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Couple Power Struggle as Compromise Formation?

November 8, 2025

This post was first published in October of 2016. This frame just came up for me in some couples work, and I thought it might be helpful to re-post it today. What I like about it is it gets at this idea we are all operating out of some degree of partial cure defenses. When we show up with each other and commit to honoring our depth work, think Clarrisa Pinkola Estes’ telling and interpretation of Skeleton Woman, our primary wounds to loving will always show up. Always. Freud’s recognition of compromise formations, or what I like to think of as psyche’s camouflage tool, helps us understand we have powerful defenses dedicated to (Bromberg): “... controlling both the triggering of unprocessed emotion schemas that were created by trauma and the release of ungovernable affect of hyperarousal that could threaten to destabilize its function.” Here is the archival post:

As I’ve been exploring the idea our most challenging and repetitive intimate partner conflicts may be generated by our dueling partial cures, Freud’s discussion of dreams and compromise formations popped into my head in the middle of the night. The unbidden thought/question was: Is it possible what we can remember and report about a painful fight is really the waking dream equivalent of a dream’s manifest content? I recalled Freud’s view of dream work is that the dream we remember – the “manifest” dream is actually a compromise formation: a psychic product, symptom, symbol, or dream form that expresses simultaneously and partially satisfies both the unconscious impulse and the defense against it.” (For more on manifest versus latent contents, see link below.)

What gets our attention, what we fight about, is something we can think about. Something deeper, and sensed to be threatening at some level, remains hidden – latent – from consciousness . (see link below) The compromise formation is psyche’s camouflage tool.

So what about the unconscious impulse and the defense against it? The Wilkinson discussion of micro-fractures in communication comes to mind. Micro-fractures as manifest content carry a charge reflective of a compromise formation dynamic at work. Through the opening/piercing they provide, something unintended is shown to us. What is being shown at some level can be thought of as an out-picturing of “raw material from the patient’s internal world and history.” As compromise formations, these spontaneously expressed offerings can become the engine of self – other analysis. Note it is best to recognize by definition that what is being revealed is wearing camouflage, and all parties want to respect the dynamics at play to keep hidden the true meaning until the conditions are favorable.

The phenomenon of the blur, as an altered and altering state of emotional consciousness, provides an important bridge between the here and now and the unconscious-to-ego “latent” contents. When triggered, internally or externally, activating complexes, if unchecked, provide the stage, actors, and script for the purpose of re-enacting the wounding. That is, until such time as one or both can gather enough consciousness to wake up within this dream.

How might it shift the dialogue to consider, mutually, what we are fighting about in the blur reflects to some degree a manifest content? Note one does not want to ask is this or is this not the real fight we’re having. Rather, if something of our reality is defensive, in what ways might this reflect our co-created manifest content? And if so, how might we  penetrate the defensive camouflage? Recall, if manifest content rules are in play, psyche is allowing into consciousness material which expresses simultaneously and partially satisfies both the unconscious impulse and the defense against it.

A simple example which comes to mind is if we argue about who gets to drive the bus and something about your tone awakes my inner child, I am likely to project my shaming parental figure/introject onto you. My impulse might be to scream or cry out “NO! I want this, that, or the other” but, fearful I might sound like a two year old, and/or be shamed or punished for trying to have a say, I may hold back, in silence or protest. The defenses responsible for our early survival will kick in automatically and silence the impulse to be heard, to matter, to be a part of all that is good in the family. How are the defenses enabling our survival then still being deployed today? Getting to the core character building origins of his/her/they stories is never easy.

I am struck with the overlap between the concept of compromise formation and Jung’s view of the symbol. An image functioning as a symbol both informs us about, while at the same time protects us from, an emerging, essential to conscious life awareness. Jung (1921) defined the symbol as “the best possible designation or formula for something relatively unknown yet recognized to be present, or required.” (Jung, C.G., CW6)

Is it possible the blur, when recognized for what it is, may be the best possible designation or formula for something relatively unknown yet recognized to be present, or required? For more on this see my section on Complexes as Bridge to the Symbolic World in the Psycho-Educational Symbolic Overview, or my exploration of the teleology of the complex in Musings on Metamorphosis post.

When one can see the unconsciousness present in the blur as an unbidden opportunity, one can get perhaps more  wholeheartedly embrace the suffering which comes with the piercing of the the veil of camouflage. In telling our stories we create opportunities to reminisce deeply, experience again more and more of the original affects. We practice embracing our lost selves, taking care of them and bringing them home.

The take away is be on the look out for mysterious movements and meanings. The participation mystique is more than an abstract concept!

Here is more response ease for Freud’s use of manifest versus latent dream content:

“Manifest content
The manifest content can be interpreted as the information that the conscious individual remembers experiencing. It consists of all the elements of actual images, thoughts, and content within the dream that the individual is cognitively aware of upon awakening. Illustrated through iceberg imagery, the manifest content would be identified as the “tip”: it is barely exposed above the surface with an enormous portion still hidden underneath. As the hallmark of psychoanalytic theory suggests, what is observed on the surface is only a partial representation of the vastness that lies beneath (Friedman & Schustack, 2012). Although images may initially appear bizarre and nonsensical, individual analysis of the dream can reveal its underlying meaning.

