UNION-DEATH DYNAMICS IN ANALYTIC PRACTICE

In dealing with the coniunctio-nigredo sequence in analytic practice, the analyst must thus be alert to the darker forms of union. For example, the so-called negative transference can be such a union state forged through hatred and envy. Yet it is also a union state in which fusion drives and individuating tendencies towards separation are intertwined. If seen as a coniunctio and respected as such, the negative union state can develop along the creative lines set out by the Rosarium. In other words, if the analyst only looks for positive union states that ‘feel good,’ he or she will never be working within an alchemical spirit and will not help the analysand to work towards mind-body linking or the creation of a self. These same remarks are of course true for any couple attempting to embrace the depth and mystery of relationship.

The following, extensive clinical material illustrates the union-death dynamic in the albedo phase of the first ten woodcuts. This case also highlights errors that occurred in the nigredo stage and the process of repair that then took place. The material is taken from the fourth to the sixth years of my work with a female analysand suffering from relationship issues related to early physical and sexual abuse (Schwartz-Salant 1990).

During the first four years the theme of incest and its devastating effect never arose; it had also been hidden in a number of her previous analyses. One of her initial complaints was that her previous therapist told her that he found her spiritually but not sexually attractive. This judgment was a grave injury to her, and when she spoke about it, she was in a state of mind-body splitting and mental blankness. But most significant for our later work was my willingness to side-step these dissociated states of mind and instead focus upon her statement as an injunction to me not to reject her.

After four years, she began recalling memories of being sexually abused by her older brother, and much earlier by a nursemaid. At this time, we explored the sadomasochistic nature of her inner life, first as it expressed itself in brutal self-attacks for what she took to be her role in the incest episode and then in even harsher attacks that she had made it all up and was really crazy. As this theme of incest gradually became more central to our work, I found myself internally resisting the possibility that it could really have happened to her. She then began a session with a question: ‘What do I do with my feelings when I feel no connection with you?’ It was as if she had said, on the one hand, that she had no feelings at all and then that she had said, on the other hand, that she had feelings. The confusion and emotions that accompanied the posing of this question were so charged that I tried to avoid the effects and contradictory nature of her communication; but I only felt challenged and angry. I was bewildered by the strength of my reaction, but I mostly side-stepped it and focused upon a sense of being irritated with her. I took this feeling, along with my tendency to dismiss her question as unimportant, as representing an induced reaction to her masochism. I challenged her by insisting that a connection did exist between us, but it was on a sado-masochistic level; and I focused the session on exploring these dynamics as they were developing within projective identification. I

thought a good deal had been accomplished, but the result was the emergence of a psychotic transference.

In subsequent sessions, the analysand was blank, withdrawn, and terrified. She took anything that I was saying to her or had said to her in previous sessions in a very literal way. For example, at one point in the previous session, while engaged in what I took to be a mutually enlivened field through which I was experiencing introjects from a projective identification process, I said: ‘You expect me to hate you and find you a disgusting whore.’ I experienced this fantasy as pressing into my awareness during the session, and I believed that I had sufficiently processed it internally so that I could share it as an imaginal process and thus bring it to her awareness in the here-and-now of the analytic session. My shocking language was cast in the material of many previous sessions in which we had dealt with her self-attack stemming from memories of her brother’s sexual abuse of her. I had come to believe that by now she knew she was an incest victim, but I was soon to learn that while this knowledge had been assimilated by her normal neurotic ego, it had not been assimilated at all by her more psychotic parts.

Thus, with the interactive field enlivened, I believed I experienced the analysand’s sado-masochistic couple in which her inner sadist was blaming her for the incest and, in effect, accusing her of being a whore. I thought I was bringing this dynamic out and into consciousness by giving it voice. In fact, I was revealing my inexperience (at that time) both with the anti-worlds of the opposites in psychotic processes and with counter-transference tendencies to avoid these areas by creating meaning. Furthermore, if I had recognized that the sado-masochistic couple was not ‘hers’ but ‘ours’ and that this couple was a negative form of the coniunctio, I would have provided a far better container for the analysand, and the nigredo that followed would have been less severe and less dangerous. However, this awareness only came to me several months after my inappropriate intervention.

