"Psychoanalysts who do not cite Jung out of old prejudice and Jungians who do not attempt to translate Jung to the larger profession do injustice to our scientific tradition" Beverley Zabriskie, 2000

`If we [psychoanalysts] fail to come to terms with Jung we are self-proclaimed partisans, partisans in a false cause.' D.W. Winnicott, Introduction to Memories, Dreams & Reflections, 1963

"kinship libido ..... 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." C.G.Jung Psychology Of the Transference , 1946

As theorists and practitioners of psychoanalysis and related professions reflect on the acceleration of change over the past two decades, new conversations are emerging between contemporary psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In making use of two new Jungian books to illustrate some of the convergent dialogue, I shall first briefly review them comparatively, and then continue comparisons while attempting to sketch where contemporary relational psychoanalysis and post-Jungian clinical and theoretical thinking take up similar issues, sometimes with very different metaphorical references, but on what in the most important sense may be common fertile ground.

Sedgwick’s Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship (TRR), a practical clinical introduction and guide to Jungian psychotherapy, is basically descriptive, with a wealth of instructive material organised around a central theme of the therapeutic relationship. Contemporary Jungian Clinical Practice (CJCP) is a collection of seventeen theoretically grounded clinical papers all of which emanate from the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP). Each book reflects the place of Jungian thought and practice in the contemporary psycho-therapeutic scene.

CJCP is a companion volume to an earlier collection of theoretical papers with the same editors: Jungian Thought in the Modern World.(2000). Part One, an introduction, addresses pressing ethical issues of current debate such as accountability, permission to publish, confidentiality and its relevance to the reporting in supervision. The chapters of the second part are supervised clinical cases written up for membership of the association, and as the editors attest, reveal both the Jungian training and other psychoanalytic influences. The papers of the third part: "In the Maelstrom and in the Doldrums" are accounts by senior BAP clinicians of the tumult and stagnation encountered in depth work over long periods. The final section, "Reflections: Perspectives on Analytic Practice" addresses contemporary clinical issues such as analytic dependency, supervision, racism and retirement. The editors claim that considerations of these issues, presumably within supervisory and collegiate affiliation, form a ‘reflective professional boundary’ which contains and sustains the clinicians who engage with such work.(xiii) The editors emphasise aspects of therapy-seeking concerned with personal growth and improvement in the capacity for relationship, at the same time acknowledging the reality that clinical practice attracts a multiplicity of psychopathologies. This broad range is reflected in the detailed and often moving clinical reporting and discussion.

Sedgwick’s book is organised into four chapters: a lengthy introduction which addresses the history and place of Jung in psychoanalysis and of contemporary analytical psychology; a second chapter which engages with some of Jung’s theoretical principles and their implications and two long chapters on the therapeutic relationship. The first of these is an overview addressing the basics and the other a detailed account of processes around such issues as frame, expectation, empathy and countertransference. His prospective audience is non-Jungian therapists or counsellors interested in learning about Jungian clinical practice without immersion in a full training.

For Sedgwick, Jung’s contribution on the therapeutic relationship is far more important than the work on dreams, for which he is more generally known. Sedgwick considers that Jung’s writing on the relationship is his most important and far-reaching contribution, making it as relevant today as it ever was in his own time.

In their introduction, the editors of CJCP similarly note that Jung ‘stressed the importance of therapy as an intersubjective, two-way process’, remarking that his maxim "the doctor can have no influence unless he is influenced" (Jung, C.W.16, para.163, cited in CJCP, p.7)appears frequently in their texts.

As is well known, the greater part of Jung’s work rests in his theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Among his many writings on archetypal theory, the first reference is possibly one of the most useful, certainly when seeking a brief account of the central premise rather than an explanatory argument:

"Just as his instincts compel man to a specific mode of human existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns." (Jung, Vol.8, para. 270)

For Jung the therapeutic relationship itself is archetypal and it was perhaps this understanding which attracted him to alchemy. He saw the alchemists’ pursuit of the lapis - the philosopher’s stone, and their quest to turn base metal into gold by chemical transformations, as projections of an unconscious and intuited understanding of human relationship and psychological processes. In Psychology of the Transference (1946), Jung makes use of a series of fifteenth century woodcuts, the Rosarium philosophorum, to describe metaphorically the therapeutic journey and the individuation process. The Psychology of the Transference includes reference to almost all of the major features of his theory.

Sedgwick notes the connections between archetypes and myths and stories and describes how as a therapist he personally finds the ‘wounded healer’ archetype persuasive and useful. The stories around Asclepius, the ‘father of medicine’ and his teacher, the wounded centaur Chiron, for example, resonate with the fact that many of us are led to our work through our own personal conflicts and suffering. (pp.70-75). This pull toward the profession may be reparative, gratitude for one’s own therapy or analysis, because it was unfinished or inadequate, or a general fascination with psyche on whatever grounds. Sedgwick thinks that whatever the case, because of her or his familiarity with personal woundedness, the therapist is able to be reflectively open to the emotional ‘infection’ in the patient. Jung described this ‘taking on the illness’ as indispensable for its complexities to be made conscious and integrated.

