The Half-Alive Ones

Clinical Papers on Analytical Psychology in a Changing World

Eva Seligman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429920967
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Half-Alive Ones consists of nine clinical papers and two more theoretical ones. It celebrates almost fifty years of therapeutic work, depicting some of the author's most poignant professional experiences, both personal and collective. The author sees herself as an eclectic Jungian, with a flexible approach to analysis and therapy, revealed in her case studies, which demonstrate that the author rarely works with a single person who is ill by himself. She finds it more fruitful to perceive him and to treat him as part of a total situation, which he brings into the consulting room: his family of origin, his work situation, and part or current significant relationships. The author attempts to confirm her deep-felt belief that good listening, sensitive timing, versatility, and evaluation of the other's truth, are indispensable ingredients of every therapeutic hour. Analysis is but an arid endeavour without compassion and creativity.

Chapter One
The case for a versatile approach to analytical practice

All insights are private and words but vehicles we use to convey the incommunicable. Yet we continue the attempts to pool information, hopeful of stimulating an interchange of ideas based on our own experience, and to learn from one another.

In this chapter I shall be describing adaptations in my own practice, which I believe to have evolved out of our changing civilization. These adaptations seem, to some extent, to lie outside the mainstream of analytical practice and, moreover, require a highly diversified approach from patient to patient that cannot readily be accommodated within our traditional conceptual framework. My account naturally has a subjective, if you like an autobiographical, side to it; and here I take courage from the following lines in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

I am often asked about my therapeutic or analytical method. I cannot reply unequivocally to the question. Therapy is different in every case. When a doctor tells me that he adheres strictly to this or that method, I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect. . . . Psychotherapy and analysis are as varied as are human individuals. [Jung, 1963]

To begin with I should like to make four points, which I shall afterwards illustrate with case material.

First, I should like to emphasize the effects on the analyst of the consequences of the very considerable growth in psychological information to which the public has access through mass media. Never before have ordinary people been so assailed, in countless publications, by psychological topics, frequently slanted, often tendentious, and regurgitated by questionable sources. As a result, far too many people assimilate what passes for psychological knowledge in a way that promotes confusion rather than genuine understanding. As regards treatment, the widespread sedating and tranquillizing of patients, together with the extensive consumption of mind-bending drugs, more often than not merely glosses over the reason for the mental pain and conflict, producing perhaps some improvement in functioning for a time, but yielding little insight into the meaning of those symptoms.

These phenomena do little to lessen the ever-escalating isolation of the individual. At the same time they contribute towards a growing demand for some form of psychotherapeutic help. Consequently, available resources are severely stretched. Fortunately, minimal intervention can often bring about a real change for the better in a serious crisis. I cannot see how analytical psychologists can afford to turn their backs on this situation.

Second, I shall pay attention to the fact that my current practice is increasingly shifting towards younger patients, chronologically in their twenties and thirties, but all the same greatly concerned not only with acquiring an identity, but also searching, as it were, for the discovery of their true selves. My experience of working with many people in the first half of life bears out Michael Fordham’s views on individuation as a continuing process throughout the whole span of a lifetime (Fordham, 1969). The more traditional model of a predominantly reductive analysis of young people seems to me no longer adequate to the understanding of the present-day generation. It omits an important therapeutic ingredient. Jung referred to it when he wrote: “Every trace of routine can prove to be a blind alley” (Jung, 1933).

Third, I am of the opinion that I rarely work with a single patient who is ill by himself. I find it more fruitful to perceive him and to treat him as part of a total situation, which he brings alongside of himself. This approach, while making use of the well-tried tools of analysis, requires other, less well-documented avenues that reach beyond the more familiar two-person analytic set-up. I have therefore deliberately refrained from referring to transference phenomena.

Fourth, I maintain that economic considerations in their widest sense, i.e., the energy and time resources of both analyst and patient as well as the financial situation, need to be given their rightful place. Geographical distances, for instance, can impose considerable restrictions. Although many patients are, of necessity, willing to travel for hours, they must continue to earn a living and to care for their children. Therefore, unless a great many people, sometimes desperate, often well motivated and psychologically accessible, are to be turned away, the therapist must be prepared to make concessions. Mindful of the analyst’s limitations as well as the patient’s inner and outer resources, I am in favour of remaining flexible. The cutting of corners, whether it is by necessity or by choice, can and does have its therapeutic value. Indeed, I should like to go further and state with conviction that a more directive and reality-testing type of therapeutic approach is no mere indulgence, nor an aberration from analytical procedures, but rather an unavoidable and necessary development.

No one will dispute the fluidity of our present social structure, with its permissive climate; this pattern is bound to be reflected in current practice. By and large, I now feel more comfortable with the doors of my mind and of my room sufficiently ajar to admit the third, the inseparable other to accompany the patient at a given moment in time. It may turn out to be a tape-recording of a young patient on an LSD trip, brought by him in the vain hope of some profound revelation. Only in his subsequent replaying of the tape will he convince himself of the futility of an LSD-saturated session. More frequently, I have found myself confronted with the unplanned and unsolicited appearances of a spouse, of the baby or of unmanageable children, of a beloved dog, and also the frantic parent of an adult patient.

