dissociation and the self in the magical pre-oedipal field.pdf

0021–8774/99/4401/69 © 1999, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1999, 44, 69–85

Dissociation and the Self in the magicalpre-Oedipal field

Sherry Salman, Rhinebeck, NY

Abstract: This paper explores the clinical relevance of Jung’s idea of the Self in pre-Oedipal and pre-individuation psychology. Incorporating data from neurobiology andrecent theories of memory and narrative reconstruction, a post-modern conception ofthe Self is proposed akin to what Jung called a ‘dream of totality’. Such a conception ofthe Self is distinguished from a reified structure or a deified imago, and is considered tobe that aspect of psychological functioning consonant with emerging meanings, and thebirth of new psychological ground. Links are made back to Flournoy, William James,and depth psychology’s early interest in teleology, the occult, and the creative capacitiesof the psyche.

Updating this mystery tradition, clinical material illustrates how narratives of the Selfare present in such pre-Oedipal dynamics as dissociation and projective identification.These dynamics are understood not only as primitive defences but as reconstitutivesymbolic metaphors and mythopoetic expressions of an emergent rather than a super-ordinate Self.

Key words: dissociation, emergent meaning, mythopoesis, occult, post-modern Self,pre-Oedipal, projective identification.

A distinguishing feature of Jungian clinical methodology has been that all

diagnostic, prognostic, and developmental theories are organized with refer-

ence to the Self, as well as the ego. Although other depth psychologists have

alluded to the importance of the notion of a ‘self’ (Kohut 1977; Guntrip 1969;

Khan 1974) only Jung’s original model truly relativized the ego, viewing it as

vehicle, executor, or as temenos for the destiny and ‘mystery’ factors of the Self.

One way for contemporary analytical psychologists to re-assess the validity

of our Self-oriented methodology is to examine its utility in pre-Oedipal process.

Through his exploration of the psyche’s archetypal matrix, and the dynamics

of magical thinking, dissociation, splitting and projective identification, it is

becoming clear that Jung, and others such as Whitmont (1957) anticipated

many aspects of what in psychoanalytic circles generally is known as the

theory of pre-Oedipal development. Another distinguishing feature of Jungian

methodology has been the great value given to this early level of process, the

Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.

‘depathologizing’ of its archetypal dynamics, and the verification of its function

as the ongoing creative matrix for the developing psyche.

But what has become painfully apparent in the clinical situation is that

paradoxically, although archetypal dynamics are often most evident during

deeply regressed phases of the treatment process, it is at these very same early

levels of psyche that a Self-driven archetypal perspective on the unfolding

symbolic meaning of psychological process is most difficult to maintain.

Consequently, we have been pulled toward modern psychoanalysis and ego

psychology to help make sense of and ease the terrific demands that working

with pre-Oedipal process places on us. Sometimes we virtually abandon the

Self as a working construct, reserving it for cases which conform to the classic

individuation model. Interestingly, however, there seem to be fewer and fewer

of these.

Jung himself was not explicit regarding a differentiated clinical methodology.

Perhaps he was well aware of, and unable to resolve, a fundamental dilemma

central to the issue of methodology: a dilemma about the Self. How was the

Self both central to the health, integrity, and viability of the entire psyche, and

yet not really to be found at most levels of the psychological process? Jung

(1953) wrote in Psychology and Alchemy:

If the motif of the mandala is an archetype it ought to be a collective phenomenon,i.e., theoretically it should appear in everyone. In practice, however, it is to be metwith in distinct form in relatively few cases, though this does not prevent it fromfunctioning as a concealed pole round which everything ultimately revolves. In thelast analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reasonthis realization can also be called ‘individuation’.

(para. 330)

This sort of circular statement about the Self is ubiquitous in Jung’s writings.

I think it reflects a paradox which needs on the one hand to be received

creatively: namely that the mandala is an image of both the undifferentiated

uroboros and the differentiated Self. But it may also reflect the limitation Jung

encountered when trying to differentiate clinical issues regarding the Self,

particularly its function in the pre-Oedipal field.

In our modern attempt at clinical differentiation, many analytical psychologists

have separated what may be thought of as pre-Oedipal, pre-individuation, and

individuation levels of process. We often assume that in order to work mean-

ingfully with the symbol of the Self, there has to be an ego capable of ‘giving

way’ to the experience of the unknown, that is of the Other and ultimately, of

the Self. We postulate that in practice there has to be an individual, that is an

ego or identity, who then may participate meaningfully in an individuation

process. We imagine that pre-Oedipal process, which is dyadic, primary, and

two-dimensional, opens up into three-dimensional secondary process, what I

refer to as a pre-individuation level of process wherein stable ego identity and

object relations are achieved. This may then in turn open into a fourth level of

70 Sherry Salman


process, Balint’s imaginal ‘area of creation’ (Balint 1968; Field 1991), Jung’s

image of an individuating Self-oriented ego, the identity of which is both

relativized and enhanced by the ongoing dialogue with subjective elements of

shadow and complexes.