Latent content
Related to yet distinctly separate from manifest content, the latent content of the dream illustrates the hidden meaning of one’s unconscious thoughts, drives, and desires. The unconscious mind actively suppresses what can be revealed from the latent content in order to protect the individual from primitive feelings that are particularly difficult to cope with. Freud (1900) believed that by uncovering the meaning of one’s hidden motivations and deeper ideas, an individual could successfully understand his or her internal struggles through eventually resolving issues that create tension in their lives. In contrast to the information easily recognizable, latent content makes up everything underneath the surface. Illustrated once again through iceberg imagery, the depth of meaning that can be derived from examining this layer can reveal deeper underlying thoughts within an individual’s unconscious.”

Categories: Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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Jung on the therapeutic value of abreaction (pp. 130-132, CW16) (update from 01/2010 post)

November 8, 2025

Here is a source quote from Jung, with a comment from me, on the importance of recognizing it is the dissociation itself that needs healing. Given the early conditions…glint in the eye of our parents, fetus, infant, toddler and on up, it is the nature of the situation that we will all have a number of unbearable split off episodic memory based encapsulated trauma complexes. Each of these, at the time, required the activation of psyche’s super power – dissociation – to survive. While life preserving at the time and into the mid-life, these dissociation based defenses do not allow vulnerability and emotional intimacy. Before we can heal we have to first “cure the cure” ie: let go of the dissociation based defenses, before we can get to the healing of the original overwhelm. Blur states, getting triggered that is, provide the energy to eventually pierce the encapsulated trauma complex, allowing us then more conscious access. See what you think about Jung’s take here:

“. . . the trauma is either a single, definite, violent impact, or a complex of ideas and emotions which may be likened to a psychic wound. Everything that touches this complex, however slightly, excites a vehement reaction, a regular emotional explosion. Hence one could easily represent the trauma as a complex with a high emotional charge, and because this enormously effective charge seems at first sight to be the pathological cause of the disturbance, one can accordingly postulate a therapy whose aim is the complete release of this charge. Such a view is both simple and logical, and it is in apparent agreement with the fact that abreaction, i.e., the dramatic rehearsal of the traumatic moment, it’s emotional recapitulation in the waking or in the hypnotic state – often has a therapeutic effect. We all know that a man has a compelling need to recount a vivid experience again and again until it has lost its affective value. As the proverb says, “What filleth the heart goeth out by the mouth.” The unbosoming gradually depotentiates the affectivity of the traumatic experience until it no longer has a disturbing influence.”

We recognize, Jung on McDougall, however that “the essential factor is the dissociation of the psyche and not the existence of a highly charged affect and, consequently, that the main therapeutic problem is not abreaction but how to integrate the dissociation. . . .that a traumatic complex brings about dissociation of the psyche. The complex is not under the control of the will and for this reason it possesses the quality of psychic autonomy. . . .it pounces on him like an enemy or a wild animal…” “Abreaction then is an attempt to reintegrate the autonomous complex, to incorporate it gradually into the conscious mind as an accepted content, by living the traumatic situation over again, once or repeatedly,” (pp. 130-132, CW16)

Categories: blur, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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A Very Serious Microfracture in Communication: When the Inner Antagonist Gets Exteriorized and Embodied*

September 18, 2025

The Microfracture frame is a reference to Wilkinson’s work here. Here I want to walk us through the usefulness of Edward Edinger’s writings on the exteriorization of an inner antagonist. The link takes you to a post titled: A Consciousness Challenge: Recognizing the Inner Antagonist in the Outer World. (I will track down the quote and add to my source quote collection lower left)

In my world, this is a very real problem which needs some special language to help us recognize when it is in play. Once you can see it, you also may find it hidden in plain sight…with a surprising frequency.

Edward Edinger suggests we consider the possibility conflict in the outer world is psyche propelling us into a situation specifically for the purposes of learning something essential. The timing reflects our readiness in the moment to consider the next piece in working through a complex. From this perspective, what we are in conflict with is an exteriorized, embodied, Inner Antagonist. This is a radical notion. What is the teaching?

For this to be a real thing, we need to understand psyche’s powers to project. And that we understand this will be unconscious to the ego. Recall, we only project what is truly unconscious (to the ego), and that projection is how psyche gets a split off piece of our depth work back out into the world, as an assist in beginning a sorting process where in at some point we can recognize it is our own shadow driving this. Because the true meaning is unbearable to ego consciousness, if you notice you are being asked to carry someone’s exteriorized inner antagonist, and try to talk about it with the person who is relying on this defense, they will not be able to consciously see what you are trying to point out. That is the special challenge. If you understand the dynamic and can feel the pull to carry the emotional tone associated with the antagonist, but do not get pulled into the force field created by this level of projection, you can be chill enough to experience the blur and even offer some help. My plate Representation of Persona Submitting to Emotion offers a map to support trying this on. The bad news is when someone gets strongly complexed, imaged by shall we say – Hansel and Gretal and the Witch in the gingerbread forest setting – in the moment one can become identified with either the Witch or the vulnerable child state; which ever one gets control of the steering wheel, the other gets projected onto the environment. AND it can switch in a nano second. The GOOD news is when you can see this, you can help by containing the Witch and supporting the vulnerable child state in being powerful enough to send the Witch back into the dream time. This requires a capacity to stay conscious within a blur state. Both the here and now and the dream time are activated in this altered and altering state of consciousness.

