The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife 中年之路：寻找中年意义与转化的荣格心理学指南

“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” Dante wrote in the Inferno. “The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody cautioned half a millennium later as she considered the art of self-renewal, “the perilous season is middle age.”
“在我人生的中途,我发现自己置身于一片幽暗的森林,因为那条直达的道路已经迷失,”但丁在《地狱篇》中写道。五个世纪后,富有远见的伊丽莎白·皮博迪在思考自我更新的艺术时告诫道:“对于最有天赋的人来说,危险的时期并非青年时代,最危险的季节是中年。”

In The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (public library), Jungian analyst James Hollis offers a torch for turning the perilous darkness of the middle into a pyre of profound transformation — an opportunity, both beautiful and terrifying, to reimagine the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior acquired in the course of adapting to life’s traumas and demands, and finally inhabit the authentic self beneath the costume of this provisional personality.
在《中年之路:从痛苦到意义》(The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife)一书中,荣格心理分析师詹姆斯·霍利斯(James Hollis)提供了一把火炬,旨在将中年那危险的黑暗转化为一场深刻转化的篝火——这是一个既美丽又恐怖的机会,让我们重新审视在适应生活创伤和需求的过程中所习得的思想、情感和行为模式,并最终在这一临时人格的面具之下,栖居于真实的自我。

One has entered the Middle Passage when the demands of the true self press restive and uprising against the acquired persona, eventually colliding to produce untenable psychic ache — a “fearsome clash,” Hollis writes, leaving one “radically stunned into consciousness.” A generation after James Baldwin contemplated how myriad chance events infuse our lives with the illusion of choice, Hollis considers our unexamined conditioning as a root cause of this clash:
当真实自我的需求开始躁动不安,并反抗那后天习得的人格时,一个人便进入了“中年之路”。两者最终发生碰撞,产生难以忍受的心理阵痛——霍利斯写道,这是一种“可怕的冲突”,让人“在极度的震惊中觉醒”。在詹姆斯·鲍德温思考无数偶然事件如何让我们的生活充满选择的错觉一代人之后,霍利斯将我们未经审视的心理定势视为这场冲突的根本原因:

Perhaps the first step in making the Middle Passage meaningful is to acknowledge the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture, and through which we have made our choices and suffered their consequences. If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens. The lens we received generated a conditional life, which represents not who we are but how we were conditioned to see life and make choices... We succumb to the belief that the way we have grown to see the world is the only way to see it, the right way to see it, and we seldom suspect the conditioned nature of our perception.
或许,让“中年之路”变得有意义的第一步,是承认我们从家庭和文化中所继承的视角的局限性,正是通过这一视角,我们做出了选择并承担了后果。如果我们出生在另一个时代和地点,拥有持有不同价值观的父母,我们就会拥有完全不同的视角。我们所获得的视角产生了一种受限的生活,它代表的不是我们是谁,而是我们如何被训练去观察生活并做出选择......我们屈从于这样一种信念:我们成长过程中看待世界的方式是唯一的、正确的方式,而我们很少怀疑自己感知的受限本质。

Haunting this conditional life are our psychic reflexes — the coping mechanisms developed for the traumas of childhood, which Hollis divides into two basic categories: “the experience of neglect or abandonment” or “the experience of being overwhelmed by life,” each with its particular prognosis. The overwhelmed child may become a passive and accommodating adult prone to codependence, while the abandoned child may spend a lifetime in addictive patterns of attachment searching for a steadfast Other. These unconscious responses adopted by the inner child coalesce into a provisional adult personality still preoccupied with solving the emotional urgencies of early life. Hollis observes:
萦绕在这种受限生活中的是我们的心理反射——即针对童年创伤而形成的应对机制,霍利斯将其分为两个基本类别:“被忽视或被遗弃的经历”或“被生活压倒的经历”,每种经历都有其特定的预后。被生活压倒的孩子可能会变成一个被动且顺从、倾向于情感依赖的成年人;而被遗弃的孩子可能会终其一生陷入成瘾性的依恋模式,寻找一个坚定的“他者”。内在小孩所采取的这些潜意识反应,凝聚成了一个临时的成年人格,其依然全神贯注于解决生命早期的情感紧迫问题。霍利斯观察到:

