Muriel Rukeyser in Analysis: Body of Waking

In 1953, after the death of her mother Myra, Rukeyser began an analysis with Jungian analyst Frances G. Wickes and engaged in intentional, rigorous “work on the self” that culminated in the publication of Body of Waking, her first book of poems after a 10-year silence. Rukeyser captured parts of her work on the self in a detailed account of her analysis, included in The Inner World of Choice, Wickes’s third book (1963), which Rukeyser researched and anonymously co-wrote. Entitled “The X in the Calculation,” the chapter follows the case of an unnamed woman who suffered from debilitating fears that threatened her adult life with exhausting alternations of rebellion and inertia. Rukeyser, assuming her analyst’s perspective, excoriates her “victim complex,” her rages, her fears. By contrast, in Body of Waking, her poetic tribute to Wickes, Rukeyser plumbs the resources of poetry and Jungian analysis, embracing the erotic as an untapped power of women linked to their “human cunt” and the processes of sex, birth, and nursing. Anticipating Audre Lorde’s proclamation on “The Uses of the Erotic,” Rukeyser champions it as a source of profound pleasure, nourishment, strength, political resistance, and cultural survival, which over centuries of misogyny had been “translated,” contained, and robbed from women. Lingering in the “littoral” space of becoming, of dreaming and waking, Rukeyser reclaims the power of the erotic, and credits her therapist, Wickes, with helping her espouse an affirmative, womanly sense of self and freeing her from fears and inhibitions that, as she mourns in a group of poems in Body of Waking, had stunted her mother’s life and led to the suicide of three male friends, hounded by heteronormative social and sexual pressures.

Keywords: Muriel Rukeyser, Body of Waking, Frances Wickes, Jungian Analysis, Eros, Homoeroticism