Before going into some theory which helps us think about how complex and yet often utilized these defense are, I want to make a case for a very useful try on with stuff that erupts into the environment like a bad dream. And that is, simple put: imagine this is a dream, your dream. When both parties can aspire to take 100% responsibility for where each goes within an outer world encounter – with or without video coverage – we have our best chance to get to the deeper layers of work which drive our repetition compulsions – or – episodes of enactment which fit our re-enactment of the wounding dynamics. The Edinger teaching after all works in both directions: how is what I’m getting from you an encounter with my Inner Antagonist, while at the very same time, what you are getting from me is an encounter with your Inner Antagonist? This is a truly awesome complexity!

When you wake up with a start from this dream, grab your journal and start writing as fast as you can to capture everything that just happened, as if it was your dream. Treat it as a communication from your Guiding Self. Include as much detail as you can. Keep adding to your depiction of the setting(s), scenes, speech, feelings, sensations, all of it. Note your spontaneous associations, call for memories. Try to get busy with all of that in an effort to get inside with your own process.

Remember, if you have just encountered conflict in the world, in what way are you being shown an inner antagonist? This helps us find our way into the co-created, dissociation enabled enactment which will show us, like an out-picturing of our soul wound via the dream time, what our core resonance or reactivity is about. Why now, why in this way has this come up?

And while we want to give serious consideration to the actual others in our relational world who will populate our dreams, intense feeling toned episodes always point back to our earliest challenges. It is the deeper level of personal developmental history and ancestral complexes at play in the dream at hand. In short, what can I hope to learn about my cast of inner antagonists?

Back to a depth psychological view: How is this impossibly complex defense even possible? From the psychoanalytic side, Christopher Bolus has described the defense mechanism employed here: “Kleinian psychoanalysts, in particular, have focused on one way in which a person may rid himself of a particular element of psychic life. He does so by putting it into someone else.” See the linked post for an interesting case illustration. I have a more lengthy comment on his observations in my post Projective Identification: Informing the Experiential State.

I am wanting to restate that assertion: One way in which a person may rid himself of a particular element of psychic life is by putting it into someone else. If like most, you have not heard about this power, try to think about if this could be true. The implication being that until we are ready to embrace parts of ourselves which through our known histories likely could not have survived our childhood conditions intact, we/psyche can just rid ourselves of them by just putting it/them into someone else? Mind blowing really. And try on what it might be like to have someone make such a deposit of emotionally charged experience into your core, and not notice it came from outside one’s self? Another big wow. It is also true that if/when we share similar core conflicts – core shame – we are more vulnerable to taking in these projected antagonists and becoming identified with them as if they were only our own self. Meaning we don’t see that the sometimes dramatic shift in our mood reflects something was put into us by another.

Suffice to say now, whenever we get triggered, get our buttons pushed, or simply are on the receiving end of an emotionally charged offering, with or without getting activated, it is important to consider, how might this be something deeper trying to come into consciousness?

For more on the subsymbolic and symbolic worlds and the role of enactments, see my Bromberg review post: Enactments: Setting the table…together.

*If you saw this offering before 2:30 PM on 9/18/25, you would be reading: A Different Kind of Homewrecker: When Inner Antagonists Get Exteriorized. Sitting with the post today, it has become obvious the use of label Homewrecker, whatever I was thinking, and I do have thoughts, was to jump into the deep end of the name-calling which has been such a toxic part of our political discourse/discord. Name calling reduces our world to othering; from complexity devolving into either/or, in contrast to both and more. It reflects an activation of splitting and scapegoating defenses. These primitive defenses are hardwired. Dante’s Divine Comedy describes a special place in Hell for Sowers of Discord (written between 1308 and 1321). It does not recognize the shared complexity. Seeing this I was able to connect more consciously with my own sadness and deep discouragement about the seriousness of the impact on family and friends when we can’t choose to be with our own contributions to the disharmony. When name calling seems to be again tolerated… My sincere apologies.

Let’s leave it there for now….

goodby for now,

chuck

Categories: blur, Communications from the Dream Time, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Dream, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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On The Importance of Getting Triggered

September 15, 2025

As part of my preparation for co-leading an embodied, community dream group, I have been reviewing some of my earlier conceptual stuff and have revised this one a bit.

The dream group offering is very exciting and will focus on bringing in dreams and support for being with them in more depth. How precious is that?! This will not be so much a thinking about and analyzing them. That being said, as a part of my preparation for the community dream group I came across a favorite Edward Whitmont and Sylvia Perera quote which puts complexes right at the center of dream life: “… every dream points to an unconscious complex and to the archetypal dynamism behind the complex’s emotionally charged layers.”

This observation is very intriguing to me. We can consider dreams as out-picturings of inner life, ie: the image and affect based dream symbolism points directly to unfinished emotional business. Consider then the role of enactments, in waking life, in bringing subsymbolic material into our shared, waking world. I am thinking it will be helpful to consider dream symbolism and enactments as being on a continuum. Our core defenses work to protect us from being re-traumatized by still unbearable, repressed experiences. (See post on Freud’s discussion of compromise formations.) I want to distill my view of complexes down into a everyday life kind of familiarity. How might we usefully orient to complexes? This early post is one broader way into all of this stuff. May the force be with you!