Sedgwick writes that after the break with Freud, Jung went into "clinical obscurity", albeit with a continuing small following, considerable erudition and researches that brought him fame in the ordinary world, as well as a reputation as a healer. Sedgwick, himself a Jungian analyst, sees that psychoanalysis is no longer mainstream and is also headed for clinical obscurity. His decision to write a book on everyday Jungian psychotherapy rather than analysis reflects his view that many of the elements which set Jung apart in his own day, and which contributed to the break with Freud, are at the centre of current theoretical and clinical thinking and change. Of the "uniquely Jungian aspects" of psychotherapy he writes:

"C.G. Jung at his best, was way ahead of his time. His bold statements have come home today: they match current, cutting-edge conceptions of psychotherapy as a two-person interchange in which the therapist is involved in an intersubjective process and sometimes changed as well." (p.3)

A prospective reader dipping into the introduction of CJCP could be put off by the list of ‘archetypes’ because it may seem to suggest the very hypostatizing for which Jungians are sometimes criticised. In fact there is very little of such reification of constructs in the book as a whole. Sedgwick several times mentions the disservice done to post-Jungian practice by such over-literalisation of classical Jungian ideas. Sensitivity to complexity and the need for subtle theoretical differentiations characterise most of the papers in CJCP , and jargon is largely absent from both books. Concepts need to be redefined from time to time so that we know what we mean by the terms we use for them. Sedgwick bluntly states that "psychotherapists’ terms and what they are talking about should have clear referents" and a down-to-earth language characterises his nevertheless layered approach. On what brings people to therapy:

"Something is bothering them enough to come in. Complexes are a way to talk about that. As the web of emotions and thoughts connected with a complex becomes conscious and ..... accepted by the patient and therapist, the complex loses its strength and autonomy." (TRR p.31)

Despite the common associations of Jungian thinking with mysticism and other esoteric pursuits, Jung was sure that science would eventually yield support for his theories and indeed some contemporary findings in the cognitive and neuro-sciences suggest the appropriateness of his speculative metaphors.(3) Sedgwick believes that Jung’s scholarly interests in symbol, myth, dreams and alchemy, while of great individual use to him in his times of personal crisis, tend to obscure the pragmatic clinician and sees some of them as largely irrelevant for the practice of psychotherapy, though forming a strong background. On the other hand, several of the authors of CJCP find these aspects are at the very heart of a synthesis between Jungian thought and contemporary psychoanalytic object relations.

Both Sedgwick and the CJCP editors note Jung’s teleological (4) approach as crucial to his key idea of the symptom being an expression of the psyche’s attempt to heal itself. Authors of both books would agree with Jung’s dictum that for this healing process to be released, the therapist must be "in the process" with the patient. Sedgwick notes:

"the emotional experience in the therapeutic relationship is what makes therapy therapeutic." (TRR p.3)

and is in agreement with Jung in stressing the ‘personal equation’:

"Every psychotherapist not only has his own method, he is that method ... the great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor’s personality". (Jung, 1945 p.88, cited in TRR p.3)

Sedgwick as well as several of the authors of CJCP make references to parts of the following quotation:

"the personalities of doctor and patient are often infinitely more important for the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says and thinks (although what he says and thinks may be a disturbing or a healing factor not to be underestimated). For two personalities to meet is like mixing two different chemical substances: if there is any communication at all, both are transformed. [and] In any effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the patient but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal influence on the doctor.[and] You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smoke screen of fatherly and professional authority. By so doing he only denies himself the use of a highly important organ of information. The patient influences him unconsciously none the less ... One of the best known symptoms of this kind is the counter transference." (Jung, CM., 16, para. 163) (my italics).

Jung’s ideas of mutual influencibility and the analyst’s susceptibility in this regard anticipate much recent work on transference, countertransference, mutuality, in short, intersubjectivity. As I shall try to suggest, the particular ‘take’ on intersubjectivity of some contemporary American writing reads well with these ideas of Jung’s.

A vigorous outcome of the crisis in classical psychoanalysis to which Sedgwick alludes has been the emergence of a new ‘tradition’ in psychoanalysis in the United States. Stephen Mitchell and Jay Greenberg’s early work (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983)described how theorists such as Harry Stack Sullivan and W.R.D. Fairbairn had rejected drive theory and placed relationship at the centre of their theories, a move that marked the beginning of the development of what is now relational psychoanalysis. Prominent among the theorists of this new work are Lewis Aron, Jessica Benjamin and the late Stephen Mitchell, on whose work I have drawn for some of the links made in this paper. Preoccupations of relational psychoanalysis include those ideas of Jung’s to which Sedgwick has referred as "cutting edge", namely: intersubjectivity, mutual influence in the analytic dyad and the radical questioning of certain fixed notions of classical psychoanalysis, such as the constitution of the drive, of sexuality, aggression, spirituality and the religious impulse. Relational psychoanalysis moves against the doctrinaire bases for inclusion and exclusion in and from what constitutes psychoanalysis, and thus is open to dialogue with other discourses such as psychoanalytic feminism and various postmodern excursions into critical and cultural theory and philosophy. In 2000, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, which is the journal of the now officially inaugurated International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, devoted an issue almost entirely to Jungian papers(5), and in that same year Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron conducted an international online seminar on relational psychoanalysis in which Jungian thought was widely discussed.(6) 

The question of an originally separate self or separateness as an achievement is one which is never quite satisfactorily settled, probably because it is a matter of "both and" and not "either or". It is notable, however that in Mitchell’s(2000) explorations into the question he uses Loewald’s (1971, cited in Mitchell, 2000) concept of ‘primal density’ to evoke the idea of a self emerging from an originary oneness. This view holds that emergence from undifferentiated primal density does not imply its transcendence and that returning to the field of its primary processes is a necessary and vital aspect of psychological functioning implicit in all aspects of creative living.

Questions of what constitutes "real" psychoanalysis and what distinguishes different psychoanalytic psychotherapies invariably arise when Jungian psychotherapy and analysis are being compared with psychoanalysis and with each other. On some measures, such as the number of sessions per week and the use or otherwise of the couch and the manner of its use, these differences are by no means clear-cut. Sedgwick asks us not to split hairs and states simply that "Jungian treatment has almost always involved a style and frequency close to what is currently known as psychotherapy." (p.18) Classical Jungian analysis used a face-to-face encounter, and two sessions per week were considered sufficient. Sedgwick does not consider its clinical emphasis on archetypal dimensions clinically imperative. CJCP, arising within the British Association of Psychotherapy, clearly presents psychotherapy, yet in the text references are made to the requirement of three or four sessions per week, and there are numerous references to analysis. Perhaps this puzzle reflects an existent ambiguity in the style of training and the place of the BAP on the international Jungian scene.

