On the Sublime in Psychoanalysis, Archetypal Psychology and Psychotherapy

On the Sublime in Psychoanalysis, Archetypal Psychology and Psychotherapy EDITED BY PETRUSKA CLARKSON

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Whurr Publishers Ltd London

© 1997 Whurr Publishers Ltd First published 1997 by Whurr Publishers Ltd 19B Compton Terrace, London N1 2UN, England All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Whurr Publishers Limited. This publication is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon any subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 86156 0192

Printed and bound in the UK by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear

Dedicated to my husband Vincent Keter with whom I dwell in Sublime and celebrate the ridiculous. "Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again. Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words, There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts, They shatter even the strength of iron or bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost heartS Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids."

I Chil

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Contributors

ix xi xii

Chapter 1

1

The sublime in psychoanalysis and archetypal psychotherapy

Petrriska Clarkson Chapter 2 Placing the sublime - cosmology in the consulting room



15

Marie Angelo 46

Chapter 3

Sublime moments in the body of the double pelican Alan Bleakley 69

Chapter 4

Psychoanalytic framing of the sublime in the creative act Tessa Adams 85

Chapter 5

Everyday epiphanies Ginette Paris Chapter 6 Reflections on chance, fate and synchronicity



96

Gerhard Adler 109

Chapter 7

Refathering psychoanalysis, deliteralising Hillman: imaginal therapy, individual and cultural

Michael Vannoy Adams vii

On the Sublime

viii

123

Chapter 8 The phallus, alchemy and Christ: Jungian analysis and the sublime Christopher Hauke

Preface

145

Chapter 9 Countertransference, the imaginal world, and the politics of the sublime Andrew Samuels

176

Chapter 10 Letter to my daughter Petriiska Clarkson

180

Chapter 11 Sublimely sexual: Eros and the sublimation of desire Thomas Moore

191

Chapter 12 Of castles and melts; Dickens and the dark sublime: the uses of creativity Andrea Duncan

Chapter

13

219

Conditions for excellence — the coincidentia oppositorum of the inferior function Petrtiska Clarkson Chapter 14 Elemental images of impossible love' — the brother—sister coniunctio as reflected in art Eva Loewe

244

Chapter 15 On the sublime: Eva Loewe and the practice of psychotherapy, or Aphrodite in the consulting room Noel Cobb

271

Chapter 16

279

The archetypal situatedness of supervision: parallel process in place PetrUska Clarkson

This book is based on contributions around the idea of the sublime and its presence, avoidance or use in contemporary psychotherapeutic practice. It is a reply to people's yearnings for an acknowledgement and an honouring of the many incarnations of the sublime enacted in the tragedies and triumphs of the world soul — the trivial, the transpersonal, the beautiful, the grotesque, the sensual — in the everyday as well as in the foundations of perennial wisdom. It was imagined and realised by Professor Petriiska Clarkson as an answer to these needs from contemporary psychotherapy, Jungian practice and psychoanalysis. This book brings together for the first time some of the most experienced and dedicated academic teachers, professional practitioners and supervisors from both sides of the Atlantic in the fields of archetypal psychology and psychotherapy. These are all psychotherapists and writers who have seriously engaged with the theme of the sublime in everyday life, in clinical practice and its place in the world. They come from universities ranging from Goldsmiths' College, London to Eugene Lang College in New York, and professional associations/affiliations such as the London Convivium for Archetypal Studies and the Society for Analytic Psychology. They are: Dr Marie Angelo, Dr Alan Bleakley, Dr Tessa Adams, Dr Ginette Paris, the late Dr Gerhard Alder, Dr Michael Vannoy Adams, Dr Christopher Hauke, Prof. Andrew Samuels, Dr Thomas Moore, Dr Andrea Duncan, the late Eva Loewe, Noel Cobb, and Professor PetrUslca Clarkson. Referencing styles may differ due to the exigencies of circumstance, but in this `caravan' of writers each of us speaks with our individual voice to the matter of our hearts. When we allow the sublime to move us, it is as Rumi taught — `the soul is tested here by sheer terror'. Yet in our companionship, our spirit has been quickened. May that be your experience too.

What is the path?

Acknowledgements

A self-sacrificing way, but also a warrior's way, and not for brittle, easily broken glass-bottle people. The soul is tested here by sheer terror as a sieve sifts and separates genuine from fake. And this road is full of footprints! Companions have come before. They are your ladder. Use them! Without them you won't have the spirit-quickness you need. Even a dumb donkey crossing a desert becomes nimblefooted with others of its kind. Stay with a caravan. By yourself, You'll get a hundred times more tired, and fall behind. (Rumi') 'Rumi (1991) One•Handed Basket Weaving: Poems on the theme of work (versions by C. Barks). Athens, GA: MAYPOP, p. 112.

Chapter 1 by Petelska Clarkson is a revised version of the paper, 'The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', delivered at the Tenth Jung Studies Day held at University of Kent, Canterbury 25 November 1995. 'What is the path?' by Rumi. p. 112 from One-Handed Basket Weaving: Poems on the theme of work, versions by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of MAYPOP books 196 Westview Drive, Athens, GA 30606, USA. Quotations from 'The Sweetness of Life' from Men and the Water of Life by Michael Meade. Copyright © 1993 by Michael J. Meade. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Quotations from Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva. Copyright © 1982 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Reproduction of The Wanderer above the Mists by Casper David Friedrich © Elke Walford, Hamburg. Chapter 6 by Gerhard Adler is a revised version of a paper in The Shaman from Elko published by The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in 1978. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Excerpt from Burnt Norton © 1943 by T.S. Eliot and renewed in 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company, and Faber and Faber. Excerpt from Phoenix by D.H. Lawrence reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material throughout this book. If any proper acknowledgement has not yet been made, the copyright holder should contact the publisher.

On the Sublime

Contributors

xiii

Archetypal Studies, and has over 20 years' experience of supervised active imagination work with the cosmology of the Sapphire Tree. Alan Bleakley is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Cornwall College, where he runs undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Archetypal Psychology and in Post-compulsory Education for the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth. Dr Bleakley's publications include two books on the psychology of imagination: Fruits of the Moon Tree and Earth's Embrace, and a collection of poetry: Hermes in the Kitchen Drawer. He is currently completing a book on the animalising imagination.

Tessa Adams is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Human Sciences, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, where she is Section Head of Counselling and related Studies, responsible for the MA in Applied Psychoanalytic Theory, Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling and Certificate in Humanistic Psychodynamic Counselling, and a recognised Teacher of the University of London for supervising postgraduate work including PhD research. Dr Adams is a UKCP-registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists, South London Psychotherapy Centre and the Greenwich Consortium of Psychotherapists. Her private practice includes individual psychotherapy, supervision and work consultancy. She is also a qualified fine artist (St Martins School of Art) and a practising painter. Gerhard Adler was a distinguished analyst, child therapist, teacher and lecturer. Between 1931 and 1934 he worked at the BurghOlzli and underwent a training analysis with C.G. Jung. He subsequently coedited the 20 volume English translation of the Collected Works and edited two volumes of Jung's letters. Jung said that only five of his students understood him completely; one of those was Gerhard Adler. Adler was a founding member, and president from 1972 to 1977, of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, and in the 1970s he helped to found the Association for Jungian Analysts. His published work includes Studies in Analytical Psychology, The Living Symbol, and Dynamics of the Self He died in 1988. Marie Angelo is a senior lecturer in psychology at Richmond College, London where she writes and researches on Archetypal Psychology and is developing a Practitioner Masters Degree in Archetype and Culture. She trained in dance therapy, occupational psychology and psychoanalytic studies. She is a 'founding friend' of the London Convivium for xi i

Petrriska Clarkson is Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy at Roehampton Institute, London, a Consultant Chartered Counselling and Clinical Psychologist at PHYSIS, London, in private practice as a UKCP-registered psychotherapist, accredited supervisor and accredited organisational consultant with some twenty-five years' experience in pioneering innovative, academic and creative professional course design as well as providing psychotherapy, supervision and training to hundreds of professionals in these fields. She is a visiting lecturer at a number of universities across the world, the author/editor of twelve books and over one hundred professional papers in the fields of psychotherapy, counselling psychology, supervision, qualitative research and organ-isational consultancy; and founder supervisor of the Independent Centre for Qualitative Research at PHYSIS. Professor Clarkson is a Supervisor and Teaching Member of Archetypal Jungian, Integrative Psychotherapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, and Group Psychotherapy Organisations and a supervisor for trainee and qualified BPsS Psychologists (Counselling, Clinical and Occupational) with substantial experience/supervision from major psychoanalytic bodies. She is also the Principal Founder or Chair (past or current) of several national and international accredited organisations in these fields. She serves the profession (for example) as Chair of the Counselling Psychology Diploma Examination Board of the British Psychological Society, on the Ethics Committee of the British Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision, and as a Teaching and Supervising Member /Mentor of the London Convivium for Archetypal and Cultural Psychotherapy. Noel Cobb, called 'one of the trustworthy fathers of archetypal psychology' (Thomas Moore), is a psychotherapist, poet, and teacher who works as a consultant in Archetypal Psychotherapy and gives supervision for therapists wishing to revise their practice. He is chairman and founder of The London Convivium for Archetypal Studies, created in order to give English archetypal psychology 'a local habitation and a name'. He is author of Prospero's Island — the Secret Alchemy at the

