Imagination, Illness and Injury

Jungian Psychology and the Somatic Dimensions of Perception

Melanie Starr Costello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415376389
• eBook ISBN: 9781317796992
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does the body influence the way we see the world?

Imagination, Illness and Injury examines the psychological factors behind perceptual limitations and distortions and links a broad range of somatic manifestations with their resolution.

Melanie Starr Costello applies Jungian theory to a variety of cases, attributing psychosomatic phenomena to cognitive processes that are common to us all. She analyses the role of illness in several life narratives, and interprets the appearance of somatic phenomena during important phases of analytic treatment. Together these case narratives present a significant challenge to established views of psychosomatics. Subjects covered include:

• archetypal constrictions of identity
• somatic elements of perception
• the psyche-soma split.

Imagination, Illness and Injury brings a fresh perspective to the understanding and treatment of the psychotherapy client as a psycho-somatic unity. Jungian analysts, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists will greatly benefit from the clinical applications of archetypal theory presented here.

Part 1

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Chapter 1

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The imaginal system

Archetypes and complexes as perceptual determinants

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Human consciousness is the great mystery of creation. The means by which we apprehend inner life and outer world have mystified philosophers and scientists for centuries. Learned dialogues on the nature of consciousness often return to one key question: is it possible to perceive the world as it truly is? From the founding fathers of psychoanalysis we have inherited many assumptions about reality perception originating in nineteenth-century philosophy and science. Of particular influence on both Freud and Jung was the Kantian view of perception as subjectively conditioned. This axiom continues its hold on psychoanalytic imagination: we do not regard what is perceived in consciousness as identical with the object, whether that object is physical or psychical. Unconscious mental products are the true objects of our perceptions.

In common parlance, perception refers to the mental apprehension of sensation or experience. The Latin word percipere denotes the taking of something (capere) through (per), that is, to thoroughly take up something. To know an experience, percepts from the various modalities – hearing, seeing, touching, along with pro-prioceptive sensations – must first be perceived, then apperceived (contextualized and given meaning), and finally formulated at the cognitive level.

We may therefore speak of a hierarchy of perceptual functioning. The hierarchy begins with those sensory processes known to both humans and animals and ascends to the highly complex levels of verbal and pictorial formulations that are distinctively human. Those processes that mark the province of human knowing involve the elaboration of experience in the fullness of meaning.

In imagining a hierarchy of perceptual experience, psychoanalyst David Beres' (1960) model of perceptive functioning is particularly helpful. Beres speaks of three levels of perceptive experience: the pre-perceptual level; the level of percept; the level of imagination. The rudimentary level is the pre-perceptual. Pre-perceptual experience involves sense data from the primary modalities. This includes the responses of the sensory nerve endings to temperature, pain, touch, proprioception, and pressure. Also included are the special sensory responses of vision, hearing, taste and smell. At this level of experience we speak of sensation, signifying a neuro-physiological experience that is non-reflective.

At the next level primary sensations are organized into percepts. Percepts, found in human and animal mentation, are characterized by their relation to direct and immediate sensory stimulation. They are gestalts and configurations of space, form, and color and are recognizable by the responses they produce. Percepts may involve complicated mentation, but at this level the imaginative process has not come into play. This level of organization of experience involves signals rather than mental representations, or images.

The level of perception that is characteristically human is the level to which Beres applies the term imagination. Here percepts are organized with the involvement of a number of ego functions, producing mental representations. Perception achieves representation independent of immediate and direct sensory stimulation. At this level,

Stimuli emanating from the outer world are organized into a concept of this outer world, of reality; and stimuli emanating from the body organs and the muscles contribute to another part of the concept of reality, the image of the self. But in both instances the stimuli must pass through a complex process before they are conceptualized in the mind.

(Beres 1960: 328)

The distance between the first two levels of perception and the third level is, of course, tremendous. At the first two levels perception is physiological; while at the third, we experience psychic perception, involving mental representation of external and internal reality. Only through the employment of mental representation, that is of imagination, are percepts transformed into perceptions. Apperception – the process whereby we contextualize experience – presupposes this transposition of physiological experience into psychic perception. From this activity of abstraction and conceptualization of sensory experience follows cognition, the apprehension of what is apperceived into the fullness of understanding (Beres 1960: 327–34).

This complex movement from physiological perception to psychic perception is, of course, subjectively conditioned. The awareness we bring to experience involves intricate connections between event, memory, meaning, interpretation, and character. Perceptions draw upon and add to a repertoire of life experience; as apperceptions they have been arranged and colored by our individuality. Our memories and personal identities are a matrix in which experience is contextualized and meaningfully elaborated.

