The Mystery of Human Relationship

Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self

Nathan Schwartz-Salant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134740703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

All human relationships are containers of emotional life, but what are the structures underlying them? Nathan Schwartz-Salant looks at all kinds of relationships through an analyst's eye. By analogy with the ancient system of alchemy he shows how states of mind that can undermine our relationships - in marriage, in creative work, in the workplace - can become transformative when brought to consciousness. It is only by learning how to access the interactive field of our relationships that we can enter this transformative process and explore its mysterious potential for self-realization.

1 Alchemy and transformation in human relationships

EXPERIENCING THE MYSTERY WITHIN RELATIONSHIPS

All people in committed relationships inevitably experience conflict within themselves and with each other which endures despite their best efforts at resolution. Whether subtle or blatant, the nature and sources of such conflict are usually hidden within the equilibrium that can be maintained within a normal relationship, particularly in its earlier stages. One person has not necessarily ‘caused’ the other to feel hurt, angry, unappreciated, unloved, guilty, among countless possible negative emotions. And even when an allocation of cause or blame may have some validity, an attempt to determine who is right and who is wrong or who is conscious and who is unconscious fails to resolve the conflict, and surely fails to reveal its mystery.

A common example of the dynamics of such conflict is the situation in which a husband is snoring contentedly, sleeping the sleep of the blessed, while his exhausted wife, lying beside him, keeps hearing his snoring and is so far away from sleep that she feels as if she is being tortured. Beyond the levels of physical causes and practical solutions which such a situation immediately brings to mind lies the realm in which a kind of insane conflict lives, ready to erupt into ordinary time. The natural inclination is to assume that somehow someone is at fault. Is the husband deliberately snoring loudly to keep his suffering wife awake and in a constant state of personal disequilibrium? Is the wife merely a light sleeper who is unappreciative of her husband’s vital need for rest at the end of a strenuous day? Whether the answer to these questions is, in fact, negative or positive is ultimately irrelevant.

Instead, these two people must penetrate into a deeper level of their relationship, into a domain they both share, in which neither is ‘doing’ anything to the other. Indeed, they would have to discover that they share not only a conscious but also an unconscious relationship. This unconscious relationship can be far larger and more encompassing than the conscious one. If they could work together to explore this deeper level of their relationship, they would find that the conflict between them was a mere fragment of a larger, more complex, and ultimately more meaningful pattern of interaction.

For most couples, it is far easier simply to avoid exploring such conflicts at a deeper level of their relationship and to tolerate ongoing emotional distractions as they try to communicate and to be intimate with one another in their customary way. But such conflicting states deeply affect relationships in ways that can easily go unseen or be dismissed. The result is a growing gulf between people, a decline in trust and intimacy, a dwindling of a passionate and exciting sexual life and, above all, an absence of any sense that their relationship holds the mystery of growth, individually and together. And without this mystery what do they have? They may play mutually denned roles, or if they are psychologically sophisticated, they may help each other deal with individual projections. But they will not feel and know the mystery of passion and change that can be explored and discovered through their relationship. Thus, their relationship diminishes in passion and becomes merely ordinary. Love, compassion, and caring may exist, but a shadow cast by the absence of passion and meaning enables both of them to know that they are choosing to live in shallow waters and to settle for an apparent security that actually diminishes them.

This book is intended for people who want to deal with such normally hidden areas in relationships, who are able to go beyond the assignment of blame or a concern with being ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and who wish to recognize and to engage the mystery of growth within themselves and within their relationships.

Attempts to make rational sense of chronic conflict within normal relationships invariably fail when these attempts do not probe the depths of the human psyche to discover the underlying nature and source of the conflict. Within this deeper realm, totally contradictory states of mind can exist simultaneously within each person and as a quality of the relationship itself. These contradictory states which define ‘mad’ (see p. 36ff) aspects of the psyche actually annihilate one another, so that attending to one state totally destroys an awareness of the preceding state. Anyone relating to a person exhibiting such contradictory states will tend to feel this process, to become confused, and to withdraw or feel an impotent rage. But to a certain degree, such an area of madness is an integral part of everyone’s existence. Embracing the mad areas of our psyche and acknowledging the ways they limit us is a way to discover the mystery of the self and the other. This subtle ‘madness’ becomes a kind of chaotic shore that the relationship is destined to wash up against and to be bounded by.

