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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 all in this together,

chuck

Categories: Author, blur, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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The Importance of Getting Triggered

September 1, 2023

As part of my work preparing 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, I came across a favorite Whitmont and Pereira 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 unconscious complexes, their emotionally charged layers and the archetypal dynamisms behind them? This early post is one broader way into all of this stuff. May the force be with you!

ARCHIVAL 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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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.

Here is Sonu Shamdasani, the primary 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 is in a mescaline experience – so that it emerges.’ (BB, Volume I, p. 24)

“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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Ichsucht (“ego addiction”) A Source Quote from Elie Humbert: On Ego, Self, and the Individuation Process

September 10, 2020

Below is a lengthy and interesting formulation on narcissism from an ego problem in need of a solution perspective.

“Narcissus directly experienced an insatiable quest for the self and acute anguish in the face of everything that threatened his self-image. Jung took up Narcissus’ subjective experience and discovered the Ichhaftigkeit (“ego attachment”) within which the subject is caught. This internal force seeks the constitution of an ego complex around which it wants all of psychic life to revolve. Before the ego differentiates itself by relating to the unconscious, it is in a state of Ichsucht (“ego addiction”) (C.W. 14, par. 364), a turning of consciousness upon itself. The danger then is that the image of the world and the image of the ego risk becoming confused with one another.

Ichhaftigkeit (C.W. 11, par. 554) might well dominate the individual psyche if its own one-sidedness did not give birth to the shadow, which becomes in turn an independent complex opposed to the ego. The ascendancy of the shadow (of which the return of the repressed is but one aspect) overturns the organization of the ego. Jung analyzed the transformation process that then begins. Rather than focusing upon narcissism, he studied the conflicts, sacrifices, and mutations that mark the successive moments of the subject’s formation.

Jung insisted on the fact that becoming conscious puts the ego in jeopardy. A 1941 text reflects what he himself had lived through thirty years earlier:

The integration of the contents split off in the parental imagos has an activating effect on the unconscious, for these imagos are charged with all the energy they originally possessed in childhood, thanks to which they continued to exercise a fateful influence even on the adult. Isolation in pure ego-consciousness has the paradoxical consequence that there now appear in dreams and fantasies personal, collective contents which are the very material from which certain schizophrenic psychoses are constructed. (C.W. 16, par. 218)

Even while it endures such an ordeal, the ego cannot escape from an inflation, be it a negative or positive one. While relating to its own solitude and to the psychic elements it integrates, the ego either allows itself to become possessed by an upsurge of psychic energy or defends itself from this energy by identifying with its own conscious boundaries. Is there no way to avoid these two false solutions?

But at this point a healthful, compensatory operation comes into play which each time seems to me like a miracle. Struggling against that dangerous trend towards disintegration, there arises out of this same collective unconscious a counteraction, characterized by symbols which point unmistakably to a process of centering. This process creates nothing less than a new center of personality, which the symbols show from the first to be superordinate to the ego …The center cannot be classed with the ego, but must be accorded a higher value… for which reason I have called it the “self.” …the experience of the self has nothing to do with intellectualism; it is a vital happening which brings about a fundamental transformation of personality. I have called the process that leads to this experience the “process of individuation.” (C.W. 16, par. 219)

Thus by becoming conscious and by withdrawing projections, the ego is led into a state of either inflation or deflation. Neither of these states is resolved unless an unconscious center of the personality to which the ego can relate is brought to life.

…Influenced as he was by alchemy, Jung focused less upon images and more upon processes. The conjunction of opposites, with all that it implies of separation and differentiation, provides the schema with which one can understand the activity of the Self. Jung summarized this activity using three concepts: (1) becoming follows upon a compensatory movement; (2) wholeness consists of the relationship of consciousness with the unconscious; (3) psychic organization evolves according to the law of differentiation.

