Female ego ideal conflicts in adulthood

A woman's early development, including the unique mother-daughter bonding, the development of her body image, her castration and annihilation fears, and the interaction with her father, causes specific conflicts when she comes to make choices about motherhood and career. She struggles with disrupting and changing the early mother-daughter bond, with her belief that she should be able to accomplish what she expects of herself without help, with her priorities of relatedness to others as she deals with a larger number of people. She struggles with assertion and anger in her self-interest and with ego ideal expectations that demand she have infinite patience and caring for others.     

Allergic to People: Building Bridges in a Ripped Psychic-Soma

An exploration of the use mind/body metaphors in a woman whose physical, environmental and psychoneurotic trauma culminated in an irreversible colostomy. She lived in a world of concrete symbols, her primary process damaged such that she could not create generative symbols to process her trauma. She regressed to a state of infantile megalomania, recoiling from the external reality of subjective others. Her introjective disorder mirrored her digestive disorder as she could absorb neither good objects nor good nutrients. The analytic situation has been an auxiliary fecal container and we work to bridge her mind body split with mind/body metaphors. As she reclaims lost development mastery, she displays a symbolized sphincter. As her capacity to form symbols grows, she rages and mourns for the loss of her fantasized ideal parents and her ideal body.     

A physically handicapped teenager is helped to own her body

In this paper I am presenting my work with a 15-year-old girl, Nina, who was born premature with congenital feet deformities. Her twin had died at birth, and Nina spent eight weeks in a Special Care Baby unit. She had also suffered from bronchial asthma, which was under control during the months she was in therapy with me.

An attempt to overdose, and a letter she had written to a teacher, brought Nina to our services and to individual psychotherapy. The weekly sessions gave Nina the opportunity to elaborate her mourning for the dead twin and to face her physical problems more realistically. She had coped with these by idealising a beautiful body and giving it, in her phantasy, to her dead sister for whose death she felt responsible. Her identification with characters from horror stories, of which she was an avid reader, was a key to understanding how she felt trapped in her deformed body, to which she would refer in the phrase ‘It doesn't bother me.’ The working through of her feelings of guilt, anger, and envy enabled her to lessen the split and to own her body.     

Gray Matters: A Deployed Physician’s Perspective on Combat Medicine in Iraq

A female physician who was serving as a first-year medicine resident in Manhattan in September 2001 writes this paper. It details her experience of signing up for military service as a result of the September 11th attack on the United States. She lays out the surroundings, atmosphere, and reactions of those around her during the attack and details her own personal motivations for joining the military, her need to take control and help those in need heal while also trying to heal herself. Grateful, yet haunted by her experience, she provides an intimate glimpse into her time serving as a combat physician at a trauma hospital in Balad, Iraq during the 2007 military surge. A trained geriatrician and palliative care physician she recounts the stories of several patients that have forever shaped her life and explores the contradictions and ethical challenges she faced while caring for them ultimately struggling with the uncertainty of whether what she was truly doing was good for those she served or herself.     

Kristallnacht: Experiencing Nazi Germany

Lore Zeller, long-time friend and proofreader of Psychological Perspectives, is a first-time contributor to our journal—or any journal. Lore is also something of an icon at the bookstore of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, where she has worked, dispensing books and wisdom, for over twenty years. She is eighty-seven years old. Over the past few years she has translated all of the correspondence from her German-Jewish parents and in-laws after she, her husband, and their two-year-old son fled their hometown of Berlin to seek safety in the United States via England. Within a few years of their escape, both sets of parents had perished in death camps. As survivors in Los Angeles, her husband and she helped found the Jung Institute here.

When she mentioned that she had been working on this paper, it was suggested she send it to us for review. After giving the idea some consideration, she eventually overcame her innate shyness — the results of which can be seen in the riveting story that follows.

Lore Haber Zeller is honoring the memory of her parents by using her maiden name with her married name for this publication. —Gilda Frantz     

On mirroring in group psychotherapy

“A woman has two images. There is a magical person seen or remembered by those who love her, her finest qualities are flesh and spirit illuminated. She herself knows this ideal self; she projects it, if she is confident; or she daydreams her ideal self; or she recognizes it with gratitude in the admiring eye of others. There is at the same time a second image; the woman as seen by those who dislike or fear her. This cruel picture has an all too powerful mirror in her own negative idea of herself. She sees with fear her own ravaging impulses and most painful of all, a graceless, freakish, and unlovable physical self, this was the mirror her parents held before Edith. Her brothers saw her with love. She herself knew both images. Her life, and her poetry, constituted a flight from the second one.”     