xiv

On the Sublime

Heart of the Tempest (1984) and Archetypal Imagination — Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art (1992). He is chief editor of SPHINX — a Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, now in its seventh issue. Andrea Duncan is a principal lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of East London. She has given conference papers and published in the field of creativity, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. She is co-editor of the forthcoming The Feminine Case: Jung, Women's Language and the Creative Discourse (Rebus Press). Christopher Hauke is an Associate Professional Member of the Society of Analytical Psychology in private practice with adults and families in Greenwich. He organises and lectures on the MA in Applied Psychoanalytic Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London and on the MA in Dance Movement Therapy at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. He teaches Jungian psychology at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Kent and other clinical and academic institutions. He is writing a book on Jung and the Postmodern and has co-edited Post Jungian Perspectives: Current Papers from the Society of Analytical Psychology — both to be published by Routledge in 1998. Eva Loewe was born in Vienna in 1937. After studying at art school, she raised a family of three and directed a fashion business before becoming a UKCP—registered Analytic Psychotherapist. From 1985 she practised and taught Archetypal Psychology, lecturing on it both in the UK and abroad. In 1987 Eva co-founded The London Convivium with her husband, Noel Cobb, and became his co-editor on the journal, SPHINX. The poetess Kathleen Raine has called her 'an artist of life'. This was particularly evident in the unique women's group, The New Lacemakers, which she created and led from 1985 to 1995. She died in London on May 6, 1996. Thomas Moore is a psychotherapist and teacher. He received his PhD from Syracuse University where he focused on world religions, Jungian psychology, and literature, and in the early 1980s he worked closely with James Hillman, Robert Sardello, and Patricia Berry at the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. In 1992 he published Care of the Soul which has sold over two million copies, followed by Soulmates, also a bestseller. Mediations: On the Monk who lives in daily life, based on his experiences as a young man in the Servite Order, was published in 1994, and the third book in the soul series was The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life which won the 1996 prize for the best book on spirituality. His other books include The Planets Within, Rituals of the Imagination, Dark Eros, The Education of the Heart, and A Blue Fire — a collection of the writings of James Hillman.

1" I u '1T11111' , 1 4 11, 1 1 ' ', I

xv

Ginette Paris is a psychologist and core faculty member at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. She has written on the archetypal perspective of Greek and Roman mythology for Spring Publications, including the best-selling books Pagan Grace and Pagan Mediations. She is currently at work on Mythology: CDROM Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, Greek and Roman, to be published in 1998. Andrew Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and a Jungian training analyst in private practice. He also works as a political consultant. His publications include Jung and the PostJungians, The Father, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, Psychopathology, The Plural Psyche, The Political Psyche, and the forthcoming The Secret Life of Politics. Michael Vannoy Adams is Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at the New School for Social Research and a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. Dr Vannoy Adams's new book The Multicultural Imagination: 'Race', Color, and the Unconscious was published by Routledge in 1996.

Chapter 1 The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy PETRUSKA CLARKSON This is Federico Garcia Lorca speaking about duende: In all Arabic music, either dance, song, or elegy, the duende's arrival is greeted with energetic cries of Allah! Allah! which is so close to the Ole of the bullfight that who knows if it is not the same thing? And in all the songs of the south of Spain the duende is greeted with sincere cries of Viva Dios! — deep and tender human cry of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende, who shakes the body and voice of the dancer. . . . The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. . . . With idea, sound or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with violin and compass; the duende wounds. In the dealing of that wound, which never closes, lies the invented, strange qualities of a man's work. [And a woman's work too] Years ago, an eighty-year-old woman won first prize at a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor. In that gathering of muses and angels, beautiful forms and beautiful smiles, who could have won but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives. (Garcia Lorca, 1980, pp.46, 49-50) The sublime enters into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in a similar way. In some particular moment some communicative relationship is established that celebrates life and death in beauty, in awe and in reverence. 1

2



On the Sublime

Longinus (1899) said that without the sublime, the body is left without soul (XI, 21). The sublime lifts up the soul in 'joy and vaunting' (VII, 23); gladness and boastfulness; in exultation, 'as though it had itself produced what it has heard' (VII, 23-4). In this moment there is no 'other'. Creator and created are one, audience and artist vibrate to the same hummingbird's wing. The space between breaths becomes one soul. Whenever we speak of the soul, we speak of the sublime. Peri Hypsous. Concerning the sublime. The elevation. The height.

The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy 3

uncleanliness of the blackness, all death, hell, curse, wrath, and all poison would depart'. But what she forgot in her Romantic Sublime was the necessary manifold work of circulating the tincture through the endless distillations 'in and out of the forms and qualities of nature' — 'the water . . . and heavenly dew' (Jung, CW16, para.515), but the blood and the rage — and the mud. For ever and ever. Longinus (1899) also said that the sublime must be referred to physis (nature), for it is by physis 'that mad is a being gifted with speech' (XXXVI, 18). So, whenever we speak of the sublime, we speak of physis — 'the original and vital underlying principle' (II, 5). Inadequately translated as nature by the Romans, physis is the very life-force itself, the élan vital. The soul of the world and the soul of the word. Physis is also the root word for physicist, physician, physic (as in medicine). Perhaps the medicine for the injured soul inextricably embodied. Heidegger thinks that physis as logos is the poesis of physis 'the ultimate source of thought as well as of language and poetry. The human logos, as it shows itself in language and poetry, is merely a response to the logos of physis' (Avens, 1984, p.70). —

The Greeks did not learn what physis is through natural phenomena, but the other way around; it was through a fundamental poetic . . . experience of being that they discovered what they had to call physis' (Heidegger, 1959, p.14).

Physis is growing, becoming, coming into being, healing, creativity, evolution, very nature. Heraclitus bears witness that physis loves to

Figure 1. Sublimatio Sapientia veterum philosophorum sive doctrina eorundem de summa et universali medicina, eighteenth century, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, Ms. 974.

And a young woman came to see me because she wanted to be a high tincture — to attain 'whiteness and brilliance in Venus and Luna' divinely virgin, to be pure like a distilled Madonna lily, like brilliantly polished silver, sanctified, resurrected, purified and made white, so that 'all the

hide' (Kahn, 1981, p.33). It represents the eternal cycle. The 'experiential reconciliation of permanence and degeneration' (Guerriere, 1980, p.88). That means always the opposites of coming into being and being destroyed. Enantiodromia for ever and ever. From the fullness of one, its opposite. Breathing in and breathing out, living and dying. Endlessly. Et saecula et saecula. Of course logos is not only words. The sublime also speaks in the silence. 'The silence of Ajax in the Underworld is great and more Sublime than words'. Thus spoke Longinus (1899, IX). One thousand and nine hundred years later — approximately — Weiskel (1976) says that 'the sublime moment establishes depth because the presentation of unattainability is phenomenologically a negation, a falling away from what might be seized, perceived, known. As an image, it is the abyss.' (pp.24-5) [italics added]. It is the void. 'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God, but it is a much more terrible thing to fall out of them' (Lawrence, 1992). A poet speaks the poesis of despair. My patient says: I have always dreamed that there is nobody on the other end of the phone when I call. It just rings and rings and rings as if in an empty house because all the people have moved on to another place.' Lawrence (1992) again:

On the Sublime

4

The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy (a)

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change. (p.258)

THE NEGATIVE SUBLIME



Theme (imagery): Structure: Semiotic occasion:

Without the sublime, the human is bereft of soul, abandoned to a pedestrian existence on crowded and dusty hot sidewalks. Without the sublime, the world soul is emptied of awe, of mystery — but also of the possibility of nuclear extinction, or obliteration by cyclone, or armies of jeeps hunting tigers. It is robbed of its particular perilous grandeur. In denial of the sublime, Freud can say that Leonardo's drawings of fountains and the wondrously chaotic movements of water are simply to do with his childhood enuresis, and his translucent Madonnas the sublimation of his incestuous love for his mother.

5

Transcendence Dualism Excess on the plane of signifiers

Primary Basic fantasy: Oral Nss Wish: To be inundated, engulfed (ambivalence) Anxiety:

Fear of being incorporated, overwhelmed, annihilated

Defence:

Reaction formation (passive active)

Secondary Oedipal To possess 'mother'

lir (melancholy) Identification (introjection) (delight) Metaphor (substitution) Schizoid alienation Imitation

Semiotic resolution: Ethos: Phase of 'influence':

(b)

I

4 Guilt (superego anxiety) (1) Castration (terror) (2) Loss of narcissistic supplies

THE POSITIVE SUBLIME

Past

Present



Future

Identity X90

^

-

";."

161,

Identity (signifier) 'Some other being'?

,91:-041'.;00-1 -c1r).1 -Ott1w R'. '"cf Figure 2. A study of turbulent motion by Leonardo da Vinci. The Royal Collection 0 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The how of the telling has more eternity than the what. The winedark sea or the woods of Dunsinane. The keening against the silhouettes of mosques in torture or the worksongs bled out in painblinded endurance and diamondbright brilliant exuberance in a field of cocoa, or tea or innocent sunpolished poppies. There was a man who believed the whole world could be put in one part of one story — the middle part — and that was a life. He told the story well and many believed him, but many did not. (Clarkson, 1995a, pp.106-7).