From The Importance of Getting Triggered post (9/15/2018):

Thinking about my conceptual frame Couple Experiential State Complex as Activated Threshold, I have been struck this week by the importance of focusing on tracking when we, self and others, get emotionally triggered.

By using the word triggered, I am hoping to tap into our collective, universal sense of knowing we are getting hijacked by something intensely emotional. As in getting your button(s) pushed.

This shift in emotional intensity is the simplest indicator we may be activating, or activated, announcing to all who can perceive, the emergence of the blur.

From this perspective, when caught in the middle of a microfracture in communication, can we recognize the experience as meaningful? Is it possible this really is an unbidden (not ego driven), spontaneous opportunity for healing? What if there is no such thing as (fighting over) little stuff with regards to our archaic wounds to loving?

Fred Kaufman has a post on LinkedIn Every Emotion Is A Love Story. I find this to be a great opening assertion! If true, in accepting the validity of the emotion, under what circumstances is this present  emotion appropriate? We call for any associations, feelings, sensations, and memories that can help us understand the true context/setting giving rise to the emotion. When and where was this emotion a normal reaction to what was happening? As Rumi advises in A night full of talking that hurts…: Everything has to do with loving and not loving.

Preparing oneself to enter into such a healing moment includes learning to see the power struggle as a co-created complex. From this perspective, the ritualistic elements reflect what we think of as repetition compulsions or re-enactments of the wounding. In alignment with Bromberg’s description of co-created dissociative enabled enactments, these bring the essence of our unfinished business palpably into the present moment. This is the layer which drives the transference and counter-transference dance. In this blur, how are each of us standing in for the important others populating our complexes?

In his discussion of complexes in their favorable aspect, John Perry observes: “The repetition compulsion, as has been pointed out so often, provides the ego the occasion again and again to encounter these rejected components of development in order finally to assimilate them in some happy moments…” My sense of what he means by rejected components of development is simply the recognition in the absence of elder functions being available at the time of the wounding to help protect the vulnerable child or adult, and/or help metabolize the unbearable affects, the unmediated violation is certain to overwhelm the vulnerable psyche, necessitating the activation of archetypal layer defenses, ie: a trauma complex. What was needed at the time to understand and work through the emotional overwhelm is still needed. We can see that we really need now is what the elder knows, the functions needed to bring us through… We keep looking for them in anyone we intuitively sense may be carrying them.

I have played with this in thinking about the function complexes serve in my Musing on Metamorphosis: the Complex as Chrysalis post. I have to confess for me teleology is a big word, but, I believe it works!

The complex as chrysalis supports imaging the chrysalis as the container functioning to hold the original episode in a state of suspended animation (not inert however!), preserving the episodic memory based trauma in it’s original, unabstracted wholeness. Each reflects a developmental layer, ie: what anyone would see if you had a baby cam recording of the episode, as well an archetypal, evoked node layer. Here, think of it as Psyche’s lending library of hardwired, genetic memory, image/affect based guides to survival templates. The developmental, experiential state image overlaps with the archetypal evoked node, as each is comprised of the same components; the archetypal comes in when the level of intensity evokes the hardwired resources for survival.

Until we can more consciously experience this trauma complex, it will remain un-inventoried, un-integrated, and located in Bromberg’s subsymbolic mode of experience. My consideration of the conceptualization of the teleology of the complex as chrysalis, acknowledges the reality these subsymbolic mode trauma episodes complexes are the depositories of our split off experiences; they contain the original whole episodes of experience, intact and highly charged, along side of time and space. When the conditions later in life support the piercing of the containers, it is as if a time machine appears, ready to transport us back into the original experience, enabling us direct, conscious enough access to that which at the time could only be handled through life preserving dissociative defenses.

In closing, I have included the graphic above to highlight the Participation Mystique &/or Trauma Portal detail.  We are all involved all of the time with some deeper level of consciousness, a multiplicity of self-states if you will, which wants to inform us about what more is going on. Because I tend to think about getting hijacked into negative emotion enactments, I find the idea getting triggered serves the blur’s function in opening a portal into the associated trauma. The repetitive couple complex enactments do seem to provide a portal into our most painful relationship failings.

Clearly, we need each other to approach going there. What is needed may be as simple, and as difficult, as dropping into the original scene, so that we may feel all of it, within relationship, bear witness together, and get the story told. (See Sandner and Beebe for an articulation of what it takes to heal a split.) This reflects the conceptual notion traumas, until they can be suffered consciously in the service of re-integration, are incomplete initiatory experiences. Creating the conditions, essentially accessing a consciousness that can bear to suffer the wounding without splitting, is the work.

If we can only hold onto the here and now, this world enactment – what you/he/she/they did or did not do to uphold our loving – we are doomed to continue with our co-created dissociated enactments. Best practices to stay regulated and calm and more, are great and important, but they will not protect us from going there when psyche assesses the conditions are right for suffering a transformative descent and rebirth. All in the service of integration and healing.

