that stimulate her interest is the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and his followers.

Jung's model for the evolution of consciousness has helped Alize understand a group of patients that share a common characteristic: a wish to retrieve or recreate an idealised Eden-like state. They resist dealing with the psychological challenges and spiritual conflicts that are necessary for normal development. She believes that neuroses and addictions to drugs, issues of bulimia and anorexia, and dependence on religious and political ideologies can be explained as nostalgia for an original state of perfection in which there is no suffering.

Alize explains that according to Jungian theory the identities of children living in a pre-experiential world of innocence merge, without conscious awareness, with the psychic wholeness Jung calls the Self and others have called the God within. In infancy, Self is represented by the mother. Mother and child are merged in a state in which the child experiences no separation from his source of being. Soon however, normal growth and ego development exiles us from the protection and security of this paradise.

If development proceeds naturally we eventually come into conscious relationship with our source of life. An internal line of communication, a kind of nurturing umbilical cord, develops between the personal and transpersonal and the conscious and unconscious aspects of being. This internal dialogue leads progressively toward the reunion of ego with Self, the unknowable essence from which we've emerged and the wholeness toward which we naturally strive.

Alize points out that healthy development entails the expansion of awareness. Some resistance to the changes in perception that accompany growth is normal. However, development can be arrested if resistance to change is too strong or if there are unresolved issues from a previous stage. The result of such an impasse between moving forward and remaining in the past weakens the vital force and creates pathological conditions.

Alize suggests that Psora arises from the realisation that we are no longer in the Garden of Eden. Inevitably, we eat the apple of the knowledge of good and evil and cannot go back to Paradise. Malus Sylvestris, (Crab Apple), is the primary example of a remedy expressing the desire to return to that unconscious, undifferentiated state, free of physical, mental or spiritual impurity. Malus Sylvestris has a feeling of disgust and repulsion, of being unclean, ashamed and unattractive. We often see it in young teenagers who are feeling uncomfortable with the changes in their bodies.

She believes that the Psoric miasm has changed since Hahnemann's time when it addressed the insufficiency of food, shelter and clothing. Today, for many in the developed countries, these basic security needs are mostly satisfied. Psora has mutated to express the desire that everything we have be perfect. It is not enough to be sufficiently sheltered, clothed and fed. We desire a beautiful home, fashionable clothing and a wide variety of foods interestingly prepared and presented. Our privilege both nurtures the illusion that we can avoid the darker sides of life and increases our awareness and anxiety over the poverty, pain and death around us. When this sensitivity to suffering is excessive, Alize says it is the contemporary expression Psora expressing itself as “the helping miasm”.

The cases of a teenager, a clergyman and a yoga teacher summarised here demonstrate how Alize applies her understanding of development, based on a Jungian model, to homeopathy. Each of these patients has the unconscious desire to retrieve an idealised past in order to bypass the conscious awareness of a painful reality. The basic conflict is the same for each person but Alize finds the curative remedies in quite different areas of Materia Medica.

The teenager is facing an experience that is prompting a change from being a child to being a young adult. Her conscious expression of this unconscious inner process is an inability to take tests in school. In the homeopathic interview she expresses a desire to do well to please her parents, especially her father. She is unable to think because of nervousness before exams. This problem is severe enough to keep her home from school and to force her to repeat a grade.

Her mother, who is present at the interview, adds that she and her daughter quarrel because the daughter refuses to stop seeing friends who are stealing. One of them is a very close friend from early childhood who, the daughter argues, is an essentially good person. She insists that she must help these friends see the error of their ways and persists in trying to reform them. She believes that it is the disadvantages in their lives which account for their asocial behaviour. She can neither bring herself to abandon two friends nor betray their trust by reporting them. In addition, she feels partly responsible and guilty because she introduced the two to each other. She wants the relationship with her best friend not to change from the happy days of their childhood together: “I don't want to know this is happening”, she says. “I only want to think about how good it used to be.”

Alize points out that conflict between loyalty and morality is not uncommon during the teen years when we begin to come to terms with moral and ethical issues. This young girl wants to maintain her image of a friendship and a world that's innocent and good. She's vacillating between the opposing feelings of: “I want to be nice and sweet” and “I have to see what's actually happening”; “I can't associate with my friend. She's doing wrong” and “I want to be with her and help her.” She struggles to go forward while longing to return to the past. She doesn't know how to resolve this troubling issue. Alize comments that her request for help is a sign that she is striving for health. She is merely in the process of rebalancing the vital force which has been destabilised in the process of growth in experience and awareness.