Madness is a frightening concept, for it implies that one is out of control, distorts reality, is overwhelmed by compulsive responses and very strong emotions, and does things that are destructive to one’s own best interests, all while assuming oneself to be totally in control. The mad parts of sane people are always dangerous; but if recognized and their power acknowledged, they are potentially healing. Mad areas continually confront us with the borders and limitations of ourselves and our knowledge, and they cause us to reflect and re-frame our attitudes over and over again. Without embracing our own madness, any approach to understanding relationships becomes dull and dangerously repetitive, tending to become a matter of technique and knowledge alone. Madness seems to be our best ally in restraining the dangerous and soulless tendency of knowledge used to shield ourselves from the shock of new experiences. As we accept such areas, we do not necessarily solve the problems within our relationships; instead, we transform ourselves and our relationships.

Transformation is always a very difficult process for us to contemplate and to embrace, for the psyche tends to revert to its most stable forms, typically the older ones that have been tried in the crucible of time. New forms are unstable and consequently dangerous in that they may lead us to lose a sense of identity, to become subject to strong emotions, and to become susceptible to the will of another in a way that feels threatening. So, in our established forms of relating, we tend to operate within a comfortable, chosen structure. We may be polite; we may recognize certain roles; or we may act in kind or unkind ways. For example, a couple may continually but politely poke ‘fun’ at each other in a public setting and deny that this behavior might point to their underlying contempt for each other and to their desire to humiliate each other since such an admission would destabilize their relationship. However, probing beneath such interactions reveals that this form of politely hostile behavior actually serves to protect against exactly those deeper and more dangerous levels of engagement. At these deeper levels, people would have to take responsibility for areas of their psyches within which they were not only harboring resentment and other negative feeling but where they were also truly out of control, that is, mad.

Transformation within a relationship can only begin with an acknowledgement that we are unconsciously projecting on to the other person, thereby distorting the other’s reality and our own. Through the process of projection, we tend to diminish or enhance the identity of others by presuming that we actually know the nature and motivation of their interactions with us. The other person’s own reality has little credibility in our mind, but more important, the other’s unfathomable nature is not even considered. In other words, through projections, we ‘know’ only fragments of truth about the other and consequently deny the essence of the other’s spiritual being. Therefore, the more we can withdraw projections and recognize the reality of the other person, the more each person is empowered and the relationship between the two people is enhanced.

But to sustain and deepen the process of transformation, we must move beyond the recognition and acknowledgement of the dynamics of projection. Such a possibility may be difficult largely because psychoanalytic thinking about human relationships has developed within scientific models which regard projection as a key concept. Starting with the early twentieth-century work of Sigmund Freud, the analysand was believed to project his or her inner contents on to the analyst who, through the device of an ‘even hovering attention,’ could perceive the nature of the projection. Within this causal structure, the interpretation of the projection is seen to unlock and resolve unsuccessful developmental transits which were part of the analysand’s early life. The precise nature of this process is controversial since many competing ideas exist about how people develop in a successful or unsuccessful way given the nature of their childhood experiences.

For example, focusing on certain ‘absences’ in early childhood and/or on emotional or physical intrusions into the child’s vulnerable psychic state is a valid and useful approach to understanding personal development. Infants can suffer specifically from the absence of a maternal presence that could calm their anxieties or generally from the absence of a parental figure who could stand against the physical and emotional intrusions which invariably leave the young child with no sense of safety or integrity. Such absences and such intrusions prevent the infant from ever experiencing a ‘container’ for his or her distress, and the adult may therefore suffer from neuroses such as dissociative disorders, or narcissistic, borderline, and psychoid personality disorders, or in extreme instances, psychotic disorders. Psychoanalytic treatment attempts to create a containing space so that experience of psychic states is possible. Ideally, through the transference, such early absences and insults to development can be recapitulated, understood, and most significantly, survived without regressing to primitive defenses; and the individual’s development essentially can be allowed to find its natural ways of expansion. Progress on this scale requires an unusual amount of courage from the patient, and often from the therapist as well.