Counter-transference errors are extremely common when dealing with the nigredo that follows a coniunctio. A (sado-masochistic) union state had preceded this session, but my desire to avoid the blank and dark states of mind of the nigredo caused me to not remember, to believe in the existence of and not a preceding state of connection. This connection was now totally absent from the analysand’s awareness; and if I had been more conscious, I would have recognized that this connection was also absent from my awareness. I forced a connection. Contradicting the wisdom of the ‘Tale of Isis to her Son Horus’ to create ‘like from like,’ I erred in trying to create order and meaning in a chaotic, meaningless state as a defence against that condition.

In his investigation of alchemy, Jung mentions that the nigredo ‘brought about a deformation and a psychic suffering which…[compared] to the plight of the unfortunate Job’ (1963, 14: paragraph 494). The alchemical writer Olympiodorus notes the pain, struggle, and violence of the nigredo, saying that ‘all the while [a] demon…instills negligence, impeding our intentions; everywhere [this demon] creeps about, both within and without, causing oversights, anxiety, and unexpected accidents’ (Jung 1963, 14:

paragraph 493). And the philosopher Petasios says: ‘So bedeviled and shameless is the lead that all who wish to investigate it fall into madness through ignorance’ (Jung 1963, 14: paragraph 493). If the alchemists are correct, investigating the difficult experiences associated with the nigredo will bring about levels of psychotic transference and

countertransference, and ignorance will rear its head anew in each case.

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung records various alchemical texts that depict the coniunctio and its results. In a sense, the alchemical texts are like X-rays that show what lies beneath the surface of phenomena that are often dealt with through a personal historical perspective. According to Jung, the coniunctio has undesirable results at the beginning (1963, 14: paragraph 152). He explores the nature of one of these negative images, the rabid dog, in a way that I find particularly insightful as it relates to the clinical material under discussion:

The infant hermaphrodite, who is infected from his very cradle by the bite of the rabid Corascene dog, whereby he is maddened and rages with perpetual hydrophobia; nay, though of all natural things water is the closest to him, yet he is terrified of it and flees from it. O fate! Yet in the grove of Diana there is a pair of doves, which assuage his raving madness. Then will the impatient, swarthy, rabid dog, that he may suffer no more of his hydrophobia and perish drowned in the waters, come to the surface half suffocated… Keep him at a distance, and the darkness will disappear. When the moon is at the full, give him wings and he will fly away as an eagle, leaving Diana’s birds dead behind him.

(Jung 1963, 14: paragraph 182) Jung views the source of madness, the rabid dog, not only as dangerous but also as the source of a new spirit, the eagle that ascends from its transformation.

Jung links the rabid dog to chaos or the prima materia, or to lead which ‘contains a demon’ that drives the adept mad (1963, 14: paragraph 183). Elsewhere, Jung refers to the enemy of the new birth as the ‘thief’ (1963, 14: paragraph 193). In clinical practice, this dangerous quality takes various forms, including incest. The alchemical symbolism of transforming the rabid dog or thief can reflect the arduous process of creating an analytic container for the anxieties, shame, panic states, and associated opposites split in a mad way that accompany the return of the experience of incest abuse. The ‘thief’

represents an experience of losing, over and over again, any seeming gains in awareness or linking with the person. The miraculous transformation into an eagle can appear in terms of an idealized transference as a manifestation of the spirit archetype (Schwartz-Salant 1982, 43–44). When the analyst works with the unbounded, chaotic and extremely distrustful states of mind to which imagery such as the rabid dog refers, he or she can experience the emergence of both a creative, idealized transference and the extreme vulnerability that accompanies such transference as a quite miraculous occurrence. At this point, however, the analysand had no perceptible idealization.

The analysand, largely through my blunder, thus entered into her psychotic part, but with a certain degree of containment. She was filled with distrust and terror toward me.