Without imagination, reality cannot be experienced reflectively. With imagination, reality attains representation, becoming an object of consciousness. The mystery of imagining as the means by which we experience the world is the motive force of Jung's psychology:

Far too little in theory, and almost never in practice, do we remember that consciousness has no direct relation to any material objects. We perceive nothing but images, transmitted to use indirectly by a complicated nervous apparatus. Between the nerve-endings of the sense-organs and the image that appears in consciousness, there is interpolated an unconscious process which transforms the physical fact of light, for example, into the psychic image “light.” But for this complicated and unconscious process of transformation consciousness could not perceive anything material.

(Jung 1933: 383–4)

The various depth psychologies recognize the products of our imagining – words, ideas, pictorial imagery, even spacial elaborations – as conditioned by cultural and individual factors. But Analytical Psychology further distinguishes this conditioning from the enduring, ubiquitous structural element: the archetypal pattern.

Where classical psychoanalysis attributes the organization of percepts to the ego's reality functions, Analytical Psychology attributes perception largely to the formal operations of the archetypes. As is well known, Jung conceived his model of the psyche by observing the effects of unconscious processes upon consciousness. Among the effects that he observed was the uniformity and regularity of human perceptions regardless of the boundaries of time and culture. Universal themes in myth, folk tales and dreams suggested a transcultural and transpersonal point of origination. Jung called the apparatuses determining our modes of apprehension the “archetypes” and he envisioned them as the contents of the “collective unconscious.” Thus he conceived the collective unconscious as something that developed out of humanity's experience of the world over the course of eons. As elements that have “crystallized out” of that world, the archetypes function as “ruling powers” determining our modes of perception and our instinctive responses (Jung 1943: 95).

Our apprehension of experience is structured by these innate archetypal forms and, in response to these forms, consciousness reaches out into the environment in search of corresponding elements. But the way in which experience is selected, colored, and con-textualized will be influenced by factors unique to the individual.

The dynamic interplay between archetypal factors and individual qualities begins in infancy. An experience acquires a positive or negative quality, depending upon the infant's success in finding correspondences between archetypal forms and environmental features. The general valence of these positive and negative correspondences is an essential factor determining strengths and weaknesses, response and defense patterns, reality functions, and organizational capacities of the ego complex.

Archetypes determine our perceptions of both the external world and of inner drives and mediate them to consciousness by means of mental representations (images). This formulation begs a question: if archetypes are unconscious determinants of images that appear in consciousness, does the ego not have a role in image production? Where in the psychic system is the image itself formed? In the conscious? The unconscious? Jung himself would have objected to the question; he rejected psychoanalytic attributions of dynamic processes to functions located in distinct systems, suggesting instead that we “accustom ourselves to the thought that conscious and unconscious have no clear demarcations, the one beginning where the other leaves off” (Jung 1954: 200). For example, contents of the personal unconscious are perfectly conscious in certain respects but are known to a subject only “under a particular aspect” or at a particular time (Jung 1935: 57).

Freud is seeing the mental processes as static, while I speak in terms of dynamics and relationship. To me all is relative. There is nothing definitely unconscious; it is only not present to the conscious mind under a certain light. You can have very different ideas of why a thing is known under one aspect and not known under another aspect. The only exception I make is the mythological pattern, which is profoundly unconscious, as I can prove by the facts.

(Jung 1935: 62–3)

Even while accepting the relativity of the unconscious to consciousness, we cannot help but depend upon temporal and spacial analogies for our imagining of body, archetype, and identity as determinants in the dynamics of perception. And as Jung himself admits, archetypal components of psyche remain forever unconscious to us, that is, they reside in the unconscious. As unconscious perceptual determinants residing outside the ego-complex, archetypes can never be accessed in themselves by consciousness (Jung 1954: 213–14). We must therefore picture the unconscious, rather than the ego-complex, as the “place” where archetypal operations transform sensory impressions into meaningful constructs. Thus, the mental representation (image) is something that stands between the archetype as the formal unconscious element in perception and the consciousness that apprehends it. At the same time, it becomes necessary to speak of mental representations as “appearing at” (or “over”) the threshold of ego-consciousness, for all representations, even highly typical motifs, must contain conscious personal elements before consciousness can apprehend them (Jacobi 1959: 35).

It also follows that the archetype is the agent responsible for the selection and synthesis of personal contents for the production of mental representations. And we must assume the involvement of the personal unconscious when we consider the necessary mingling of percepts with existing elements of experience (memories, emotions, ideas) – personal elements that rest for the most part in the unconscious until archetypal operations release them into consciousness. Perhaps Jung had this function in mind when he speaks of the “archetypes of perception and apprehension, which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes” (Jung 1948a: 133).

