“Spacious Enough to Receive What Came to Me”: An Interview with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky tells the story of how synchronicity and a bad dream flung her into a Jungian analysis, how her experiences as a young woman in India opened her to the Jungian Weltanshauung, and how analysis gave her access to her passionate and absorbing inner life. She speaks about her relationship to inner figures—her muse, her ancestors—and how they continue to influence her life and writing.     

Recognition of Difference in the Author–Discussant Relation: Reply to Commentary

This author describes how poetry infuses her way of thinking, feeling, and writing and her way of working analytically. She introduces the concept of a nonanalytic third—the analyst's personal, intimate, and substantially abiding relationship to some body of experience unrelated to materia psychoanalytica. She posits that this nonanalytic third, the nature of which is unique to each analyst, constitutes a source of enrichment, texture, and dimensionality as well as personally compelling metaphors that the analyst may offer to the patient as other-than-me substance and a placeholder for cultivating the potential in the discourse of analytic potential space, in addition to serving as a facilitator and comfort for transition when the analyst must recognize and promote the necessary ending of an intimate analytic relationship.

Using Stephen Mitchell's notions of intersubjectivity and also using the analyst's and patient's separate role responsibilities in the creation of a context for the absence of conscious intentions, the author develops her concept of the nonanalytic third and the particular contribution of poetry to clinical process. These ideas are illustrated with a detailed case example of an unfolding analytic process that includes an e-mail exchange at the time when a shocking form of nonanalytic third appeared—September 11, 2001.     

Psyche and Cinema: “Go Ask Alice (or Neo); I Think They'll Know”

The Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland is a musical animation beginning in a semi-pastoral setting with butterflies, birds, and daisies. Alice is bored with the textual reading of classical history being given by her uptight Victorian sister. Instead, she wants images, pictures in a book. She sees image as world. “In my world, books will have nothing but pictures,” she declares. This thought takes her further into her imagination and the deconstructive realm it creates. “Everything will be what it isn't and not be what it is.” Finally, she looks into a pond and the reflection of a white rabbit dressed in a frock coat passes by. The mirror of the water surface has released an image of the “other,” an animal, difficult to catch and associated with luck, fertility, and the underground. Alice follows the rabbit into a hole and takes a fall, a radical descent into the underworld. She speculates about descending through the earth to the other side and walking around upside down. She finally lands in front of a door with a punning knob that takes three linguistic “turns.” For Alice, it is impassible but not impossible. Stuck and distraught, she finally gets caught up in the flow of her tears, and rides through the door on her stream of consciousness.     

A Book to Think With: Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ work with Augustine’s Confessions offers a model for a “philosophical life,” a term used in an earlier century for a life focused on seeking wisdom. As Miles reviews her life, she traces how she has come to see in all the particularity of her experience “what really exists.” She shares many scenes from her life, but most striking is her frank exploration of sexual experience in its complexities as a doorway to the kind of knowing that leads us to gratitude. She found Plotinus’ understanding of what really exists as the “surround-love of the All” most useful. This review describes how her autobiography permits fresh thinking and talking about God among those of us with a modern worldview.     

“Jung Has Always Seemed Like an Old Friend”: An Encounter with Claire Dunne

This article provides an account of a visit with the author of a very popular Jungian book, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, in which the interviewer relates his conversation with Claire Dunne about her relationship with Jung and how she got involved in Jungian psychology. She also discusses the workshops she has done around the world and the fascinating dreams she has had of Jung.     

People are not cabbages: reflections on patient and analyst change

The author describes how her own internal change was a vital part of transformation between herself and two patients. She draws on Loewald's work as she discusses how change in her own internal relationship with her father was part of a lifelong emotional reorganization of Oedipal relations. She describes a process of mutual change whereby her and her patients' unconscious growth each stimulated the other. She suggests that the analyst's own emotional growth is a vital, not an incidental, part of psychoanalysis, as it brings new life to the work for patients as well as analysts themselves.     

Creative surrender: A Milnerian view of works by Y. Z. Kami

Born in 1900, Marion Milner started psychoanalytic training in 1940, following a trajectory which took her into territory later developed by Winnicott. She was an independent thinker who drew on a variety of sources to explore her own and her patients' creativity. She linked the creative process to psychic health and to the ability to achieve a level of perception that leads not to the re‐creation of lost objects but to the creation of what did not exist before. By linking Milner's theory of perception to works by Y.Z. Kami, I draw parallels between a psychoanalyst's perception of the creative process and that process as described and executed by an artist. Milner's lens and Kami's brush both articulate thoughts and feelings about what it means to be human, the condition of mortality and, after Freud, the illusions that sustain mankind through the creation of the gods. This study looks at how the work of an artist and a psychoanalytic thinker can be mutually reinforcing and inter‐animating, thereby broadening and deepening the insights gained from both.     

African Dreamers and Healers

The author spent five summers in South Africa, doing a cross-cultural study of the indigenous healers among the Zulus in Natal Province, near Durban. She compared the indigenous healers, the isangomas, with a second and seemingly evolving group of healers in the Zulu culture, called prophets. The prophets are connected with a powerful, breakaway Christian movement in South Africa and other parts of Africa that is known as the African Independent Churches or AIC. In this article she shares the conclusions of her research and her comparison of the ways the Zulu healers interpret and value dreams and how Jungian analysts might interpret similar dreams. She sought to identify and understand how the Zulu god-image might be in flux as the Zulu culture is changing in response to other cultures, in particular, the more powerful Western European culture with its advanced technology. Relying on Edward Edinger's conceptualization of the consequences of the destruction of the god-image, she concludes that, in this case, instead of the “cup being broken,” it could be that the “cup is changing its shape.”     