Yet, largely through the sane part of her being, she also knew that she had to work things out with me; an alliance did exist. She had written up the session which began with her question about feelings and her connection to me, and her belief that I had said that I hated her. At this point, I was still (foolishly) committed to helping her more normal ego qualities recognize the distortions of her psychotic part. I was looking ‘at her’—not ‘my’

or ‘our’—psychotic distortions, trying to help her sort out reality. When we finally went

back to her initial question, I told her that I felt angered by it, which I experienced as an attack upon our work. I had tried to forge a connection that did not exist, which I could now see was a hostile act on my part. Only after this kind of exploration, in which I began to reflect upon the validity of her perceptions, did she find some relief. Now, a space was reconstituting in which she could again work on her incest issues and her psychotic qualities which had been manifesting as extreme splitting, withdrawal, reality distortion, and suicidal drives.

If I were to foster the integration of her psychotic part rather than to fortify her normal-neurotic ego, I would have to acknowledge openly the truth of her perceptions, even if these perceptions could be seen as partial and distorted. Such acknowledgement can help the analysand to risk recognizing and expressing perceptions such as feeling hated by the analyst. My analysand, I later learned, was terrified that such an assertion would lead to my decision to terminate the analysis.

The reality distortions that stem from the psychotic part would appear to make the act of acknowledging the truth of the analysand’s perceptions quite hazardous. The analysand could use such a procedure to reify further his or her distortions. But my experience is that, unless a schizophrenic process is at work, this concern usually does not prove to be problematic and is often based upon the analyst’s introjection of the analysand’s fears of being abandoned for having been confrontational. Unless the analyst finds a way to mirror the accuracy of the soul’s vision, he or she will rarely succeed in helping the analysand integrate the depth of his or her being that is trapped in psychotic distortions.

In a subsequent session, the analysand said:

I cannot trust anyone. I’m in a cold, withdrawn place and I am terrified of the power you have over me. If I tell you anything of what I thought last night you can annihilate me in an instant. I have never before felt the total power you have over me and it terrifies me. I just want to withdraw and totally leave everything, this process, life.

At this point, her terror now centered upon what I had said when we went over the session, for I told her that she ‘heard’ me say that she was a disgusting whore. I explained that I did not actually believe that she was a whore but that I was playing out a fantasy with her, a process of which I thought she was aware while it was happening. She listened intently, and I thought I was making progress in helping her to see her reality distortions. In the next session, I learned that it was not the ‘whore part’ that got to her but rather that I had said that ‘she “heard” me say’ what I said, implying to her that I had not said it at all and that she was psychotic. She felt that I had annihilated her perceptions, and she was left not knowing what to believe or trust.

She was especially terrified by the possibility that I thought she was crazy. She felt that now I was just soothing her and lying to her. As I again explained that I had actually said what she believed I had said, but that she had taken it in the wrong way, it was becoming clear, even to me in my absurd attack on the psychotic elements between us, that I was having little effect. I then asked myself: Where is she correct? She believed that I had said what I did because I really felt that she was a disgusting whore, but that I was now

denying this feeling. Her belief could stem from her psychotic part or from a trickster-like force dominating our process—Mercurius in his demonic form, trickster-like the rabid dog. Or was her belief rooted in a perception of my own mad parts, with which I have had, when with this analysand, too little awareness?

I did deny her perceptions, as when I did not accurately hear and process her question concerning what she should do with her feelings when she felt no connection to me.

When I insisted that only a change of form in the connection had occurred, I denied what she experienced, namely a space in which she had absolutely no link with me or with herself.

After another session, feeling the stress of my work with her, I recorded the following imaginal process:

I want to thrash her, drown her in a stormy sea, throw her body to and fro in the waves until she will stop this torture of me with her withdrawals and masochism, leaving me always the guilty party. More and more I feel as if I have committed incest with her. I feel as if I am her guilty brother who did it to her and then denied it. I feel the edges of losing the as-if. Did I do it or didn’t I?

I recognized that unconsciously I may have felt this identification for some time, namely that I was her older brother, the one who had incestuously violated her. As a consequence of denying this level of psychotic countertransference, I had been forcing interpretations and trying to feel empathic and related to her, rather than feeling the air of unreality which actually pervaded our work.

CONTAINING PSYCHOTIC PROCESS THROUGH THE FIELD