Abracadabra Tongue: Poetry Magic

The author has known that poetry is magic since she was a child. However when she sat down to write about it she went blank, confronted by the taboo against magic in our rationalistic culture. In the way of Jungian magic she is helped by dream figures. The Muslim Solomon takes her on a flying carpet journey which reveals the magic of poetic influence: how Hafiz influenced Goethe influenced Lorca influenced her, which is how Persian mysticism found its way into her poetry. She tells the story of her development as a poet, how she learned fermentation magic—the difficult and often painful process required by poetic vision and revision in which grapes must be crushed, favorite phrases and metaphors must be ruthlessly smashed. The Queen of Sheba, another dream figure, shows up to tell her version of the story of her relationship with Solomon. She reveals the dark, fierce, and lusty lineage of her “old black magic” and how it has made its way into the author's poetry.     

Sylvia Plath and the failure of emotional self-repair through poetry

Creativity serves not only an aesthetic function but also psychological self-repair for the creative artist. The authors examine the failure of Sylvia Plath's efforts to control her suicidal violence and to bridge her isolation from others via the shared affective experience of poetry. At first, she used traditional forms and mediated images, but when she abandoned them for a more personal expressive art, she lost the shaping, controlling devices she had been using for self-containment and self-repair. They were no longer available to her when she underwent a sweeping narcissistic regression following some very stressful life events. Her emotional deterioration ultimately cost her her life.     

A second Leonardo da Vinci?

We describe a young woman who suddenly began mirror writing with her right hand and has not reverted to normal writing for more than 6 years, although she writes normally with her left hand. She is ambidextrous, although she had previously used only her right hand for writing and drawing. Since it is much easier for her to use right-handed mirror writing, she uses her left hand only for writing meant to be read by others and her right hand for all other writing. Her hobbies are sculpture and painting, and her chief complaint is migraine accompanied by sensory and perceptive disturbances.     

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930)

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was fourteenth President of the American Psychological Association, invented the paired-associate technique, founded an early psychological laboratory, and developed a system of self-psychology. Her eminence as a psychologist and a scholar was widely acknowledged and she was the recipient of two honorary degrees. Calkins published prolifically in both psychology and philosophy, moving away from psychology into philosophy during the latter half of her career. Both her work in psychology and philosophy came to center on the importance of the self. Calkins studied with William James, Josiah Royce and Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard in the 1890s, and although she completed all the requirements for the Ph.D., she was not granted the degree because she was a woman. In 1902, she was offered a Radcliffe degree which she declined on principle, because she believed that work done at Harvard should be recognized by a Harvard degree regardless of whether the recipient was a female or a male. On many occasions throughout her life, she expressed her opposition to differentiation between the sexes based on the assumption of inherent differences in mental abilities.     

Impediments to the development of attachment

The function of the mother's reverie, as described by Bion, is viewed as a psychological parallel, following birth, to the physical function of the placenta.

Clinical material from psychotherapy with a 3 1/2-year-old girl illustrates that, as long as she maintained the delusion of being attached to her mother's body by a physical placenta, she was hindered from learning to experience herself as a separate individual and from developing normal feelings of attachment and grief over loss.

She was referred soon after her parents' separation when she showed a lack of reaction to the loss of her father. The material suggests that at the time of separation from her father she regressed to an earlier stage where there had already been a failure to work through infantile separation and individuation from her mother

The material reveals stages of her emergence from an illusory state of union, into one in which she could increasingly tolerate her separate existence. There followed an enrichment of her psychological means of communication through the use of imagination and symbolic play. She also became more receptive to her therapist's communications and could increasingly use psychological support to share and face inner pain.     

学习压力引发焦虑情绪的咨询——我是一位“笨”女孩

本案例是一位刚入学的研究生,由于是跨专业读研,学习统计,实验有点吃力,担心自己做不出科研成果。从而压力大,情绪低落,认为自己是位"笨"女孩。咨询师主要运用认知疗法,帮助其调整认知观念,运用合理情绪疗法对求助者心理问题进行了分析,改善其适应不良情绪,咨询效果明显。     

一例使用态度治疗对大学新毕业生神经衰弱的案例报告

大学新毕业生工作适应不良是常见的现象,也是目前大学生就业担忧和顾虑的问题之一。这位刚毕业进入工作岗位的求助者出现了明显的抑郁症状,且在咨询过程中发现其抑郁的根源可以追溯到童年时期,并且有深刻的家庭教育文化背景。诊断为神经衰弱,采用态度治疗和心理稳定化技术后,经过两个月的咨询,求助者的神经衰弱症状基本消失,对自己和未来的态度基本明朗。一个月后电话回访,显示咨询效果良好。     

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.     