For Sedgwick, although Jungian therapy might include early experiences and countertransference, it does so by incorporating them in what "psychoanalytically inclined analysts might call ‘ corrective emotional experience’." Sedgwick’s analysis of Alexander’s recommendations (Alexander and French, 1947) and of orthodoxy’s rejection of its claims, is sketchy and incomplete, but relational psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell(1997) has described Alexander’s ostracism as an institutional defence of classical psychoanalysis in suppressing difference and shoring up notions of neutrality and objectivity against the ‘non-analytic sins of influence and suggestion’ (pp 14-18). For Mitchell, classical analytic rejection of the notion of corrective emotional experience is based on a conflation of the elements of description and prescription in Alexander’s work. According to Mitchell, the "analyst’s interpretive activity and a deeply affective interaction are not alternatives but often are different ways of describing the same event" and the idea that interpretation merely generates insight and does not influence is an illusion. (p.16)

Alexander’s account of the importance of the emotional experience of relationship was accurate, whereas his prescription for the analyst’s ‘corrective’ behaviour was grandiose, as it was based on a faulty notion of analytic omniscience and certainty. Thus Mitchell’s view is similar to Sedgwick’s, that the idea of corrective emotional experience, provided it is not based on false ideas of analytic certainty, describes an important dimension of analytic experience which is widely accepted today.

Recalling Jung’s idea of the therapist’s immersion in the therapeutic process, of the ‘mixing of chemicals’, we are again reminded that Jung saw so early on the impossibility of the analyst’s unmoveable neutrality, that above all he or she must register, be moved by and contain the troubling contents in order to work with them. Sedgwick devotes several pages to empathy in this regard, considering it to be the ‘basis for understanding on which all healing rests’ (p.88) and draws our attention to a remark of Freud’s in a letter to Jung that, in a sense "the cure is effected by love" (McGuire, 1974). He mentions the Christian notion of agape, the austere and undemanding love, a concept which helps to describe what it takes to stay with a patient who may be difficult and, as he puts it, toxic, and with whom one would at times simply rather not be. These ideas of contagion, immersion of the therapist in the process and the wounded healer rely for their reasonableness on the belief central to Jungian thought, that the way to healing is concealed in the symptom itself. Sedgwick believes that it is by moving to that wounded part in himself which resonates with the patient that he is able to find the empathic response necessary to further the work. My only objection as I read these pages is that both Sedgwick and Jung, who claimed that the therapist could take the patient no further than he himself was prepared to go, seem to imply that the wounds themselves need to be similar in nature. Surely it is the identification with woundedness per se and not the specifics that matter.(8)

In a compelling example of the use of archetypal theory, Eleanor Cowen’s paper "An oedipal struggle towards individuation" ( CJCP,p.17) describes her engagement with a young man entrapped in and beginning to emerge from a seductive maternal domination. Cowen’s patient, Jack, is a young man "in thrall of the anima and unable to differentiate the anima from his actual mother." (p.31). He was indeed difficult and requiring much agape. She describes his predicament in terms of Britton’s (1989) "tragic version of the Oedipus complex", where the discovery of the oedipal triangle is felt to be the death of the mother and baby pair. Readers familiar with Britton’s paper "the missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex" would recognise the dynamics of his Miss A as similar to Cowen’s patient in terms of the failure to develop a sense of "triangular space" and the resultant inability to tolerate the analyst’s otherness, exemplified by his or her having private thoughts. Britton attributes such manifestations, in this instance in particular, to a refusal to acknowledge the reality of parental intercourse. In bringing combined Jungian and object relations perspectives to bear on her material, Cowen makes use of Colman's (1996) synthesis of Jung's contrasexual theory(9) with an object relations view of the Oedipus complex to describe Jack’s predicament.

In his paper Aspects of anima and animus in oedipal development, Colman viewed the Oedipus complex as the "obvious place" to pursue what he saw as a gap in the post-Jungians theorising of the personal dimensions of anima/animus as mediated by the parents. He describes the anima as a paranoid schizoid fantasy of the mother in the boy's Oedipus complex. For Cowen’s Jack, the magnitude of this contrasexual figure combined with the image of the real parent rendered the mother imago fatefully powerful. In Jack’s story the father imago was similarly imbued with the presumably "larger than life" fantasy of an aggressive and animalistic sexuality and power. Cowen felt that while in reality the father was emotionally cold and often verbally abusive and humiliating, the collective or archetypal factor added an extra dimension of fear and apprehension to the inner representation. I would imagine this figure to be comparable to Bion’s (1967) 'ego destructive super-ego'. Colman further suggests that the energy of these figures in concert with the longings and passions of the Oedipus situation "..in a sense, creates the complex" (p.40). Be that as it may, whether the power of the archetypal images dominate over the "real" parent will depend on the capacity of that parent or parents to mediate the infant’s experience(10).