Vacancy



Ideal

t

(memory) (desire) Vacancy

Intentionality (signified) Figure 3. The Negative Sublime and the Positive Sublime (Weiskel, 1976, pp.106 and 152, The Romantic Sublime. 0 The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Freud's views on the oceanic, the merging, the religious, the spiritual and the artist are well known. Without the sublime, we have to practise a therapy of the psyche which reduces the sublime to diagrams of 'the positive sublime' and 'the negative sublime' (Weiskel, 1976, pp.152, 106).

6



On the Sublime

This is the reductio. Creativity has become just the result of our sublimation of sexual and aggressive drives. 'For Mrs Klein even the pleasure of learning becomes just epistemophilia — the thirst of knowledge regarded as either a derivative of scopophilia, i.e. as an extension of sexual curiosity, or as a sublimation of oral drives' (Rycroft, 1972, p.45). (`The better known spelling "scoptophilia" dates from a mistake made by Freud's first translators' (Hinshelwood, 1989, p.148).) `Klein's first psychoanalytic writings demonstrated the close link between sadism and the desire to know' (Hinshelwood, 1989, p.292). Thirst for knowledge becomes a sublimation of the pleasure of looking at shit. Scopophilia and the love of learning — practically the same thing. What is sublimity now? [The] process postulated by Freud to account for human activities which have no apparent connection with sexuality but which are assumed to be motivated by the force of the sexual instinct. The main types of activity described by Freud as sublimated are artistic creation and intellectual inquiry. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p.431) Freud's own gifts were great. Sex is numinous indeed, and death compelling. But E = me, the Sistine ceiling, the poignant hope of a bruised Madame Butterfly trilling into 'one fine day', a lapis and gold icon burnished with faith and miracles, the ironwork tracery in Islamic courtyards, the benzene ouroborous, the plastic heart valve, the dirty saucer left by the cleaning maid put to service against pestilence, the smoky sacredness of patchouli incense drifting over the Ganges, the pyramids gloating against the onslaught of eternity. For better sex lives — merely the end of art and science! A poetic injustice? But, to use Blake's protesting words: 'You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting and fitted. I know better and Please your Lordship' (Blake, 1965, pp.655-6). Jung said it this way: 'Freud invented the idea of sublimation to save us from the imaginary claws of the unconscious. (Nature, red in tooth and claw'? (Tennyson, In Memoriam, lvi.)) But what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated, and if anything is apparently sublimated it never was what a false interpretation took it to be ... it is a view that springs from fear of nature' (Jung, CW16, para.328). Physis phobia? He also said, 'Sublimation means nothing less than the alchemist's trick of turning the base into the noble, the bad into the good, and the useless into the useful. Anyone who knew how to do that would be certain of immortal fame' (Jung, CW15, para.53). And the poesis of physis reveals and conceals itself inevitably always already in the telling of the tale, the ordering even of unlovely words, the hesitant invocation of the presencing of the sublime and the insistent lamentation for its loss.

The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy 7

It has been said of Jung that he also 'defended himself through technical analysis against feeling the aesthetic response' to Picasso's work (Bleakley, 1996). Bleakley goes on to say that 'art is more powerful than psychotherapy, and prior to it'. I would say that physis is more powerful than Eros and Thanatos, and prior to both. If not present, it may be merely concealing itself in the background of the Gestalt — the whole. Until the images are made and the songs are sung, Until the stories are told, there is only the thing itself without its history, without its cast, without its incidental music. Until the vitality of its life is distilled in the telling the construction of a bridge across a gorge cannot become the bones of a life. Until a heartbreak is fashioned into pearls of remembrance, there is only the heartbreak. (Clarkson, 1995a, pp. 105-106) And I would say that Jung was the man who opened his arms to the whole feast of stories, the myths, the legends, the ancient woodcuts. He welcomed them into the healing rooms, he made his heart hospitable for them and their puzzles and their furies. He honoured and flowered the signs and symbols and signifiers and souls and stones and signals. He and his dog in Aesculapian partnership, attended the dreams, the distractions, the disappointments, the despairs. Not just one story, but all of them, all the time, in their fullness. And he described the numinosum, the self and the mystery of the sublimatio. And if he quaked and shuddered and transgressed, so much more to the story and so much more to learn. He writes like this: Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal His immediate communication with nature is gone for ever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious. (Jung, CW18, para.585) Then therapy is the restoration of relationship between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos, the alchemical meaning and the spiritual magic, man and nature. In the words of Heraclitus — the way up and down is one and the same (Kahn, 1981, p.75). Jung knows that 'there is

8

On

the

Sublime

a god hidden in matter' (CW13,para.138), and that it is God who cures. Meier (1986) reminds us that how psyche acts on physis and how physis acts upon psyche is an enigma (p.176). At the roots of nature lies the soul energising the will to recover. Without this

spontaneous healing tendency of Nature . . . skill is of no avail, either in the somatic or in the psychic sphere. The dexterity of the surgeon creates nothing but destruction, and the skill of the psychologist is reduced to a dangerous experiment of the sorcerer's apprentice. (Meier, 1986, p.30) A man dreams that he bleeds from a wound in his thigh made by his father's sword. Emerald drops form a snake curling into in a chalice of rubies, salted by a memory of killing a stag one day driving impatiently along a highway going to a city meeting and his soul just won't rest until he plants a tree to mark the spot of his guilt. 'How can the all-embracing logic which mirrors the world use such special catches and manipulations? Only because all these are connected into an infinitely fine network, to the great mirror' (Wittgenstein, 1922, 5.511). And the scientists also teach that the haemoglobin molecule in human blood is very similar to the chlorophyll molecule (Fox, 1983, p.352). And whose self is it then? Mine — or the world's? Self can stand for many things. That which is not my ego, my daytime self. That which is both my centre and my circumference, or that which is my self as archetype of the supreme soul — and of course therefore not my self. Jung's notion of the self as totality archetype represents an organised wholeness of the personality expressed in symbolic experience which is transpersonal and transcends the incompatible opposites psychically and physically which apparently constitute the human being — psyche and soma, ego and non-ego, inner and outer. The matter at issue in Heraclitus is physis . . . . And correlative to the matter is a self-experience which is as deep as physis is comprehensive. The experience of physis is an experience of self for two reasons: (I) physis comprehends (encompasses) the self as it does everything else; and (2) the self is the locus where (for the human self) physis comprehends (understands) itself. Human experience is, in terms of physis, the self-experience of physis. (Guerriere, 1980, pp.129-30) Yet Jung at other times almost recoils from physis: 'Man's connection with physis, with the material world and its demands, is the cause of his anomalous position; on the one hand he has the capacity for enlightenment, on the other he is in thrall to the Lord of this world' (Jung, CW11, para.263). The medieval alchemist sees the work as contra naturam —

t 0' OP' , I tr.

The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy

9

against nature. The function of the sublimatio is to separate the physical from the psychical, spirit from matter, 'for the purpose of purifying away the mali odores, the foetor sepulcrorum, and the clinging darkness of the beginning' (Jung, CW16, para.403). What is this smell that he smells? Perhaps it is not totally surprising that `meretrix the whore is a synonym for the prima materia, the corpus imperfectum which is sunk in darkness, like the man who wanders„ in darkness, unconscious and unredeemed. This idea is foreshadowed in the Gnostic image of Physis, who with passionate arms draws the Nous down from heaven and wraps him in her dark embrace' (Jung, CW16, para.312) in the stinking waters . . . 'where he assumes the chthonic form of the serpent' (para.380). But which serpent? And whose stink? And even as man seeks to rise higher and higher — in his knowledge too — so the ground fractures more and more beneath his feet. 'Nature' is forever dodging his projects of representation, of reproduction. And his grasp.That this resistance should all too often take the form of rivalry within the hom(m)ologous, of a death struggle between two consciousnesses, does not alter the fact that at stake here somewhere, ever more insistent in its deathly hauteur, is the risk that the subject (as) self will crumble away. (Irigaray, 1985, p.135) Hillman too has this ambivalent relationship with the anima mundi (Garufi, 1993) who gives soul 'with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street' (Hillman, 1982, p.77) and he acknowledges that 'the human psyche is one of the great forces of nature' (Hillman and Ventura, 1992, p.123). At other times he waxes vociferous against these very 'man-made things' — the subway, the organisation of the workplace, the ugly, the neurotic, the noxious, the hysterical theatrics of baroque altars; in the anorexic emptiness of high, glass-enclosed atriums; in the oppressive claustrophobia of low-ceilinged, overstuffed trailers; in gaudy escape through the slot machine casino and provincial red-light district'. (Hillman and Ventura, 1992, p.128) Would it be different if it was a cosmopolitan red-light district? Once there was a client or a patient (and why would it matter if it were a man or a woman?) who wandered into a park in central Paris. Languishing on a wooden bench, with collar turned up against the autumn breeze, suddenly hearing the gentle and penetrating song of a bird. Recognising the nightingale's voice, there was marvelling at its beam); the particular miracle of its out-of-season exuberance, the gentle magic of a moment of awe and mystery. Soul-nourished, the wanderer