When referring to the concept of wholeness, which Jung used frequently, one must recall that the English word totality obscures the original German meaning. Jung rarely used die totalitat but almost always die Ganzheit (ganz, ganzwerden). Now the root prefix ganz does not signify “total” but “whole.” It would be better to translate Ganzheit by the English “wholeness.” Far from aiming to become, possess or experience everything, the Ganzheit is correlative to the experiences of dissociation and fragmentation. Jung specified that Ganzheit is not a Volkommenheit, not “a total achievement, perfection.” To individuals who feel the presence of two beings within themselves, Ganzheit appears as a possible unity. It is in the sense of a possible unity that the experience of the Self resolves the dissociation of consciousness from the unconscious and allows the subject to be whole.

…the Self is the true center of the personality from which the ego, by its goals and values, is alienated. Thus the ego must sacrifice its values and goals if it is to submit to the orientation of the Self. This sacrifice is brought about by the recognition of the shadow, and will have the characteristics of what some will later call a symbolic castration. Sacrifice differs from symbolic castration, however, because sacrifice does not culminate in the mere acceptance of human limitations and death but leads to a living relationship with the unconscious subject.

…What is at stake in the analytic process is not the death of the ego but the sacrifice of Ichhaftigkeit (“ego attachment”). Not only does the ego not disappear, but the conflicts that it goes through release it from imaginary states and allow it to come to its own reality.”

Excerpted from Humbert, Elie, C.G. Jung: The Fundamentals of Theory and Practice, Chiron Press, 1988, pp. 61-64.

Categories: Connecting the Dots Series, Images of the Self, Individuation

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Getting Started

September 1, 2020

How might we frame our depth work process approach?

Let’s open with an observation from Rumi:

“A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.”  Rumi poem translated by Coleman Barks

Orienting to my wordpress layout: In terms of how this blog offering works, note that if you click on an activated link, the link will take you either to the internet source, or quite often, to another one of my posts here. My pages are fixed and reserved for core components of the symbol system. The posts are listed below the pages, with the most recent on top. Below the posts are my selected Source quotes, which are simply posts consisting of direct quotes without much comment from me. When you click on any page, you go there; hit the back button to return to prior page, or, just return to the website to see the top page layout. The search function is helpful if you have a key word, such as “micro” as in micro-fracture, or partial as in partial cure; you can pull up a few postings on the theme and see which may be the best way into the conversation.

Back to Rumi: In this case, the observation from the Rumi poem is the opening of a post from me about this work. Please take a minute to go there and consider following up with the additional embedded links, to begin to orient to my processing focus.

Managing our power struggles: The immediate priority from my perspective is to consider that the ways we have been getting triggered and pulled into emotional conflicts are all part of our co-created system dedicated to enabling each other to try to maintain order and comfort when really something else is emerging. The concept of the blur, and the perspective healing only occurs in the blur is central to understanding the emotional charge in triggers here, and the importance of getting triggered.

We want to consider the possibility our hard work and dedication may be paying off, and as a reward, psyche is now offering an initiatory process which sets the ego up to be sacrificed. This is quite different from getting an unsolicited robo-call offering x-nights of free lodging at an exotic resort!

We are called to consider the meaning and impact of the possibility everything that has ever happened to us is entirely conscious now, but not to the ego…

Jung’s concept of the ego-Self Axis is crucial to understanding the mid-life transition as an initiatory process. As Stein and Stein note in their excellent overview, what is needed is the art and science of maieutics – midwifery. It is a birth process: symbolically the ego must suffer a kind of death, in the service of a rebirth, enabling a new working relationship with what Jung called the Self, the deep center of conscious and unconscious life.

Really, what this is about, is a return to discovering and then re-connecting to our lost selves.

For this opening and true coming home to occur requires that we let down the very defenses that enabled us to survive our unique challenges. This means wrestling with our core character defenses. This is the partial cure problem. As children we find work arounds, but ultimately, these dissociation based defenses enable a core disconnect, which works against living life fully.