In Jack’s case it would seem that there were not sufficient emotional resources available to contain his early anxieties nor was his father able to join with his mother creatively in Jack’s life. Thus it was not possible to offset Jack’s fantasy of a special incestuous bond(11) with his mother and the need to rescue her from an imagined sexual brutality on the part of his father. Jack had no adequate capacity to reflect on himself in relation to the real others around him. Klein’s metaphor of unconscious phantasies is frequently thought to equate with the archetype. It is true that both views hold that the parent imago does not necessarily bear much relation to the real parent, and both views suggest that the individual, for Klein specifically the baby, carries a readiness for interpreting experience in certain ways. However Klein invokes the idea of innate knowledge(12) accompanying impulses of instinctual and somatic origin while archetypal theory does not. Archetypal theory suggests a predisposition for related or similar affective situational experiences to flow along a corresponding ‘affective gradient’ or continuum, either towards the positive or negative, in response to relational as well as internal stimuli and lack.(13) Both Kleinian and Jungian theories suggest that powerfully negative ways of experiencing can come into being in the absence of sufficient care, rather than necessarily in the presence of active malignant external influences and that accompanying imagery may or may not be projected. .Hinshelwood (1989)has outlined criticisms of the concept of innate knowledge and their refutations using Bion’s theory of thinking in support of the concept. However, Jungian analyst Jean Knox suggests that recent work on the human genome, which puts the number of individual genes at closer to thirty thousand rather than the hundred thousand or more expected, makes the inheritance of images and ideas impossible. (Knox, 2003). Her synthesis of current positions of neuroscience, cognitive science and the developments in attachment theory makes a convincing case for the archetype as emergent, based on the presence of genetically catalysed image schemas which are elaborated into images of archetypal complexity by actual affective experience. An example which she cites is the presence of a schematic preparedness for "containment" which the neonate organism seeks. This image schema would be elaborated into the archetypal representation of the mother. Another such schema is preparedness to register the configurations of a face. In this view, the archetypal aspects of experience, though in no way less influentially powerful, will be subject to cultural determination over a biological substrate, thus socially constructed rather than inherited. The imagery arising from these experiences is not innate, nor is it restricted to responses to physiological events such as hunger giving rise to an image of a ravening object inside the body. To my mind such theoretical revision in no way diminishes the power and ubiquity of the imagery basic to our humanness, imagery which has long been understood by Jungians as collective in its affective elements, thus archetypal.

Cowen makes further use of Colman when she writes that resolution of the Oedipus complex in this instance requires the capacity to differentiate mother and anima by the emergence of a symbolic capacity, allowing the individual to observe other relationships from a third position. From this position the individual is also able to envisage being observed. A sense of "triangular space" would seem in this view to rely for its appearance on the meaningful incursion of a second other into the dyadic space. (Britton,1989) As we have seen above, Benjamin’s relationalist view of intersubjectivity suggests that the maternal dyadic space is capable of becoming a social space by virtue of negotiations made between mother and baby. It is clear that the capacity for thirdness presents different issues for negotiation in the triangle of mother, father and toddler, but Benjamin’s idea of thirdness also has implications for how we think about the child’s capacity for at least a rudimentary self-reflection and symbolisation. It follows that the nature of affects aroused in the triangle would vary depending at least in part on the degree of development of any reflective capacity, which in turn depends for its establishment on the inter-relationship between the child and its ‘others’, including siblings.

In a concise but oblique reference to contemporary theories of mind, Sedgwick writes of the patient’s response to the therapist’s curiosity about them: "People begin to imagine themselves by being imagined by others" (p.89). In another addition to post-Bion discussions on theories of thinking and self, relational psychoanalyst Lewis Aron (1998) writes of self-reflexivity as the "capacity to experience, observe, and reflect on oneself as both a subject and an object", arising in an embodied intersubjective encounter. In their papers on mentalization, to which Aron refers, Target and Fonagy (1996) link their work to the interpersonal and self-psychological traditions with a correspondingly reduced emphasis on the oedipal. They describe an optimal interpersonal situation where "Unconsciously and pervasively, the caregiver ascribes a mental state to the child with her behaviour, this is gradually internalized by the child, and lays the foundations of a core sense of mental self-hood" (p. 461).

Thus the child's sense of agency and intentionality arises through the experience of another mind which is seen to be thinking about and reflecting her experience. The capacity to reflect on oneself gradually develops through the intersubjective processes, not only between the child and parents but child and siblings as well. What this suggests to me is that incestuous and murderous feelings need not be paramount in the oedipal situation and that when they are, it is because earlier situations have not been sufficiently mediated or negotiated such that the child can manage triangular space in a way that provides a secure base for the arrival of a more overt and differentiated erotic. In this sense Jung’s idea of the Oedipus as one complex among many resonates with some relational, self-psychological and attachment theorists who de-emphasise its absolute centrality.

In classical Jungian analysis the alchemical metaphor of separatio has been invoked to represent the process of the separation of subject from object (Edinger, 1985)as the analysand moves toward an increased capacity for reflection and, prospectively, towards the self-reflexivity just outlined. Separatio could also be understood as a metapor for the separation of ‘mind from body’, not in a dualistic Cartesian sense, but as the emergence of a reflective function beyond the undifferentiated state of what Jung called participation mystique. When chaotic and uncontained early experience of the analysand is revisited in analysis and is held and contained enough eventually to make sense of at least some of the chaotic or pre-individuation affects of earlier stages of the work, a more clearly delineated "self" begins to emerge. Optimally the analyst and analysand together are able to begin to dis-entangle and explore projections in the shared field. After months of regressed chaos, a patient of mine dreamed that a woman artist whom she admired and idealised appeared as a kind of goddess holding out to her a carved glass phial containing a luminous green liquid, the exact colour of a glass container on a low table near where we sat in my room. The ‘goddess’ told her it was a precious medicine which was for her to heal her world. In a classical Jungian analysis this figure could be understood as representing the Self, and may have been interpreted as such, though Jung himself would probably warn that an interpretation at this level, at a first movement out of a chaotic period of regression, risks inflation. Although we did not interpret the dream for some time, my patient eventually associated the green of the liquid and the green of the glass on the table with the increasing sense of the separateness and space between us, and the healing effect of her growing reflective function, providing another vantage point from which she could ‘see’ and think about herself and others in a clearer, more complete way. Salman(1999) writes of a very similar experience in which she and her patient recognize the dream ‘medicine’ symbol as expressing an aspect of the patient’s emergent self as it becomes grounded in her own psychological reality, differentiating from archetypal fusions and paranoid fantasies similar to those of my patient. I shall return to this work of Salman’s below.