If she allows herself to continue the normal development of her consciousness from a simple rather childlike state into the more complex one of a young adult, her self image will have to change and her relationships will be wounded. She wants to avoid this. She's also burdened with the feeling that it is somehow her fault if her friends are not reformed. This guilty feeling is a sign of her advance in consciousness. She's in conflict with an earlier psychic order, based on connection and closeness, that doesn't accommodate her growing awareness of separateness and the personal and social responsibilities of young adulthood.

Alize believes it is very important to distinguish between the patient's sensation (feelings) and function (action) because the wound is visible in the discrepancies between the two. In this case, the acute manifestation of the girl's state is fear of exams and fear of betraying her friends. She wants to be a good daughter but she can't perform well at school. She doesn't want to betray her friends but she can't stop them from stealing.

Her overly persistent and unsuccessful attempts to transform the lives of her friends are an example of what Alize calls “the helping miasm”. Her socially conscious, healthy and supportive family has made her sensitive to deficiencies in the family lives of her friends. She attributes their behaviour to these deficits and tries to compensate their need with her fidelity and concern.

There is also an incongruity between feeling and function in her relation to her father. This discrepancy reveals another aspect of the developmental stage that takes place at puberty when a child is working on his or her ability to go out into the world. Moving outside of the safety and security of family requires male energy in both boys and girls and is, therefore, traditionally modelled by the father. Before this time a child, boy or girl, is more aligned with the nurturing female energy, traditionally fulfilled by the mother.

The patient's physicals are scoliosis, vertigo, pressing headaches, lying, sleeping, pressing, jerking migraines, teeth growing into the gums and nose obstructed. She was born with a hip problem that required a brace which prevented her from walking or sitting. Even then, her mother says, she was cheerful and curious. She had always done well in school and was very sympathetic and devoted to the needs of her little brother.

Alize points out the Carbon element in the case because of the congenital hip problem, the scoliosis and the abnormal growth of the teeth. Carbon is the main element in the mineral and salt remedies necessary for the development of both the physical and psychological structures of children. However, she concludes that because this is a person going from a simpler to more complex stage of life, the curative remedy must also be more complex. This would put her more firmly in the Silicum series and the case might require Phosphorus except for the added element of guilt. Phosphorus would show the nervousness but not the guilt. The Phosphorus consciousness is more typical of a six to nine-year-old, an age at which we relate to friends and siblings viscerally and emotionally but essentially without objectivity. This patient's conflicts reveal that she's moving into a higher, more complex state.

Alize believes that a more developed consciousness carries more guilt. Using Jan Scholten's psychological map of the periodic table of elements as a way of correlating Materia Medica with human developmental stages, she understands that lower levels of the periodic table correlate with expanding consciousness. She recognises that this patient is moving down from the Silicum series, with its theme of developing relationships, to the Ferrum line. Her teenage patient is working on learning the skills she can take into the world and establishing her individuality. The feeling of criminality and guilt is typical of the Ferrum line, particularly in Ferrum itself. However, Zinc, which is to the right of Ferrum in the area of the more introverted remedies, more closely fits the basic character of this young woman.

From this analysis, Alize arrives at the remedy, Zincum Phosphoricum, whose essence, observes Jan Scholten, is “overdoing the communication”. Scholten says that Zincum Phosphoricum is very sympathetic to friends and relatives and wants to do things for them, but it never seems enough - a description which fits this case very well. It combines Phosphorus's desire for communication and its sympathetic outlook with Zincum's feelings of pollution and guilt. Ferrum expresses the qualities of persistence and discipline evident in the patient's desire to succeed both in school and in reforming her friends.

In Zincum Phosphoricum we experience restlessness from an inner conflict that produces an antagonism between extremes. We urgently want something and yet we just as strongly refuse it. We want to help and at the same time we want to walk away. The capacity to judge and criticise ourselves develops as the process of self-searching begins. We can't accept things as they are, with their imperfections. We begin to feel that there's something unacceptable in everything, including ourselves. Zincum Phosphoricum helps us face what we perceive as life's defects and deficiencies and integrate them into our consciousness.