These more flexible techniques, which I now favour with certain of my patients, seem to me to concur with the spirit of Jung’s writing and with his practice. To quote one passage picked at random: “Each case is individual and not derivable from any preconceived formula. Each is a new experiment of life in her ever-changing moods, and an attempt at a new solution or new adaptation” (Jung, 1926).

This does not mean that I have abandoned the basic structure of analytical procedures. I have tried to vary and develop them, but continue to learn from them and how best to apply them. The cases I present will show that it would be difficult to accommodate more than a limited number. I am attempting a fresh approach to my work. Such patients tend to be very demanding in their way, spuriously coming up with surprises that impinge on timetables, plans, and the furniture. This work, though initially based on hunches and conjectures, is reinforced by one’s capacity to understand the meaning of the action; but it is not without risk. I am quite prepared to be drawn into aspects of a patient’s outer life, as well as those of his inner self, and to share his most immediate burden; I will not, however, grant him entry into my private life. Some part of my own space remains sacrosanct.

I shall now give an illustration of a microscopic intervention, which seems to have been incisive in spite of the economy in time, money, and energy. This case might equally well have provided material for an extensive period of work, but circumstances decreed otherwise.

The prisoner

An unknown man with a Welsh accent rang me up. “I am a prison officer. I have a drinking problem which makes me violent towards my wife and child, and I am also in danger of losing my job.” As I had two free hours, I asked him if he would come right away, which he did. He told me his life story. His father had died when he was two, and he had been surrounded and brought up entirely by women, who made him feel suffocated and restricted. He had begun his heavy, solitary drinking when, following the birth of his child, his married life had likewise become constricting and stifling. He felt as if he had lost his wife, who was taken up with the baby, and I linked this with the loss of his father: had father lived, he would have acted as a buffer against the suffocating women of his childhood. I further drew his attention to his attempt to come to grips with his inner predicament by working in a prison where others, not himself, were being deprived of their liberty. This situation could not but repeatedly bring him face to face with his innermost problems, primary among which, after all, was that of feeling a prisoner.

I heard from him on three other occasions in all, each time by a telephone call made at night from a pub. I could hear the hubbub of the bar in the background. “I am about to get drunk again, but I don’t want to.” We had a longish talk, elucidating which recent event or experience had triggered off his flight to the bottle. On the first two occasions, the conversation ended with his saying: “I am all right now. I am not going to get drunk. I shall go home.” Some weeks later he telephoned me for the last time. “I no longer drink. I wanted you to know that all is well. We are emigrating to Australia where a better job is waiting for me.”

That was the end of the contact with this one man; but let me go back to Jung. I quote: “When we are dealing with the human soul, we can only meet it on its own ground, and this is what we have to do when we are forced with the real and overpowering problems of life . . .” (Jung, 1946).

Before I continue, I should like to explain that I tend not to make a decision about whether to take on a patient for analysis if I have any doubts as to whether analysis is the treatment of choice for a given individual. I usually see a new patient for several spaced-out weekly sessions prior to a commitment by either side.

So it was with “the tied-up man”, my second example.

The tied-up man

He was a tall, handsome, young-looking forty-year-old, nonchalant and arrogant. He had been going on and off to analysis with a male analyst who had, quite simply, got fed up with him. His irregular sessions had spanned several years. He was unmarried, and always had been. To some extent he was bi-sexual, falling in love as he did with beautiful young men. However, he also liked playing with girls.

I felt he was intent on intimidating me by his overbearing, presumptuous manner, and he seemed to be trying to play games with me, too. By far the most exciting of these games was that of getting a woman to tie him up, if not in fact, then, at least in fantasy. For him this was the ultimate thrill and triumph. He boasted that he belonged only to his mother as he always had, and it became clear to me that he would use his analyst as a camouflage which would allow him to perpetuate this condition indefinitely.

In his sixth session he spoke with enthusiasm about T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Eliot, 1940). They had been broadcast recently; I had heard them, and been moved by them too. Then I remembered Eliot’s words: “In my beginning is my end”, and later: “what we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning . . .” I took my cue from these lines: without any clear, prior decision the situation with this patient had fallen into place, and I realized that this was to be our last session. I proceeded to explain the reasons to him as follows: he was seeking experiences that would ultimately not change anything but only enable him to hold on to the symbiotic mother whom he had never renounced. I could see that the prospect of cutting the tie with his mother would constitute his renunciation of her magical powers, which he could not yet do without. He made them a part of himself. So I told him if he was ready to tackle this struggle in earnest, he could come back. He went away feeling relieved, perhaps because he had for once encountered a woman who declined to tie him up.

I have recently heard by chance that he is more content with life. I think that whatever was possible at that point in time was achieved and that a long-drawn-out attempt to analyse him would have been sabotaged by him.

My third case links with the idea that only rarely do I work with a single patient who is ill by himself.