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stepped out on to the path where a noticeboard politely thanked the Paris Municipality (or such) for the provision of the electronic equipment. The nightingale's song had been mechanically reproduced from another place, another time - was its sublime pleasure thus diminished or thus enhanced? Tacey (1993) said: The task ahead is to free ourselves from Jung's dualism, to realise that psychic depth and meaning can be found both in ourselves and in the so-called external word. Having withdrawn psyche from the world to experience our own souls, we must now break this artificial dualism and grant the world again its soul dimension, while remaining aware of soul within. (p.280) The physicist used to live in a world where a clear distinction existed 'between spirit and matter, physis and psyche' (Erkelens, 1991, p.41). But to the dream stranger (as the quantum physicist Pauli told it to Von Franz), there is no distinction between the physical and the psychical. Contrary to the deep rift in Pauli's personality, 'as the spirit of matter, he embodies a unity of physis and psyche which cannot be comprehended rationally' (Erkelens, 1991, p.41). 'But the image is of a cosmos very different from the one we have known up to now in our era. This yet to be is the image of a PSYCHOPHYSICAL COSMOS' (Holms, 1992, p.6). But of course it is also a very old one. Skatole is a necessary ingredient of all the most refined perfumes in the world (van Toller and Dodd, 1991). Without the smell of faeces, there is no jasmine for the Fedeli de Amore (Corbin, 1990). 'The myth of the omnimorphic soul [imagines the world soul in such a way as it] includes all of experience, all situations, all happenings, without exception' (Wheeler, 1993, p.290). There can be no separation of the self. There is nothing which lacks soul. Nothing. There is only the ongoing movements and happenings of psychological life, in the adventures, interactions, and fates of fantasies, images and experiences. In this way of imagining, soul qualities are inherent to all psychological life, and can never be absent or lost from it. (Wheeler, 1993, p.291). Nor can they be lost from the world. No matter what. When we take this view of the world soul, there is no 'war with monotheism, because polytheism and monotheism exist in two different dimensions of imaginal life' (Wheeler, 1993, p.291). The normative and the transpersonal - levels 4 and 7 (Clarkson, 1995b). And this is the view of the later more Taoist Jung. Tao is defined as:

The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy 11 The Way; principle; cosmic order; nature. [Again] 'the Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.' It is 'vague and eluding,' 'deep and obscure,' but 'there is in it the form' and 'the essence'. Its 'standard is the natural' (Lao Tsu). (Runes, 1966, p.312) So how will the therapist, the alchemist, the patient be different from 'an animal fulfilling the will of God unreservedly? The only difference I can see is that I am conscious of, and reflect on, what I am doing'. 'If thou knowest what thou art doing, thou art blessed' (Jung, CW18, para.1628). Jung continues, 'Life then becomes a dangerous adventure, because I surrender to a power beyond the opposites, to a superior or divine factor, without argument' (para.1628). And if, in the unforeseeable future, she happened to unleash some nameless potency, it would not be up to her to judge whether or not this unpredictable event had occurred. She would not concern the sudden unchecked appearance of the physis as a monstrosity, and aberration in the essence of plant life . . . . And if, through some impossible - in the Aristotelian meaning of that word - realization of some as yet unknown essence, matter were to supplant or at least question the ontological development of man himself, overturning the premises that ensure his logic, then it seems likely that discourse would set out to prove that she was malformed. (Irigaray, 1985, p.163) Hillman says, 'Therapy has to be sublime. Terror has to be included in its beauty' (Hillman and Ventura, 1992, p.127). And fate-ful Hekate of the sun and of the moon, guardian of thresholds, fecund goddess of the life-force, ensouler of the world, physis herself, birther and destroyer, the very earliest anima mundi, queen of the dreamworld, primordial matter or mater, with nature on her back enters on the world stage ablaze with terror and glory, with city walls for a crown, and screaming at the crossroads, her angels and demons and dogs barking over the sewers of the world, straddling ocean and heaven and hell with the source of the virtues faith, truth and love boiling from one hip, and the source of souls gushing forth in abundance from the other, the serpent coiling about her thighs irradiating healing, Leo viridis in attendance, presiding over the Katharsia at the crossroads, the opposites finally reconciled. The beginning and the end. 'How does the force of life manifest as the force of death?' (Ronan, 1992, p.132). How else could it be? This is Nature conforming to her own laws. Sublime. Some say she is even older than the Father of the gods (Kroll, 1894, pp.29-31). She heals sick limbs and raging souls, and guides the weary to the haven of piety with her winds. She trashes cemeteries and eats the dead. She also rules chaos.

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References Avens, R. (1984) The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Blake, W. (1965) 'Annotations to Wordsworth's Preface to The Excusion' , in D. E. Erdman (ed.) The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, New York: Avery Bleakley, A. (1996) 'Psychotherapy stinks! - or Hekate rising'. Sphinx, 7. Clarkson, P. (1995a) 'Story as medicine, narrative to sing for the world', in The Therapeutic Relationship: In Psychoanalysis, Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy, pp.105-7. London: Whurr. Clarkson, P. (1995b) 'The transpersonal relationship', in The Therapeutic Relationship: In Psychoanalysis, Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy,

pp.181-221. London: Whurr. Corbin, H. (1990) 'Jasmine of the Fedeli d'Amore: A discourse on Raz behin BaqIi of Shiriz', Sphinx, 3, 189-223. Erkelens, H. van (1991) 'Pauli's dialogue with the spirit of matter', Psychological Perspectives, 24, 34 53. Fox, M. (1983) Original Blessing. Santa Fe, NM: Bear. Garcia Lorca, F. (1980) Deep Song and Other Prose (ed. and trans C. Maurer), London: Marion Boyars. Garufi, B. (1993) 'Anima mundi and anima mater: a reply to James Hillman's talk: "Beyond the Narcissism of Psychology"', Sphinx, 5, 266-77. Guerriere, D. (1980) 'Physis, Sophia, Psyche', in J. Sallis and K. Maly (eds) -

Heraclitean Fragments: A Companion Volume to the Heidegger/Fink Seminar on Heraclitus, pp.86-134. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Heidegger, M. (1959) An Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. R. Manheim), New Haven,

Figure 4. Artist's impression of Chaldean Hekate by Laura Knobloch (from Ronan,

1992).

Longinus (or perhaps he was only a pseudo-Longinus) ended his treatise concerning the Sublime thus: 'Such are the decisions to which we have felt bound to come with regard to the questions proposed, but let every man cherish the view which pleases him best' (Longinus, 1899, XXXVI, 27).

CT: Yale University Press. Hillman, J. (1982) 'Anima Mundi: The return of the soul to the world', Spring 71-93. Hillman, J. and Ventura, M. (1992) We've bad a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's getting Worse. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1989) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books. Holms, D. (1992) 'Synchronicity and science', Fourth Jung Studies Forum: 'Synchronicity', pp. 6-9. Canterbury: University of Kent. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman (tr. G. C. Gill). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jung, C. G. The Collected Works (eds. H. Read, M. Fordham and G. Adler, tr. R. F. C. Hull), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. The volumes referred to in this chapter are 11 (2nd edn, 1969), 13 (1967) 15 (1966), 16 (2nd edn, 1969) and 18 (1977). Kahn, C. H. (1981) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kroll, W. (1894) De oraculis chaldaicis. Breslau. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Lawrence, D. H. (1992) Selected Poems. London: J.M. Dent. Longinus (1899) Longinus on the Sublime (ed. and tr. W. Rhys Roberts). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meier, C. A. (1986) Soul and Body: Essays on the Theories of C. G. Jung. Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press. Ronan, S. (1992) 'Chaldean Hekate', in S. Ronan (ed.) The Goddess Hekate, pp.79-139. Hastings: Chthonios Books,

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Runes, D. D. (1966) Dictionary 0/Philosophy. Totawa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams. Rycroft, C. (1972) A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tacey, D. J. (1993) lung's Ambivalence Toward the World-Soul', Sphinx, 5, 278-87. Toiler, S. van and Dodd, G. H. (eds.) (1991) Perfumery: The Psychology and Biology of Fragrances. London: Chapman & Hall. Weiskel, T. (1976) The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wheeler, C. (1993) 'The lost Atlantis: a myth of soul in the modern world', Sphinx, 5, 287-302. Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (tr. C. K. Ogden). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Chapter 2 Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room MARIE ANGELO Longinus, quintessential philosopher of the sublime, does more than describe a quality of experience when he suggests that, 'It is our nature to be elevated by true sublimity' (Longinus, trans. Russell and Winterbottom, 1972, p.467); he also describes a direction and location for that experience, a movement upwards. Alchemically, such elevations are a result of the sublimatio, the technique which loosens sedimented thinking (the 'sitting mind') so that new descriptions and imaginative variations can rise into awareness (Moore, 1990, pp.70-2). In this paper, the loosening and lifting turns on the style of questioning about the sublime, for I want to release some spatial imaginings about this rising itself. Philosophical and aesthetic analyses ask, 'what is the sublime?', demonstrating a sophisticated range of conceptual modes. The deconstructions of archetypology are more likely to turn the question around and ask, 'who is asking about the sublime?', so that they may 'see through' into the mythic narrative and the persons of the gods. The characteristically unasked questions are those of archetopology, which want to know 'where is the sublime?', and seek differentiated images of ascent, location and place. This is to place the sublime in the context of cosmos rather than logos or mythos, introducing what might be called 'a cosmologising mode of enquiry'. Although the personifications of mythos are becoming a familiar mode of discourse in psychology, this is not so with cosmos and the equivalent activity of `spatialising' (for which we lack even a recognised term). The techniques of active imagination and guided fantasy have made familiar a certain plasticity of the archetypal, by which subjective experience is objectified and encountered. As Jung so vividly describes in Memories Dreams Reflections, the shift from being immersed in a mood to meeting an imaginal figure who is that mood enables the individual to bring the unconscious contents into 15

