Psychopathology

Contemporary Jungian Perspectives

Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429918179
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The latest addition to the Library of Analytical Psychology is an outstanding collection of papers written by Jungian analysts from different schools of analytical psychology on various aspects of psychopathology. The subjects covered include depression, anorexia, schizoid personality, narcissistic personality disorder, mania, psychosis, paranoia, masochism, fetishism, transvestism, perversion, marital dysfunction, survivor syndrome, and old age. The book is intended to appeal beyond the Jungian community, and the editor's introductory remarks which precede each paper highlight (and where necessary explain) concepts and attitudes which seem special to analytical psychology. In this way, as with Andrew Samuels' previous edited volume The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, psychoanalytically and eclectically orientated practitioners can make full use of this book. The papers in this volume contain a wealth of clinical knowledge – pragmatic, flexible, disposable, but above all rooted in what actually happens in analysis.

Chapter One
Depressed patients and the coniunctio

Judith Hubback

Hubback’s paper is of interest because of her express intention of using both ‘archetypal structuralist concepts’ and ‘the findings of developmental researchthe former is represented in the paper by a tracking of the dynamics of the coniunctio oppositorum, the patterns within a person of integration and unintegration, harmony and dissonance, and the latter by a study of the part played in her patients’ depression by their having had a depressed mother. Where experience of parental imagos of a depressed kind has led to splitting defences, this has injured the innate capacity of the person for coniunctio. What is more, when the parental marriage is experienced as divisive, weak or non-existent, a further injury is done to the prospect of internal marriage within the patient.

This is the background for Hubback’s noting a special clinical phenomenon in relation to her group of depressed patients: the necessity of analysing the patient’s ‘phantasies about his mother’s inner life’. The interactive focus naturally falls on the inner life of the analyst in general and on her countertransference in particular. Thus the analyst’s participation in the patient’s process is explicitly noticed—and compared by Hubback to the vital presence of the soror, the alchemist’s assistant, in the alchemical process—a Jungian metaphor for analysis itself.

A.S.

Introduction and theme

There are six particular people—patients—whose lives and therapies are at the empirical core of this paper. What they have in common is that their mothers were each of them seriously depressed during their son’s or daughter’s infancy and childhood. The other thing they have in common is that they had their analytical therapy with the particular analyst that I am, and that over the years I have had a growing interest in trying to find out more about what it is that enables someone effectively to emerge from long-term depressions. I would like to isolate one particular factor from those, often explored and discussed, concerning the nature, the manifestations and the treatment of depression. I am thinking of a factor whose absence could be a great disadvantage, but whose presence can enable a patient to become, in the course of therapy and time, less depressed, less frequently so, and less paralysingly; such a factor might also help the person to be less aggressive towards others and facilitate the development of a truly viable sense of self.

Depression as a form of feeling ill, and as a clinical syndrome or illness, has been known for thousands of years and described from the earliest days onwards both by sufferers and by their doctors. A precise or short definition cannot be offered here, particularly as I am not a psychiatrist and because all authorities agree that there is a wide spectrum of symptoms and indications. At one end of that spectrum, depression is a natural reaction to painful emotional experiences, to bereavement and loneliness, to physical ill-health or the approach of death—all features of the human condition. At the extreme melancholic or pathological end of the spectrum the mood change is extreme and persistent. If more of us had time to read (rather than occasionally dip into) Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, as well as to study modern psychiatric textbooks, we would appreciate even more widely than we do from introspection and as Jungian psychotherapists the many aspects of the whole depressive picture. Its main attributes are: (1) alteration in mood to sadness, apathy and loneliness; (2) a negative or otherwise self-attacking self-concept, with self-reproaches and self-blame; (3) regressive wishes, the desire to escape, to deny, to hide, to die; (4) crying, irritability, insomnia, loss of sexual appetite; (5) a low level of general activity, loss of decisiveness and of other ego capacities, sometimes a heightened level of inappropriate anxiety, fear or agitation. In this paper there is no possibility of describing or accurately naming in psychiatric terms just which kind of depression afflicted the mothers of the patients about whom I am writing, e.g. whether these were basically endogenous depressions reactivated during their son’s or daughter’s infancy; the more important common feature was that the mothers had suffered a serious personal loss, a bereavement from which it appeared they had not recovered. None of them was hospitalized; the patients each had a far clearer impression of the depressed moods than of any intervening manic ones that there may have been; and the suicide of one of the mothers undoubtedly affected her daughter’s life most deeply. The manifestations of depression in the patients themselves will emerge, I think, in the course of the paper.