Colman’s selection of the Oedipal as the "obvious place" to resuscitate the anima/animus theory misses another equally compelling area, and that is of the identificatory aspects of the non-oedipal relationship(14), Colman does not explore contemporary meanings of the ‘contrasexual’ in terms of current gender debates nor does he consider the fate of contrasexual identifications after their supposed suppression during the negotiation of the oedipal. The prospect of the recuperation of such identifications, particularly in adolescence and in therapy or analysis, no doubt has quite different implications in the current climate of relative gender fluidity than in Jung’s time. It is useful nevertheless to consider an ‘archetypal position’ of unconscious fusion of contrasexual identifications with the archetypal in certain extreme situations(15), Benjamin (1988, 1994) has explored the power of such thwarted ‘identificatory love’ from a relational perspective, suggesting in particular the need for the little girl to have an acknowledged identificatory love for her father and for the boy not to repudiate his feminine identifications totally. Such thwarting and repudiation are no doubt at the basis of the extreme gender splitting which plagues our world.

Almost twenty years ago Andrew Samuels (1985) noted Jung’s anticipation of object relations in his attention to the importance of the relationship of mother and infant at a time when Freud was insisting that the oedipal situation was the most formative:

"The mother child relationship is certainly the deepest and most poignant one we know; in fact, so to speak, for some time the child is part if the mother’s body. Later it is part of the psychic atmosphere of the mother for several years ....... the same extraordinary intensity of relationship which impels the child to cling to its mother". (C.W. 8, Para 73.)

The inherent dissociability of the psyche is central to Jung, and his theory of individuation includes the gradual integration of dissociated aspects of the complexes by the activity of the Self archetype. In provisionally conceptualising this dissociability and its relation both to the complexes and to the Freudian unconscious where the Oedipus complex is central, it might be useful first to employ Sedgwick’s description of the complexes as the structural basis for the personality. For Jung the ego itself was a complex, albeit the dominant conscious one, providing the individual’s sense of self. Sedgwick writes:

‘His theory describes personality as an ego ... surrounded by part-selves, often unconscious and autonomous (the complexes)(17)  .........complexes are emotionally based personality structures, tied to certain images, and they circulate, as it were, around the conscious personality, popping up when a situation or an image touches them. They then, to varying extents, temporarily supplant the personality, depending on their strength or the strength or cohesiveness of the ego.’ (p.30)

Of the complexity and telos of the psyche Jung wrote:

"Multiplicity and inner division are opposed by an integrative unity whose power is as great as that of the instincts" (Jung, Vol.8, para.96)

The multiplicity and inner division refer to the dissociability previously mentioned, a view consistent with the post modern conception of a non-unitary self. Integrative unity, on the other hand, is the goal and process of individuation. Jung saw that process as belonging more to the second half of life, the first part being the work of ego- differentiation and development through the establishment of identity through family, work, and concerns of everyday life. Michael Fordham’s reintegration/reintegration theory extends the idea of individuation back into infancy and indeed he saw the merging of the concrete and symbolic in the early drawing of circles by the young child as evidence of the activity of the Self archetype as the child more or less rhythmically orders and re-orders new experiences.

We are used to imagining vertical splits as occurring defenisvely in splitting and projecive identuification,and, as developed by Bin and others, as attempts at communication. In a post-Jungian conception of the disosociability of th psyche we can imagine movements toward healing or growth as sometimes giving ris to dissociation. Dissociation of a sort islikely to occur whenever an ucs preoccupation is struggling with its own becoming-conscious, as if the energy from an old organisation has been drawn off to work with the new.

The idea of an organising principle as some kind of hidden omniscient Other doesn’t sit well with constructivist ideas(18) nor does it seem to have a clinical place in working with deep regressive states. As the CJCP collection demonstrates most vividly, the BAP and the ‘London school’ is very much influenced by the principles of psychoanalytic object relations. However valuable those principles are, some Jungians have reservations regarding their exclusivity:

"Our present understanding of pre-Oedipal and even pre-individuation levels of process is so prejudiced in a clinical notion of’ primitivity' that it no longer seems to partake meaningfully of the quintessential Jungian dynamism, the Self." Salman (1999)

There are two considerations to be made here. The first is to recall that for Jung, every neurotic symptom contains somewhere the seed of its own recovery. As Sedgwick relates, though Jung first understood complexes as the basis of personality, when he became preoccupied by the collective unconscious he began to be more interested in what the psyche was trying to do with the complexes rather than where they came from and how they arose. This prospective view is at home with the relational emphasis on the here-and-now of the intersubjectivity of the session(19).

This idea of a non-individuated field, out of which a self differentiates, yet which remains a continuous background is a perspective consistent with Leowald’s sense of a ‘global’ primal density mentioned previously:

"The secondary process," Loewald (1977a) suggests, "consists not simply in splitting, dividing, discriminating, . . . but that in this same act the original wholeness is kept alive by an articulating integration that makes a textured totality out of a global one" (p.196). cited in Mitchell, 2001, p...

Thus for Jungians two kinds of analysis are necessary, reductive and prospective. It is obviously essential that in clinical work we understand these distinctions and work accordingly, and several of the papers in CJCP describe the different approaches of the reductive and the prospective, with an ideal of holding both possibilities in mind simultaneously, though the overt focus may be on just one.