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relationship with consciousness by relating to them as a 'vis-à-vis' (Jung, 1961, pp.211,369). But what of the plasticity by which subjective experience is objectified as context and environment? In this mode an archetype, such as 'the self', can not only be encountered as a person but entered as a place. What insights into pluralism, anima mundi and the paradoxical non-ego nature of an 'imaginal ego' (Hillman, 1975, p.135) might come from such an 'environmentalism of the psyche'? Bringing personifying to the fore is perhaps inevitable in a 'talking cure', but the risk is that context is kept as a permanent background, either ignored and undifferentiated, or stereotyped through simplistic interpretations, and the creation of imaginal settings for guided work which are as culturally limited, and damaging, as any bad architecture and bad art. Yet when concepts and personifications are 're-placed' through attentive spatialising, they display subtle detail, form and relationship, locating an imaginal ground and directions. They point out the value of knowing not just who you are, but where you are. In a short paper such as this I can only briefly entertain some of the spatial images which arise from this cosmologising mode, but I hope to clear some imaginal ground for 're-placing' the sublime, and to open up areas for further research. I have three themes to introduce, beginning with some observations on the nature of the sublime in relation to the psychoanalytic cosmologies of depth and height. Both 'the round art' of anima and 'the square art' of animus appear in the mandalas of cosmologies, creating highly differentiated spatialising which displays the sublime in multiple, polytheistic ways. There are some interesting connections between these multiplicities and the complex spatial charts of integrative psychotherapies (and here I am thinking particularly of Clarkson's seven levels of epistemological discourse, and five kinds of therapeutic relationships; Clarkson, 1995). Hence, my third theme is to identify some of these connections as a basis for bringing insights directly into the consulting room. In his paper 'Cosmology for soul', Hillman (1989) points out that the original Greek word kosmos can best be translated as 'fitting order', or 'that which is held in orderly arrangement'. It also connotes 'discipline, form and fashion', and has a second group of meanings concerning decoration, embellishment and ornament. It is an aesthetic, sensate term with an implicit morality of 'good order, good behaviour and decency'. Translated into 'the monist and abstract' term 'universe', however, these connotations are lost and now, 'our word cosmetics is closer to the original atmosphere of kosmos than is the latinate universe'. Hillman regrets that 'universe' now refers only 'to a vast gas bag, outer, empty, spacey and cold', while 'the logos of the cosmic is without sweet song'. The soul needs cosmologies and displays delight in tales about itself, especially these 'tallest of tales'. As Hillman describes it, 'the psyche tells cosmologies as one of its most georgous acts of

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imagination. A cosmology is a display in the art of thought similar to the rainbow in the art of nature, to the wheeling night sky, to the parade of four-footed beasts' (Hillman, 1989, p.21). Being 'a self' in relation to 'a universe' appears differently if reimagined cosmologically. As an expression of spatial relations, it can be seen as one of many possible displays of the cosmological archetype macrocosm/microcosm (the great wholeness and the small wholeness). The nature of the macrocosm and ways 'In which it is experienced and related to is a key issue for understanding the 'sublime. Writers on the sublime, notably Burke, stress the human sense of being dwarfed and lonely in the face of the vastness outside and beyond oneself (Burke, 1756, p.91). Emotions deriving from pain and terror prevail (related to Aristotle's definition of the tragic as giving rise to pity and terror), and care is taken to differentiate the sublime from the beautiful and the numinous. Spatially this suggests a particular response of the small to the large; is it perhaps specific to macrocosm identified as 'universe' and microcosm personified as 'self' but not spatialised? Taken literally, such imaginings become concrete 'facts', lacking the sublimatio by which other images of cosmos can arise, yet, depending on psychological orientation the 'great wholeness' outside and beyond oneself may be named in many ways; 'the collective unconscious', 'the imaginal', the 'cosmopolitan', 'the transpersonal', or simply 'the other'. Each cosmologising mode has corresponding implications for the 'small wholeness' which stands in relation to it, and for the nature of that relation. The experience of the sublime lies in a shift of perspective which moves between microcosm and macrocosm. It is a moment in which background becomes foreground as a new and larger Gestalt is momently construed. There is no inevitable response to this larger-sized perception, which may point to an explanation for the many modes of the sublime which are described and analysed; the transcendent, the terrible, the obscure, the astonishing, the violent, the apocalyptic, the grotesque, the joyful (Paley, 1986, pp.1-18; Weiskel, 1986; Ramazani, 1990, pp.79-133). To study the placing of the sublime, rather than its definitions or narratives, makes it possible to recognise some of the paradoxes and problems which arise when it is construed in limited and unrevisioned cosmologies. A cosmos is an imagistic paradigm, setting the boundaries of 'imagining about imagining', just as the invisible structures of thought set the boundaries to the more familiar philosophic mode of 'thinking about thinking' (Angelo, 1994, p3). Jung describes how his 'Confrontation with the Unconscious' began with the question,'... what is your myth - the myth in which you . . . live?' (Jung, 1961, p.195). The inner voice would not have asked 'what is the cosmos in which you live?', for Jung was responding to philosophies of time, not of space. As Ed Casey points out in his influential study 'Getting placed: soul in space', in earlier Aristotelian philosophies place was 'the first of things', and

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considerations of the nature of existence were first situated, before being described. In philosophical theory, however, time has now been assigned superiority over space; memory has become time-bound, the ancient and vast halls of Memoria dropping into disuse (Casey, 1991, pp.290-309). Yet mythic narrative and cosmic display are as related as the concepts of time and space. They are like the concepts of soul and spirit, but expressed in imaginal rather than abstract terms. From this perspective, the sublime is seen as an essential archetype of space and spirit, and as an expression of the cosmoplastic, it will vary according to the way in which the cosmos is imagined and displayed. The cosmos inhabited by the alchemists so carefully translated and studied by Jung, was not the modern universe/self, but the circular mandala of the pre-Copernican world view. Figure 1 is one of the most detailed presentations of this cosmology, with Earth at the centre, surrounded by concentric circles which open up to ever more exalted planes; from elements, through the planets, to the stars and the triple fire of the Creator. In the centre 'the woman crowned with stars' is the mediating link between the animal and the divine. p eculu mAtis re imago.

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

This cosmology is an image of the unconscious, for as Hillman has pointed out, the 'discovery' of the unconscious in depth psychology was simply a re-naming of ancient terms, because, 'the unconscious, so newly found, was in fact a palace left from antiquity and the Renaissance, still inhabited by the surviving pagan gods and once called the realm of memoria' (Hillman, 1972, p.172) It is not only spatially extensive and imagistically rich, but animated and animating, connecting together the whole of creation, like a living web, throUgh chains of correspondences. Historian Frances Yates has detailed the way in which such correspondences reach between all the worlds, forming ladders of occult sympathies running through all nature. (Yates, 1964, pp.44-61). She describes a cosmology in which the visions of the Hermetic philosophies, married with the interest in practical magical operations, brought into focus the imagination of the individual as a microcosm of the whole. This is a cosmology in which animism is not a primitive mode, prior and inferior to abstract and mechanical modes (as it is in the stages of Piagetian development theory, for example) (Angelo, 1997, p15). In this cosmos of the alchemists, anima is celebrated as anima mundi, linking Earth and the Heavens. Although such a cosmology, operating as a mandala, gives images of completion, it is its very circular, concentric, nature which sets its limits. Its containment can make Jungian work feel both claustrophobic and monotheistic, a centripetal force drawing all into its demesne, and interpreting it as 'Jungian' (for example, seeing Zen as 'Jungian' rather than Jungianism in relation to Zen). In addition, the cosmology has been deformed by imagining in two dimensions only, so that the image is rendered as a flat circle rather than a full sphere. All that is seen in the illustration is a single diameter with the sublime displaced out to the periphery as the Empyrium, the transpersonal or transcendent. Earth at the centre is ego consciousness, whilst concentric circles of elements, planets, stars and light, identify the Jungian topography and the mythology of inner space travel. With 'Place' restored to 'the first of things', its shaping influence is apparent, and so it is clear that in this `Jungian cosmos', the journey to individuation follows the line of ascent from earth. Hence, Lunar consciousness must come before the Mercurial and Venusian anima animus, which in turn is a polytheistic stage prior to the solar self. Similarly, the personal ought to come before the transpersonal, and the mundane before the sublime, otherwise essential fundamentals are being avoided. But what of different routes? A reversal, for example, would begin with the sublime. Perhaps this would establish essential 'firmamentals' belonging to the vault of Heaven, enabling us to 'grow down' (Hillman, 1996) into the worlds of physical expression. This would focus on leaving 'self'-ishness for plurality, and developing that energetic capacity for action which is what might be given by an imaginal ego of the depths rather than an heroic ego always striving up to the heights. There is a —

Figure 1. `Integrae naturae speculum artisque imago', by de Bry for Robert Fludd, Collectio Operum, Oppenheim, 1617. Reprinted with permission from Ponce, C. (1974). Kabbalah: An Introduction and Illumination for the World Today, Garnstone Press, London, p.217.

