An Evening With Frances Hatfield: An Individuation in Poems

Who set me wandering through my dreams
searching for relics of my wings?

Who lit the lamp and drew for me a bath
scented with roses and myrrh?

That light will surely shatter me
when it finds me hiding in ashes

What do you mean, take off 
the demon-riddled rags?

What then
could I wear?

From “The Invitation" by Frances Hatfield

Every individuation is as unique as the soul that lives it. Though all partake of archetypal patterns — marriage, sacrifice, descent, death, rebirth, resurrection (to name a few) — each is virtually inexpressible except through symbolic or mythopoetic means. Alchemy provided Jung with such a means.

All my life, I have turned to poetry to meet a deep need to try to articulate something of my ineffable inner experience.

In this presentation, I will share with you a selection of these poems from the past five decades of my life that say something of the nature of the individuation path I have followed so far. My hope is that these poems will spark your own search to express the inexpressible mystery in your soul. 

Frances Hatfield is a senior training analyst, vice president, and co-director of training at the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe, as well as a poet. She teaches in the training and the public programs in Santa Fe, the San Francisco Jung Institute, and the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Her poems and essays have appeared in Parabola, Jung Journal, Psychological Perspectives, Numinous, Monterey Bay Anthology of Poetry, The Book of Now, and others.  Her book of poems, Rudiments of Flight, won the 2013 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters poetry book prize. Frances lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she has a private practice. .