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Like Berlin, we all have a wall, an inner wall, that needs to be torn down. It's a wall we built at a young age, when socialization began and we needed a barrier behind which we could hide that part of ourselves that was unacceptable to our mothers as well as important others. What we hide is the "shadow." To conceal it, we create a wall that we call the "persona. "
To be a Berliner, is about starting out as a unified whole, as we all started out as infants, as Berlin itself started out. It is then to be split in two with a wall erected between the two parts, as Berlin was, and as we all were when socialization began, shattering our original wholeness.
Finally, it is to become one again, as Berlin has done and as we hope to do, if we do our work and if we are lucky. As in the case of Berlin, the wall keeps us from becoming all we can be. Berlin, thus, is a metaphor for the enlargement of personality that can occur when we, like Berlin's inhabitants, tear down that wall and become bigger, richer, freer, and more diverse and democratic. In this sense, we are all potentially Berliners.
About the author
Lawrence Staples is a retired Jungian Analyst. He is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, has a Ph.D. in psychology and holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, Lawrence is author of The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness and co-author, with Nancy Carter Pennington, of The Guilt Cure and Our Creative Fingerprint. His book, Eighteen East 74th Street: An Autobiographical Novel, was published by Chiron Publications in 2020. In his first half of life career, he was a corporate vice president and officer of a Fortune 500 company.
