Working with chronic and relentless self‐hatred,self‐harm and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections

This paper is the first of a two‐part series which explores some of the theoretical and experiential reference points that have emerged in my work with people whose relationship to their body and/or sense of self is dominated by self‐hatred and (what Hultberg describes as) existential shame. The first paper focuses on self‐hatred and the second paper focuses on shame. This first paper is structured around vignettes taken from a 14‐year analysis with a woman who was bulimic, self‐harmed and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. It draws together elements of Jung's concepts of the complex and symbol, and Laplanche's enigmatic signifier to focus on experiences of ‘inner otherness’ around which we are unconsciously organized. It also brings Jung's understanding that emotion is the chief source of consciousness into conversation with Laplanche's approach to the transference which is that by being aware that they do not ‘know’, the analyst provides a ‘hollow’ in which the patient's analytic process can evolve. These combinations of ideas are linked speculatively to emerging understandings of the neuroscience of perception and throughout the paper clinical material is used to illustrate these discussions.     

‘Thank God I’m not a Jungian’

This article focuses less on the content of Jung's ideas than on ways in which they act as both invitation and challenge to engage with psyche. It explores the mythic framework of Jung's approach and how this can enable individuals to live in psychological and mundane worlds in which there can be no final certainties. It elaborates three particular aspects of Jung's thinking that I have found personally valuable: his generosity of vision, his insistence that individuals engage for and with themselves rather than relying on someone else's ideas, and his ponderings on the relationship between the individual and the collective. All three aspects seem to be important elements of the work of individuation.     

Political and clinical developments in analytical psychology, 1972‐2014: subjectivity,equality and diversity—inside and outside the consulting room

Utilizing Jung's idea of theory as a ‘personal confession’, the author charts his own development as a theorist, establishing links between his personal history and his ideas. Such links include his relationship with both parents, his sexuality, his cultural heritage, and his fascination with Tricksters and with Hermes. There follows a substantial critical interrogation of what the author discerns as the two main lines of clinical theorizing in contemporary analytical psychotherapy: interpretation of transference‐countertransference, and the relational approach. His conclusion is that neither is superior to the other and neither is in fact adequate as a basis for clinical work. The focus then shifts to explore a range of political and social aspects of the clinical project of analytical psychology: economic inequality, diversity within the professional field, and Jung's controversial ideas about Jews and Africans. The author calls for an apology from the ‘Jungian community’ for remarks about Africans analogous to the apology already issued for remarks about Jews. The paper is dedicated to the author's friend Fred Plaut (1913‐2009).     

Outside‐In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or ‐ Knowing me,Knowing Jung – ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one‐sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the ‘inner life’ over the ‘outer’ can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on‐going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The ‘ambiguation’ of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.     

‘Who is my Jung?’ The progressive,though sometimes ambivalent,expansion of Jung's idea of the collective unconscious: from an ‘unconscious humanity’ to – in all but name – the soul of the world

This paper discusses Jung's idea of myth as a projection of the collective unconscious, suggesting that the term ‘projection’ separates human beings from nature, withdrawing nature's life into humanity. Jung's discovery of a realm independent of consciousness – in conversations with his soul in The Red Book, and in synchronicity, began a dialogue which finally brought him, through the Alchemical Mercurius, closer to the idea of a world‐soul.     

Bridging worlds: participatory thinking in Jungian context

Introducing the ‘participatory’ paradigm associated with the work of transpersonalists Richard Tarnas and Jorge Ferrer, the author outlines an approach to Jung's archetypal thinking that might offer a more adequate basis in which to ground a non‐reductive approach to practice. In order to demonstrate the relevance of this outlook at the present time, the author begins by examining recent debates concerning the nature of ‘truth’ in the clinical setting. Reflecting on the difficulties analysts face in attempting to maintain professional authority without falling into an implicit authoritarianism, it is argued that any approach to therapy seeking to orient itself towards ‘the unconscious’ must posit the challenges of pluralism as a central concern for practice. With reference to the relationship between analytical psychology and the psychoanalytic mainstream, attention is drawn to the theoretical problems raised by the relational commitment to constructivist epistemologies, and a consequent tendency towards biological reductionism. Turning to the Jungian literature, similar tensions are observed at play in the present state of analytical psychology. Drawing attention to the process‐oriented qualities of Jung's work, it is suggested that the speculative nature of Jung's psychology offers a more adequate basis for contemporary practice than might be assumed.     

Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.     