The countertransference: When painful traumatic traces sustain the countertransference and reveal themselves to the psychoanalyst … 14 years later!

Although she experienced, as did the many psychoanalysts before her, the countertransferential dynamics of disgust towards a patient presenting great deficiency in terms of mentalization capacity, the author strives to understand what urged her to tolerate the patient, to invest in her and lead her to develop a capacity for internalization, after 6 years of analytic work filled with transgressive‐transferential acting‐out. Fourteen years later, she becomes aware of the way in which the revival of some grief related to traumatic traces in her own lived experience, sustained, without her knowledge, a saviour/countertransference, creating a specific transferential‐countertransferential spiral which rescued a situation whose advent could have been compromised. This could happen thanks to what she refers to as the unique inter‐relation between her and this particular patient.     

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): mysticism and worship

This article focuses on some themes in the work of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941). It is now over a century since she began work on the first version of Mysticism (1911). She was a pioneer not only in the study she undertook for this book, but in the specifically Christian theology she was bold enough to work out from it, with Christ in person the paradigm mystic. The Latin Mass of her day she deemed both as recapitulating Christ's own experience, as well as re-presenting the stability and growth of his ‘Body’ present at the Eucharist. Once recommitted to the Church of England in 1921, at a time of liturgical revision and in a deeply troubled political era, her concentration on Christ's sacrifice led her to embrace pacifism as the world lurched towards World War II. Her theological work, summed up in her final major book Worship (1936), reveals her continuing preoccupation with the question of how Christology integrates with liturgy, and therefore with the living of a distinctively Christian life.     

“My Spiritual Journey to Know and Find Myself”: An Interview with Manisha Roy

In this interview, Manisha Roy shares how she became interested in Jungian psychology and how the concept of the shadow became a living help in her life. She relates how she has dealt with the heritage from her native country of India and shares her experience with marriage and divorce. She expresses her opinions about the future of depth psychotherapy.     

Simone Weil’s Passion Mysticism: The Paradox of Chronic Pain and the Transformation of the Cross

Simone Weil’s theology is deeply connected to her experiences with chronic pain. Pain is paradoxical in that it is an essentially private phenomenon yet it simultaneously demands to be shared with another. Weil’s life and thought exemplify both aspects of this paradox, demonstrating how her pain alienated her from her own body and from others, and how her thought found full expression as she attempted to share experiences with pain. Weil’s experience of pain was transformed in her passion mysticism, the deep connection she felt with the crucified Christ. In this connection, the most unbearable aspect of her pain, the threat, which it presented to her very self through annihilation, was absorbed into the cross and transformed by God’s love. While this did not necessarily diminish Weil’s pain, the meaning it had for her as a person was transformed through an encounter with Christ crucified, in which she experienced God’s suffering along with her.     

Experiences of spiritual visitation and impregnation: potential induction by frequency-modulated transients from an adjacent clock

A left-handed Roman Catholic female adolescent with a history of early brain trauma reported nightly visitations by a sentient being. During one episode she experienced vibrations of the bed, an external presence along the left side that moved into her body, inner vaginal (not clitoral) and uterine sensations, and the sense of being impregnated by a force she attributed to the Holy Spirit. After the latter experience she felt an invisible baby superimposed upon her left shoulder. Analyses of the measurements for magnetic anomalies within her bedroom indicated an electric clock about 20 cm from her head while she slept. The complex form of the 4 microT magnetic pulses generated by the clock was similar to shapes that evoke electrical seizures in epileptic rats and sensitive humans.     

Light and shadow in the life and work of Louise Nevelson

The life and work of the artist Louise Nevelson are examined through the lens of her ideas about light and shadow. Nevelson developed several ways of dealing with a basic fault established in childhood. Some ideas of Christopher Bollas are used in understanding the artist's relationships with art dealers who served her as transformational objects. The artist became the grandmother of environmental sculpture in America and saw her work as a bridge between the third and the fourth dimension--an idealized realm and a popular concept in twentieth-century art that she related directly to light and shadow. Colette Roberts, a dealer with whom she worked, allowed Nevelson to arrive at a signature style. Arne Glimcher, who represented her for twenty-four years, provided the material and psychological comfort that allowed Nevelson to explore new materials and new styles and to arrive at aesthetic solutions of remarkable power and sophistication through her eighty-ninth year. From the time she met Roberts in 1953 until the end of her life thirty-five years later, Nevelson's ideas about light and shadow expressed not only her thoughts about visual perception but her experience of her mother as her original transformational object and unthought known.