Body, Mind and Healing After Jung

A Space of Questions

Raya A. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415483063
• eBook ISBN: 9781136896316
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

It is difficult to point to an aspect of Jungian psychology that does not touch on mind, body and healing in some way. In this book Raya Jones draws on the triad of body, mind and healing and (re)presents it as a domain of ongoing uncertainty within which Jung's answers stir up further questions.

Contributors from both clinical and scholarly backgrounds offer a variety of cultural and historical perspectives. Areas of discussion include:

• the psychosomatic nature of patients' problems
• transference and counter-transference
• therapeutic techniques centred on movement or touch.

Striking a delicate balance between theory-centred and practice-oriented approaches Body, Mind and Healing After Jung is essential reading for all Jungians.

Chapter 1
Returning to life

Trauma survivors’ quest for reintegration

Gadi Maoz and Vered Arbit

Psychotherapy with trauma victims is like a journey into the ‘land of the dead’. After suffering the trauma of his separation from Freud, Jung made this assertion in his memoirs: ‘I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world’ (Jung 1965: 181). In this metaphoric territory, trauma victims experience an emotional loss of soul and a bisecting of the meaningful and creative relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. The wholeness of the psyche dissipates, and life dissociates into fragments resulting in suffering and despair. Such a process can take place after serious traumas that affect the victim’s linguistic symbolization. Verbal images are no longer easily created, and the mechanisms integrating body and psyche cease to operate. Victims who have undergone major traumas in their childhood ranging from blood-curdling abandonment anxieties to sexual abuse to complex traumas involving physical and emotional exploitation are cast into this dark and terrifying land, as are those who have survived terror attacks or fiercely disruptive war experiences. On the therapeutic journey with these post-trauma victims, therapists become acquainted with the traumatic memories and shocking experiences that flood their psyches. The alchemical mystery of how their bisected and shattered psyches reintegrate remains just that – a mystery.

Jung writes of the trauma complex as follows:

Today we can take it as moderately certain that complexes are in fact ‘splinter psyches’. The aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche.

(Jung 1934: par. 204)

The question of how to fuse and heal a psyche split by trauma has engaged modern psychologists for the past hundred years and continues to be a fertile field for clinical and theoretical research and writing. Monahan (2009) mentions many of the leading contributors to the study of trauma and dissociation, following Jung and Janet. The basic principles of healing the trauma complex were laid out as follows by Jung:

Hence one could easily represent the trauma as a complex with a high emotional charge, and because this enormously affective charge seems at first sight to be the pathological cause of the disturbance, one can accordingly postulate a therapy whose aim is the complete release of this charge.

(Jung 1928: par. 262)

[A]breaction by itself is not sufficient to resolve the dissociation. If the rehearsal of the trauma fails to reintegrate the autonomous complex, then the relationship to the doctor can so raise the level of the patient’s consciousness as to enable him to overcome the complex and assimilate it.

(Jung 1928: par. 273)

Such an intricate therapeutic journey incorporates healing components that at times may generate wear and tear in the body-mind connection of therapists as well as of patients. The emotional-physical experience of confronting the dissociative defences of their emotionally torn patients elicits physical sensations and powerful emotional experiences among therapists as well. Often these sensations and experiences are essential to the growth of new tissue to help the trauma wounds heal.

The political, social and cultural situation in Israel serves to intensify the vulnerability of individuals and groups within society. Against this background, in this chapter we present two clinical cases demonstrating our experience with the victims of serious post-trauma disorder who have permitted us to follow their quest through the ‘land of the dead’. We describe the psychotherapeutic process and demonstrate how it merges with and penetrates the dissociative defence mechanisms that protect and shield patients while at the same time causing them harm and leading them astray. We do not put forward any special technique or tidy paradigm ultimately leading to a definitive protocol for treating trauma. Rather, we strive to describe interventions and to present explanations for the psychotherapeutic processes as we have observed and understood them, though they remain somewhat abstract, subjective and obscure. We do not offer comparative data with respect to other cultures or societies across the globe, where psychotherapists must cope with national existential as well as personal traumas. We do however describe the situation on the ground in Israel, where, against a backdrop of turmoil, existential danger and national and historical traumas, analysts must cope with the personal traumas of patients who are exposed daily to the anxiety and stress of living under threat.

Land of the dead

In the midst of her painful attempt to ‘reintegrate’, Dana (pseudonym), a 24-year-old victim of appalling sexual violence since childhood, wrote these lines during her fourth year of therapy:

I am sure this is how you feel when you die. The pain never leaves me, it’s as if something inside me has exploded and I am walking around with a huge hole burning with flames of pain. My body recreates this pain over and over, making me go back there and die again, until I myself try a million ways to die… I do not want to feel this pain ever again.

Talma (pseudonym), a 30-year-old woman, became a victim of a terror attack by a female suicide bomber six years previously. In her second year of therapy, she made the following remarks:

I was in the land of the dead. I smelled it already, and I saw the green and yellow colours flowing there in the puddles together with all the body parts scattered all around me. I stepped on a piece of flesh and I came back from there. But it has all remained inside my body.