Why not make a dedicated effort to sit with our deeper selves? We have to find a way to get to what was my part in initiating or participating in the dissociation just now? Can we strive to bear to feel as vulnerable as we may be feeling? To be continued…

Categories: Communications from the Dream Time, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Initiation, Poems, Transference and Countertransference
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A Dream Time Image of Piercing Encapsulated Trauma: Three Crones Receive the Knife

June 18, 2025

(Note this post is a lightly revised post from August of 2019) How can we image the sticky wicket problem of opening to split off complexes, given their/our lifetime of dedicated defenses working to keep them split off? As Donald Kalsched has observed, healing requires the dismantling of the dissociation based defenses which were our survival; one must first cure the (partial) cure. For me this dream provided an orientation to the requirement that the defenses containing an episodic memory based trauma complex must be pierced prior to them allowing direct contact with the split off image and affect charged scene. Here is the dream:

11-29-12 Thursday 4:56: Very vivid, short dream with three of us, all women. I’m one of the them, and I am also myself, observing my woman-self as if standing behind and looking over my crone self’s shoulder. We are standing together in a kitchen and we understand we are dead, or have died, and its not a problem for us. The focus turns to the idea, the recognition of the timing being right, for giving and receiving the knife. This is a ritual process we are in charge of doing periodically. It is somehow vitally important we attend to this for the sake of the community. The woman opposite me pulls out several ancient, long curved bladed knives and with great intention brings one forward towards the belly of the woman on my left, making contact and slowly plunging it into her; the movement is a bit downward; I/we can all feel it going in deeply. Then, slowly withdrawing the blade, she turns to see me, signaling now it will be my turn to receive the knife. I seem to ready myself for this by involuntarily shuddering and leaning first forward, leading with my head/chin pulling up and back, offering my belly, and then, intensely anticipating the knife finding my belly, I can’t help flinching and pulling slightly back. I am struck by how deeply I can feel this wounding, penetrating me to my core, opening me up completely; there is a moment of tremendous surrender and release of pitiful grief as I fully experience receiving the knife. Coming out of this deep practicing of having been pierced, I am silently, through my tears, attentive to what will happen immediately, my turn… I am thinking, yes, this is what we do; this is what it is like, it happens like this to all of us. It is painful. This is the way it is.”

Waking Reflections: At the time I had this dream, my sense was it was a compensatory dream pointing to my ongoing vulnerability to inflation; this offered a radical image of deflation. The intensity and directness of the action suggested I was/am experienced in the giving and receiving of this primary wound. The ritual, anchored by ritual elders, crones in this instance, seemed to be in the service of supporting the community/collective to be continuously aware of the reality of ongoing sacrifices, both conscious, in this case, but also unconscious. A contemporary example of this would be government actions which seem completely removed from the profound impact on the children separated from their parents, without notice.

My analyst at the time, Jerome Bernstein, offered what seemed to me to be a very helpful interpretation. He suggested the crone on my left represented the opening of encapsulated trauma. While I have been able to grasp the conceptual meaning of this dynamic in this regard, the dream provided a direct experience of the relationship between function/purpose of the encapsulation in defending against previously unbearable trauma, in contrast to gaining direct access in the service of healing: this piercing of the encapsulation is necessary for one to access the original wound directly.

From this perspective, this sequence signals progress on the continuum of my personal work to support the deconstruction of my own dissociation enabled defenses. (see Kalsched’s “cure the cure”.)

In order to access our wounds directly for purposes of healing the split one must both suffer and bear witness to an immersion into the original affects. As Donald Kalsched has observed, for this to occur, a deconstruction of the partial cure defenses is required.

One more comment for now: We clearly have problems with inflation at the collective level. At this level, it seems the three crones are keeping the vigil for all who may not be able to choose deflation. At the human, personal and couple work level, how often do we put our partner in the position of delivering a necessarily deflating message? What might be going on here for you?

Categories: Author, Communications from the Dream Time, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Dream, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Soul, Waking Reflections
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If the Experiential State as Complex is a Thing, Then What?

January 3, 2025

Greetings to all in this very new 2025! I am tracking my need to show up more often in shorter sound bites. Still sorting through what am I doing here with this, my passion project. As usual, it seems I am still working to distill out a ten page, graphic comic like guide/representation to understanding psyche, our universal challenge, and a pathway to healing born out of the mystery, the reality of the numinosum. Note the posts here are inventoried to the right, below the fixed pages. I try to use hyperlinks to provide easy access to other essays and what I call source quotes. Hopefully you can search within an offering and find your way around. Feel encouraged to talk to me if inspired…

Today we begin with my opening assertion about this symbol system:

These practice-informed symbolic representations reflect intuitive connections. With regards to the validity of the system, reflecting my 50 plus years of clinical practice and process observations, I appreciate this observation by Jung cited by Helene Shulman (Living at the Edge of Chaos, 1996, p.18.):

“All knowledge is the result of imposing some kind of order upon the reactions of the psychic system as they flow into our consciousness … it is not a question of … asserting anything, but of constructing a model, which opens up a promising and useful field of inquiry. A model does not assert that something is so; it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation.” (The Structure and Dynamics of Psyche, Volume 8, par. 362, 381)

We will start with an orientation to Jung’s Ego-Self Axis. I believe this plate captures more on a page than any of the others. It introduces the foundational idea the Ego is in reality the center of the conscious personality, but, the Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious). We can see the importance of usual and unusual episodes of unbearable experiences in activating core dissociative defenses, in relationship to how those get buried somewhere in our bodies. These impossible to metabolize at the time episodes, swallowed whole, encapsulated, split off from consciousness, and uninventoried, constitute a special category of sub-symbolic, incomplete initiatory experiences. From this perspective we will then drop into the deep end with imagining together, don’t hold your breath, the nucleus of a complex in contrast to Representations of Interactions Generalized over time (RIGS).

