Healing Within the Blur

We’ve all suffered what I think of as wounds of overwhelm. It’s easy to understand this in reflecting on what it’s like for infants and toddlers working so hard to find their own legs, so to speak. Jung and others have noted psyche utilizes dissociation as a defense against more serious psychological damage, and the good news is we are also wired to heal from problems secondary to the splitting solution, as well as the original trauma(s) itself.

Check out this observation from Donald Sandner and John Beebe: “Jung contended that neurosis sprang from the tendency of the psyche to dissociate or split in the face of intolerable suffering. … Such splitting ‘ultimately derives from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one’s nature’ (Jung 1934, p. 98), and gives rise to the whole range of dissociations and conflicts characteristic of feeling toned complexes. This splitting is a normal part of life. Initial wholeness is meant to be broken, and it becomes pathological, or diagnosable as illness, only when the splitting off of complexes becomes too wide and deep and the conflict too intense. Then the painful symptoms may lead to the conflicts of neurosis or to the shattered ego of psychosis. The way back, the restoration – perhaps always partial – is the work of individuation.  …” (see Source: Sandner/Beebe on Dominant Harshness and Vulnerable Woundedness Complex Split page)

Donald Kalsched’s formulation of Psyche’s Self Care System takes this to another level in pointing out the role and workings of the archetypal protector complex. This complex, personified, is the voice of “never again” as in never again will we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to insult and injury.

Back to “This splitting is a normal part of life. Initial wholeness is meant to be broken, and it becomes pathological, or diagnosable as illness, only when the splitting off of complexes becomes too wide and deep and the conflict too intense.” It is helpful to recognize psyche has been dealing with the totality of human experience from the beginning. Through what Jung designated the collective unconscious, we have incredible resources available via the self care system. These resources both allow the initial split to occur, in the service of survival, and then guide us in healing of this same split. In recognizing the fact of the trauma, we can turn our attentions towards creating the conditions which support accessing these resources in re-remembering the fact of the symbolic dismemberment. In truth, we have already suffered it through at the time of the wounding.

Can we bare to embrace the lost scenes and witness them with all the attendant joy and sorrow? Joy related to walls of defenses coming down, allowing direct access to huge split off energies, and sorrow as the direct experience of the original scenes, which, by virtue of having necessitated the split in the first place, are understandably painful. In my experience, however painful the emotional facts are, the joy of release aspect as if trumps the reality of the suffering; the home coming/coming home of the lost soul essence is experienced as a most important/valuable recovery of self.

When is the last time you bumped into “an exteriorization of an inner antagonist”? It is challenging for consciousness to grasp the possibility conflict with others may reflect, at the root, an out-picturing of an important inner conflict. Think about times when you found you were very sensitive or emotional reactive to a situation or person.

What do we know about the inner antagonist and its origins? What is the meaning and purpose of  projecting this pole of the complex onto someone in the outer world?

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? How can we be open to another who suggests our problem with them comes from us?

Conflict, with the presence of emotion signaling something important is trying to happen, brings the complex to our attention. In what way does our partner selection reflect their unique and peculiar capacities to carry the Inner Antagonist for us?

See discussion in the Representation of Persona Submitting to Emotion page.

This blog continues mostly as a kind of on-line resource file for the symbol system, theory quotes, and application essays. It may be most helpful to start with the Counseling Support for Self-Other Analysis above, and work your way down through the pages.

Best,

Chuck

“Practical analysis has shown that unconscious contents are invariably projected first upon concrete persons and situations. Many projections can ultimately be integrated back into the individual once he has recognized their subjective origin; others resist integration, and although they may be detached from their original objects, they thereon transfer themselves to the doctor. Among these contents the relation to the parent of the opposite sex plays a particularly important part, i.e., the relationship of son to mother, daughter to father, and also that of brother to sister. As a rule this complex cannot be integrated completely, since the doctor is nearly always put in the place of the father, the brother, and even (though naturally more rarely) the mother. Experience has shown that this projection persists with all its original intensity (which Freud regarded as aetiological), thus creating a bond that corresponds in every respect to the initial infantile relationship, with a tendency to recapitulate all the experiences of childhood on the doctor. In other words, the neurotic maladjustment of the patient is now transferred to him.” (p. 170-171.)

