Stephen van Beek MA (Tripos), CMC, DCTP, Member CAPT

The Matreshka Doll

Matreshka dolls have always fascinated me since I first discovered them, incongruously, in a small booth at the Sportsman's Show in Montreal in 1955. It wasn't the doll form I found intriguing at that time; I was there to buy my first fishing reel. No, not the doll form, but the fact that inside the largest of the seven dolls was another smaller doll, differently painted in a summer dress, within the large one.

And again, inside that doll, yet another. And within that one another, far smaller.

Finally, through layer and layer of doll-form, gaily painted, within the last and smallest doll, a tiny one, just a modest little naked child of a doll, entirely plain and simple in its original wood.

This was an epiphany that I couldn't put into words. I had already bought my fishing reel for the then massive sum of two dollars, and I did not have an extra dollar to buy these costly wonders.

Besides, what would my friends have thought of me? How could I have explained that it was not the female dolls that fascinated me but the curious way in which they in-folded and incorporated so many stages of existence?

Boys of ten are not notorious for being articulate, so what I did was to file in my memory the pure wonder of it all, and to buy a little book of Russian short stories that I could afford with my few remaining pennies. You have at this point to remember just how long ago this time was, and to remember that Russian books of the time were mass-produced by a government eager to place any good cultural object in the hands of foreign readers. My book was called The Malachite Casket, its cover was appropriately green, and I still treasure it after all these years. Another story for another time perhaps!

You may already have seen or even bought a matreshka. To this day I have not bought one, perhaps because the first one I saw is still such a powerful memory. As I recently learned from the Internet when embarking on this essay, the original matreshka - the name derives form the Latin word for 'mother' - came from the Japanese island of Honshu but was carved by a Russian monk.

Later in life, reading Carl Jung's fascinating autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections, one of the few books I would suggest to anyone considering a creative self-exploration, I found his description of the little doll he once carved connecting with my psychic matreshka.

I won't spoil his story by revealing what that was all about for him, but I will say that in the last twenty years of my own psychic journey, first as a student of myself and now as a student of life through my work with my clients, the inner meaning of the matreshka has widened and expanded until it is almost capable of providing a full explanation of what therapy is all about for me. Subject to further reflection, of course.

When you really think about it, isn't it strange that, in the words of the great American poet, e.e. cummings, when we were children, 'down we forget as up [we] grew'? Isn't it more than a little strange that our embodiment as children falls farther and farther behind us, and that we become increasingly the corpulent - even if beaming - person signified by the biggest outside matreshka/mother itself?

For inside the biggest is one less big, less grand, less sure, more alive.

Within her is another still, less grand again, fresher, differing in hopes and fears, still more alive.

And yet again as the diminishing scale of proportion takes us ever downward, is there then not yet another less powerful human being, even more untouched by the sheer experience of living, with a softer sweeter smile available, fewer strong defences and more vulnerabilities?

And so on, and so on...

Layer after layer peels off until we come at last to the tiniest one, the very seed and starter of all those who followed on after her.

A successful therapy is very much, in my mind, like the process of returning back to fresher and more vital levels of our selves, sloughing off the exterior armour of the big powerful ones that we are forced to be for lack of a successful solution to the challenge of retaining all our youthful psychic vigour and openness, until at last we may come to that littlest, inmost Self where all of us started out from.

Given the Zen tradition of Japan, and its core belief that at our core is the fresh potential of life buried under social obligations and conformity to others who are also trapped in conforming, it is not surprising that it was on the Japanese island of Honshu that the matreshka doll concept began.

For inside us is the eternal living seed of the forgotten self, patiently waiting and enduring until such time as it can once again liberate itself, shedding its husks and shells, and expose to the light and air the essence of spiritual force that each of us has within ourselves.

There, in a nutshell, so to speak, is what I learned about therapy from my encounter with the matreshka dolls.