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tendency towards literalism in the classical images of necessary stages and sequences which makes it hard to imagine such different routes. Jung's Copernican revolution seeks to re-centre the personality around the Sun, making the centre of the cosmos at once the starting place of Earthly ego consciousness, and the Sun-self goal of individuation. It becomes a monotheistic cosmos, with the universal goal to achieve union with the one god 'whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere'. It is the perfect ideal of utopia, but a sublime terror, for ou-topos means 'without place', and without place, there are no images. The universe/self image overlaying the old macrocosm/microcosm of anima mundi creates the tension and confusions between the metaphorical and the literal which is a key to Jungian critique. Spatially this can be seen as a senex problem. Macrocosm defined as 'universe' is a cosmology dominated by negative senex, permitting no other image to appear. In The Puer Papers Hillman identifies senex as the principle of form and boundaries, and makes one of his most powerful contributions by identifying the syzygy between senex and puer (Hillman, 1979, pp.30-8). When this archetype is split, both senex and puer then display only a negative aspect. Senex without puer congeals ideas and stiffens into literalism, forming simplistic rigid hierarchies and dogma that empty-out space and exile the sublime to the periphery. Puer without senex does not show that marvellous soaring of vision and imagination of the divine youth, but is all flying and falling, puerile restlessness and impulse which cannot learn or develop; 'the aura of knowing all and needing nothing' (Hillman, 1979, p.25). The boundary-making and formal aspects of senex identify this as a key spatial archetype, but what of the flexibility and metaphors of puer-space as well as senex-space? Cosmology formed as negative senex is surely the very way in which cosmos is reduced to universe, offering fixed boundaries, literal space, and certainties. Senex-space remains as an exaggeratedly respected macrocosm, and puer, rather than being part of the space, loosening and de-literalising, is split off as microcosm, personalised, and reviled as 'nothing but imagination'. The relation between the two will reflect the agon of father and son, as so clearly suggested in psychoanalytic conceptions of the sublime, (in which an Oedipal dynamic is played out, 'whereby the hero and the poet surmount the threat of the destructive father through identification with him'. Ramazani, 1990, p.110). Is this an artefact of the split archetype which could be imagined differently via a 'union of sames'? Senex gives form but tends to literalise; puer, moving swiftly by, gives metaphor. Imaginal space formed from both senex and puer might open a different mode of the sublime altogether, one informed by positive senex and positive puer rather than negative versions. The two together avoid the separation into polarities of structure and dynamic and together can make an animated, and animating cosmology to inhabit.

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When expressed as dynamic, puer becomes the image of love, vitality and metaphor, blowing like a breath ofspiritus through the structures of many congealed and senex-dominated cosmologies. Hillman is not excluded from this, for he too personifies rather than spatialises. He calls puer down into personification, and senex personifications are honoured in the form of Old Saturn (melancholy) and Cronos (the weight of time rather than the terror of space), but the heights of cosmological space are left senex-dominated and named 'spirit'. His avoidance of senex-space is part of a 'constellation of rejects' in his work which align animus, ego, hero, height, space and vastness. He has been loud to condemn 'transcendentalism' and the 'grids and systems' which map the psyche and guide imagery on an ascent to the higher self; Assagioli's 'egg diagram', for example (Assagioli, 1975), or Wilber's 'levels' (Wilber, 1983), and all cosmologies structured with the evolutionist's relentlessly Darwinian eye (Hillman, 1972, p.188), but how can the sublime be restored from concept to cosmos if our spatial imagination remains as emptied out as a spacey gas bag? A description of macrocosm solely in terms of universe does not provide a differentiated and subtle space for the sublime. A cosmology which can re-place metaphor into the sublime relationship between microcosm and macrocosm must be made of metaphor and the sublime, as much as it is made of form. It is this quality which I think is offered by the the Kabbalistic Tree of Life or Sapphire Tree (Bloom, 1975, p.26). This is a complex, imagistic and above all, spatial philosophy and magic which informed the more subtle workings of Renaissance magi. As a more complex expression of cosmology it has much to offer the classical 'Jungian cosmos'. It was Marsilio Ficino's brilliant pupil Pico Della Mirandola who first noticed the subtleties which the Kabbalah could bring to the cosmology and to work in the halls of memoria (Yates, 1964, pp.84-116). Pico's puer-like enthusiam and sweep of ideas combined with a genius in spatialising. He identified patterns of symmetries in the diverse presentations of Angels and Intelligences, and made the imaginative leap which identified the Tree of Life as a special presentation of the traditional cosmology All the details of the earlier image-filled and animating cosmos are present, but rather than be placed in concentric form and asserted as a literal picturing of the cosmos, the spheres of the Earth, Elements, Planets, Stars and Empyrium are set out in a number of different imaginative patterns and geometrical forms and interconnected in a multitude of ways (some of which are described and illustrated later in the chapter). Pico had made the move from astronomy to psychology, from the literal exegesis to work with other levels of discourse. It is a non-literal spatialising which incorporates the metaphorising puer as part of the structure itself, and hence a psychology is made which can know itself to be a psychology. The implications of this insight into social construc-

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On the Sublime

tionism are considerable, for to journey within this cosmos is to enter an imaginal space which is multiple, various and metaphorical. Like a move to the post-Jungian, cosmos becomes places of story-telling from which insights can be gained into the operations of microcosm and macrocosm. !Cabbalism in its entirety is an extensive tradition, located in Judaism much as Sufism is located in Islam, and capable of being approached in multiple ways. This depends on the 'who?' and the 'where?', the approach varying according to who is asking the questions; philosopher, theologist, psychologist, magus, and from which domain of discourse they are asking. Four methods of exegesis are described, each complete in itself, of which 'The most sublime and divine of all' is the mysticism of the Tree of Life operating at the anagogic or spiritual level. But equally extant are the figurative or tropic level, which operates in metaphor; the allegorical level, which operates as narrative; and the literal level, which operates as practical action. Hebrew scholars such as Gersholm Scholem, formerly professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have regretted its adoption by Christian magi during the Renaissance revival of magic, but acknowledge its 'universal, archetypal appeal' (Scholem, 1955, pp.1-2). Scholem has shown that the Kabbalistic tradition has roots in both gnosticsm and neoplatonism, seeming to represent a struggle between these two great visions, in which they sometimes blend, sometimes pull apart, but constantly re-invent themselves, moving on from one 'processional exit' (pace Hillman, 1975, p.229) and transformation to another. It is a philosophy expressed in images, with the special mythical structure of being a complex of symbols in which the sublime is depicted spatially as unfolding through a sequence of archetypes. 'These are the fundamental powers of all being . . . [each] correlated with a vast number of symbols relating it to other archetypal images to form a special structure.' (Scholem, 1969, p.96) In this image, the sublime is distributed throughout the cosmology and present at every point as both immanence and transcendence, and in multiple ways. Hence, 'man's ascent to higher worlds and to the borders of nothingness involves no motion on his part, for 'where you stand, there stand all the worlds' (Scholem, 1969, p.122). The archetypal world, containing the infinite unity of divine being, not only in its hidden essence, but in its creative unfolding, must not be interpreted as a world of pure transcendence, for 'what is below is above and what is inside is outside' (Scholem, 1969, p.122-123). In the Kabbalistic view, everything not only is in everything else, but also acts upon everything else. As early as the thirteenth century, Kabbalists spoke of the worlds (called sefirot) reflecting themselves within themselves, so that each contained all the others (Bloom, 1975, p.36). In modern language, this identifies the Tree of Life as a hologram, in which each point of light in

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

23

an image contains all the information for the whole figure, and is a fractal of the sublime. The Tree of Life as cosmology expresses subtle paradoxes of space and time, providing images of both microcosm and macrocosm which touch and relate at every point. They can be described with the sophisticated phenomenologies of classical imaginal disciplines as well as modern ones. In its earliest presentation, the Tree of Life appears as simple Directions in space, intersecting to form the first Place, the Centre. Three axes give rise to six spatial possibilities, each of which is then imagined as one face on the Cube of Space, an image to generate in the imagination from the descriptions (such as Ponce, 1974, pp.42-5) for there are no formal illustrations. A second and later exegesis elaborates this further, into a complex tree-form of circles, the Tree of Life, arranged to show spatially how the various worlds are archetypally connected via an extensive patterning of pathways, making a multitude of places (not empty spaces) between the furthest horizon (at the top of the Tree) and the earth, as pendant to the spheres of the planets and their many interconnecting pathways of consciousness (Ponce, 1974, pp.101-68). I would like to spend a little time with both of these cosmologies, to consider some of the ways in which a cosmologising mode of enquiry can re-vision images of the sublime and contribute to an archetypal-integrative position for therapy. By taking space as 'the first of things', the first emphasis is on the axes and Directions of the Cube of Space. These are deceptively simple, but they are the essential structure of assumptions, the 'firmamentals' containing and orienting all the imagining and narrative which will be expressed in the consulting room 'where cosmologies meet'. What is the effect of the monoaxial emphasis which dominates many topographies? Even before Christian polarities strictly stated that 'up' is good and leads to the sublime, whilst 'down' is bad and leads to the infernal, Olympus and Hades were in position, the roots below the Norse Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, were under attack from the dread Biter Nidhogg, and up above the gods met in council in its branches (Cooper, 1978, pp.196-7). When Assagioli translated his love of Dante into the famous 'egg diagram' of the psyche (Hardy, 1987, pp.143-9), he was not only re-stating these topographies, albeit in a rather mechanistic way, but was also laying claim to a 'height psychology' which would oppose the 'depth psychologies' for their supposed lack of awareness of the superconscious and the transpersonal. The two have drawn ever further apart, particularly through Hillman's work. In perceiving the 'depth' of depth psychology as a metaphor, Hillman sought to take it to fullest expression, going 'down South' to the Renaissance, then down to the domain of Hades, then 'de-literalising' descent to mean anima mundi, depth of soul in the world. Hillman's imaginal psychology contains many spatial moves and potentials, but, if