We can try to think about the idea that psyche, in psyche’s wisdom, has chosen a beloved who is sensitive and strong enough in just the right ways, to help us break down our defenses. Once we put them in place to help us become our true authentic selves, we fight like crazy to resist their best efforts. If we succeed in thwarting their sacred mission – which we unconsciously assigned them to take on in our behalf – there will be no wedding! The story reference here is we will not be able to achieve true self-other emotional intimacy until we recover our own.

For today, please take a close look at the partial cure link.

Categories: Author, Connecting the Dots Series, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Poems

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From Margret Atwood’s Surfacing: an image of the (radical) tear

June 25, 2020

After recently streaming a very compelling documentary on the life and work of Margaret Atwood – see Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power – I was moved to order a couple of her earliest books: Surfacing and The Edible Woman. Both have been very powerful reads. I was struck by her vivid description of having been cut in two:

“No hints of facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been alright then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or, no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb. At school they used to play a joke, they would bring little boxes with cotton wool in them and a hole cut in the bottom; they would poke their finger through the hole and pretend it was a dead finger.” (pp 108-109)

By the dates, Margaret published this when she was 42 or so. That seems about right in terms of psyche helping us realize we have experienced a significant disconnect which has required a partial cure work around. Seems like a lot of Donald Kalsched’s formulation on trauma, dismemberment, and re-memberment is present in this painful realization/reflection. I recently worked this from the perspective of recognizing the “tear that always shows.”

On that note, I have been pondering the relationship between tear (tare) and tear. ie: tear “…to rend (a solid material) by holding or restraining in two places and pulling apart, whether intentionally or not; to destroy or separate.” In contrast to: tear “…A drop of clear, salty liquid produced from the eyes by crying or irritation.”

Categories: Connecting the Dots Series, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Soul
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Source: “…the important units of recall are the occasions of repeated interaction.”

June 25, 2020

The source quotes below are from The Journey of Child Development, Selected papers of Joseph D. Noshpitz. I appreciated his description of the layers of infant experiences which contribute to Daniel Stern’s conceptualization of representations of interactions that have been generalized (RIGs). The image of RIGS helps us understand the origins of what was presented to me as the nucleus of the experiential state: the composite scene/image of the episode(s), one’s self in relationship to the other, standing in for all the others, and the associated affect, as reflected in the totality of the expressions in the moment of impact.

Let’s hear now directly from Dr. Noshpitz:

“…let us turn our attention to actual details of the process of recall: what are the elements babies use to construct inner images? It is evident that one of the elements of experience that has particular valence for babies is the encounter with the significant other. For infants, this 3- to -9 month period is a time of extraordinary pressure toward socialization. Another way of saying that is to state flatly that during this interval all babies fall intensely, passionately, head over heals in love with their mommies. They cannot get enough of her; nothing means as much. They yearn for her when they do not have her at hand, light up when they see her, reach for her when she comes near, and crow when they touch her. Smiling has appeared, social smiling in response to other’s presence, with a special smile for the beloved mommy. Hence, in laying down memory traces, special emphasis should be given to these moments of intense interactive experience with the loved one as begetters of memories.

It is therefore not surprising that Stern suggests that the important units of recall are the occasions of repeated interaction. Thus, a feeding experience, a mother-infant play session, or some other such exchange between the two is the likeliest place to look for the groundwork of memory constructs. What happens then is that the interactions between the mother and infant become familiar; their quality is both anticipated and predictable. A feeding is a comparable sequence of positionings, holdings, lookings, sucklings, with a fairly standard pattern of overall conduct of self and other as the process continues. Babies lay down a memory trace of such an exchange, then add another of very similar character the next time, and then another, and yet another as time advances.