The following thoughts have become the theme of this paper: too many and too strong negative archetypal images are absorbed by an infant or young child from a depressed mother, most particularly if she is a bereaved woman who is still caught up in her anger and sadness, so that she cannot direct herself towards the baby and genuinely smile into its eyes. Not enough validation of its lovableness is offered to such an infant at the stage in life when that experience is essential for a healthy self-belief to develop, which will be based on enough internal feeling that there is more growth than destructiveness both in himself and in his environment. To alter the attitudes stemming from those early inner and outer pathological experiences, an analytical therapist makes herself available for a relationship to grow within which a number of coniunctiones can occur: if, at the level of the objective psyche as manifested in the analyst, there is a well-established coniunctio of internal images, and if the patient is able to identify with that inner healer—whose outer scars may still be evident—then what is happening is that both archetypal structuralist concepts and the findings of developmental research are confirmed.

I am not speaking simply about the patient’s need to (I quote Jung) ‘kill the symbolic representative of the unconscious, i.e., his own participation mystique with animal nature… the Terrible Mother who devours and destroys, and thus symbolises death itself (CW 5, paras. 504-506). The patient with a depressed mother does need to emerge from an unconscious identification with his mother because of the killing quality of her depression and needs to cease participating in her anger and sadness. After the passage quoted above, Jung added in brackets:

I remember the case of a mother who kept her children tied to her with unnatural love and devotion. At the time of the climacteric she fell into a depressive psychosis and had delirious states in which she saw herself as an animal, especially as a wolf or pig…. In her psychosis she had herself become the symbol of an all-devouring mother.

And, following that clinical vignette, he went on:

Interpretation in terms of the parents is, however, simply a façon de parler. In reality the whole drama takes place in the individual’s own psyche, where the ‘parents’ are not the parents at all but only their imagos: they are representations which have arisen from the conjunction of parental peculiarities with the individual disposition of the child, [ibid., para. 5051

If for the term participation mystique we substitute the words and concepts unconscious identification, then I can go along with the way Jung used Lévy Bruhl’s term. Many writers since Jung have used the concept of participation mystique in a more simplistic manner than he in fact did, at least in the passage quoted. And it is regrettable that the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl should have had his phrase over-used and distorted, when the perhaps rival psychological concepts of projection, introjection, identification and the transcendent function really serve us better. Identifying with those structures in the analyst which have developed as a result of her working on instinctual ‘animal nature’ in herself can and does happen within the therapeutic relationship; projections and introjections can be discerned and described. I think they are marvellous, but not mystical.

The patient with a depressed mother is suffering from a serious narcissistic wound. I develop in this paper the theme that such patients benefit greatly—perhaps essentially—from the analyst using to the full a combination of developmental observations and her own internal search for harmony, for coniunctio.

From the following brief descriptions of the patients (with fictitious names) it can be seen that the character and quality of their mothers’ depressive reactions to the loss of either their husbands or an earlier child ran the whole spectrum of possibilities: paranoid, manic, animus-ridden, schizoid, closed, sulky, aggressive, obsessional and suicidal. Some of these patients made images, or allowed the images to make themselves, easily and early on in their analyses, others with difficulty and only much later. They also varied in their ability to fantasize in the transference, and to dream. Each of them suffered from internal impoverishment.

Anthony

A’s father abandoned A’s mother when he was very young; the precise age is unknown. This unsupported woman suffered all the rest of her life from a depressive and persecutory reaction to that loss. In addition to having to try to learn to live with such a mother, A (who became my patient in middle age) had certainly inherited some of his father’s capacity to opt out of emotional commitments. He was evacuated at the age of six from a large city, with his school, for the duration of World War II, and billeted with several different families, who treated and ill-treated him in various ways. His parental imagos were of course very confused. He related to other people in as distant a way as possible. Virtually the whole gamut of possibilities reappeared in the transference, from delusional idealization, via distancing coldness, to destructive hatred. Trust and self-confidence grew only slowly, through many discouraging phases.

Belinda

B’s father disappeared even earlier in his child’s life than did Anthony’s; she thinks he was not told she had been born, and he may even not have known she had been conceived. All through her childhood her mother suffered from that, to her, crucial object-loss; it came after other similar losses. As a mother she seems to have been unable to emerge enough from her own narcissistic wounds to offer her daughter (my patient) a reliable self-feeling as a reflector of the child’s potential belief in herself. The mother’s long-drawn-out self-attacks, sulky depressions and obsessional cleanliness were partly introjected by her daughter and partly defended against; the defensive manoeuvre was fairly successful, perhaps as a result of the daughter having inherited from the father what may have been a self-protective ability to push ‘the woman’ to one side. But analysis, as it progressed, revealed how very powerful the damaged and damaging mother still was.

Christine

C was the younger of two children and was in her fourth year when her parents’ marriage broke down in violence, and her mother never forgave her father for the loss not only of economic support but, more dangerously, of personal happiness. While the mother saw herself as the injured and wronged one, the father also had in fact been deeply hurt and deprived of his children. My patient C grew up with an aggressively depressed mother and an absent, rarely mentionable, unmoumed father, for whom all the same she hankered. C’s depression had, for a time, a paranoid quality to it. In her, the defences of the self (Fordham, 1974) were obstinately structured, and early in her analysis she was blocked against using her imaginative or symbolizing capacities.