We all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.
我们都在潜意识里践行着由过去拼凑而成的条件反射。

Carl Jung termed such reflexes personal complexes — largely unconscious and emotionally charged reactions operating autonomously. Most of life’s suffering stems from the unexamined workings of these complexes and the conditioned choices they lead us to, which further sever us from our true nature. Hollis writes:
卡尔·荣格将这类反射称为个人情结(personal complexes)——即在很大程度上处于无意识状态、带有强烈情感色彩且自主运行的反应。人生的大部分痛苦都源于这些情结在未经审视下的运作,以及它们引导我们做出的条件反射式选择,这些选择进一步使我们与真实的本性疏离。霍利斯写道:

Most of the sense of crisis in midlife is occasioned by the pain of that split. The disparity between the inner sense of self and the acquired personality becomes so great that the suffering can no longer be suppressed or compensated... The person continues to operate out of the old attitudes and strategies, but they are no longer effective. Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal... In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die... Such death and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage. It is necessary to go through the Middle Passage to more clearly achieve one’s potential and to earn the vitality and wisdom of mature aging. Thus, the Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.
中年时期的大部分危机感是由这种分裂带来的痛苦引发的。内在自我感与习得人格之间的差距变得如此巨大,以至于痛苦再也无法被压抑或补偿......个体继续沿用旧有的态度和策略行事,但它们已不再奏效。事实上,中年困境的症状是值得欢迎的,因为它们不仅代表了习得人格之下那个基于本能的自我,还代表了一种强大的更新指令......实际上,过去的那个人将被未来的人所取代。前者必须死去......这种死亡与重生本身并不是目的,而是一个过程。必须经历这段“中年之路”(Middle Passage),才能更清晰地实现潜能,并获得成熟老龄化所带来的生命力与智慧。因此,中年之路代表了内在的一种召唤,促使我们从临时性的生活迈向真正的成年,从虚假的自我迈向真实。

The summons often begins with a call to humility — having failed to bend the universe to our will the way the young imagine they can, we come to recognize our limitations, to confront our disenchantment, to reckon with the collapse of projections and the crushing of hopes. But this reckoning, when conducted with candor and self-compassion, can reward with “the restoration of the person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe.”
这种召唤通常始于对谦卑的呼唤——在未能像年轻人想象的那样让宇宙屈从于我们的意志之后,我们开始认识到自己的局限,直面幻灭,清算投射的崩塌和希望的破灭。但是,当这种清算以坦诚和自我慈悲的态度进行时,它会给予回报,即“恢复个人与宇宙之间一种谦卑而有尊严的关系”。

This, Hollis argues, requires shedding the acquired personality of what he terms “first adulthood” — the period from ages twelve to roughly forty, on the other side of which lies the second adulthood of authenticity. Bridging the abyss between the two is the Middle Passage. He writes:
霍利斯认为,这需要蜕掉他所谓的“第一成年期”所形成的习得人格——即从十二岁到大约四十岁这段时期,而在这段时期的另一端,则是真实的“第二成年期”。连接这两者之间深渊的桥梁便是“中年之路”。他写道:

The second adulthood... is only attainable when the provisional identities have been discarded and the false self has died. The pain of such loss may be compensated by the rewards of the new life which follows, but the person in the midst of the Middle Passage may only feel the dying... The good news which follows the death of the first adulthood is that one may reclaim one’s life. There is a second shot at what was left behind in the pristine moments of childhood.
第二个成年期......只有在丢弃了暂时的身份、虚假的我死去之后才能实现。这种丧失的痛苦或许能由随之而来的新生活所补偿,但身处“中年转型期”(Middle Passage)的人可能只会感受到死亡......紧随第一个成年期死亡之后的好消息是,一个人可以重新夺回自己的生活。那些在纯真童年时光中被遗落的东西,有了第二次机会。