24

On the Sublime

noticed, they tend to be personified rather than spatialised. Although archetypal psychology's concern for image enriches the sense of context, the spatial imagination simultaneously suffers certain limitations, for it does not revision the attributes of 'height', and so makes space for soul, but not for the sublime. This axis of depth and height, as the directions of Below and Above, forms a part of the Cube of Space. However, with only one axis, there can be no substantive middle ground of the soul. The axis of East and West must be present, and that of North and South. Only when these three come into being and intersect is there the stability to establish 'the place of holiness in the centre'; the principle of form rather than simple Direction. This adds to Casey's important distinction between space, site and place (Casey, 1991, pp.302-3). Casey separates the emptiness and unboundedness of space from the potential which inheres in a designated site. This is different again to its fully worked, inhabited expression when it becomes a place. Space is formless, but a site has a relational position and, although as yet unformed, has potential. A building site, for example, is not yet a habitation, but can be located via the relational properties of directions ('further North', 'South-east' etc). By contrast, a place is identified with inherent properties which come into being because it is a site which has been particularised, through soul-making. A site may become many things, but a place, like an image, is a singular expression of creative decisions and effort which have gone into its design and making. In this sense, 'site' can be seen as a spatial term for 'archetype', for there are certain limitations to it, yet a multitude of possibilities for the way it will become expressed and filled with place. The Cube of Space is an expression of space, site and place. It is a spatial unconscious, and as an archetype made of archetypes, is an architectonic. It identifies the making of primordial space, then the filling of space with sites, as potential places, then the possibility of coming into relationship with those sites to build an expression of place. It is formed through sacred language, since in Hebrew, as in Sanskrit, each letter is itself the living power of an archetype, with its own phenomenology (giving 22 essential archetypes to consider). The three axes correspond to 'the three mother letters' of the elements of air, fire and water; the faces of the cube, plus the centre, correspond to 'the seven double letters' of the seven planets, whilst the twelve edges of the cube, each a threshold between two faces, correspond to 'the twelve single letters' of the zodiac (Poncê, 1974, pp.42-5). The imaginal discipline of forming and holding these Directions in imagination, 'polishing' the inner images, and crafting them as talismans of remembered attributes, was the sophisticated and cultural work of the Renaissance magus, practising the occultised or symbolic form of the ancient art of memory (Yates, 1966). The deliberate creation and revisiting of imaginal 'places' made it possible to inhabit the imagery as

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

25

cosmology and through the imagery spontaneously arising in a 'place' to explore relationships between microcosm and macrocosm. Images built in this way, as a memory theatre, are sites which fill with place, so that memory becomes enlivened and 'hitched to the stars'. In the intentional craft-work of this complex and highly cultured discipline of 'imagining actively' one can see the ancestry of guided fantasy, for the Renaissance magus, educated in the hermetic philosophies, was equipped to use the architectonic properties of the art to the full. By comparison, modern versions seem sadly stripped of both culture and imaginal discipline, tending to be subjectively generated and acultural, and to exist in pockets of unlocated and unreflected imaginal geography. Just as a student of archetypology needs to study myth and image in order to orient among the imagery, so, too, does a student of archetopology need to study those 'displays in the art of thought' which are the cosmologies. Therapy here becomes remedial education for imaginations with undeveloped, and hence stereotyped 'visual thinking' (Arnheim, 1970). A cultural lack of imaginal education has emptied the cosmology, and to learn how to take the work seriously without taking it literally needs senex and puer together in the making. As Hillman confirms, with enthusiasm but giving no guidelines, 'training the person to whom the fiction or the figure or the dream or the epiphany comes to to respond adequately, genuinely is three-quarters of the work'(Hillman, 1983, p.67). This is not an easy art, for as Berry points out, 'our imaginations are untrained'(Berry, 1982, p.78) and we have no idea how to separate images from subjectivity. Such insights suggest that there is a cosmological aspect to any form of therapy training which, if not made explicit will simply perpetuate the old cosmology and sedimented Directions. It may not be possible for trainees to study and practise the Renaissance art of memory (but then, why not?) but a trainee does need to address his or her own sense of cosmos in order not to make sedimented spatial interpretations. To take only a small example from the first axis: the Direction Below tends to be perceived as a simple move into depth, but imagining the Cube of Space with consciousness at the centre reveals that it is a complex move towards a location which has Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern modes. Each of these modes has a detailed phenomenology of symbols, images and associations. A lack of differentiation here can lead even the sophisticated archetypalist into sedimented imagining. Hillman, lyrically 'venturing South' in one of his early writings, speaks only for the Northern Hemisphere, even more specifically, for mid-Europeans, when he talks of this 'journey for explorers' as: the journey down into depth, different from the Eastern trip and from the Western rush of golden boys and girls to pacific harmonies, and from the Northern ascents to cool, objective

26

On the Sublime observation. Going South means leaving our psychological territory at the risk of archetypal disorientation. . . . Venturing South may mean departing from all we have come to consider psychology (Hillman, 1975, p.223).

Only if everyone started in the same place would Below be identified with South in this way. The compass points overlap with that other, equally old quaternity of the four elements that found expression in Jung's typology. South then implies a descent to immediate sensation, rather than remaining up North in conceptual abstraction. This is an axial overlay which suggests two-dimensional thinking in the geography of the imaginal, rather than the three dimensions which would be needed to appreciate an axis of Above-Below' separate from 'North-South' and 'East-West'. This mode of enquiry through cosmos offers the possibility of a topographical critique of many aspects of archetypal work, and suggests a number of cosmological or spatial moves for the increasingly cosmopolitan consulting room. Many subtleties and blocks become apparent which produce distortions and assumptions about the placing of the sublime; such as Eurocentric bias, confusions of time and space, and confusions of gender and space. Notice, for example, the way in which, without realising it, South and Down part company in Hillman's imagination exactly on the edge of the conventionally accepted boundaries when his desire to go further 'down' than Renaissance Italy results in a descent below the surface, into Hades rather than crossing geographically into Egyptian mythology (which as Bernal has so convincingly demonstrated, is a major culture whose influence on the classical world is still waiting proper acknowledgement; Bernal, 1991, Angelo, 1997). Hillman's move was perhaps motivated partly by a desire to get out of the 'sun', along with an attraction forgravitas and shadowy things, but it does mean that the first formings of archetypal psychology have been essentially monomythic, dominated by Hermes and Aphrodite (the Mercury and Venus stages of the old cosmology). The 'cosmology shift' by which Hillman made his escape, both from underground containment and perhaps from the unwelcome implications of the spatial unconscious, was a shift from the vertical axis to the horizontal, following the horizontalisation rule of phenomenology. In finding the de-literalised anima mundi at the heart of things, he still studiously avoids the heights (those despised 'peaks' of spirit; Hillman, 1979, pp.54-74), but shifts the cosmology from the cosmic to the cosmopolitan (followed through into the cosmo-politic by Samuels, 1995). Hillman's Orphic head floats amongst the ways of the world 'singing still, and from afar', but the cosmic realm of the heavens is left to the transpersonal, scorned as senex-bound spatial metaphors of levels and progressions for puerile new-agers.

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

27

A further spatial move for the consulting room is to notice the way in which time and space interact, particularly in the way the past is attached to the direction Below. When the past is placed here it becomes limited to developmental history and the firm foundation of causal, psychoanalytic explanations. If all experiences of the sublime are interpreted in terms of developmental history, then the psychoanalytical reductionism of Oedipalism comes into play. Sublimation becomes a suspect and defensive activity, elevating-fantasies away from the Oedipal dynamic where they belong. However, if Hillman's insights into Oedipus are taken (Hillman, 1991, pp.113-14) we might see that the crucial insight here is the meeting at the crossroads; the place where three paths cross. If the implications of this were followed through, then the spatial imagination could become flexible enough to imagine in all four dimensions. If the past is released from Below to become as relative as the directions pointed out by the three axes, then it may be located anywhere. As that which is 'behind' the client, the past can be North, South, East or West, depending on where one is facing now (and can be encountered by turning to meet it not just by archeological digging underneath). Imagining the past as Above is a different cosmos again, in which there is no rise from bestial depths to human heights, but a descent from the angelic into experiences of the depths. This is the cosmogony of 'the romantic sublime', giving rise also to nostaligia and regrets for the lost 'golden age'. To try a reversal of that axis can be a powerful way of reimagining life as a process of gradually 'growing down' from Heaven's firmamentals, until it is only with maturity that we truly have our feet on Earth, to finish by becoming one with Earth, mingling with it. Being able to imagine spatially in three dimensions helps differentiate the fourth dimension of time also. The third move within the Cube of Space which I want to raise for the consulting room is that of gender bias. The sublime has been masculinised in the same way that the tragic has tended to be feminised, and orienting within the simple axes and Directions offers a way of avoiding such sedimenting. The alignment of Above with spirit and masculinity, and Below with matter and femininity, reflects a cultural position of the rejected feminine mater or matter, elaborated by the long-term Manichaean heresy and amplified by Christianism. Jung pointed out that the psychological science of alchemy can be seen as running along the underside of such Christianism (Jung, CW12, para.26), attempting to reclaim the despised and 'vile thing'. However, there is only a fine line between the compensations of reclamation and the patronising 'spiritualisations' of redemption. Hillman tends to reflect rather than re-vision these cultural positions, considering them fait accompli. He does see a succession of central myths in psychology as portraying a movement of consciousness from Oedipus and the Hero to