Recall the nucleus of a complex is simply the scene of a wounding, in the act of being wounded… if/when we have the opportunity to explore this together, I will be calling for important memories of emotionally charged experiences. We will practice listening carefully and each try to drop into the scene as presented, have the experience of taking a look around, noticing what we each can about the ancestral, archetypal layer of collective/genetic memory.

With the help of the symbol system, and your stories, we will think together about what it takes to complete the initiations. And how psyche is working 24-7 to support us in our own timing.

Now it’s time to say goodbye…

Categories: Author, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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Ask Chuck: A Great Question about Self States

March 12, 2024

I was pleased to get an email from a reader asking: “… I had a question about self states or emotional states. How do I get out of a self state or an emotional state? For good.”

The short answer is we want to recognize self-states as important parts of ourselves that historically could not find a way to stay conscious, given our sensitivity and complexity. Growing up and getting stronger means they can start to rattle and make themselves known, and we want to commit to honoring their request to be in relationship, and begin sorting out who are they really and what will our relationship to them be? Some of these emerging self-states are actually the internalized/introjected parental and authority figure “others”, who, populating our complexes, contributed to our rejection of parts of ourselves. Lots more on that via Donald Kalsched’s work with the archetypal predator/persecutor complexes. Not going there now.

Having some additional communications with the person asking the question, I am going to connect some dots tailored to the backstory. Note, recognizing one’s sensitivity and complexity, potentially a mixed blessing at best, seems actually to me like winning life’s most important lottery!

Of note, most of us have grown up believing the key to success in life depends upon the development of a well functioning ego based consciousness, which then can identify and apply best practices in everything we do. It is interesting to remember Donald Winnicott, from the psychoanalytic side, believed a successful, integrative analysis resulted in one achieving a unit – self personality. In contrast, a Jungian perspective recognizes a multiplicity in consciousness as the rule. Jung’s concept of ego and Self, imaged as the ego-Self Axis, is extremely useful. It lends its self to a non-denominational, ancestral, archetypal understanding of consciousness in relationship to the unconscious, or collective consciousness. It also addresses the developmental stage dynamics working for and against remembering what has been unbearable. We will close with more on that below.

I am thinking the reader is familiar with self – states through prior study or analysis, or, has reviewed some of my posts on the importance of the concept (see Philip Bromberg)

In his (my Source Quote) discussion, Bromberg notes when at times he might think a person’s mood has shifted, he has learned rather to consider a shift in self – states as the explanation for the change in mood. He then offers this review:

“For those who are not yet totally at home with how the concept of self – state is different from a shift in affect or mood, let me offer a one sentence clarification: Self – states are highly individualized modules of being, each configured by its own organization of cognitions, beliefs, dominant affect and mood, access to memory, skills, behaviors, values, actions, and regulatory physiology. (Chuck’s bold)

These highly individualized modules of being sound like active, dynamic willing entities with minds of their own!

Take a minute to think about what this (having your own cast of highly individualized modules of being characters within) might mean to you. And, where might they come from?

We can start with orienting to the concept of evoked companions. When I just googled evoked companions, an excellent paper popped up reviewing some of the literature around the concept as it informs the development of spontaneous imaginary characters from early childhood and throughout our lives. And the importance of recognizing this capacity for interacting with these figures as a power, not a pathology. For here, it serves to provide context around our experience of finding unknown presences in us, coming into our world, which can be confusing and frightening.

An early mentor put it this way: After about the first 24 – 48 hours of being born, the infant is never alone, because enough actual interactions have occurred with the mother and caregivers to allow the infant to experience connections with the evoked companions; something of each of those experiences with the actual others taking care of us, provides psyche with enough to begin forming internal representations of the holding environment; when a new need arises, the associated state then evokes internal representations of the presences of the caregivers who have attended to us earlier in our very short time in the world. We are wired to begin connecting, with the help of these evoked companions. See my Developmental Considerations for more on the importance of of the gradual evolution of this internal representation of being held, refueled, and released. Countless traces of interactions, averaged and generalized over time, become the condensed, composite template for one’s Experiential State.

In every childhood, there are tremendous pressures put on the child to conform with expectations to behave, in short. A beautiful image of why this is so can be found in Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow:

“Let’s talk about the personal shadow first. When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360° personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, alright; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: ‘Can’t you be still?’ Or ‘It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.’ Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep her parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: ‘Good children don’t get angry over such little things.’ By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as ‘the nice Bly boys.’ Our bags were already a mile long.”

And he offers this gorgeous description of our arrival, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’:

“The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life – in short, with our 360° radiance – and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked: they needed us for something. My mother, as a second-generation immigrant, needed my brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place.”

…so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place. Somehow, somewhere in psyche, the unconscious, our bodies, all these rejected part of our selves, self -states, remain, continue on, waiting for the conditions conducive for them to re-enter our consciousness.

While we’re here, this pre-verbal place is also the realm of the sub-symbolic mode of experience, in contrast to the symbolic mode. Much more on that later as it informs our vulnerabilities to enactments.