Hollis envisions these shifting identities as a change of axes, moving from the parent-child axis of early life to the ego-world axis of young adulthood to the ego-Self axis of the Middle Passage — a time when “the humbled ego begins the dialogue with the Self.” On the other side of it lies the final axis: “Self-God” or “Self-Cosmos,” embodying philosopher Martin Buber’s recognition that “we live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe” — the kind of orientation that led Whitman, who lived with uncommon authenticity and made of it an art, to call himself a “kosmos,” using the spelling Alexander von Humboldt used to denote the interconnectedness of the universe reflected in his pioneering insistence that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.” The fourth axis is precisely this recognition of the Self as a microcosm of the universe — an antidote to the sense of insignificance, alienation, and temporality that void life of meaning. Hollis writes:
霍利斯将这些不断转变的身份构想为轴心的更迭:从生命早期的“父母-孩子”轴心,转向青年时期的“自我-世界”轴心,再到中年转型期的“自我-本我”轴心——这是一个“谦卑的自我开始与本我对话”的时期。而在其彼岸,存在着最后的轴心:“本我-上帝”或“本我-宇宙”。这体现了哲学家马丁·布伯的认知,即“我们的生活被不可思议地包含在宇宙流动的共同生命之中”——正是这种导向,让生活极度真实并将其升华为艺术的惠特曼称自己为一个“宇宙”(kosmos)。他使用了亚历山大·冯·洪堡用来表示宇宙互联性的拼写方式,洪堡曾先驱性地坚持认为,“在这条巨大的因果链条中,没有任何单一事实可以被孤立地考虑。”第四个轴心正是这种将“本我”视为宇宙微缩模型的认知——它是对抗那些使生命失去意义的渺小感、疏离感和暂时性的解药。霍利斯写道:

This axis is framed by the cosmic mystery which transcends the mystery of individual incarnation. Without some relationship to the cosmic drama, we are constrained to lives of transience, superficiality and aridity. Since the culture most of us have inherited offers little mythic mediation for the placement of self in a larger context, it is all the more imperative that the individual enlarge his or her vision.
这一轴心由超越个体化身之谜的宇宙奥秘所构架。如果与宇宙剧场缺乏某种联系,我们注定会过着转瞬即逝、肤浅且干涸的生活。既然我们大多数人继承的文化很少提供神话媒介来将自我置于更宏大的背景中,那么个体扩大自己的视野就显得尤为迫切。

These shifting axes are marked by several “sea-changes of the soul,” the most important of which is the withdrawal of projections — those mental figments that “embody what is unclaimed or unknown within ourselves,” born of the tendency to superimpose the unconscious on external objects, nowhere more pronounced than in love: What is so often mistaken for love of another is a projection of the unloved parts of oneself.
这些不断变化的轴心以几次“灵魂的巨变”为标志,其中最重要的一点便是投射的撤回——那些“体现了我们内心未被认领或未知部分”的心理虚构物。投射源于将潜意识叠加在外部客体上的倾向,这种倾向在爱情中表现得最为显著:那些常被误认为是爱上他人的情感,往往只是对自己不被爱的那部分自我的投射。

Drawing on the work of Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, Hollis describes the five stages of projection — a framework strikingly similar to the seven stages of falling in and out of love that Stendhal outlined two centuries ago. Hollis writes:
霍利斯借鉴了荣格心理学家玛丽-路易丝·冯·法兰兹的研究,描述了投射的五个阶段——这一框架与司汤达在两个世纪前概述的坠入爱河与失恋的七个阶段惊人地相似。霍利斯写道:

First, the person is convinced that the inner (that is, unconscious) experience is truly outer. Second, there is a gradual recognition of the discrepancy between the reality and the projected image... Third, one is required to acknowledge this discrepancy. Fourth, one is driven to conclude one was somehow in error originally. And, fifth, one must search for the origin of the projection energy within oneself. This last stage, the search for the meaning of the projection, always involves a search for a greater knowledge of oneself.
首先,个体深信内在(即潜意识)的体验真实地存在于外部。其次,逐渐意识到现实与投射意象之间的差异......第三,个体被要求承认这种差异。第四,个体被迫得出结论,认为自己最初在某种程度上是错误的。第五,个体必须在自身内部寻找投射能量的来源。这最后一个阶段,即寻找投射的意义,总是涉及对自我更深层次认知的探索。

In consonance with Joan Didion’s piercing insistence that “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs,” Hollis considers the ultimate payoff of this painful turn from illusion to disillusionment:
正如琼·狄迪恩(Joan Didion)那针见血的坚持——“愿意为自己的生活承担责任,是自尊涌现的源泉”——霍利斯思考了这种从幻觉转向幻灭的痛苦转变所带来的最终回报:

The loss of hope that the outer will save us occasions the possibility that we shall have to save ourselves... Life has a way of dissolving projections and one must, amid the disappointment and desolation, begin to take on the responsibility for one’s own life... Only when one has acknowledged the deflation of the hopes and expectations of childhood and accepted direct responsibility for finding meaning for oneself, can the second adulthood begin.
对外在救赎希望的破灭,开启了我们必须自我救赎的可能性......生活总有办法消解投射,而一个人必须在失望与荒凉之中,开始承担起对自己生命的责任......只有当一个人承认了童年希望与期待的幻灭,并承担起为自己寻找意义的直接责任时,第二成年期才真正开始。

The vast majority of our adult neuroses — a somewhat dated term, coined by a Scottish physician in the late eighteenth century and defined by Carl Jung as “suffering which has not discovered its meaning,” then redefined by Hollis as a “protest of the psyche” against “the split between our nature and our acculturation,” between “what we are and what we are meant to be” — arise from the refusal to acknowledge and let go of projections, for they sustain the persona that protects the person and keep us from turning inward to befriend the untended parts of ourselves, which in turn warp our capacity for intimacy with others. Hollis writes:
我们成年后绝大多数的神经症(这是一个略显过时的术语,由一位 18 世纪末的苏格兰医生创造,卡尔·荣格将其定义为“尚未发现其意义的痛苦”,随后霍利斯将其重新定义为心灵对“天性与教化之间的分裂”、对“现状与应然之间的鸿沟”的“抗议”)都源于拒绝承认并放下投射。因为这些投射维持着保护个体的“人格面具”,阻碍我们转向内心去接纳那些被忽视的自我部分,而这些部分反过来又会扭曲我们与他人建立亲密关系的能力。霍利斯写道:

We learn through the deflation of the persona world that we have lived provisionally; the integration of inner truths, joyful or unpleasant, is necessary to bring new life and the restoration of purpose.
通过人格面具世界的瓦解,我们认识到自己一直过着暂定式的生活;整合内在的真相,无论它是令人愉悦还是令人不快,对于带来新生命和重塑目标感都是必不可少的。

[...]

The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves. How we are related to ourselves determines not only the choice of the Other but the quality of the relationship... All relationships... are symptomatic of the state of our inner life, and no relationship can be any better than our relationship to our own unconscious.
亲密关系的真相是,它们永远不会优于我们与自己的关系。我们与自己的相处方式,不仅决定了对他人的选择,也决定了关系的质量......所有的关系......都是我们内心生活状态的征兆,任何关系都不会优于我们与自己潜意识的关系。

It is only when projection falls away that we can truly see the other as they are and not as our need incarnate, as a sovereign soul and not as a designated savior; only then can we live into Iris Murdoch’s splendid definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” and be enriched rather than enraged by this otherness.
只有当投射消失时,我们才能真正看清对方的本原,而非将其视为我们需求的化身;将其视为一个主权独立的灵魂,而非指定的救世主。只有那时,我们才能践行艾丽丝·默多克对爱那精彩的定义——“意识到除自身之外的事物是真实的,这是一种极难实现的觉悟”——并因这种“他者性”而变得充盈,而非感到愤怒。