The personal unconscious, as defined by C.G.Jung, is a reservoir of disowned contents and processes which can be experienced as separable parts in normal space and time, and which have location. In the process of projection, the parts of the personal unconscious are experienced as existing ‘in’ the person, or they are projected ‘out of’ the person and ‘into’ another person. Projection has an effect, and through it one does things to another person. Approaching people and their relationships from the vantage point of someone’s ‘doing something’ to someone else—for example, one person is unconsciously projecting on to another either expectations of abandonment, loss, and hatred, or qualities of great value, perfection, and wholeness—is a powerful lens through which to understand relationship. A great deal of modern psychological thought has gone into understanding that projections affect people, either by diminishing the ego strength of the projector and distorting his or her sense of reality, or by causing an emotional and cognitive change in the object of the projection. Projection can be employed to get rid of distressing feelings and ideas. And projection can also be a state that accompanies the emergence of consciousness: one always projects before one becomes conscious of one’s ownership of unconscious contents. Projection can also be a way of disowning one’s psychic structure through an imaginal process in which contents are felt to be ‘put into’ the other person, and subtly watched in a trance-like way in order to discern what the other does with these projected contents. This latter process is known as projective identification, and an analyst may spend many years becoming aware of its subtleties, so that he or she may recognize its existence where less trained or less sensitive souls might just act out the contents that have been projected into them.

Freud and other subsequent psychoanalysts essentially recognized that the projectionbased model of recapitulating early conflict and resolving it was over-simplified, for the analyst also projected on to the analysand. From this notion of counter-projection evolved much of the current psychoanalytical thinking about transference and countertransference, the mutual projections of both people. Still, psychoanalysts believed that these projections, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, could become objectively perceived data. Some even hoped (and many still endeavor in most quarters of psychoanalytical thought) to make use of countertransference to understand objectively the inner workings of the analysand’s psyche.

In an effort to overcome the difficulty of separating projections and counterprojections and to meet the standards of scientific objectivity, some analysts began to think in terms of a ‘third area’ or a ‘field’ that was comprised of a kind of mutual subjectivity. Created by mutual projections, this ‘third area’ could then be used to derive some objective understanding of the inner workings of analyst and analysand. Whether it was through the work of Self Psychologists or the contributions of Thomas Ogden and his notion of the ‘analytic third,’ the analyst becomes aware that subjectivity can never be denied in the interaction. And through the use of his or her perceptions of the nature of this ‘third area,’ the analyst can still craft interpretations, feel empathy, and effect interventions to help the analysand recognize his or her unconscious and maladaptations.

Jung’s research sowed the seeds of an alternative model of analysis based on the exploration of an intermediate realm between analyst and analysand. Jung recognized that two people create an unconscious relationship that is comprised of psychic contents not only derived from personal experiences in early life. These psychic contents, which Jung called ‘archetypes,’ are the spontaneous self-organizing structures of the impersonal layers of the collective or objective unconscious. Unlike personal contents, such archetypal aspects of the collective unconscious cannot be fully perceived as stemming from inside one person and being directed outside of that person, into another. In fact, archetypal processes create a ‘third area’ between people that cannot be experienced or understood through the spatial notion of insides and outsides. The sense of space created within a relationship cannot be understood as an ‘empty space’ characterizing the area through which (largely) personal projections pass. Rather, this ‘third area’ has its own peculiar objectivity: a subjective-objective quality. The individual projections cannot be separated from the objective transformative trends as they interact within this ‘intermediate realm,’ and neither causes the other to exist. When Jung analyzed this largely unconscious third area between people, which was his way of explicating the transference-countertransference process, he also approached the archetypal aspects within the scientific paradigm of projection. Indeed, Jung’s work helped us to see that more than personal psychic contents could be projected.

Moreover, archetypal levels create a ‘third area’ that cannot be embraced simply as things, like the projected parts that two people may encounter. Rather the archetype creates a paradoxical sense of space in which one is both inside and outside, an observer but also contained within the space itself. Furthermore, and in distinction to the emphasis on subjectivity in psychoanalytic approaches to the ‘third area,’ I find that a concomitant objectivity of process derived from the inclusion of archetypal dimensions must also be considered.