Dominic

D’s mother had lost her first son when he was aged about eight months, before D was born, and although there was no factual evidence that he was a mere ‘replacement baby’, his insistent conviction of hardly having his own real identity was tenaciously held on to for many years. His mother’s depression was so thoroughly introjected that it acquired a most powerful melancholic grip on him. He knew a great deal about the losses of other significant males in his mother’s and his maternal grandmother’s lives, each of those males having either died suddenly or been killed in various wars. In analysis the transference projections were intense, violent, cold, envious and haunting; the countertransference affect was inescapable. But, as in the cases of A and B, he had internal warmth, which, however strenuously he used his splitting defences to ward it off, always came back sooner or later.

Erica

E’s mother had had to leave her country of birth and childhood when, as a teenager, her parents became refugees. This woman apparently never fully accepted the loss of her mother country: she gave all her children, E and her brothers and sisters, names that were clearly foreign in the country of their birth, which was in the Antipodes. E could not identify with a mother who was still mourning, everlastingly yearning for the impossible. She came to England. She developed moderate anorexia nervosa; in spite of the somatization of her mother complex she made a fair beginning in analytical therapy. But the shadow of her mother’s depression came between her and all attempted relationships with men or women. And my offer of intensifying her analysis, which would have taken it a stage forward, into a deeper commitment, and would have involved the underlying archetypal structures, led to her abrupt flight to the place where her parents still lived, as far away from me as possible: the other side of the world.

Freddie

F was the first of three children of his mother’s second marriage: before that she had twin sons in a marriage which had broken down in a way or from a cause which F never heard mentioned, Her intensely erotic relationship with F when he was a baby and a child, her grousing attitude to life, her constant denigration both of the twins and of F’s father and a number of physical ills probably indicate a long-term depression. There was a mysterious or glamorous other man between the two marriages. She does not seem to have mourned the failure of her first relationship, nor the disappointment over the mystery man, but moaned about her marriage. F was very closely bound to her and decided one day early in puberty that he was a homosexual. He would not move from that decision: it meant to him that he was not an ordinary or banal man like his father, he was going to be extraordinary, his mother’s lover. He himself was not a depressed man, but his psychic development was held up by the bond to a mother who had—as far as I could tell—not been able to mourn losses which occurred before F’s birth.

In the interests of analytic theory it would be satisfying if it were possible to point to some factor in these people which seems to have made them especially liable to identify with their mothers, and to receive the projection of the mother’s damaged self. For example, the stage of the patient’s life at which the mothers were bereaved might be significant: but it was not the same for all, e.g. the first year of life, or one of the later developmental stages, such as the oedipal one, when the incest archetype dominates. Then, another possible factor would be personality type; they were all certainly more introverted than extraverted, but in terms of the classical Jungian typology of the four functions I can discern no categorical significance.

Another possibility, to which I incline, but it is a speculative one, is that the characterological feature of both the mother and the father by which each of them was both victim and victimizer had been inherited by the son or daughter, and the component of aggression—passivity led the child to identify with the available parent, namely the mother, in whom the victim/victimizer syndrome had led to depression. That factor would be a somewhat subtle version of the well-known defence of identifying with the aggressor. The theme of identification needs more examination than is possible here, and contributions from several angles, with clinical examples.

Self-feeling, narcissistic deprivation and depression

Many analytical psychologists have studied both the self in the sense that Jung used the term, and the patient’s sense of himself, self-feeling, or self-experience. Moreover, the originally psychoanalytic (Freudian) term, narcissism, is currently used more frequently in studies relating to the Jungian self and the primal self by analytical psychologists than in Jung’s own writings. (See, for example, Ledermann, 1982; Gordon, 1980; Humbert, 1980; Schwartz-Salant, 1982; Kalsched, 1980; and Jacoby, 1981). The study of narcissistic personality disorder is proceeding apace, within a current Jungian frame of reference. Jungians are also making use of Kohut’s and Kernberg’s post-Freudian observations. My impre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Bibliography and Conventions
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Depressed patients and the coniunctio
• 2. Success, retreat, panic: over-stimulation and depressive defence
• 3. A psychological study of anorexia nervosa: an account of the relationship between psychic factors and bodily functioning
• 4. Object constancy or constant object?
• 5. Narcissistic disorder and its treatment
• 6. Reflections on introversion and/or schizoid personality
• 7. Reflections on Heinz Kohut’s concept of narcissism
• 8. The borderline personality: vision and healing
• 9. The treatment of chronic psychoses
• 10. The energy of warring and combining opposites: problems for the psychotic patient and the therapist in achieving the symbolic situation
• 11. Schreber’s delusional transference: a disorder of the self
• 12. Masochism: the shadow side of the archetypal need to venerate and worship
• 13. The psychopathology of fetishism and transvestism
• 14. The androgyne: some inconclusive reflections on sexual perversions
• 15. The archetypes in marriage
• 16. The analyst and the damaged victims of Nazi persecution
• 17. Working against Dorian Gray: analysis and the old
• Index