For example, Birgit Heuer (CJCP, p.37) makes use of both levels of analysis in her paper about her patient Annie, a woman with a borderline psychotic disturbance. Annie could function well in her artistic profession, but in an important sense was absent. She seemed never to have learned to relate to a ‘real other’ and thus had little capacity to reflect on her own emotions or think of herself as a separate being . She was ‘not available for human contact’(p.38). Heuer writes that Annie’s first dream of a baby deer can be understood to function both ‘as a metaphor - an organizing principle of limited meaning - and as a symbol - carrying and generating infinite meaning.(p.37, my italics). Annie’s baby deer, though never associated to, persisted as an evolving leitmotif throughout the years of her work. The psychological context and meanings of the image shifted as different layers of the psyche were brought forward and addressed. At one level the emphasis was on the deer’s baby-ness, its careful and expectant demeanor expressing a fearful isolation. At another level, because it was wearing a tiny gold crown (not reported until many weeks later ) and because of various mythological amplifications available to Heuer, its powerful and complex symbolic layering were emphasised. As metaphor, Heuer plays reductively with notions of the deer representing Annie’s infancy; as symbol it may be read prospectively in terms of existential purpose and impetus, as the

‘archetypal force behind the processes of Annie’s incarnation that had lain dormant in the archetypal storehouse’ (p. 57).

Thus at this second level of analysis the deer can be seen as representative of Annie’s soul. While this latter reading may have been present early on, it could in no way be addressed until Annie was able to reach the feelings it aroused in her and to reflect upon them, and lay in a dissociated wing of the ‘archetypal storehouse’ of Annie’s mind.

In this prospective sense we can understand "soul" in terms of Annie’s potential personality (C.W. Vol. 6 Paras 787-802) obscured by her isolation, her ‘unhumanised’ incapacity to know her feelings. Various understandings of the dream became clearer as Annie’s self began to emerge. Such synthesis could not have been reached until access to feeling and its understanding had been achieved by painstaking reductive work. In this therapy the symbol of "infinite possible meanings" was there to be worked with in a variety of ways from the start; in the ‘medicine’ dreams of my patient and of Salman’s , the self symbol appeared at a time when its transformative capacity was closer to being realised. In all three cases long and painful reductive analysis had preceded working with the symbol itself.

Sedgwick writes that all efforts to describe the healing effects of psychotherapy are necessarily metaphorical. He is no doubt correct in suggesting that Jung’s alchemical metaphor, as a representation of the processes of analysis and individuation, is not accessible to every reader. He, Sedgwick, devotes a few rather dismissive lines to the sixteenth century text and woodcuts of the Rosarium philosophorum upon which Jung drew for his Psychology of the Transference (1946). Clearly he does not dismiss the content, since it is central to the therapeutic relationship, but in criticising the archaisms of both the language and the woodcuts, he suggests that Jung is falling into a trap he himself warned against - allowing an aesthetic consideration to override good practice. While it’s true that the esoteric language can’t be recommended to the beginning psychotherapist, it is nevertheless fascinating to discover how nearly the ancient texts reflect psychological processes as we understand them. Whether one likes such a vehicle for contemplation is clearly a matter of taste, and since Sedgwick claims to return to Jung’s writings again and again because he finds them congenial and inspiring, one wonders if his comments about the Psychology of the Transference aren’t a little too apologetic.

In CJCP’s Chapter 10 : The difficulties inherent in having your own mind, BAP writer Geraldine Godsil uses the four cycles of the Rosarium to illustrate her Jungian thesis that individuation is : "a series of perilous coniunctios that constantly succumb to the pressure for new development." (p.210).(20) Godsil draws on Freud’s early work on hysteria and parallels between Jung’s theory of the processes of individuation and Bion’s thoughts about thinking to trace the struggles of another young woman whose capacity for linking and triangulation have been seriously impaired. The editors write in this connection: "Having a mind of one's own depends on a connection with internal objects that have a life of their own and that are experienced as not under one's omnipotent control." Like Heuer’s Annie, this woman also had great difficulty in thinking about her emotional experience. Like Cowen with her patient, Jack, Godsil is dealing with early experience of apparently insufficient emotional holding where the capacity for self-reflection is non-existent or minimal and where not to know seems imperative for survival.

Godsil relates a therapeutic journey from a beginning where meaning was relentlessly attacked to a place where a sufficiently reliable internal world began to allow the generation of lively thoughts. She implies the universality of certain manifestations of relationship, such as projection and projective identification, as they are presented in Jung’s interpretation of the woodcuts, and as we are familiar with them in practice. She stresses that the symbol, and hence symbol formation, was crucial for her patient Nina in the transition from one state of mind to another, and she describes this notion of symbol formation and its reliance on ‘triangulation’ as each theorist has presented it, with the addition of Britton (1989).

Godsil’s paper is one of the many excellent essays in CJCP, however after reading those and Sedgwick’s clearly argued material, there were aspects of this paper which I found disappointing. Unlike the other accounts, when I came to write about it, I could not recall the patient’s name. I attribute this to a peculiarity of a certain kind of clinical writing which rests on the somewhat doctrinaire assumption that certain interpretations do not have to be substantiated. While the emphasis in this collection is clinical, Godsil has spent many pages outlining the theory that supports her work. In my reading this was at the cost of immediacy in the clinical writing. For example, the reasonable suggestion is made that a stolen new bicycle saddle and its replacement by a shabby man’s saddle represents a distortion of genital imagery. However it is then asserted, with no additional clinical material, that the saddle/bicycle link reveals difficulty in triangulation, that the bicycle wheels are breasts and the saddle seems to represent mouth, vagina and penis. While all of these might well be useful metaphors, the writing rings of analytic certainty rather than creative speculation. Similarly, although Godsil claims to emphasise the relational aspect of mind she does so in an experience-distant way. One does not get the feeling of two people immersed in the process which several of the other papers, especially the two already mentioned, manage to convey.