Symptoms from the repertory that reflect this process of self searching, common in the teen years and prevalent in this case include: Thought vanishing off (often during exams); Concentration difficult while studying, Confusion of Mind; Dullness and sluggishness of thinking and comprehending. (One of the main difficulties for Zincum Phosphoricum is getting behind in their studies, repeating and revising until they are exhausted). We also find Impetuous; Escape, desire for; Company, desire for; Vertigo and Head Pain, pressing.

The mother reported that after the remedy her daughter's fears abated and that she was doing quite well in school and in her life in general. Alize didn't ask this patient to return for a follow-up because she judged her to be essentially healthy. She just needed support to move through a normal growth process.

Alize offers the case of a 60-year-old clergyman, for whom she prescribed Psorinum, as another example of the contemporary expression of Psora and the “helping miasm” that can emerge with it. He seeks homeopathic treatment primarily for profound fatigue and difficulty concentrating. He suffers from painful flatulence which awakens him one hour after going to bed. He also has bladder pain during the night with an inability to urinate and numbness in his hands, feet and left leg.

He works unceasingly to raise money to help indigent congregations in Holland and Eastern Europe but feels powerless to allay the material poverty and the spread of spiritual poverty he perceives all around him. He sometimes lies sleepless with a foreboding that Holland will someday suffer the spiritual and material poverty he sees on his missions to less affluent countries. He's discouraged and afraid he could lose the idealism that once motivated his ministry.

The clergyman likes antiques and collects pictures of pastoral life in bygone times when the church was the spiritual centre of the community. He can't accept the poverty or the indifference of many to the suffering of other human beings. No matter how hard he works, he can't succeed in eradicating, or even substantially amending, these realities. He surrounds himself with soothing images of an idealised past to which he has no way of returning. Interestingly, among his discomforts is an allergy to apples. They give him the sensation of choking.

After his first dose of Psorinum 1 M he reported feeling much less powerless and more positive. He no longer awakened at night with flatulence or dysuria. The numbness in his limbs also improved. He had an outbreak of excema, which he had had as a child, around his right eye and had one nightmare that everyone was going to die for lack of food. He had been feeling quite well until five months later when he had a throat inflammation that was relieved by drinking wine. He coughed and expectorated a lot of mucus. Psorinum in the LM2 potency helped his throat immediately.

Alize says that a category of Materia Medica useful for people who, like the clergyman, resist accepting the distressing afflictions of life are the drug remedies. These patients want to be, as a former heroin addict told Alize, “rocked in the arms of God”. Alize believes that each of the drug remedies contains a spiritual question needing to be addressed. She observes that people are attracted to the crude substances that can put them in touch with a corresponding spiritual question. For many, the enhanced perception of an actual drug experience does lead to a spiritual practice, a phenomenon that occurred frequently in the drug culture of the l960's. Other drug users merely get stuck in a cycle of painful addiction. Drugs expand consciousness but at the same time bypass the inevitable discomforts and difficult choices inherent in authentic life experience.

Cannabis Indica is Alize's example of a drug remedy that addresses the desire to escape suffering. The drug brings peace, love and an open mind, but it also has a dark side: war, hate, judgement and paranoia. Unwillingness to experience the shadow side leaves Cannabis “empty-headed”, unable to think clearly and unable to concentrate or to follow through with anything. It is a state of open mindedness filled with grand ideas but no direction or will to realise them. It is often accompanied by the desire to disappear into oneness with the universe. One of Alize's patients whose remedy was Cannabis Indica described her former frame of mind: “I thought the world was good and that I was good. I thought I did everything for wholeness and for God, but it was all a fake. I didn't know grief. I never felt it before”. Alize point out that Coca too fears suffering, but where Cannabis has a softness to it, Coca is hard and materialistic, very black and white.

Another category of remedies that can be considered for patients who try to avoid the conflicts and discomforts necessary for psychological and spiritual growth, are the milk remedies. As an example, Alize cites a Lac Humanum case which shows the two antagonistic sides of the remedy: the baby's animal hunger and aggression satisfied by the mother and the boundaries and cultural mores first taught by her.

The patient is an attractive, youthful and delicately built 40-year-old man. Though he has studied meditation, homeopathy, acupuncture and yoga as a means of gaining psychological and spiritual insight, nothing has improved his sense of self worth. He is accompanied to the interview by his girlfriend with whom he is having communication problems. He also has sexual interests outside their relationship which are hurtful to her.