But this differentiation of our model of development has led to an inevitable,

and in my view costly, estrangement from the starting place, the archetypally

determined ‘magical’ (Whitmont 1956) pre-Oedipal field to which we must

periodically return if any fresh development is to take place. Our present under-

standing of pre-Oedipal and even pre-individuation levels of process is so pre-

judiced in a clinical notion of ‘primitivity’ that it no longer seems to partake

meaningfully of the quintessential Jungian dynamism, the Self.

I propose to address several issues related to this estrangement – the first

being, for modern clinicians, whether it is really meaningful to consider the

Self in our work at early levels of process. If so, how are we to envision the

Self at pre-Oedipal and pre-individuation levels of process, and in what ways

is it – or isn’t it – to be differentiated from the Self of the later individuation

process as we see it in a psychologically mature individual? Jung was obviously

not able to answer this question adequately, and Michael Fordham (1985) has

offered a subsequent model of individuation as the cycles of integration and

deintegration which begin with infancy. However, it is interesting to imagine

that even Jung may have originally postulated the notion of the Self in direct

relation to pre-individuation dynamics: as a counterpole to the dissociation

theory. The ‘fact’ of the Self may have answered for him the question posed by

the ‘fact’ of the dissociability of the psyche: how are dissociative phenomena

to be organized? The Self provides an image of order within the seemingly

chaotic world of dissociation.

But are the notion and experience of the Self really necessary in order to

work therapeutically at early levels of psychological process? I think that it is,

but why this is so has been obscure. Our understanding of what Self-process

is has to emerge beyond our images of a ‘reified’ Self, a superordinate ‘con-

cealed pole round which everything revolves’, or a redemptive ‘deified’ Self.

Moreover, we have to accept the constructive scepticism of A. Guggenbuhl-

Craig (1997): there may be no ‘concealed pole’, nor is every life necessarily

the ‘realization of a whole’. Rather, wholeness and meaning may be emerging

from moment to moment only as psychological reality emerges, and symbols

of the Self may be the psyche’s reflections of that very process.

In the light of new scientific data and paradigms about the emergent nature

of the mind, as well as in the light of what we now know about such new con-

structs as psychological narrative, clinical reconstruction, and the mythopoesis

of psychological experience and healing, we are in a position to re-imagine

what constitutes the essential mystery of the Self. It may be that it is the

capacity for symbolic transformation of psychological reality which is most

intimately connected to the magic of the Self, at all levels of process, however

early.

Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field 71


For example, if analysts consider basic responses like dissociation with

accompanying projective identification to be not only defensive, but also

reconstitutive (Field 1991), they too can be understood, like symbols, to be

transformers of psychic energy: magical modes of communicative metaphor and

expression, ways of creating links to affective experience. These mechanisms

may be ways the psyche reflects to the consciousness of both patient and

receptive analyst the things which are coming into being: the unconscious

material which is evolving from dissociated experience into psychological

ground. They are mythopoetic expressions of an emergent, rather than a

superordinate, Self.

The Self

Jung and post-Jungians (Young-Eisendrath 1997; Weisstub 1997) were not

the first and will not be the last psychologists to struggle with paradoxes of the

self and the Self. William James, Winnicott, and many others have wondered

how it was that what they termed the self encompassed both a stable sense of

identity and an ever-changing consciousness? Jung actually had several differ-

ent visions of the Self, each paradoxical and containing an intimation of a new

orientation toward the central mystery he was trying to identify.

The first was a structural view, the idea that the Self is made up of

capacities, attributes, temperament and genetic determinants comprising a kind

of ‘virtual-organic’ Self, all there in concealed seed form waiting to unfold.

Here the Self is that which functions throughout the life of an individual as

the ordering and unifying factor behind all development. This is the Self as the

initiating, structuring, prospective force behind symptoms and symbols.

The other Self was the functional-transcendent Self, the Self which is like the

moving wheel of the individuation process, the unfolding and integration of

what is not given, what is acquired through psychological process alone. This

is the ‘opus contra naturam’ Self, the Self that functions toward wholeness and

the creation of the panacea, the Self as goal of all process, the transcendent

Self, unique in its infinite singularity. This is the Self related to the god-imago,

religious mythologems, and the redemptive philosophers’ stone.

Jung amplified and enlarged both these perspectives in the image of the

Self’s alchemical journey from chaotic ‘massa confusa’ to integrated ‘lapis’ …

The Self here appears in symbolic images of the unfolding genetic blueprint,

seed germ, or mandala, the developing and then individuating Self. What was

there at the beginning is still there at the end, but the Stone is also no longer

just a stone.

More recently, the developmental school arising out of Fordham’s exten-

sions of Jung has envisioned a primary self containing all archetypal potentials

which undergo a process of deintegration/reintegration as they are embodied

and meet the world. Although the spontaneous movement that produces dein-

tegration is also seen as archetypal, the self is primary, and forms a background

72 Sherry Salman


for deintegration. As Judith Hubback (1990) describes it: ‘the embodied

psyche, the person, changes through activating and using the complementary

unchanging archetypal nature of the self’ (p. 114).