The conventional meeting is followed by an unconscious “familiarization” of one’s partner, brought about by the projection of archaic, infantile fantasies which were originally vested in members of the patient’s own family and which, because of their positive or negative fascination, attach him to parents, brothers, and sisters. The transference of these fantasies to the doctor draws him into the atmospheres of family intimacy, and although this is the last thing he wants, it nevertheless provides a workable prima materia.” (p. 218)

“The transference is the patient’s attempt to get into psychological rapport with the doctor. He needs this relationship if he is to overcome the dissociation. The feebler the rapport, ie., the less the doctor and the patient understand one another, the more intensely will the transference be fostered and the more sexual will be its form. . . . To attain the goal of adaptation is of such vital importance to the patient that sexuality intervenes as a function of compensation. Its aim is to consolidate a relationship that cannot ordinarily be achieved through mutual understanding. ” (p.134.)

“The transference therefore consists in a number of projections which act as a substitute for a real psychological relationship. They create an apparent relationship and this is very important, since it comes at a time when the patient’s habitual failure to adapt has been artificially intensified by his analytical removal into the past.” (p. 136.)

“Even the most experienced psychotherapist will discover again and again that he is caught up in a bond, a combination resting on mutual unconsciousness. And though he may believe himself to be in possession of all the necessary knowledge concerning the constellated archetypes, he will in the end come to realize that there are very many things indeed of which his academic knowledge never dreamed.” (p. 178.)

Entering Into the Transference

“Individuation involves the transformation of the analyst as well as the patient, stirring up in his or her personality the layers that correspond to the patient’s conflicts and insights …Archetypal dynamics will affect any analyst, but particularly one whose life is not fully lived and needs to be (Jung 1975, p. 172).

“The doctor, by voluntarily and consciously taking over the psychic sufferings of the patient, exposes himself to the overpowering contents of the unconscious and hence also to their inductive action. The case begins to “fascinate” him. . . .The patient, by bringing an activated unconscious content to bear upon the doctor, constellates the corresponding unconscious material in him, owing to the inductive effect which always emanates from projections in greater or lesser degree. Doctor and patient thus find themselves in a relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness.” (CW 16, p. 176.)

Ann B. Ulanov:“Jung remarks that the sexual attraction is always used by the unconscious to represent the urge toward reconciliation with split-away parts of ourselves (1976, p.173).The sexual transference, then, is a spontaneous way by which the psyche seeks to bridge a gulf between the patient’s ego-identity and the contra sexual contents projected upon the analyst (von Franz, VI, pp. 3-4). What would otherwise be a humiliating fixation upon the analyst is redeemed by its hidden purpose – to bring light into the patient’s relation to the anima or animus,….Patients in this position need not then just go on feeling foolish for desiring someone they cannot have, and indulging in childish sulks, mopings, or resentments when refused gratification. Instead, such patients see the task set them by this welling up of emotion, impulse, and aspiration, and the sense of soul with which they cloak the analyst figure. When patients long for the analyst, it is their first direct experience of their strong longing to be reconnected to a missing part of themselves, to some aspect of their own souls (p. 73-74). Jungian Analysis

“Once the projections are recognized as such, the particular form of rapport known as the transference is at an end, and the problem of individual relationship begins. . . .The touchstone of every analysis that has not stopped short at partial success, or come to a standstill with no success at all, is always this person-to-person relationship, a psychological situation where the patient confronts the doctor upon equal terms, and with the same ruthless criticism that he must inevitably learn from the doctor in the course of his treatment. . . . This kind of personal relationship is a freely negotiated bond or contract as opposed to the slavish and humanly degrading bondage of the transference. For the patient it is like a bridge; along it, he can make the first steps towards a worthwhile existence…” (CW- 16, p. 137)

“To the extent that the transference is projection and nothing more, it divides quite as much as it connects. But experience teaches that there is one connection in the transference which does not break off with the severance of the projection. That is because there is an extremely important instinctive factor behind it: the kinship libido. . . . Everyone is now a stranger among strangers. Kinship libido-which could still engender a satisfying feeling of belonging together as for instance in the early Christian communities – has long been deprived of its object. But, being an instinct, it is not to be satisfied by any mere substitute such as a creed, party, nation , or state. It wants the human connection. That is the core of the whole transference phenomenon, and it is impossible to argue it away, because relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself.” p. 233-234.