As it is our fate, all starting out as infants, we will be overwhelmed at many points in life, and it is helpful to acknowledge and appreciate psyche’s life-saving super power of dissociation, or what we think of as the splitting off and encapsulation of unbearable, whole episodes of experience. It is as if dissociation functions to take the 110 voltage wired ego off-line in the face of 220-10,000 voltage traumatic physical and emotional episodes of overwhelm.

We can/will go on, but one more key concept for right now: recognizing the blur.

As in “healing only occurs within the blur.” When I first heard my psychoanalytical mentor reference this profound notion, at about age 41 for me, I immediately recognized how important it was to understanding the healing process. He went on to clarify that the blur state represented a betwixt and between state where in what was happening in the here and now, for real, was activating a remote time and space experience of something unfinished in our emotional life. Which is to say, our here and now experience is somehow infused, as if in a dream, with some emotionally charged unfinished business. This can be thought about as a co-created, dissociation enabled re-enactment of the wounding. The blur state refers to the peculiar experience of finding one’s self in this activated state.

Learning to recognizing this it-is-going-to-be-uncomfortable-state is key to begin having more choice in when to go there. Preparing to go there may be psyche’s first half of life task.

For a story like imaging of a number of important inter-related concepts, see my companion pages: Couple Experiential State Complex: Re-enactment of the Wounding and the Couple Experiential State Complex as Activated Threshold.

The key concept here is we all have lots of parts of ourselves that have become lost to us along the way, from birth to now. And our life’s work is re-integrate those split off parts. This requires building the capacity to hold what in earlier life was unbearable. This ultimately requires being able to consciously suffer the powerful affects evoked by unbearable traumatic experiences. Typically, this is the work of the midlife and second half of life. If one is called to this early, the challenge is to know how powerful it is and that psyche has your back. Think of it as a totally precocious midlife initiation. Because it is just that. It can be very helpful to begin to orient to Jung’s Ego-Self Axis Separation and Reunion frame.

In closing, here is an observation which suggests what we can try do to reconnect with our precious little lost selves: do your best to create/embrace opportunities to dance with your inner child:

“In healthy families, a baby forms a secure attachment with her parents as naturally as she breathes, eats, smiles, and cries. This occurs easily because of her parents’ attuned interactions with her. Her parents notice her physiological/affective states, and they respond to her sensitively and fully. Beyond simply meeting her unique needs, however, the parents “dance” with her. Hundreds of times, day after day, they dance with her. … There are other families where the baby neither dances nor even hears the sound of any music, in these families, she does not form such secure attachments. Rather, her task – her continuous ordeal – is to learn to live with parents who are little more than strangers. Babies who live with strangers do not live well or grow well.”

Be well and, borrowing from Joyce Vance,

We’re in this together,

chuck

Categories: Author, blur, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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Donald Kalsched: on …”When the relational environment … fails … to provide “good enough” attunement and empathic responsiveness for the growing baby”

November 9, 2021

It has been a while since I’ve posted any of my musings! Here is one more source quote with a few very important ideas and conceptualizations. Enjoy.

“Object-relations theory and interpersonal theory provide the best understanding of how trauma develops but, missing a grasp of the self-curative capacities of the psyche’s inner world, they do not adequately envision the healing of trauma that comes about through other than personal resources. The self-care system comes about as a result of acute or chronic failure by the relational environment to provide “good enough” attunement and empathic responsiveness for the growing baby. Trauma occurs when this “failure” falls outside what Winnicott calls the “area of omnipotence,” by which he means experience the baby can make sense of or “metabolize” within its own tolerance-limits or its own nascent symbolic capacity. Events that fall outside this area are “unbearable” or “unspeakable” and constitute nothing short of “madness,” by which Winnicott means literally a “breakdown” of infancy that cannot be remembered and around which the growing child (with the aid of primitive defenses) must erect a false self, like a tree growing around an absent center hollowed out by a lightning strike.

This sobering and compelling story about the effects of early trauma represents a partial truth, but it is not the whole story. There is something essential that Winnicott leaves out of his completely interpersonal metapsychology, namely, the “nonhuman environment” outwardly (Searles, 1960), and the “prehuman environment” inwardly, in other words, the archetypal layer of the psyche (Jung). The child is not just in relationship to the mother, but to the “world” beyond and the “world” within—poised, as it were, between two great, beautiful and terrible mysteries. It is the mother’s job to help mediate these Titanic realities. Without the mother’s “good enough” mediation, the child will be exposed to these inner and outer beauties/terrors and this will inevitably lead to traumatic symptoms in relationship, for example, unresolved omnipotence and grandiosity, insecure/disorganized attachment, and so forth.

But the child will not necessarily be “mad.” The Self Care System (SCS) will come to its rescue, and this system will recruit the archetypal powers of inner and outer Nature in its “effort” to save the child’s spirit – its core of health. The many myths that retell the story of children being abandoned and exposed but rescued by transpersonal powers or wild animals record the “saving” miracle by the SCS (Otto Rank). True, without an adequate human relationship to mediate “psyche and the world” the traumatized child will have life-long difficulties in intimacy with others. Born of broken attachment bonds, its SCS will not allow it to trust a process of reattachment with others for fear of retraumatization. But the self that grows around these limitations will not necessarily be a “false” self and may in fact be more creative than mad, perhaps with a rich inner world, a privileged access to “non-ordinary reality,” a deep cultural life, and a huge passion for a capacity for life. In the language of Jerome Bernstein, these individuals will occupy a “Borderland” between the worlds rather than be “Borderline” personality disorders (Bernstein, 2005).”