But notwithstanding all there is to imagine about the symbol of the Self,

Jung always insisted that the Self was fundamentally unknowable, and he

continued to insist on its essential mystery. It was not unknowable just because

of epistemological issues, or unknowable because the Self is both the subject

speaking and the object of its contemplation, or because it had not yet un-

folded. It was unknowable because it didn’t really exist. In a 1957 interview

with Miguel Serrano (1966), Jung said: ‘So far I have found no stable or

definite center in the unconscious, and I don’t believe such a center exists. I

believe that the thing I call the self is a dream of totality’ (p. 50). Is the Self

then a symbol of the stuff of dreams, of a shift in psychic process, of emerging

psychological ground and reality? Is this what Jung meant by the ‘lapis invisi-bilitatis’ (Jung 1953, para. 247), and how can we understand this now?

This symbol of the Self as ‘mystery’, points the way into an aspect of Jung’s

perspective that is essentially post-modern: a perspective whose central meta-

phor is an ever-changing interchange among subject, object, the intrapsychic,

the interpersonal, the transpersonal, and the world. From this perspective,

the Self is neither a structural entity, actual or potential, nor symbolic of a

redemptive God-imago. A post-modern view of the Self suggests that there is

no Self per se, either structural, functional, or transcendent, that it is unknow-

able because it exists only as a symbol of process, as part and parcel of the

psyche’s acts of creation – the creation of new psychological reality and ground.

Jung related the Self to process alone when he wrote in relation to the mandala

that:

[It is] the real – i.e., effective – reflection of a conscious attitude which can stateneither its aim nor its purpose and, because of this abdication, projects its activityentirely upon the virtual centre of the mandala … But that the mandala is a merepsychological reflection is, however, contradicted … For this hypothesis overlooksthe creative capacity of the psyche, which – whether we like it or not – exists, and inface of which all so-called ‘causes’ become mere occasions.

(Jung 1953, para. 249)

The Self as a symbolic image accompanying the emergence of new psycho-

logical territory dovetails with modern understandings of personality develop-

ment, trauma and recovery, and recent advances in neurobiology. For

example, through the work of Hillman (1972), Lacan (Kugler 1987), Daniel

Stern (1985) and others, we have come to realize that there is an ever-present

capacity on the part of the psyche to create key metaphors and ‘narrative points

of origin’ for itself, including even for the origins of its trauma (Stern 1985,

p. 258). The meaning and even perceived genesis of a traumatic event undergo

successive changes with time and with reconstruction within the transference

field. Personality is now being understood as creatively synthesized by the



psyche through an ever-changing ‘narrative’, not as something necessarily

originating in literal events. An organic, synthetic, emergent psyche is pre-

sumed to exist, even in infancy.

It also seems clear from clinical process that various archetypal themes move

in and out of the healing fictions we create about ourselves, both individually

and collectively, and that this process of fictionalization is what is central and

indispensable for a healthy and evolving psyche. We spend much of our time

clinically discovering, articulating, living through, and creating new meta-

phoric traces of archetypal themes. This understanding harkens back to the early

days, when Ferenczi noted the healing that occurred when abused children

were able to translate their traumatic experiences into a private ‘language’ of

their own (Ferenczi 1933).

Most intriguingly, recent advances in neurobiology provide paradigms and

data suggesting that emergent, synthetic processes are actually evident in the

neural responses of the brain. Jung was aware of the importance of looking

to biology in order to understand the psyche, and I think also felt the lack of

adequate scientific paradigms. At the end of his life, in the Foreword to

Mysterium Coniunctionis, he had this to say about the origins of symbolism

and symbolic capacity:

The structure and function of the bodily organs are everywhere more or less thesame, including those of the brain. And as the psyche is to a large extent dependenton this organ, presumably it will – at least in principle – everywhere produce thesame forms. In order to see this, however, one has to abandon the widespreadprejudice that the psyche is identical with consciousness.

(Jung 1953, p. xix)

Today perhaps we can follow Jung in looking to the soma, because in the sci-

ences the brain and mind are already being reconceived of as adaptive systems

geared towards evolution and the ever-changing construction of a coherent

self (Tresan 1996). For example, recent work on the emergent properties of

mind and memory by Edelman, Freeman, and others (see Modell 1997) sug-

gest that what constitutes ‘memory’ appears to be an experience of neuronal

re-categorization, a re-writing and re-transcription of events rather than a pro-

cess of retrieval. There is actually no fixed library of memories, no stored replicas,

only potential categories which are formed by correspondences. Memory is

always ‘emerging’ and created afresh in the light of new experience. When new

experience occurs, the cortical mapping of all similar past experience is re-

encoded in the light of the new data.

Events, both inner and outer, are categorized, and re-categorized into new

neural schemas which are themselves continuously emerging and updated.

