This something shows up in strange places and at inappropriate times. For instance, Dianne recently received a major award from a New York Based Advertising Association. She was delighted about receiving the award and knew that she deserved it. Yet . . . at some level Dianne felt like a “fraud.” She was accustomed to pumping up the products she was paid to advertise. At this moment Dianne feels like she is pumping up herself or perhaps being pumped up by her colleagues. Is she really “this good” or is she actually a “mediocre” product that needs a whole lot of “pumping up.” Dianne leaves the award ceremony with her husband and begins to cry. He asks if she was crying out of gratitude. “No . . . I am crying because I am terribly sad right now and I am terrified. I don’t know why I am feeling this way or why I am so afraid. God. This is horrible. I want to return the award!”
There was another recent moment in Dianne’s life that was shocking and shattering of her sense of self-worth. Dianne had flown to the West Coast with her husband in order to be with her daughter who was about to graduate from college. While Dianne was very proud of her daughter and wishes nothing but the best for her daughter as she ventured into adult life, she finds herself envious of her daughter. Dianne decides to write down what is going through her heart and mind: “My daughter is young, intelligent and beautiful. A life of great promise is in front of her. By contrast, I am getting old, may be losing some of my critical and creative faculties, and feel like most of my life is behind me.”
Dianne was shocked when she read what she had just written. She wanted to crumple up the paper on which this horrible statement was written but decided not to do so—for this statement was one of the most honest things she had said to herself in many years. Instead of being the slick Ad executive, Dianne was a vulnerable woman who was afraid of growing old. Dianne tucked this piece of paper in a safe hiding place when she kept several mementos from her wedding, a copy of her first employment agreement—and a copy of her own graduation program.
A perfect storm was swirling around in Dianne’s unconscious and has spiraled out into her third quad. It was now spilling over into quad one. In some instances, as I noted when presenting the variants on the Johari Window, the material was crashing directly into Quad One. Why was this occurring? As Joe Luft noted, we are curious about the contents of quad four. I suspect that Dianne was particularly intrigued with this content and without knowing it explicitly she might have found a way to link quad four hopes and fears that all of us possess into her compelling advertising campaigns. Perhaps Dianne was not only intrigued but also conversant with the unconscious—even a collective unconscious.
