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In Aboriginal culture, going back maybe 50,000 years, the physical place where the young Aboriginal woman was pregnant and gave birth to her baby was sacred ground, always revered by her and her community. That place the young pregnant suburban Aboriginal woman of today must reclaim, but now, instead of being land, it is the space of her body, mind, and emotions. She needs to reclaim this space from alcohol, drugs, and violence and declare it once more a sacred place of holding life and giving birth-the sacred land of new beginnings-not only for her infants, but for herself and her community.
PRECREATIVE SPACE
At the core of the personality is a particular psychic space, which I describe as the precreative, primordial abyss. It is the nothingness, no-where space, enunciated in most religions as the primary black void. It precedes all creative psychic living, all ambivalence; it is "before is and is not." It is not a static space, for there is a dialectical movement to and from it in every living experience, as old patterns of being are surrendered to allow return to the abyss but paradoxically for the first time, and from that be born psychically anew. I propose this dynamic as a continuum from birth to death, from womb to tomb, and as an integral part of living experience in every moment of our lives. In the primordial precreative space is the potential of life, risk, surprise, fear, danger, along with the possibility of the joy of creativity. This paper is about two different psychic spaces. The first space we call precreative. It can become procreative when there is holding and therefore the possibility of having life in it. The second space has its roots in abject fear and terror, for there is no holding in it. This is the dark abyss resulting from unresolved trauma. Death becomes more active than life as it works to annihilate life- terror freezes all affect. There is no movement. We call this space autistic or schizoid or psychotic.
In the beginning was the darkness, the void, then because the void was tolerated came the light, the spark. The tolerance of that void allows intercourse, an intersection of ideas, an intersection of emotions, resulting chaos,...