This process is based both on objective facts and phenomena, and also on what

has subjective value and meaning for the individual. Consciousness itself is

increasingly being understood as an active, dynamic, very personal evolution-

ary process. Anthony Stevens (1995), in his book Private Myths, suggests that

74 Sherry Salman


the neuronal re-categorization process is part of what is going on during

dreaming. Thus when Jung remarked that ‘the thing I call the self is a dream

of totality’, he may have been more precise than he knew.

This model of an emergent psyche and the continuous creation of psycho-

logical reality extends Jung’s observation of the spontaneous emergence of

symbols of the Self which accompany the transformation of unconscious

experience into psychological ground. What remains consistent with Jung’s

original conception of the Self through modern data about mind and per-

sonality is the focus on the psyche’s archetypal capacity for construction and

symbolization, for continuous creation of new coherent syntheses of the real,

the imaginary, and the mystery of what will be.

Emergence may represent a symbolic image more limited, less precise, but

more fluid than a redemptive god-imago or a superordinate organizing prin-

ciple. But a spontaneously emergent Self retains the subjectivity and relativiza-

tion of the ego which both the redemptive and superordinate Self provide,

perhaps even more so; as ego encounters other, a symbolic state of mind

emerges, in which the ego is truly entirely transformed. There is no doubt that

the earth revolves around the sun. Ego is informed by Other from moment

to moment. The process reflects our microcosmic lived experience of Goethe’s

archetypal formula ‘Formation, transformation, eternal spirit’s eternal recreation’.

But an emergent Self is a quiet Self, less like a knowing, definitive, prophetic

voice of truth, which makes an appearance only rarely, less identified with a

redemptive god-imago, and more like the small, still voice of unknowing, whose

whisperings are barely discernible but are always there. What we lose in super-

ordinate authority we gain in companionship. What we lose in coherence, we

gain in on-going generative, creative dialogue.

In Jung’s alchemical vision, the Self was the symbolic image of the arche-

typal fantasy of redemption. But even here, the stone is only a phase in a long

dynamic process, and the alchemists were clear that the stone represented

not the object of the process, but process itself. In this spirit, can we clarify the

symbol of the Self as that which expresses and accompanies the emergence of

evolving psychological ground? This facet of the symbol is clinically relevant

at multiple levels of psychological reality and constructively, I believe, bridges

the distinction between individuation and pre-individuation in our thinking

about the Self. In this view, the narratives of the Self become readable from

dissociation and projective identification at one end of the continuum through

active imagination at the other.

Dissociation and projective identification

Turning now to two features of the pre-individuation field, specifically dis-

sociation and projective identification, I will examine their relationship to the

Self. Following is case material which suggested to me that dissociation, regulated

by projective identification, did not simply interfere with recategorization and



emergent processes of the Self, but also expressed those processes at the pre-

individuation level of psyche.

As with the Self, Jung’s ideas about dissociative states were central in his

model. In the early Zofingia Lectures, he began to argue that the occult experi-

ences of ‘spirits and souls’ possessed their own psychological reality. This

formulation would evolve into the complex-theory, the personification of auto-

nomous split-off unconscious contents, archetypes and the objective psyche,

and his particular vision of mental illness as loss of soul or archetypal posses-

sion. Up to the very end in Mysterium Coniunctions, the fragmentation and

coagulation of the body/soul/spirit triad remained centre stage (Jung 1963).

The seeds of an emergent symbol of the Self had their origins in Jung’s pros-

pective approach to the dissociability of the psyche, an approach which was in

place long before Symbols of Transformation (Jung 1956) and the break with

Freud. Jung had always held the fantasy that the psyche had multiple fields of

reality, whose meaningful relationships to each other were expressed in sym-

bolic images. This fantasy had been informed by some very colourful and

important developments which pre-dated Jung, and had paired dissociative

states of mind with the Self.

As now, at the turn of the last century there was a proliferation of ‘multiple

personality disorder’ (MPD), with spiritualism as the vehicle through which

the reality of the psyche entered the collective. Mediums in trance were the psy-

chopomps to the unconscious. When psychologists William James, Frederic

Myers, Theodore Flournoy, and later Jung entered the spiritualist arena, the

source of what was revealed during an altered state was moved into the intra-

psychic sphere, and conceived of as the unconscious. This irrevocable moment

is depicted vividly in Theodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars, pub-

lished in the watershed year of 1900. In his Introduction to the new edition,

Sonu Shamdasani makes a compelling case that this formulation of uncon-

scious multiple selves was the true discovery of the unconscious.

Shamdasani makes it clear that it was Flournoy, studying the fantasies of his

student, Miss Miller (eventually the subject of Symbols of Transformation,

CW 5), who first suspected that within the phenomenon of dissociation the

psyche is re-combining old material into something new. Flournoy used the

term ‘creative imagination’ to identify the process. And it was Frederic Myers,

an English psychologist, psychic researcher and close friend of William James,

who first suggested a model of the unconscious based on ‘subliminal selves’

with creative capacities and a ‘mythopoetic’, as he termed it, function

(Ellenberger 1970, p. 313).

