‘The Giving Tree’, published in 1964, is a minimalist American children’s book by Shel Silverstein, comprising of only 600 odd words, alongside simple black and white images drawn by the author. I was captivated by this book when I first encountered it, and it has continued to occupy my thoughts ever since. The book was the basis of the first service I ever gave here in the Meeting House, and ever since then it has been my intention to return to its pages and consider its rich imagery afresh. The story is written in a parabolic style, and as such it seems reasonable to posit we’re working in an allegorical mode. Whatever this story is about, it’s surely not about a boy and his tree. The trouble is, the author himself always denied this. Shel Silverstein maintained that the book had no message, it was not to be interpreted, and it simply is as it appears, a story ‘about a boy and a tree’. “It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.” Despite the author being so matter of fact about this, I beg to differ.

When a piece of art is created, be it a movie, a painting, a rap song, or a children’s book, whether the artist likes it or not we are going to interpret the meaning of that art for ourselves. Although I don’t think the author’s personal interpretation is irrelevant, I don’t think it’s paramount either. It’s not even the case that what the artist claims concerning their own work is de facto his/her true perspective. Rather, a motivation for offering either no interpretation, or denying the legitimacy of interpretation, may be that in doing so one bolsters the piece’s mystique. Likewise, I don’t think the author’s biography is irrelevant either, but again, nor do I think it is paramount. We should not underestimate the extent to which a piece of art stands independently from its author. I’m not here agreeing completely with the postmodernist position that the author is irrelevant, but I am saying it can be overstated. Shel Silverstein was a prolific womanizer; it strikes me as being erroneous though to allow that fact to unduly overshadow the work. ‘The Giving Tree’ is a piece of art that has an identity of its own. Its very form suggests a depth of meaning, and the author’s inability or unwillingness to recognise this is not the whole story. In fact, if indeed the author was truly unconscious of the depths herein, I might suggest that this in fact attests to the legitimacy of a psychoanalytical reading of the story. There is content present herein that the author is not even aware of! Beneath the surface of the text there is recurrent material of the collective unconscious coming to the fore and finding expression.

Let us begin then by considering a surface reading of the text. The story is apparently about a boy and his tree. The boy would play in her branches. The boy grew older and went away, which made the tree sad. He returned to ask for money - she gives him her apples to sell, she gives him her branches, she gives him her trunk, until there is nothing left of her but an old stump. The boy, now an old man, sits upon the stump, and we’re told the tree is happy. Let us suppose then, that the story is not ‘about a boy and a tree’, but rather that these two characters represent or symbolise aspects of the psyche. Not so much Silverstein’s psyche, but rather the psyche of each one of us. The boy represents the ‘ego’, the ‘I’ part of the psyche, which we experience mediating the conflicting impulses within our interior world, and the tree represents, in Jungian terms, the capital ‘S’ Self.

Now, ‘Self’, in this context is a jargon term, so I’ll unpack it a bit. The capital ‘S’ Self can be thought of as God within one’s own psyche, the divine image, and so the person with the cultivated religious attitude is the one who has discovered the divine within the Self, and remains in tune with it, not allowing single minded drives to subvert our attention away from the God within. Furthermore, the ego, the boy, is represented as the masculine dimension of the Psyche, whereas the tree, the Self, is represented as the feminine aspect of the Psyche.

So now, back to the story. In the beginning, the boy and the tree, the ego and the Self, are in harmony. This is the Edenic state of being, the intuitively held sense that in a bygone age we were in harmony with nature and the cosmos. We all have this inbuilt sense that we must recover this once lost oceanic oneness with the cosmos. So the alienation begins. It starts with the ego recognising that it is distinct from the Self. We get the first hint of this in ‘The Giving Tree’ on page twelve; we see in the black and white picture that the boy has carved into the base of the tree a heart, with the words, ‘Me + T’ (‘Me + The Tree’), hinting at the beginning of disharmony within the psyche, for now the Self is an objectified other.

As this estrangement between the ego and the Self reaches its apotheosis in our story, the divine image, the tree, is said to feel sad. The divine image within actively doesn’t want to be estranged from our ego, and when that estrangement does occur, we often feel a deep sense of disharmony within our psyche. This disharmony attests to the need for the spiritual journey, this process of individuation—and this is an important point to emphasise, as within liberal religious communities such as ours there is often a misconception that arises, that because we desire to accommodate and embrace every individual, we do not therefore encourage a process of spiritual renewal. This mistake has led many liberal religious communities to abandon the fostering of spiritual renewal and spiritual discovery, instead focusing upon community for community’s sake, or social action to the detriment of religiosity.

The psyche has gone through a complete process, the ego is not who it was, and the Self is not who it was. Both have undergone transformation; the masculine dimension of the psyche has been reconciled with the feminine. They now sit in peace with each other, and the tree was happy.

Amen.