At this point, however, if Stern is correct, a remarkable thing happens. Babies begin to average out these experiences and to construct a model of how the experience should go. It were as though a generalized representation of the interaction emerged from the recurrent encounters, an image that can serve as a basis for predicting and judging the character of the next such encounter. Stern calls these representations of interactions that have been generalized RIGs). These RIGs are the building blocks of the core self, islands of consistency that form and coalesce out of the welter of infantile experience. They provide the basic material for constructing a sense of self as well as a sense of other.

It is my view that these early generalized representations are a unique and precious achievement to infants. In effect, each one is a work of art, a creation, their own rendering of a series of intense and valued experiences into a concentrated and succinct whole. There is a quality here of recording unifying it, distilling its essence and capturing its quality, and this, I believe, is central to the aesthetic encounter with a work of art, whether as creator or as viewer.

It is important to keep in mind the central role of these RIGs. They provide the bricks to build the mansion of the sense of self. They give infants the agency, the intensity, the coherence, and the continuity that together make for a continuing awareness of inner presence, inner integrity. They are dynamic presences, constantly undergoing small changes as each new experience is summed into the average, yet they are static in the sense of being repeats of the same kind of sequence over and over; this is what offers the sense of self the necessary stability and continuity and engenders the feeling of knowing one is there and who one is.” (pages 70-71)

As a conceptual tool, the experiential state gives us a way to think about our history as it contributes to our memory banks at the level of these RIGs. It seems our work in becoming conscious – recognizing enactments as blur moments – will involve connecting the dots between present day conflicts and our corresponding RIGs origin experiences.

To be continued.

 

 

 

Categories: Connecting the Dots Series, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Transference and Countertransference
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Stern: “The experienced micro-world always enters awareness but only sometimes enters consciousness (verbalizable awareness).”

June 10, 2020

This source quote comes from a paper by Beatrice Beebe, Ph.D.,  Daniel Stern: Microanalysis and the Empirical Infant Research Foundations

I will be following this up with more descriptions of representations of interactions that have been generalized over time (RIGs). For me, this is the level of experience informing the experiential state images of self-other-affect. In opening to recognizing the blur we then have the opportunity to be with that which is trying to surface, via the enactment. By definition of the terms, we do not have language for the subsymbolic core. (See my Philip Bromberg post Enactment: Problem AND Solution?) We really want to try to get comfortable enough to simply be with the emerging experience, and try to find language together; this is the process for bringing the blur into conscious, symbolic awareness. The microfractures in communication quotes go well with this layer of material.

“The experienced micro-world always enters awareness but only sometimes enters consciousness (verbalizable awareness). [Stern, 2004, p. xiv]

Stern operated at the interface of the empirical analysis of mother-infant communication, systems theories, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis. Dyadic face-to-face communication was the focus. Using the method of frame-by-frame microanalysis of film, moment-by-moment interaction sequences became the center of his thinking: miniplots of brief interaction scenarios. He described the reciprocal dyadic communication process across time: Each partner is changing with the other. Miniplots of the temporal-spatial-affective flow of each partner changing in relation to that of the other became his definition of procedural representations. Stern emphasized the primacy of time and temporal process over more static notions of psychological organization. Most fundamentally, Stern’s work in microanalysis has changed what one can see, and thus what one can know. His work fostered a dynamic, interactive model of the organization of experience. The foundation of experience, the origin of mind, and the key to change in psychotherapy are found in the moment-by- moment interactive process itself.

Dan’s fascination with the micro-momentary details of the present moment, which became the title of one of his books (Stern, 2004), was the core of his inspiration and talent. In the preface to that book he wrote,

In considering the micro-world of the present moment, I first thought of the working title, A world in a grain of sand from William Blake. … It captured the size of the small world revealed by micro-analysis. … One can often see the larger panorama of someone’s past and current life in the small behaviors and mental acts making up this micro-world. … Seeing the world at this scale of reality changes what can be seen [italics added] and thus changes our basic conceptions. [Stern, 2004, p. xiv]”

The Blake poem referenced by Stern above opens with:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.”

 




				


				
Categories: Connecting the Dots Series, Transference and Countertransference 
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