This newly discovered unconscious was considered to have an often more

useful, ‘higher intelligence’ than one’s usual consciousness. Remarkable things

had been observed and experienced during those early days in trance: clairvoy-

ance, telepathy, and artistic capacities not available to the conscious mind.

The sum total of secondary selves was conceived in those days as linked up

with a timeless, mythic big Self. William James expressed it by suggesting that

76 Sherry Salman


consciousness is split up into parts which are dissociated from one another,

nevertheless playing ‘complementary’ roles. The sum of this complementarity

he considered to be the Self (James 1890). As the doors to the Beyond closed,

for these early researchers the mediums and their trance states became portals

into the Self. The entire sensibility was in line with older, magical Hermetic

traditions in which the ‘one thing’ was considered to give birth to all dualities

and contradictions, where the notion of a unified Self, and dissociability went

hand-in-hand. Interestingly, this sensibility is mirrored again in Fairbairn

and Grotstein’s work (1981), which revisions internal objects as lost images of

the self.

But what was it that had really been discovered? It was the mythopoetic

capacity of the psyche, its capacity to spin healing fictions, to retranscribe and

re-write memory and experience. The creative potential of dissociative states

of mind, working through the vehicle of mythopoetic thought, was a key for

Jung, a cornerstone he found in the ‘black-mud tide of occultism’ before the

days of Freud. But the resurgence of interest in MPD at the end of this century

does not look primarily to the synthetic approach of Flournoy and Jung for its

foundation, but more to the approach of Janet and Freud, where dissociation

was conceived of as what interferes with integration and emergent processes,

what is not complementary but opposed to the Self. Currently, it is usually

considered to be caused by childhood trauma, to be a defence of the Self

engineered to protect its integrity, but which becomes entrenched and blocks

emergent processes. The destructive aspects of dissociation are the reason

‘narratives’ get stuck.

What has remained lost amid current ideas about dissociation is Flournoy

and Jung’s differential interpretation of its creative, mythopoetic dimension,

that is to say its individuating function as a generator of new meanings in an

ongoing story of individual development. As Shamdasani points out, this had

been, and is, a simple and startling interpretation of dissociative phenomena,

an explanation which does not need to resort to causation by the dear departed,

spiritual entities, extraterrestrials, or even childhood traumata. As Jung stated

in relation to the constellation of the mandala and its relation to the creative

capacity of the psyche, ‘all so-called causes become mere occasions’ (Jung

1953, para. 249). It is this aspect of dissociative phenomena which comes into

play when we try to listen to patients’ narratives less as repetition com-

pulsions, and more as attempts at creating new psychological ground.

But all this ‘teleology’, as it was called, fell into the shadow of psycho-

analysis, onto the fringes of discourse and legitimacy, into the mysticism and

theosophy projected onto the Jungian model. Jung had, in fact, been drawn in-

itially toward magic and the occult, because he was ‘onto’ the indispensability

of the emergent functions of mythopoesis, reconstruction and imagination for

psychological health. He understood the magical maxim: ‘It is in the power of

the mind itself that spirits come and go, and magical works are done’. But he

was reticent to acknowledge these roots, and as James Witzig (1982) points out,



Jung (or more probably the biographers of Memories, Dreams, Reflections)did not credit either Myers or Flournoy’s work in relation to his own later

ideas about the creative capacities of the psyche and their relation to symbols

of the Self.

This suppression has resulted in the ‘occult’ backdrop to Jung’s thinking

falling into our collective shadow, where many strange creatures and miscon-

ceptions have thrived, including recent criticism of Jungians for our occult

ambitions (Noll 1994). Much has been made about Jung as what he too re-

garded as at least his shadow – the black magician, a self-serving manipulator

of minds and souls through his occult knowledge of the transformative poten-

tial of the mythopoetic psyche. But as it turns out, the ancient tools of magic,

imagination and mythopoesis which Jung indeed understood, have now

become the newly discovered fundamentals in many post-modern ideas about

the emergent nature of mind and psyche. These aspects of Jung’s original vision

can be reclaimed as clinical contributions towards a post-modern under-

standing of the symbol of the Self as indeed a most magical source of personal

history.

Case material

I turn now to the case material as an example of the relationship between

dissociative states, the creative capacities of the psyche and symbols of the Self.

By dissociation I mean ‘splits’: split consciousness, double consciousness,

separate selves, subpersonalities, all there due either to the fragmenting effects

of trauma (Freud), or ‘just there’ as part of a state of primary unintegration

(Winnicott; Jung), or part and parcel of the emergence of new psychological

capacities (Jung and the moderns). These autonomous dissociable splits, in

the form of personified complexes or archetypal affects, are reinforced and

regulated by projective identification. By projective identification I mean the

process of imaginally translocating dissociated splits into an object in order to

purposively regulate the split.