Defying the dangerous Romantic ideal of love as the fusion of two souls and echoing Mary Oliver’s tender wisdom on how differences make couples stronger, Hollis writes:
霍利斯挑战了将爱视为两个灵魂融合的危险浪漫主义理想,并呼应了玛丽·奥利弗关于差异如何让伴侣更强大的温柔智慧,他写道:

When one has let go of the projections and the great hidden agenda, then one can be enlarged by the otherness of the partner. One plus one does not equal One, as in the fusion model; it equals three — the two as separate beings whose relationship forms a third which obliges them to stretch beyond their individual limitations. Moreover, by relinquishing projections and placing the emphasis on inner growth, one begins to encounter the immensity of one’s own soul. The Other helps us expand the possibilities of the psyche.
当一个人放下了投射和那些隐秘的意图,他就能被伴侣的“他者性”所充实。一加一并不等于一(如融合模式所追求的那样),而是等于三——两个独立的个体,他们的关系构成了第三者,这迫使他们超越各自的局限。此外,通过放弃投射并强调内在成长,一个人开始邂逅自身灵魂的浩瀚。他者帮助我们拓展了心灵的可能性。

[...]

Loving the otherness of the partner is a transcendent event, for one enters the true mystery of relationship in which one is taken to the third place — not you plus me, but we who are more than ourselves with each other.
爱上伴侣的“他者性”是一场超越性的事件,因为一个人由此进入了关系的真正奥秘。在这种奥秘中,人被带往第三之地——不是你加我,而是我们,在一起的我们超越了原本的自我。

Ultimately, healthy love requires that we cease expecting of the other what we ought to expect of ourselves. In so returning to ourselves from the realm of projection, we are tasked with finally mapping and traversing the inner landscape of the psyche, with all its treacherous terrain and hidden abysses. Hollis writes:
最终,健康的爱要求我们停止向对方索求那些本应由我们自己承担的东西。当我们从投射的领域回归自我时,我们的任务是最终去测绘并穿越心灵的内在景观,以及其中所有险峻的地形和隐藏的深渊。霍利斯(Hollis)写道:

It takes courage to face one’s emotional states directly and to dialogue with them. But therein lies the key to personal integrity. In the swamplands of the soul there is meaning and the call to enlarge consciousness. To take this on is the greatest responsibility in life... And when we do, the terror is compensated by meaning, by dignity, by purpose.
直面并与自己的情绪状态对话需要勇气。但这也正是通往个人完整性的关键。在灵魂的沼泽地中,蕴含着意义以及扩大意识的召唤。承担起这一责任是生命中最大的使命......当我们这样做时,恐惧将被意义、尊严和目标所弥补。

[...]

Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.
我们在中年时期的任务是变得足够强大,以放弃前半生对自我的执念,并向更伟大的奇迹敞开心扉。

In the remainder of The Middle Passage, Hollis goes on to illustrate these concepts with case studies from literature — from Goethe’s Faust to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground to Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” — illuminating how personal complexes and projections play out in everything from parenting to creative practice to love, and how their painful renunciation swings open a portal to the deepest and most redemptive transformation. Complement it with Alain de Botton on the importance of breakdowns and Judith Viorst on the art of letting go, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent meditation on menopause as rebirth.
在《中年之路》(The Middle Passage)的剩余章节中,霍利斯继续通过文学案例研究来阐释这些概念——从歌德的《浮士德》到陀思妥耶夫斯基的《地下室手记》,再到西尔维娅·普拉斯的《爹地》——阐明了个人情结和投射是如何在从育儿到创作实践再到爱情的方方面面中发挥作用的,以及对这些情结痛苦的放弃又是如何开启通往最深层、最具救赎性的转化之门的。建议配合阿兰·德波顿关于“崩溃之重要性”的论述、朱迪思·维奥斯特关于“放手的艺术”的见解一同阅读,并重温厄休拉·勒古恩关于“绝经期即重生”的精彩沉思。