The Question of a Jungian Community

The author describes her relationship with the reality of Parkinson's disease—how she twists and turns and pivots and falls with this rapacious intrusion, and how a new, hitherto unknown space opens between Parkinson's and herself. This new space claims its own dynamic, objective reality. In attempts to consciously access the reality of this third space, the author faces paradox, “plays” with metaphor, and tries to recognize the right “reality.” She considers Freud's reality and pleasure principles, Winnicott's iconoclastic declaration of “health being the ability to play with psychosis,” and Jung's transcendent function. She also calls on Hermes with his wings to fly through otherwise impenetrable borders. As an incantation, an evocation or a pathway, she implores Hermes to breathe in flight. In the midst of this inner work, the dragonfly literally appears, emanating transformation.     

Change,Vulnerability, Fear,and Taking Risks–An Interview with Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The author addresses the mythic characters of Ulysses and Penelope as archetypes for herself. She reviews divergent attitudes, beliefs and aspirations of her life by detailing an internal conflict between her identification with Ulysses1 adventuresomeness and her reluctant realization that Penelope can also represent her, however much she rejected her for seeming dull and repetitve

In this process the author notes how she constricted her own creativity when she took on uncritically the patriarchal beliefs about the roles of wives and mothers. Nevertheless she wonders whether present-day women's liberation from archaic notions about women inadvertently sacrifices the optimal development of children because of the rigid demands of the work-place.

Finally she experiences the symbolic reunion of Penelope's and Ulysses' different images within herself, and considers how what each represents can have renewed meaning for her as she moves towards the end of her life.     

Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800?ms in the neutral context, 600?ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450?ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated.     

Encounters with raven

I have been visited by Eurydice. She first came to me, unbidden, unexpected, in the way things usually first come to me–in a poem. But there was something different about how this poem happened. On one of my Fridays devoted to writing, I was suddenly hijacked by Eurydice's point of view, her voice, her demand that I speak for her. She was shrill. She was insistent. She gave me no choice but to work on the poem till I had gotten it how she wanted it. She feels she has been much neglected and misunderstood, and she let me know a poem was not enough. It was just the beginning. She wants prose. She wants essays. She wants public presentations. She wants me to tell her version of the story.     

Edith Stein's Philosophy of Woman and of Women's Education

Edith Stein, Husserl's brilliant student and assistant, devoted ten years of her life to teaching in a girls’ secondary school, during which time she gave a series of lectures on educational reform and the appropriate education to be provided to girls. She grounds her answer to these questions in a philosophical account of the nature of woman. She argues that men and women share some universally human character’ istics, but that they have separate and distinct natures. Her awareness of the rich variety of different personality types and specific differences among individuals allows her to hold an essentialist view of the nature of woman without either stereotyping individual women or assuming that woman's nature is in any way inferior to man's.     

When I Reach the Place I'm Goin', I Will Surely Know My Way

This is a story of love and courage. As the author describes some of her most memorable experiences while traveling on the first all women's raft trip down the Grand Canyon in 1978, we learn how her love for the outdoors inspires and informs her sense of courage. She learns that courage can be gentle and "quiet" or boisterous and "noisy." She describes how the exigencies of river life require that women learn to cooperate and work together despite discord and differences, and how working together results in an increased sense of competency, self-esteem, and power.     

Make New Friends but Keep the Old: The Sisterhood Bonds that Have Shaped Me

The relationships in an Asian American psychologist's life have helped to shape her as a person as well as a professional. Specifically, a review of significant female relationships indicates that they have contributed to the author's therapeutic style. In this article, the author explores some of the relationships with other women in her life and illustrates how they have informed her role as a therapist. She concludes with a case vignette illustrating how some of these concepts were applied to a long-term therapy client.     

Part III: Short Papers from the Course

ABSTRACT

At the end of each class, we ask students to write either an annotated bibliographic essay on a psychoanalytic subject of their choosing or a short paper. We include here three examples of the kind of work we receive. The first is an annotated bibliography written by Monica Black, a drama major, who has been “play-acting” since childhood and who is now a serious actress, exploring the question of “Why Perform?” She wrote the paper when she was a sophomore. The second is written by Becca Stine, a junior creative writing major, who, when she saw Waiting for Godot at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, had moving insights about her relation with her sister, insights that were enhanced by the psychoanalytic reading we did in relation to the drama. The third, by first-year neuroscience major Peter Lehman, is an annotated bibliography that seeks to understand how neurobiology and psychoanalysis can best intersect.     

NATURAL GOODNESS AND NATURAL EVIL

In Natural Goodness Philippa Foot gives an analysis of the concepts we use to describe the characteristics of living things. She suggests that we describe them in functional terms, and this allows us to judge organisms as good or defective depending on how well they perform their distinctive functions. Foot claims that we can judge intentional human actions in the same way: the virtues contribute in obvious ways to good human functioning, and this provides us with grounds for making moral judgements. This paper criticises Foot’s argument by challenging her notion of function. I argue that the type of judgement she makes about living things requires an evolutionary biological account of function. However, such an account would render her meta‐ethical claims implausible, since it is unlikely that human beings are adapted to be maximally virtuous. I conclude that Foot is wrong about the logical structure of our judgements of human action.