Life in Israel is marked by the constant stress of military, political and social conflict alongside the threat of war, terrorism, injury and death. This ongoing existential conflict drastically lowers the emotional threshold of Israelis. The national psyche is marked by restlessness, anxiety and over-arousal, extreme responses and impatience alongside emotional flooding and rushing to help others in need. Israel is also a social melting pot. Since its establishment in 1948, the country has been absorbing waves of immigrants from diverse cultures and societies across the globe, creating a pressure cooker seething with a cultural, social and socioeconomic mixture. Many of these groups immigrated in the wake of trauma and crises in their countries of origin. Against this background ethnic tensions and feelings of inequality, deprivation and victimization have continued from the time the state was established. In this shaky reality, personal traumas continue to occur, often reflecting society’s collective trauma. For most, dissociative defence mechanisms come into play when the trauma occurs, and the body-mind fixation is what leads directly to the ‘land of the dead’. The complex and turbulent situation outside intensifies personal traumas: a rape committed by a security guard who himself is a victim of terror, represents the embodiment of a shadow complex by the trauma tyrant that has turned him into an offender. His identification with the shadows of destruction and aggression has caused him to indiscriminately turn these emotions toward a helpless victim and mercilessly rape the one he was supposed to protect. Hence, in Israel therapeutic sessions take place in a hall of mirrors reflecting infinite projections from outer worlds of trauma as well as the patient’s own individual trauma. In such an analytic situation, it is extremely difficult to establish or preserve a separate temenos or sacred place isolated from everyday life outside. For example, if the noise of a helicopter taking off from a nearby military airfield penetrates the clinic, it is impossible to determine for certain what associations the noise may have for the patient and for the analyst: a terror attack, the evacuation of the wounded, thoughts of routine military operations, or the outbreak of war. Such noises piercing the therapeutic bubble stir up shocking events for the patients that catapult them back to the world of their trauma.

Sometimes someone would prepare a light meal in the treatment centre kitchenette, and the odour of burnt toast would waft through the rooms. When this burnt toast smell would reach the treatment room, Talma was overcome by the urge to get up, abandon the session with her analyst (GM) and flee.

GM: You say that when you’re at the seashore, something special happens to you, and you don’t feel you have to be on your guard all the time.

Talma: Right. That’s the only place I can let go.

GM: That happens at the seashore, and in some way maybe it happens here as well, though a bit differently.

Talma: A bit differently, but it happens.

GM: Here you also feel protected and safe.

Talma: Right. I’m less on guard here, but there are still times … When someone makes toast…

GM: In the kitchenette? When someone makes toast?

Talma: It’s hardest when someone burns the toast. It’s very hard for me. It makes me feel I can’t go into the therapy session … But except for that, it’s okay … If I let my defences down a bit, something can happen. I prefer to be prepared for the worst … though I don’t understand what I’m preparing for…

Therapists themselves must also live in the complex and difficult reality outside and often react with physical, emotional and spiritual responses associated with their own personal traumatic memories. The relationship developing behind the closed door of the therapy room is loaded with associations of national and personal traumas deriving from a shared and very challenging existential reality.

* * *

The healing journey to reintegration must pass through the carved ‘land of the dead’. This is a harrowing journey that involves recreating the experience of Dionysian dismemberment along with an uplifting of the spirits. Often this situation facilitates an archetypal self-care system, so brilliantly named and described by Kalsched (2003), who explains that the operation of archaic and primitive defence mechanisms safeguards the survival of the inner psyche’s core. This system of defence identifies and attacks dangers from outside the psyche, while at the same time launching a type of autoimmune attack against parts of the self (Kalsched 2003). He further comments:

For the person who has experienced unbearable pain, the psychological defence of dissociation allows external life to go on but at a great internal cost. The trauma ends and its effects may be largely ‘forgotten’, but the psychological sequelae of the trauma continue to haunt the inner world.

(Kalsched 1996: 12–13)

Indeed, it seems that parts that normally would be connected were split apart by powerful forces that then pitted them one against the other. The defence mechanism turns into a persecution mechanism that does not cease when the trauma is over. It continues to survive and reside within the trauma victim’s psyche, thus merging the emotional wound with the physical one.

Descent

Talma, a young mother, was standing in the doorway of her office one morning when suddenly she heard the dreadful and terrifying sound of an explosion that demolished the walls of the large building where her office was located. After the explosion, only the silence of death prevailed. Talma found herself walking out of her office into a shattered expanse where the building once had stood. She smelled burning flesh, tasted blood, saw red, yellow and green fluids pooling into puddles. Within seconds, Talma’s body and psyche were overwhelmed by the remains of the plastic-like detached body parts, and these feelings completely and absolutely cut her off from the flow of normal life she had known up until then. Talma was not hurt physically, but her body was covered with blood, and severed body parts covered her arms and her legs. In those very moments, while she was still wandering around in shock with no purpose or direction, she felt and heard the crunch of pieces of human flesh beneath her feet, and her eyes witnessed atrocities that she only dared to reconstruct years later during therapy. Everything her senses took in during those terrible moments was within seconds translated and scorched into her brain and soul, and at that same moment her psyche was also dismembered. Her dissociative defence mechanism was ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Returning to life
• Chapter 2 The body in psychotherapy
• Chapter 3 The embodied psyche
• Chapter 4 The ‘Child’ motif in theorizing about embodied subjectivity
• Chapter 5 Fleshing out the psyche
• Chapter 6 Staging the Self
• Chapter 7 The Buddhist concept of mind and body in diversity
• Chapter 8 A Sami healer’s diagnosis
• Chapter 9 Struggles, commercialism, ‘ideal’ feminine images and internal oppression
• Chapter 10 Pregnant pause
• Chapter 11 Mind the gap
• Chapter 12 The body in the postmodern world
• Chapter 13 The body in psychotherapy
• Chapter 14 ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’
• Index