Indeed, we must move beyond the notion of life as consisting of outer and inner experiences and enter a kind of ‘intermediate realm’ that our culture has long lost sight of and in which the major portion of transformation occurs. As we perceive such a shared reality with another person, and as we actually focus on it, allowing it to have its own life, like a ‘third thing’ in the relationship, something new can occur. The space that we occupy seems to change, and rather than being the subjects, observing this ‘third thing,’ we begin to feel we are inside it and moved by it. We become the object, and the space itself and its emotional states are the subject.

In such experiences, the old forms of relationship die and transform. It is as if we have become aware of a far larger presence in our relationship, indeed a sacred dimension. We become aware of a sense of ‘oneness’ that permeates being alone and with our partner. It is a ‘oneness’ that seems to infuse the relationship with a sense of awe and mystery. When this experience is intense, respect takes over where power once ruled. Fear becomes accepted as a marker of being on the right path, because one now walks towards the unknown, on a path of expanding horizons and a willingness to be moved by the truth as it exists within the relationship. And always we look for and reflect upon our projections and our personal history as if these form the boundaries that give the interactive experience its own uniqueness and particularity, thus preventing the interactive experience from flowing into a ‘New Age’ haze.

Just as archetypal contents create a third area that cannot be sufficiently apprehended through the model of projection, so too do the mad parts of sane people. Such archetypal areas are never reducible to a sum of individual projections. Consequently, the mad aspects of sane people have never been successfully embraced within rationally oriented approaches to personality development. Attempts to reduce the mad aspects of sane people to some failure in development that can be projected will amount to little more than a repressive ruse. The psychological models we have gained from studying infant development or observing development in time, that is, from infancy to adolescence and onward, do not help in grasping the strange qualities of the space that underpins the depth of relationships. We never ‘know’ madness as something to be ‘studied’ in a relationship; rather we experience it, and we must find some kind of imaginary vessel to contain it. For madness is a strange phenomenon which can be understood not only as existing within oneself or between people but also, like archetypal processes, as encompassing and influencing both people in a relationship within its indefinable realm. Indeed, if relationship is to be the place of the transformation of individuals and culture, then we must not only expose the madness within the relationship but we must also discover the mystery of that madness.

Relationship may be viewed as the container for dealing with the archetypal and irrational forces of madness within our culture. For this reason, we must think of relationship as far more than two relatively conscious or unconscious people interacting. Relationship must be viewed as resting upon a great sea of emotional life, a dimension that is never understood by rational means alone. This fact was noted by Freud and also used extensively by Jung in his investigations of the depth of relationship in the transference.

Whereas modern scientific models do not help us much to think about such experiences of madness and of ‘third areas’ between people, traditions that preceded scientific discovery and its primary emphasis upon causality can enable us to rediscover and reformulate more ancient ideas which were precisely concerned with such ‘in between’ areas and experiences. To understand and appreciate the transformative potential of such ‘third areas,’ we may profitably turn to the ancient ideas and practices of alchemy. Jung employed alchemical symbolism to grasp the nature of the largely unconscious ‘third area’ between people. By making fuller use of Jung’s alchemical research than I believe he himself did, one can learn to experience the ‘third area’ and to be changed by this experience rather than depend upon analyzing it into component projections.

I am conceptualizing and analyzing the alchemical way of thinking, as presented in its myths and stories, as a central approach to psychotherapy. This alchemical approach contrasts not only with those using alchem...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF FIGURES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. ALCHEMY AND TRANSFORMATION IN HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
• 2. ACTIVATING THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FIELD
• 3. MAD PARTS OF SANE PEOPLE
• 4. THE DYNAMICS OF THE INTERACTIVE FIELD
• 5. THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE INTERACTIVE FIELD
• 6. THE ALCHEMICAL VIEW OF MADNESS
• 7. THE CENTRAL MYSTERY OF THE ALCHEMICAL PROCESS
• 8. THE ALCHEMICAL ATTITUDE TO THE TRANSFORMATION OF RELATIONSHIP
• 9. UNION, DEATH, AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE SELF
• 10. APPRECIATING THE MYSTERY OF RELATIONSHIP
• BIBLIOGRAPHY