Perceptions become available to consciousness through a complex process of selection, categorization, and synthesis of stimuli. Attributing these functions to archetypal operations, we depart radically from the Freudian tradition, which assigns these synthetic functions to the ego as the seat of judgment and intelligence. Where Freudian psychology views the ego as a medial function, regulating the intake of external stimuli and organizing internal responses (originating from the “id”; Freud 1923: 18–39), Analytical Psychology conceives the ego as but one among myriad complexes, a feeling-toned group of representations of oneself whose nature is both conscious and unconscious. Analytical Psychology places the ego at the center of consciousness, but it is not considered the psyche's center.

While Jung characteristically emphasizes the role of archetypes in perception, he attributes to the ego-complex the determination of how a mental representation is apperceived. In his (1931) essay entitled “The Structure of the Psyche,” Jung makes the distinction between sense perception as a physiological process, and apperception as a complex psychic process. In apperception, four functions of consciousness interplay. The thing perceived by the senses first becomes recognizable through thinking. Memory images will be utilized in the course of recognition to which the perceived thing will be compared and differentiated. Then, the recognized thing will be evaluated in accordance with the feeling-tone associated with that recognition; this will be influenced by the emotional phenomena attached to the memory-images utilized. Intuition may also come into play in apperceiving something, should the experience elicit insight into the possibilities inherent in a situation. These faculties of apperception – thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition – stand among the basic components that shape one's individuality. The strengths and weaknesses of these functions in any given individual (a person's typology) contribute to the many features of personality which lend uniqueness to that person's way of experiencing self and world.

The four functions of consciousness denote apperception as a rational process directed by attention (a quantum of psychic energy available to the ego). Nonetheless, irrational and undirected apperception may be found in dreaming and fantasy, which Jung includes in the category of consciousness “because they are the most important and most obvious results of unconscious psychic processes obtruding themselves upon consciousness” (Jung 1931: 140–2).

Jung's reflections on subliminal forms of perception make apparent how far he deviated from the Freudian emphasis upon perception as an ego function. Jung believed mental representations may, under certain circumstances, be perceived in the unconscious, exclusive of consciousness. Since we cannot know the unconscious in itself, he notes, we cannot exclude the possibility that the unconscious may contain the very functions which we attribute to consciousness – including perception, apperception, memory, imagination, will, affectivity, feeling, reflection, and judgment.

The hypothesis of the threshold and of the unconscious means that the indispensable raw material of all knowledge – namely psychic reactions – and perhaps even unconscious “thoughts” and “insights” lie close beside, above, or below consciousness, separated from us by the merest “threshold” and yet apparently unattainable. We have no knowledge of how this unconscious functions, but since it is conjectured to be a psychic system it may possibly have everything that consciousness has, including perception, apperception, memory, imagination, will, affectivity, feeling, reflection, judgment, etc., all in subliminal form.

(Jung 1954: 171–2)

To the objection that one cannot possibly speak of unconscious perceptions or images because these can only be represented to an experiencing subject, Jung retorts, “the psychic process remains essentially the same whether it is ‘represented’ or not” (Jung 1954: 172). In a similar context Jung points out that in the symptomatology of somnambulism and other pathologies where consciousness is morbidly restricted, we observe unconscious processes that bear the marks of conscious processes:

One can only say that these people perceive, think, feel, remember, decide, and act unconsciously, doing unconsciously what others do consciously. These processes occur regardless of whether consciousness registers them or not.

(Jung 1931: 143)

Jung's observations led him to muse upon the possibility that the complexes of the unconscious represent in themselves “splinter psyches.” We will return to this issue as we observe “somatic” forms of perception in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. There we consider the body as a perceiving “subject” in itself.

The ego and the feeling-toned-complex: perceptual distortions and omissions

Our exploration of the perceptual process stems from our imaging of the dynamic interplay of psychic forces. Since Analytical Psychology departs from Freudian tradition in its portrait of psychic structure, our approach to the problem of reality perception is also distinctive.

Classical psychoanalytic theory is fashioned out of the discovery of conflict between psychic systems. It therefore views those processes by which the mind apprehends itself and the world with regard to ego defense mechanisms observed in psychopathology. Inquiry into the perceptual system is weighted toward the problem of memory – the mind's retention and recollection of affective and sensory experience. Freud's momentous discovery was of the process whereby certain perceptions and impulses may be ejected from ego-consciousness and subsequently retained in an unconscious system – the ego's defense operation called repression.

In psychoanalytic theory, repressed contents make themselves known in various ways. An objectionable impulse, severed by the process of repression from the ideas and conceptions that give meaning to its aim, retains its energic charge and seeks outlets. This activity produces “derivatives,” fragments of perception that attach themselves to associated but less objectionable ideas available to consciousness. These remnants of perception – memory traces – reside, so to speak, within the ego and comprise the system which Freud named the “preconscious” (Freud 1915b: 180–5). In psychoanalytic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Conclusions
• References
• Index