He says, “I feel constricted. I feel very responsible for others - more responsible for them than for myself. I don't come from anywhere. I just adapt and do what I'm told … like a dog. I don't want to do this any more but if I change I'll no longer be myself”.

Alize's asks herself what he means by ‘myself.’ What sense of ‘self’ is he experiencing when he functions as a person who is constantly adapting and adjusting to others? The differentiation between self and other and the assertion of will, is the basis of ego development. Before this, there is only the primal utopia of the infant. In later life if, like this man, a person represses his will under the guise of kindness, Alize believes it expresses an unconscious desire to remain in that undifferentiated, unselfconscious and irresponsible state.

This patient says that he “escapes the battlefield” by never expressing criticism or showing anger. “I am a weakling,” he declares. He explains that these feelings and this behaviour began when he started having relationships with women: “I did what I was told: never to be brutal, always to be kind and nice”.

Alize theorises that the aggression he holds in check in relationships with women refers back to the aggressive lust of the infant. His battlefield is the world of the toddler who wants his freedom without losing the safety and security of parental love. A healthy two-year-old expresses his will and his anger, even though it may threaten his ability to gain parental approval. It is a behaviour that's necessary to develop self-awareness, self-confidence and separation from the mother. Alize concludes that this man is imprisoned in an unconscious desire to remain innocent and good in order to receive unconditional love. Open expressions of anger or instinctual drives would threaten this illusion.

He tells Alize that although he's always outwardly agreeable and seeming to be in apparent accord with someone, inwardly he feels frozen and emotionally numb. “After such encounters”, he says, “I feel homeless, alone and full of grief. This feeling goes away as soon as I reconnect with others.”

Alize points out the important discrepancies between his sensations and his functioning. There's a split between his rational and emotional responses. He wants to merge and agree while feeling separate and removed. In the face of conflict he becomes as mute as a preverbal infant because connection and separation are contradictions he can't reconcile. He feels exiled from an early state of being in which there are neither opposites nor boundaries, no me and you, no here and there. Part of him is still caught in the world of the infant who is totally dependent on and identified with the caretaker. When the mother isn't there, the infant is lost.

In response to Alize's questions about his childhood, he replied, “I felt like I didn't fit in - that I was strange, even in my family. I was a boy who looked a lot like a girl and everyone loved me for that. I played with girls because they were more accepting of me. I was always told I was a good boy which made me mad as a child and I've never got over it. I still feel angry when someone tells me what a nice guy I am”.

He says he had a good relationship with his mother, but in his teens she confided that she rejected him when he was born because she wanted a girl. She hadn't even taken him in her arms until twelve hours after delivery. As a baby, he cried constantly. Often, his father had to come home early from work to care for him.

When his mother told him about his early childhood, he had an immediate sense that it was the cause of his feeling so powerless and unvalued. As he recalled his mother's confession, it revealed something important to him: “I'm looking for warmth, safety and protection” he said. “It is probably directly related to looking for my mother and knowing that adult relationships don't work like that.”

Alize believes that this man's experience is not uncommon. Relationship problems involving separation, antagonism and sexuality inevitably have their roots in the connection of mother and child. It is in the arms and at the breast that the patterns of connection and separation are formed.

After one dose of Lac Humanum in the 200 c potency, this patient reported that he felt acutely aware of his tongue for about an hour. This was a deep regression, Alize comments, to the baby's first instinct and relationship to the world through the mouth and tongue. Then he broke out in patches of eczema which he had forgotten to tell her he had from head to toe as an infant.

Subsequently, he noticed that he could be quiet and listen to his girlfriend. He said, “I could sympathise with her but stay with my own feelings. I realised that my choices had been made out of a need for security. I became much more objective. I could look into a situation without losing myself in it. I became quieter and wasn't restless. I understood that I confused my sexuality with lust. I realised I never wanted to hurt her like that again. I had a complete shift of consciousness. I've found happiness and joy in the relationship with my partner.”

Alize asserts that health is based on self-awareness. Self-awareness increases and deepens as we move through successive stages of psychological development toward reconnection with our innermost nature. She believes that disease and healing disease with homeopathy can best be understood from the perspective of the archetypal patterns of human development. I have tried to show in this very abbreviated summary of Alize's wide-ranging and creative speculations and the briefest outline of the Jungian model of psychological development, how she applies her beliefs in her practice.