The inability to reconstruct experience and create new meaning, presumably

due to multiple splits, is acknowledged by all as ‘a psychic catastrophe often

termed a black hole’ (Modell 1993, p. 7). This formulation was descriptive up

to a point, of my patient, a 45-year old woman. Her mother had been para-

noid, abusive, and psychotic, and she came to treatment with many split-selves,

whose competing needs made her life an agony of fear, paralysis, and

archetypal fantasies. Initially, pre-Oedipal process was paramount, with

intense needs for mirroring and holding of her material. Through a narrow-

band controlling transference, she experienced an idealized mother-imago,

which although limiting in its exclusion of shadow elements, managed to

initiate her into a new world of psychological experience. Her life took a turn

for the better, but nevertheless it was striking how slowly her new experiences

actually reconstructed the old.

78 Sherry Salman


Eventually the idealized and archetypal transference field opened up, how-

ever, into dissociation and projective identification. The timeless quality of the

previous sessions disappeared, and she became aware that she actually could

not remember previous sessions. She became paranoid, feared that therapy

was controlling her, that she was too dependent on me. Interestingly, a third

element had entered the personal transferential arena, a teacher with whom

she was studying. She became convinced that I was jealous of, and competitive

with this teacher, that she would have to choose between us, and that I would

never let her enjoy her new experience. As the dissociated envy and depend-

ency were projected, the stakes rose: Should she terminate therapy in favour

of studying with her teacher, then come back to me when she wanted to?

Would I kill her for this?

I of course found myself having grave doubts about this teacher, alternating

between feeling identified with keeping her in treatment and punitively sup-

porting her exit ‘for the good of her ego-development’. I felt victimized and

powerful, controlled and controlling. The confusing field of projective identi-

fication was in full swing. In my rational moments, I understood this field as

an attempt on her part to communicate the experience of her psychotic parent,

a creation of a kind of metaphor, an attempt to forge the previously missing

associative affective links to her dissociated experience – that is, envy, hatred,

dependency, and fear. The persecution which had been kept in abeyance and

mitigated by the idealization was out.

In the midst of this phase of treatment she had a dream which was quite

startling. In the dream, she and I are in my office, in an uncomfortable session

as usual. But she is amazed to see another woman in the room, a mysterious,

numinous figure who is holding out in her hands a small, shining sphere, which

held both our reflections, and was obviously intended for us. The dream was

so powerful that I had a strong urge to look around the room! It did not,

however, immediately break up the confusing affective field.

I felt that the dream figure was in the tradition of a daimon, genius, or inner

companion, and that it embodied an aspect of the projective identification

associated with the Self. It was offering something helpful, like a ‘medicine’

in the form of a reflecting stone, and I wondered if in fact the ‘spontaneous

gesture’ of the Winnicottian true self, the projective identification, was the

medicine, if it could be understood constructively by the analyst. The clinical

issue began to feel not only a matter of analysing an entrenched paranoid-

schizoid defence, or of assimilating the compensatory negative pole of the

Mother archetype, but also of witnessing and participating in an act of creation

profoundly related to wholeness, and expressed by the psyche in a numinous

symbol of the Self.

The reflecting stone, like a crystal ball, brought a third, archetypal element

into the transference field: an invitation to ‘skrye the spirit vision’ (use an

object to enter a trance for the purpose of making a link to other worlds;

Regardie 1984) for, psychologically speaking, a different vision of the inner



world. In the countertransference, my reflections on the projective identifica-

tion were re-visioned accordingly, shifting from a vision of a defence to be

analysed or merely survived to that of a Self-process, the affects of which were

to be metabolized and contained creatively. In the world of participationmystique and projective identification every relationship offers the possibility

of a sharing of essentials. The rituals involved link up personal allegory with

archetypal affects through a chain of archaic correspondences. The analyst’s

role in this linking, and in the sharing of essentials is crucial. The rituals of

projective identification are symbolic experiences, but are also specifically

concrete, and they cannot be replaced or omitted or abstracted from the

imagery in which they are expressed. This calls for the analyst’s presence in

the here-and-now: for the analyst to experience, metabolize, contain, and

eventually participate in re-writing the affective experience in the transference

field.

The fact that the tremendum of the lapis constellated within the context of

the shared dialogue of projective identification suggested that there was, at

least in part, a mythopoetic relationship between them, and that the lapis

could not be abstracted from this dialogue. But I wondered what facet of the

symbol of the Self it was. Amplification from alchemy tells us that there is a

special ‘medicine’ which can help prepare the body for the initial separation of

the mind from the unio naturalis. The alchemists envisioned the medicine as a

physical and quintessential equivalent of the lapis, of the Self (Jung 1963,

para. 677–8). The medicine was both concrete and symbolic at the same time,

and was healing because it was ‘like’ the illness; it was, as portrayed in

the dream, a concrete expression of a symbolic process, as was the projective

identification.