“Working with Trauma in Analysis,” by Donald E. Kalsched, PP. 281-295, from Jungian Psychoanalysis: Working In The Spirit of C.G. Jung, Edited by Murray Stein

Categories: Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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Torment and Atonement?

April 14, 2021

We have so much going on right now in the world, and, we are all vulnerable to getting triggered, or from a trauma complex perspective, activated. I wanted to bring forward a couple of paragraphs from a source quote which may answer some questions we have not consciously formulated. My source quotes collection, see bottom right of page, are simply some of my favorite quotes, without anything from me. Enjoy!

From Images of the Journey in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Charles H. Taylor & Patricia Finley, 1997

“On Torment and Atonement – Two kinds of suffering: (pp. 158-160)

“There is profound psychological meaning in the sometimes excruciating pain of purgatorial suffering: the crushing stones borne by the proud, the choking smoke enveloping the wrathful, the fire hotter than molten glass searing the lustful. Those who are saved are not sinless – far from it. Rather, they are those who have come in time to know and take responsibility for the shadow qualities that split their personalities and cause them to act destructively toward themselves and others.

The secret of salvation in Dante’s world … is insight into the nature of who one is, how one injures, what it feels like to be oneself the victim and to make others the targets of one’s desirousness, rage, pride, and deceits. Those who make it to Purgatory are not less shadow-driven, narcissistic, obsessed, or pathological than others, but they have not refused to make conscious what they are, to bear the burden of themselves, and to come in time to take full responsibility for their own natures. By coming to know what operates in us behind appearances, whether driven by unconscious instinct and aggression or by more deliberate betrayals we can choose to take a stand against whatever in our personal character moves us to wound others and our larger selves.

Atonement, the poet says in many ways takes time; the passage of time is central to the work of purgation. … It is psychologically true that a new level of self-awareness can be achieved only with sustained effort over an extended time, but how much time depends in part… on the attitude of those who are central in our lives. Taken objectively, this expresses the reality that the caring concern of those who love us can accelerate our growth and act as a catalyst for inner healing. Taken subjectively – in terms of what we can do for ourselves – prayerful engagement by the ego with the inner figures of parent, beloved, or child, as a means of reaching out to the larger powers that seek our development, often moves the process more swiftly.”

Categories: Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation
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Jung on Active Imagination

March 16, 2021

I am enjoying a seminar with THE SALOME INSTITUTE of JUNGIAN STUDIES on Jung’s newly published Black Books (BB). The course is guided by the institute’s director, Satya Doyle Byock, and astrologist Carol Ferris. Seems we’re off to a great start!

Working in depth to understand Jung’s process of self experimentation, as it informed his birthing of analytical psychology, offers an up close look at our own journeys. I hope to be bringing forward key concepts in support of all who dare to consciously deepen in relationship to the unconscious.

Below are all direct source quotes from Sonu Shamdasani, the primary (BB) editor, commenting on Jung’s approach to active imagination:

“In December 1913, (Jung) referred to this first Black Book as the ‘book of my most difficult experiments.’ In retrospect, he recalled,

‘My scientific question went: what would happen if I switched off consciousness? I noticed from dreams that something stood in the background, and I wanted to give this a fair chance to come forward. One submits to the necessary conditions – as in a mescaline experience – so that it emerges.’ (BB, Volume I, p. 24)

Shamdasani: “Jung described his technique for inducing spontaneous fantasies: ‘The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness.’ One commenced by concentrating on a particular mood and attempting to become as conscious as possible of all fantasies and associations that came up in connection with it. The aim was to allow fantasy free play, but without departing from the initial affect in a free-associative process. This led to a concrete or symbolic expression of the mood, which had the result of bringing the affect nearer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable. Merely doing this could have a vitalizing effect. Individuals could draw, paint, or sculpt, depending on their propensities:

‘Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image will be produced. As a rule such a fantasy-image will actually appear – perhaps hypnagogically – and should be carefully noted down in writing. Audio-verbal types usually hear inner words, perhaps mere fragments or apparently meaningless sentences to begin with…. Others at such times simply hear their “other” voices…. still rarer, but equally valuable, is automatic writing, direct or with the planchette.’

Once these fantasies had been produced and embodied, two approaches were possible: creative formulation and understanding. Each needed the other, and both were necessary to produce the transcendent function, which arose out of the union of conscious and unconscious contents. 

For some people, Jung noted, it was simply to note the “other” voice in writing and to answer it from the standpoint of the I: ‘It is exactly as if a dialogue we’re taking place between two human beings…’ Dialogue led to the creation of the transcendent function, which resulted in a widening of consciousness. His descriptions of the use of inner dialogues and the means of evoking fantasies in a waking state match his own undertaking in the The Black Books…” (C.G. Jung, BB, Notebooks of Transformation, Volume I, Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, 2020, pp. 54-55)

Categories: Active Imagination, Communications from the Dream Time, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Soul
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