Saying goodbye to the hero: Jung,Liber Novus and conversion from addiction

Two chapters in Liber Novus throw fresh light on Jung's epistemology of addiction. Taking these as a starting point, the nature of the challenges that patients confront in leaving addiction behind are explored. It is suggested that an archetypal process of separation is constellated at the point of quitting as the precursor to a life without the object of the addiction. A short account is given of Jung's part in the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous and the potential role of a ‘conversion experience’ as an initiation into psychological reorientation away from the negative individuation experienced by the hero. The case of a patient addicted to heroin illustrates the contribution of an analytic approach in an NHS setting, along with other workers in a rehabilitation centre. Certain challenges of working with addicted people are outlined, including arousal of the psychotherapist's rescue fantasies.     

Revisioning Fordham's ‘Defences of the self’ in light of modern relational theory and contemporary neuroscience

This paper explores the evolution of Michael Fordham's ideas concerning ‘defences of the self’, including his application of this concept to a group of ‘difficult’ adult patients in his famous 1974 paper by the same name. After tracing the relevance of Fordham's ideas to my own discovery of a ‘self‐care system’ in the psychological material of early trauma patients (Kalsched 1996 ), I describe how Fordham's seminal notions might be revisioned in light of contemporary relational theory as well as early attachment theory and affective neuroscience. These revisionings involve an awareness that the severe woundings of early unremembered trauma are not transformable through interpretation but will inevitably be repeated in the transference, leading to mutual ‘enactments’ between the analytic partners and, hopefully, to a new outcome. A clinical example of one such mutual enactment between the author and his patient is provided. The paper concludes with reflections on the clinical implications of this difficult case and what it means to become a ‘real person’ to our patients. Finally, Jung's alchemical views on transference are shown to be useful analogies in our understanding of the necessary mutuality in the healing process with these patients.     

A revolution of the mind: some implications of George Hogenson's ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ (2001)

George Hogenson's 2001 paper ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ developed the radical argument that, if archetypes are emergent, they ‘do not exist in the sense that there is no place that the archetypes can be said to be’. In this paper, I show how Hogenson's thinking has been seminal to my own: it is not just archetypes but the mind itself that has no ‘place’. The mind is a dynamic system, emergent from the cultural environment of symbolic meanings to which humans are evolutionarily adapted. Drawing on the work of philosopher John Searle, I argue that symbols constitute the realities that they bring forth, including the imaginal realities of the psyche. The implications for clinical work include a rejection of structural models of the psyche in favour of the emergence of symbolic realities in the context of psychoanalysis as a distributed system of cognition.     

Freedom and the psychoanalytic ontology of quantum physics

Jung's paper ‘Synchronicity – an acausal connecting principle’, defining the phenomenon as a ‘meaningful’ coincidence depending on archetypal activation, was published in 1952, together with a conceptually related piece by physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli entitled, ‘The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler’. Slavoj ?i?ek, in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, suggests that, in contrast to any notion of a ‘pre‐modern Jungian harmony’, the main lesson of quantum physics was that not only was the psychoanalytic, empty subject of the signifier constitutively out‐of‐joint with respect to the world, but that the Real in itself was already incomplete, out‐of‐joint, ‘not‐all’. Yet while ?i?ek frequently tries to separate Jung from his own ontology, this paper shows that his ontology is not as different as he suggests. Consistent with our earlier publications on Jung and Zizek, a closer investigation reveals an underlying congruence of both of their approaches. In this paper we show that this affinity lies in the rejection by both Jung and ?i?ek of the ideology of reductive materialism, a rejection that demonstrably draws on quantum physics in similar ways. While Jung posits an inherently meaningful universe, ?i?ek attempts to salvage the freedom of human subjectivity by opposing his Lacanian ‘dialectical materialism’ to reductive materialism.     

Reflections on the Jungian nature of psychology as the discipline of interiority: a response to Saban's ‘Misunderstandings’

Psychology as the discipline of interiority is the name of the psychology that has developed from Wolfgang Giegerich's work in the field of analytical psychology. This article offers a counterview to that of Mark Saban's claim that Giegerich's psychology is ‘irrelevant’ to Jungians today and is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Jungian psychology. It will be shown that, in fact, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Giegerich's work that has led Saban to form erroneous conclusions. Links between Jung's and Giegerich's conceptions of the ‘objective psyche’ will be highlighted, along with other examples of how, contrary to Saban's conclusions, psychology as the discipline of interiority has obvious connections to, and grounding in, Jungian psychology.     