This alchemical medicine had constellated in the analysis, and the initial sep-

aration of mind from body was now in process with the patient: the ‘medicine’

of projective identification was freeing the archetypal dimension from a

concrete life in the transference. Or put another way, disidentification from

archetypal affects was in process. This disidentification appeared as a spontan-

eous, emergent movement on the part of the psyche, reflected in a symbol of

the Self. However, this emergent movement took place, I believe of necessity,

within a transference field in which the metabolism of archetypal affects was

shared with the analyst in a living experience.

Interestingly, the symbol of the Self which appeared in the dream was not

primarily a compensatory symbol of the Self, expressing order or unification,

or even expressing a transcendent or redemptive sense of meaning. It did not

appear to be a ‘concealed pole’ around which everything revolved. Neither

was it an image of the formation of the philosophers’ stone, or a hard-won

achievement of consciousness. In fact, these interpretations might have led into

further splitting on a number of levels, and away from the matter at hand.

But this didn’t mean that there was no significant experience of the Self. The

luminous experience of meaning, felt by both of us, was in the emergence of

80 Sherry Salman


the patient’s unique psychological ground and reality, embedded in, not

abstracted from, the analytic dialogue in which it was born. The symbol of the

Self emerged concurrently with the process of re-categorization within the

transference field, in which the metabolizing and re-categorization of counter-

transference reactions played an important role. This sharing of essentials is

part and parcel of the creation of psychological territory from archetypal

wilderness in the pre-Oedipal field. The symbol of the Self which expressed

this was not primarily compensatory or redemptive, but rather related to

wholeness and meaning as a kind of marker of the moment when the arche-typal and the human co-mingled and gave birth to psyche. In the words of

post-modern narrative theory: this was the moment the analysis yielded up her

‘story’.

Conclusion

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, writing in relation to the symbolism of the Self,

Jung explicates a weird alchemical text which goes like this:

If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosenthe pores of the earth, and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workersof wickedness.

(Jung 1963, para. 190)

In deep dissociated states which manifest in projective identification usually

neither reductive nor archetypal interpretations generally serve the process.

What seems necessary is a different sort of clinical dialogue, a full participation

in re-categorization and re-contextualization, a direct mythopoetic experience

of events and images, which is neither personal nor archetypal, but partakes

of both. Through the therapeutic drama of sharing, metabolizing, and rein-

tegrating projective identifications, dissociated pieces of psyche were expressed

by establishing affective connections between them, between love and hate,

dependency and persecution. In the alchemical metaphor, this is a moistening

of the earth with its own water, reflected in a symbol of the Self.

Our health and viability as professionals and the soundness and creative

potential of our clinical model still depend on the notion of the Self and

the experience of wholeness. But an ordering and redemptive symbol of the

Self is not always to be found in the pre-individuation field, and it is certainly

difficult to maintain a reified image of a ‘concealed pole’, given what we

know about neurobiology, and about how consciousness and psyche actually

emerge. What I have proposed, in line with these recent formulations, is a

clarification of Jung’s ‘dream of totality’ as an ‘emergent’ Self, which still

reflects an archetypal process and functions in the service of wholeness. But a

symbol of the Self expressing the emergence of psychological reality, and

embedded in the dialogue through which it was created, operates at all levels

of the developmental process. It is also compatible with what we know about



dissociative phenomena, and the contributions of the archetypal school. These

strands of Jung’s original ‘occult’ vision have unfortunately unravelled and

split apart from the whole, one consequence of which has been to leave the Self

stranded in a transcendent dimension.

When working at early levels of process, integration is set into motion at the

archetypal rather than the ego level. The analyst has to help rewrite the arche-

typal dynamic expressed by the patient, by participating in sacrificial dramas

such as projective identification. Such sacrificial dramas seem to be the arche-

typal basis of the early transference, requiring the analyst to accept the role of

sacrificial victim and allow the projection onto and into oneself of the patient’s

affective experience and processing the urge to act-out into a deeper level of

meaning.

At subsequent levels of process, activation of the transcendent function is

the basis for a more developed transference. Both sacrificial dramas and the

transcendent function, however, may be expressions of the spontaneously

emerging Self. In the case I described, the crucial question was how to listen to

the patient’s psyche in a way which changed the narrative from being one more

instance of a persecutory repetition compulsion into a new story, a different

narrative? The early splittings needed to be held and recontextualized in the

transference, which is what allowed new psychological affective ground to be

claimed. This was the magic moment when the divine became human, when

archetypal affect became psychological experience, expressed by the psyche in

a luminous symbol of the Self: a transformation which seems to suggest the

magic of the Self in the pre-individuation field.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article explore la pertinence de l’idée du soi de Jung dans la psychologie pré-

oedipienne et pré-individuation. Se reliant à des connaissances de la neurobiologie et des

théories récentes sur la mémoire et la reconstruction narrative, l’auteur propose une con-

ception post-moderne du soi s’apparentant à ce que Jung a appelé un ‘rêve de totalité’.