Godsil makes the connection between Klein and Jung in terms of both the similar "archaic image schemas" which I mentioned above, and an "urge to know". Klein’s epistemophilic instinct and Jung’s individuation, which he claims proceeds from the "generative force of the archetype" each give an account of a movement into the world, though with different motive forces. To explore the differences between Jung’s "generative force" which drives individuation and the Freudian concept of drive would require an excursion into the areas of energy and libido in which there are fundamental differences. Relationalists have wished to replace drive as the sine qua non of development (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1982), and although Jung did not say as much of infant development, the centrality of individuation to relationship and vice versa is clear:

Individuation has two principal aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship. Neither can exist without the other, although sometimes the one and sometimes the other predominates. (Jung, 1946)

Michael Fordham’s de-integration/re-integration model of early development describes a dyadic relationship which is not drive-centred and makes available the logical connection with the relational development:

"provided we trust our observations and make inferences from them. .........if mothers and babies are carefully observed, it seems that both have the capacity to know what the other is like as a whole". Fordham (1985, p.54)

Fordham has suggested that it is the representations of self consequent on the mother relation which begin the process of individuation:

"Being an individual from the start, individuation becomes [the] realisation of his condition through the development of self representations." (Ibid)

To claim that it is implied by Jung that self-representations are only possible in relation to an other may seem a stretch, particularly when I rely on statements which have a quaintness or romanticism like :

"the unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without another, and the other is always found in a You."

However, it can be argued that quotes such as this one from Psychological Types come from the very heart of Jung’s thought about relationship. Soul, when unpacked and understood in its contexts not only in the alchemical and religious writings, but in the definitions which he gives it in Types referred to earlier, has a quite precise place as an "inner attitude" in the Jungian view of psyche. Here "soul" seems to suggest the potential "personality" (Jung’s term), something like Winnicott’s "true self". James Hillman(1975) has described soul as that quality of human being which "turns events into experience"- that which happens to us is organised according to our personality and the more individuated we are the more ‘authentic’ the experience. When Jung describes the "soul-image" as being projected on to the other, he does so in terms of unrecognised parts of the self which have not been integrated. Such integration depends on the processes of that ‘specific matter of recognizing the other as an equivalent centre of being’ of Benjamin’s referred to earlier. Jung spells out similar processes of recognition and destruction in his Psychology of the Transference. If we think of Jung’s individuation as an ‘equally indispensable process of objective relationship’ in the infant parent dyad, we see how its connects with the idea that recognition and acknowledgement by another mind brings to the child the idea of agency and intentionality, in short the realisation of one’s self-representation, "personality" or "soul" in this sense of Jung’s.

In this paper I have attempted to sketch ways in which some of the currents in the flow of thinking in contemporary psychoanalysis and analytical psychology may be seen to run together without either obscuring the other. I have tried to suggest that in the many perspectives which the authors of the two books employ, there are in their differences complementarities which may have always existed but which have not been made use of because of old prejudices. The old prejudices die hard, but psychoanalytic and post-Jungian conversations are continuing with vigour from their recent renewals in conferences, small meetings and in both formal and informal discussion on the Internet. These processes are gradually differentiating true difference and divergence from a tragic historical splitting. In using these two books as vehicles for my ideas, I hope I have managed my own prejudices and assumptions sufficiently so that this paper is a small but useful contribution to that conversation.

Copyright Yvonne Lynton Reid, Warrandyte, 2003.

E-mail Yvonne Lynton Reid: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

1 During Jung’s time at the Burgholzli Institute in Zurich he worked on the refinement of the word association tests earlier developed by Wundt and Galton. His findings were published between 1904 and 1909, resulting in considerable support for his idea of the feeling-toned complexes.

2 Theoretical distinctions between Jung’s meanings of ‘self’ and ‘Self’ are complex . The quotation marks around my initial use of the capitalised Self is intended to convey the provisionality of the construct when brought to postmodern review. For the remainder of the paper I shall retain Jung’s capitalisation without quotes.

3 See Christopher & McFarland Solomon(2000) and Salman(1996)and more recently Knox (2003).

4 The term "teleology" must be contextualised to determine which of many historical connotations is intended . Suffice it to say here that it stands for the ‘purposiveness’ of the symptom, where purpose might suggest meaning rather than specific intention.

5 Jungian writers were invited to convey what contemporary Jungian thought and practice might have to offer an emerging tradition which is dedicated to openness to ideas and the understanding of the central role of the analytic relationship. I understand the purpose of the two books under review to be similar.

6 Tragically, Stephen Mitchell died near the close of that seminar. Those of us who took part experienced the enormous breadth and liveliness of his thinking as well as a rare personal graciousness. His death was an irreplaceable loss for contemporary psychoanalysis and the conversation with Jungian thought lost a remarkable participant.

7 Jung disclaimed association to Hegel’s model in referring to his psychotheraputic method as dialectical, by which he meant "dialogue between two persons in which the position of one is successively modified by the responses of the other." (Clark, 1992)

8 Other writers would suggest that a compassionate connection via the identification is imperative to counter the ‘violence’ intrinsic to the analytic position. Kristeva (2000) suggests there is a ‘perversion’ in the transference / countertransference: " ... analytic listening is in itself a violent act. ......There is a part of perverted pleasure in this identification ...... the knowledge that interpretation is an act of cruelty leads us to carry it out with the utmost kindness and tact."