Harriet G. Machtiger: “The processes of projection and introjection permeate all interpersonal relationships, and as such are important components of the countertransference/transference.The introjective response of the analyst allows for the identification that is the basis of the countertransference reaction of empathy. Countertransference includes not only the analyst’s capacity for empathy, antipathy, sympathy, and other affects, but the analyst’s total mental functioning. The analyst needs to be aware of being an instrument that furthers a process. While there is talk of the analyst’s need for genuineness, warmth, patience, and humility, along with accurate empathy, additional qualities called forth in the countertransference are the ability to accept a patient’s confusion, along with painful feelings, and not promote a positive attitude. Improvement takes place when the analyst can hold the attitude in the countertransference/transference that there is growth potential (p. 89-90, Jungian Analysis, ).

Support For Conscious Surrender

Rowe Mortimer:
Concordant Countertransference: therapist identification with patient’s impulses, self experiences, & organizing efforts; byproduct of therapist’s positive transference

Complementary Countertransference: occurs because the patient treats the therapist as an internal (projected) object;

“To the degree that the therapist must disown or defend against the identifications in the concordant countertransference, the complementary countertransference is intensified (Mortimer on H. Racker formulation).

Robert Moore: Archaic Human Longing reflects a longing for essentially enthusiastic response; the development of grandiose exhibitionistic self defense; depression/addiction as defense against GES; the activation of neurotic positions in attempts to satisfy longing; six major transference positions: merger, mirror, idealizing, twinship or alter ego, adversarial, & efficacy.

Dream is “a fragment of involuntary psychic activity, just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state. Of all psychic phenomena the dream presents perhaps the largest number of “irrational” factors.”

…reflects the autonomy of the unconscious; not only fails to obey will, but often stands in flagrant opposition to our conscious intentions. As such COMPENSATION expresses perhaps the single point of the dream. suggests attempts to balance and compare different data or points of view so as to produce an adjustment or a rectification.

The essential content of the dream-action, as I have shown above, is a sort of finely attuned compensation of the one-sidedness, errors, deviations, or other shortcomings of the conscious attitude.

Analysis, including a systematic dream-analysis, is a “process of quickened maturation..”

Must have knowledge of mythology and folklore and understanding of the psychology of primitives and of comparative religion to grasp the essence of the individuation process, which, according to all we know, lies at the base of psychological compensation.

CW8 p. 561-566 Jung

Big dreams carry energy and images from deeper level, reflecting individuation process, where we find the mythological motifs or mythologems I have designated as archetypes.

…Such dreams occur mostly during the critical phase of life, in early youth, puberty, at the onset of middle age (thirty-six to forty), and within sight of death.

At these times, when the collective level breaks into consciousness, “expectations , and opinions of the personal consciousness, are stations along the road of the individuation process. This process is, in effect, the spontaneous realization of the whole man. The ego conscious personality is only a part of the whole man, and its life does not yet represent his total life. The more he is merely “I,” the more he splits himself off from the collective man, of whom he is also a part, and may even find himself in opposition to him. But since everything living strives for wholeness, the inevitable one-sidedness of our conscious life is continually being corrected and compensated by the universal human being in us, whose goal is the ultimate integration of conscious and unconscious, or better, the assimilation of the ego to a wider personality….(in understanding big dreams)…they employ numerous mythological motifs that characterize the life of the hero, of that greater man who is semi-devine by nature. Here we find the dangerous adventures and ordeals such as occur in initiations. We meet dragons, helpful animals, and demons; also the Wise Old Man, the animal-man, the wishing tree the hidden treasure, the well, the cave, the walled garden, the transformative processes and substances of alchemy, and so forth…”

Jung “On the Nature and of Dreams”, CW Vol. 8 p. 281-297.