The analyst and analysand as citizens in the world

Beginning with Jung's reflections on individuation as a starting point, this article examines the analytic relationship in the context of our current reality. The latter exerts pressures of all sorts that do not favour individuation. Indeed, geopolitical commentators see present‐day society as marked globally by excessive self‐love that seeks to dominate, at the expense of the other. Given that such forms of dominance are now also very prevalent in the workplace, this article examines how to help the increasing number of individuals with highly successful professional careers who suffer from this pressure and who then seek analysis. ‘Progressive movement’, an indicator of and incentive to change, is examined by studying the narrative processes emerging from dream activity ‐ including dreaming with the hands in the sand tray ‐ in the co‐transference. The article highlights how ‘progressive movement’, founded on narrative Competence and on the reflective function, may generate experiences of ‘realistic hope’. The latter signals the start of an individuation process in the analytic couple and, simultaneously, the transformation of both the analyst and the analysand into good enough ‘citizens in the world’.     

Soul in the world: symbolic culture as the medium for psyche

Whilst the loss of a sense of living connection with the material world is mainly associated with the scientific revolution in seventeenth century Europe, it can be traced back to Plato's introduction of a hierarchy between soul and body. Jung's attempted solution to this – esse in anima – is ingenious but maintains the Cartesian split by which the aliveness of the world is reduced to a projection of psychic forces (the archetypes). An alternative approach is proposed, rooted in the Aristotelean emphasis on practical activity that sees the soul as a function of our way of being in the world. Human cognition is extended and distributed by our social and material engagement with the world, especially via collective representations whose symbolic character is constitutive of the reality of the world in which we live. Despite the dominance of ‘scientific Cartesian’ representations in the modern Western world, there remain numerous instances of participation mystique that cannot be captured by the Cartesian notion of projection. These indicate an opening to ways of being in the world that may lead us out of the impasse of the Cartesian matrix.     

A Strange Fire: an exploration of psycho‐spiritual development aided by Jungian analysis and Vedanta

This paper explores the process of psychological and spiritual development through a series of active imaginations arising from the author's ‘psycho‐spiritual quest’, a process of transformation in which the individual progressively frees themselves from the ego's identifications and may be afforded a vision of the ‘self as consciousness’, as described by Vedanta. The author describes how this quest was facilitated by the disciplines of Transcendental Meditation, Jungian analysis and Vedanta, and how these three disciplines can work together to foster psycho‐spiritual development. The paper aims to de‐mystify the actual experiences that can accompany these practices. The records of these active imaginations, tracing some key stages in this process, are then presented, with a commentary by Marcus West, linking them to Jung's concepts of ego and Self and recent understandings of consciousness and ego development. There is a discussion of Jung's conceptualizations of the ego and the Self and his rejection of the Vedantic understanding of the Self as consciousness. These views are then explored and a reconciliation is suggested through the understanding of the process of disidentification where the difference between Jung's view of the Self and that of Vedanta is understood to be due to the extent of disidentification from the contents of consciousness.     

Imaginal action: towards a Jungian conception of enactment,and an extraverted counterpart to active imagination

This theoretical paper considers the fashion in which Jung's psychology radically challenges modern assumptions concerning the nature of subjectivity. With an eye for the clinical implications of Jung's late work, the author introduces the idea of imaginal action. In order to explain what is meant by this, the paper begins by exploring how Jung's thinking demonstrates an underlying bias towards introversion. It is argued that while Jung's interest in synchronicity ultimately resulted in his developing a worldview that might address the introverted biases of his psychology, the clinical implications of this shift have not been sufficiently clarified. With reference to some short examples from experience, the author outlines a conception of relational synchronicity wherein the intrapsychic emerges non‐projectively within the interpersonal field itself. Comparing and contrasting these occurrences to the more introverted practice of active imagination, it is claimed that such a notion is implicit in Jung's work and is needed as a corrective to his emphasis on interiority. The author suggests that imaginal action might be conceived as a distinctly Jungian approach to the psychoanalytic notion of enactment. It is also shown how the idea outlined might find further support from recent developments in the field of transpersonal psychology.     

The ethical dimension of analytical psychology

The centrality of the ethical dimension in Carl Gustav Jung's analytical psychology is demonstrated through careful reference to fundamental moments in the Jungian text. Tracking Jung's statements about the primacy of the ‘moral function’ (or ‘moral factor’) in the cure of neurosis as well as in the process of individuation, the ethical nature of the psychotherapeutic praxis proposed by Jung is highlighted. This allows us to see the ethical aspect of psychological conflicts, and thus to understand better why individuation can be seen as a ‘moral achievement’. Finally, the intelligible ethical structure of Jungian psychotherapeutic praxis is exposed.