9 Contrasexual theory proposes the metaphoric presence of an opposite-sex figure in the unconscious, masculine animus for the woman, feminine anima for the man. Each is part personal, built up through experience of the other sex, initially the parents, and part collective, flowing from the predisposition to experience a "gendered otherness" (my term) The theory reveals Jung’s proneness to the sexism of his day and has received much revision as well as outright rejection from post-Jungian writers. Samuels (2000) writes persuasively of anima/animus as denoting a representation of difference in the individual, relevant to gender only in a fluid way, in which case we could speak of a predisposition to experience Otherness which becomes variously gendered.

10 Here developmental post-Jungians would draw on the psychoanalytic theories of Klein and the Kleinian developments, like Bion’s container-contained, Winnicott’s maternal holding, and innovative ideas such as Gianna Williams’ (1998) ‘convex and concave’ containers as well as the large body of work of Jungian Michael Fordham.

11 In the case of Cowen’s patient the "incestuous bond" may well have been collusive with the mother’s unconscious involvement or his own unshared fantasy as described by Britton. My intention here is not so much to comment on Cowen’s material but on the ideas which inform the paper.

13 Neither Klein nor Jung describe a mother as a ‘real other’. Jungians might use the term ‘psychoid’ for the metaphorical ‘place’ of early or regressed archetypal experience - an area neither physical nor psychological but partaking of both. Clearly this raises mind/body issues far beyond our present scope.

14 I use the term non-oedipal rather than pre-oedipal because I think the language of oedipal and pre-oedipal continues to tie us to a linear notion which not only suggests that these complex negotiations are traversed once for all, but ignores the possibility that some ‘oedipal’ issues can be traversed successfully and become ‘organisational’ while other issues assumed to belong to ‘earlier’ phases remain stuck.

15 I have in mind a particular instance of cross-dressing as ‘extreme’ however I think there are much less obvious examples of what I have called ‘archetypal fusions’.

16 Several contemporary Jungian feminist writers are exploring alternatives to the ubiquity of genderised assumptions throughout Jungian writing which ultimately by implication seem to suggest that individuation is only for the male (cf. Angelo, 2003)

17 Joseph Redfearn, in his book :"My Self, My Many Selves" has elaborated on this theme with his idea of the "migrating self" which moves among the less split off complexes as we enact aspects of ourselves which we experience as having varying degrees of authenticity or inauthenticity. An action which we feel is "totally out of character" would suggest "possession by an archetype" and if negative we would say it is emanating from the ‘shadow’, or those unconscious parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know about. The archetypal core of the shadow, Jung claims, is Evil itself.

18 Some would argue that there is no such requirement, though constructivism in its less radical form has an obvious part in making relational links. cf. Polly Young-Eisendrath and James Hall’s Jung’s Self Psychology: A Constructivist Perspective Guilford Press 1991 Likewise Jung’s relativism is clear. He thought that "there had been a `shift in man's consciousness' in the modern age which has rendered obsolete any acceptance of absolute or dogmatic truth." (Clarke, 1992)

19 See Stephen Mitchell The Wings of Icarus in Relational Psychoanalysis: the emergence of a tradition Analytic Press, 1999

20 The coniunctio was for Jung an archetype of psychic functioning - as a symbol in alchemy it refers to the union of unlike substances; a theory of the pattern of relationships between two or more unconscious factors (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1987); the marriage of opposites which creates a new element, a third. In analytic work a coniunctio is experienced when a transformation of a prior unconscious situation is achieved between analysand and analyst such that a new position may be available from which to proceed. Samuels, Shorter and Plaut point out that because it is unconscious it is likely to be projected in images such as King and Queen, and to appear in dreams in various images of conjunction. The fit of nipple-and-mouth could be said to be an early and prototypical experience of coniunctio.

Alexander, Franz, Thomas M. French et al., Psychoanalytic Therapy: Principles and Application New York: Ronald Press, 1946

Angelo, Marie "This thing of brightness - the feminine power of transcendent imagination" in The Feminine Case, Tessa Adams & Andrea Duncan, Eds, Karnac, London.

Aron, Lewis The Clinical Body and the Reflexive Mind in Relational Perspectives on the Body The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. 1998.

Bachofen, J.J. Myth, Religion and Mother-Right Trans.R.Manheim, Bollingen Series 84, Princeton UP, 1967.

Benjamin, J. Afterword to Recognition and Destruction in Relational Psychoanalysis: the Emergence of a Tradition Stephen A. Mitchell & Lewis Aron. (Eds) The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. 1999.

Britton, Ronald The missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex in The Oedipus Complex Today Britton, Feldman, O’Shaughnessy (Eds), 1989

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Knox, Jean Archetype, Attachment, Analysis Jungian psychology and the emergent mind, Brunner-Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group Hove and New York

McGuire, W. (Ed.) The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, trans. R.Manheim & R.F.C. Hull, Harvard University Press, Cambrdige, Mass.

Mitchell, Stephen A. Relationality: from Attachment to Intersubjectivity. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. 2000

__, Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. ,1997

Redfearn, J.W.T. My Self, My Many Selves, Library of Analytical Psychology, Karnac Books, 1985

Salman, Sherry Dissociation and the Self in the magical preOedipal field Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1999, 44, No.1

Samuels, Andrew Jung and The Post-Jungians

Williams, Gianna Landscapes and Foreign Bodies: Eating Disorders and Other Pathologies (Tavistock Clinic Series, Routledge, London, 1998

Zabriskie, Beverley The Psyche as a Process Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol.10 No.3, 2000

Yvonne Lynton Reid has worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist for over twenty years, after an earlier career in theatre, in drama, dance and choreography, principally with children and adolescents. She is in the final stages of completing analytic training with the Australian & New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts - C.G. Jung Institute, in Melbourne, Australia, and is in private practice.

A version of this paper first appeared in the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy Vol.22 No.2, 2003.

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