Une telle conception du soi est différenciée d’une structure reliée à l’image de royauté

ou d’une imago dei, et est vue comme un aspect du fonctionnement psychique qui

se met en accord avec le sens qui emerge et le nouveau terrain psychique en train de

naître. Sont établis des liens remontant aux premiers interêts de Flournoy, William

James, et de la psychologie des profondeurs pour la téléologie, l’occulte et les capacités

créatrices de la psyché.

Remettant à jour cette tradition du mystère, le matériel clinique illustre le fait que des

narrations du soi sont présentes dans des dynamiques pré-oedipiennes telles que la

dissociation et l’identification projective. Ces dynamiques sont comprises comme étant

non seulement des défenses archaïques, mais aussi comme des expressions mytho-

poétiques et des métaphores symboliques reconstitutives d’un soi, plus dans son

émergence que dans son rôle de surordonnement.

82 Sherry Salman


Diese Arbeit untersucht die Relevanz des Jungschen Selbstkonzepts im Bereich der prä-

ödipalen und prä-Individuations-Psychologie. Unter Einbeziehung von Daten aus der

Neurobiologie und neueren Theorien von Gedächtnis und narrativer Rekonstruktion

wird ein postmodernes Selbstkonzept vorgeschlagen ähnlich dem, was Jung einen

‘Traum von der Ganzheit’ nannte. Ein solches Selbstkonzept ist abzugrenzen von einer

reifizierten Struktur oder einer deifizierten Imago; es wird als jener Aspekt psycho-

logischen Funktionierens gesehen, der mit entstehenden Bedeutungen und der Geburt

neuen psychologischen Bodens im Einklang steht. Rückwärtige Verbindungen werden

hergestellt zu Flournoy, William James, und dem frühen Interesse der Tiefenpschologie

an Teleologie, dem Okkulten und den kreativen Eigenschaften der Psyche.

Indem klinisches Material illustriert, wie Narrative des Selbst in der präödipalen

Dynamik in Gestalt von Dissoziation und projektive Identifizierung vorliegen, werden

diese Geheimtraditionen auf den heutigen Stand gebracht. Diese Dynamik wird nicht

nur als primitive Abwehr begriffen, sondern als wiederherstellende symbolische Meta-

phern und mythopoetischer Ausdruck eines entstehenden, nicht eines übergeordneten

Selbst.

Questo scritto si occupa dell’importanza clinica che l’idea del Sè ha all’interno della

psicologia che riguarda la fase pre-edipica e pre-individuativa. Utilizzando dati che

provengono dalla biologia e dalle recenti teoríe dela memoria e della ricostruzione nar-

rativa, viene proposta una concezione post-moderna del Sè che può essere assimilata

a ciò che Jung chiamò ‘sogno di totalità’. Tale concezione del Sè viene distinta da una

struttura reificata e da un’immagine divinizzata, ma rappresenta quell’aspetto della

funzione psicologica che si lega a significatí emergenti e al sorgere di un nuovo terreno

psicologico. Vengono fatti collegamenti con Flournoy, con William James e con i primi

interessi della psicologia del profondo nei confronti della teleologia, dell’occulto e delle

capacità creative della psiche.

Risalendo fino a questa tradizione del misterioso, il materiale clinico mostra come

manifestazioni del Sè siano presenti in certe dinamiche pre-edipiche quali la disso-

ciazione e l’identificazione proiettiva. Tali dinamiche sono considerate non solo come

difese primarie ma anche come metafore simboliche costruttive e come espressioni

mitopoietiche di un Sè emergente più che di un Sè sovraordinato.

Este escrito explora la relevancia clínica de las ideas de Jung sobre el Self en la

psicología pre-Edípica y de pre-individuación. Incorporando datos de la neurobiología

y teorías recientes sobre la memoria y la reconstrucción narrativa, un concepto post-

modernista se propone como análogo a aquello que Jung denominó un ‘sueño de

totalidad.’ Tal concepción del Self debe ser distinguida de una abstracción estructural

o de una imago deificada, y es considerada como es aspecto del funcionamiento psico-

lógico armónico con significados emergentes, y con el nacimiento de un nuevo terreno

psicológico. Se establecen conexiones con las ideas de Flournoy, de William James, y

los tempranos intereses de la psicología profunda en la teleología, lo oculto y las

capacidades creativas de la psique.

Poniendo al día esta tradición de interés por el misterio, el material clínico ilustra

como algunas narrativas del Self están presentes en dinámicas pre-Edípicas como la

disociación y la identificación proyectiva. Estas dinámicas son entendidas no solo como



defensas primitivas sino como metáforas simbólicas reconstitutivas y expresiones

mitopoyéticas de un emergente, más que como expresiones de un Self sobreordenante.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Conference

of Jungian Analysts in New York in 1996. My thanks to John Beebe, Gary

Brown, Don Kalsched and Laurel Morris for their critiques and contributions

to that manuscript.



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