Mother with Anna

A woman in her thirties has been in analysis with me for about two years. She has two abortive marriages behind her, and she is frigid with her third husband, a man old enough to be her father, who treats her and even dresses her like a precious doll. My patient has a narcissistic personality, suffers from phobias and hysterical conversation symptoms. Each night she goes through an acute attack of terror, convinced that she is going to die. She is capable of persuading herself that she has the symptoms of every known fatal disease. She also has an eating disturbance, and alternates between gorging herself and starving. Her weight has oscillated between twelve stones and seven. She was an only daughter, and her mother’s “divine child”. She remembers with horror how her mother devoured her with her eyes. Her father was always experienced by her as old, weak, pathetic, and disgusting.

One day, without warning, my patient came with Anna, her only daughter, aged three, clinging on to her. Anna, like mother, was dressed immaculately like a doll, but all skin and bones, furtive, waif-like. Mother was in one of her starvation phases, and said she had brought Anna because Anna would not eat. “You have brought a bit of yourself as a three-year-old,” I said to her.

We encountered a double repetition here. The husband treats my patient as her own mother had, and she in turn does the same to Anna, who is already displaying similar symptoms; Anna also had difficulties in falling asleep, like mother.

To continue with the session: Anna now placed herself strategically between her mother and myself, climbing all over mother like a baby monkey, demanding her unqualified attention, and preventing any communication between mother and me. I am spellbound by what the two of them are enacting. They hypnotize one another with their eyes and are totally absorbed with each other.

Nevertheless, at an unguarded moment Anna’s eyes wandered to a corner of my room where she saw a bowl of fruit. Gradually, she disentangled herself from her mother, and stealthily propelled herself towards the fruit. Mother became tense, watchful, and anxious. I said, “Let her be.” Slyly, with one eye fastened on mother, Anna began to pick at the fruit and became absorbed in eating it, by then quite oblivious of mother, who was talking to me freely. At that moment the grip of exclusive participation between mother and child had loosened.

I talked to my patient about her child’s, as well as her own, need to achieve some separate existence, and linked their mutually shared entanglement with that which had existed between herself and her mother. I reminded her of her ambivalent feelings and resultant guilt towards both her mother and Anna. She hated and resented them both and tried to compensate with stifling closeness. She then confessed to her habitual compulsive need to tell the three-year old Anna everything, quite indiscriminately.

In the meantime, Anna was enjoying herself in her own way. She came and went to the fruit bowl, explored my room, ignored the toys mother had brought and invented her own games. She discovered a low chair and clambered on to it. Having always been very timid, she eyed her mother as before, but mother was now absorbed in herself. Anna became more enterprising, culminating with her leaping off the chair accompanied by cries of joy and release. They both left reluctantly. Anna no longer clung, but skipped up the path ahead of mother. Her subsequent session continued as before; my patient reported that Anna’s eating had become less fitful, and that she herself was keeping to a normal diet.

The two of them came together a few more times, always without prior notice, and for all kinds of different reasons. Anna was filling out, and had become more venturesome. She always made straight for the low chair, which, clearly, she regarded as her own place.

It then became obvious that my patient was making a habit of bringing Anna to the last session before each holiday break. We discussed this emotional exploitation of her child, and her use of Anna as a shield against her own anxieties, just as her own mother had used her.

Mother and child were by now on the way towards something of a separate existence. Mutual enjoyment had largely replaced the hatred and resentment for which she compensated by over-identification. In the past, this had always been the pattern of relating.

I surmise that these developments would have taken much longer, and perhaps not happened at all, had Anna not personally participated.

My next case links with my fourth point, i.e., the impact of reality factors on the analyst’s pattern of work.

The puppet woman

It all began with a long-distance telephone call from a frantic husband. His wife, he said, had slipped into her third bout of depression. She was once again almost totally immobilized; he went on to tell me that they have young children, and that he was a very busy professional man; they were desperate. In spite of heavy medication and ECT her condition was deteriorating. He had spent all day contacting analysts in London, and, since he and his family live a day’s journey away, he had been advised to move all of them to London so that his wife could have analysis. Such a complete uprooting, however, seemed to him impracticable. He was just establishing himself professionally, and as a young family in their first house they were heavily committed financially, and already in debt.

I was uneasy about treating someone so ill at such a distance, but suggested that he ask his wife to write to me. After receiving her letter, written immediately, I felt that anything at a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE The case for a versatile approach to analytical practice
• CHAPTER TWO The half-alive ones
• CHAPTER THREE A psychological study of anorexia nervosa: an account of the relationship between psychic factors and bodily functioning
• CHAPTER FOUR Relationships and the growth of personality Co-written with colleagues at the Family Discussion Bureau
• CHAPTER FIVE An approach to marital therapy
• CHAPTER SIX Working with a couple
• CHAPTER SEVEN The therapeutic moment: reflections on the importance of freedom of communication
• CHAPTER EIGHT Some thoughts on stagnation and resuscitation in analytic work
• CHAPTER NINE On death and survival
• CHAPTER TEN "Experts in mothercraft"
• APPENDIX I: Book reviews
• APPENDIX II: Unedited communications from patients
• REFERENCES
• INDEX