28

On the Sublime

Eros and Psyche (Hillman, 1972, p.59), but remains pessimistic about the real possibilities for change. 'The end of analysis' won't come until the end of misogyny, and despite all the best efforts of therapists, 'the world's getting worse' (Hillman, 1972, pp.287-98; Hillman and Ventura,1992). Side-stepping the dualism question in favour of the middle ground of soul leaves the powerful gender stereotypes in position, and is 'a centre that cannot hold' (pace the poet W.B. Yeats) unless all three axes of the Cube of Space are well differentiated. The positional assumptions of gender make it 'self-evident' that matter is feminine and spirit is masculine. But what if the polarity of gender was separated from the single axis and imagined in relation to all the other sites, the feminine spirit, the masculine soul, going, for example, Up—South and Down—East in all possible combinations? The imaginal discipline of forming such places in imagination would reveal the many ways microcosm can touch the larger macrocosm. Rather than one elevated image of 'the sublime', this would give a multitude of sublimes. This multitude of sublimes is a particular feature of the later Kabbalistic cosmology of the Sapphire Tree in the form of the Tree of Life. Here the cosmology effects the same movements from space to site to place, but is much further differentiated and illustrated. The Cube of Space 'squares the circle' in an extra dimension ('cubing the sphere', which sounds odd enough to reveal our two-dimensional imaginations), but with its single Saturnian centre, retains some of the limitations of the 'universal'. It presents the therapist with many subtle moves for untangling the basic dimensions and directions of spatialising, but, as illustrations show, the form of the Tree of Life is a far more elaborate cosmological display than the simple Directions in space. Certain similarities can be seen in the three illustrations below, but each has a particular function. The illustration of the Sapphire Tree as an organic Tree of Life, with its roots in the air, shows that its life and nourishment are drawn from the divine, and its sap is the sublime. The illustration of the Tree of Life in relation to the Crucifixion is not only Christian, but is an image of the human form as a microcosm of the macrocosmic Tree, suffering the sublime pain of the relationship between human and divine. The illustration of the Tree of Life in its formal architectonic presentation at the Portae Lucis or 'Gates of Light', is held by a sturdily booted craftsman, offering an image of imaginal discipline and work. There are many other images in these illustrations and many other ways in which the Tree of Life is displayed as cosmos, some very elaborately annotated with attributions and symbols. These latter, however, have a very limited use as illustrations, for, like dreams, their value is to the maker; the one who meditatively draws and crafts the image, annotating from memory and discovering new connections in the doing of the work.

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

29

Figure 2. 'The Divine outpouring of the philosophical tree of Jewish mysticism', by de Bry for Robert Flood. Reprinted with permission from Ponce, Kabbalah, p.109.

30



On the Sublime

anfis in cruse manibus, traxi f 1 i omnia ad to SECVLA.

Figure 3. Kabbalistic Tree of Life featured in the frontispiece of a sixteenth-century Gospel of St John. Reprinted with permission from Knight, G. (1978). A History of White Magic, A.R.Mowbrey, Oxford, now an imprint of Cassell Plc.

Taken from the top downwards, the Tree expresses the infolding of the sublime into all sites. From the bottom upwards, it expresses the unfolding of the sublime through expressive work, creating places from sites, populating the spheres and planes with artefact, culture and cultivation. Among the many possibilities for working with this complex cosmology, the one I want to emphasise is the placing of the sublime in relation to integrative psychotherapy work. There is a particular value in bringing the cosmologising mode of enquiry to integrative work, for it is

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room



31

POR TAE LVC.I

Hccell porta Tctragrlmaton iufti inrrabilt t eam.

i2ltit 4 t'Irp7.1-bbyirrpripvnrly

Figure 4. 'The Sefirothic Tree', from Paulus Ricius, Portae Lucis, Augsburg, 1516. Reprinted with permission from Ponce, Kabbala!), p.110.

arguably the integrative therapist, above all, who needs a well-developed spatial imagination. Integrative work requires the ability to perceive the patterns of relationships and connections amongst the whole variety of theoretical perspectives in order to orient effectively within the complex `universes of discourse' and varieties of 'therapeutic relationship' (for example, as identified by Clarkson, 1995). These are probably only the preliminary spatial requirements for a subtle integrative therapy, but in order to move them from concepts to cosmologies careful development of imaginal skills is needed.

32

On the Sublime

The model of seven different levels of discourse has been conceptually well described by Clarkson in The Therapeutic Relationship (Clarkson, 1995). The levels are listed in sequence, and although simultaneous, outline an evolutionary path of modes of communication, from physiological to transpersonal, or vice versa. From level 1, the physiological level of 'first nature', the model builds up through level 2, the preverbal emotional level, to the nominative 'giving of names' which is level 3. Level 4 describes the sociocultural participations which establish the normative, while level 5 operates at the rational level of logic and debate. This makes a distinct contrast with the the theoretical and storytelling level of explanations of level 6, and the highest level is the transpersonal, level 7, which denotes the essentially paradoxical region of the mystical and inexplicable. The transpersonal and the sublime therefore overlap to denote the paradoxical level of discourse beyond rationality, facts and even theories, where are found 'the prescient regions of dreams, altered states of ecstatic consciousness, the spiritual, the metaphysical, the mystical' (Clarkson, 1995, p.203). Clarkson has suggested that these different levels are effectively different universes of epistemological discourse, each a coherent domain of description, evaluation and discourse, with its own key values and truths; as it were, its own central illuminating sun and dependent, satellite planets. I think a cosmological critique can restore these conceptualisations to a seven-fold cosmology, in which the levels are recognised as Kabbalistic sites, awaiting the work of imaginal disciplines to form places which resonate with history, image and ancestors. One of the patterns, which forms the Tree of Life is that of seven levels, or 'palaces', and these can be seen most clearly by counting the horizontal levels of the Portae Lucis illustration of the craftsman (whereby there is a variation between levels with two aspects and levels with one central aspect). Aligning the diagram of the seven levels with the cosmology of the Tree of Life reveals the sap of the sublime running throughout the whole. The Tree of Life offers an archetypal perspective on the models of integrative work, suggesting an archetype of integration in which both Cosmos and Mythos operate. Below I have begun a phenomenological description of this archetype, suggesting the placing of various modes of the sublime by drawing on the traditional correspondences of the art of memory in the imaginal languages of astrology, virtu (as in 'energetic effectiveness' and as a root of virility) and spiritual experience (Yates, 1966; Regardie, 1970; Ponce, 1974). I have also incorporated Clarkson's five interpersonal relationships of integrative work, from the essential `working alliance', through the `transference/countertransference' level and the reparative or 'developmentally needed' relationships to the `I/Thou' relationship and the elusive yet powerful 'transpersonal relationship'. I have placed these relationships along the central 'trunk'

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

33

of the Tree (sometimes known as 'the Pillar of the power of the soul'; Ponce, 1974, p.144), and have used the tree-form in the manner of a table of the elements to predict some of the other levels and intrapersonal relationships which might usefully be added to the integrative therapist's range. Clarkson gives a wealth of examples from therapeutic practice in The Therapeutic Relationship, which can be read in conjunction to help bring the levels to life, but it is only when these sites have been well worked into places that they can really be inhabited as a working cosmology. It may be useful, before studying the illustrations and descriptions, to recall some of the cosmological principles of the Sapphire Tree, and I have included some initial points and guidelines. However, there is a flexibility and choice to be encouraged. It might be more interesting to read the descriptions first, then come back to the guidelines. The descriptions are only brief and indicative, but many of the images of cosmos are familiar, such as the astrological names, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. Re-placing these powerful symbols in this way may release some new imaginings.

Guidelines for working with cosmology Working with these levels in the consulting room is not so much a question of bringing in new ideas, but of paying attention to what is already present and making small moves to reveal and re-place orientations. Cosmology is already there, so it does not need to be imported, but differentiated. The overt speech and behaviour of therapist and client is well recognised as only part of the encounter, for there are invisible but powerful presences, and the ritual chamber of personal change or revolution is filled with people and powers. It is also filled with the collective story-telling, myth and symbol, which ebb and flow around the participants like a great undertow. The therapeutic space is crowded with the unseen cosmos as a rich mix of possibilities. To learn the arts of therapeia is to learn the extrasensory perception which perceives and places this invisible fullness. Surely therapeia is an exercise in cosmos, and how can it be done sensitively and with subtle differentiation in either an imagined vacuum or a spatially sedimented universe? Even therapists who don't work directly with dream and image can usefully recognise and differentiate the conceptual differences between the seven levels as 'universes of discourse' and the different qualities of therapeutic relationship, but an archetypal sensitivity is needed in order to inhabit them as multiple cosmos. Whereas a conceptual model may be a useful tool of rationalism, rationalism itself is only one of the levels. To inhabit a cosmology is to be knowingly in its atmosphere, as well as to think of it; microcosm within macrocosm, in complex relation to other cosmologies.

34

On the Sublime

The therapist can prepare through an enhanced imaginal education which encounters and imagines the different modes, trying out the vocabularies and perspectives as a dancer tries out technique and repertoire, suppling and limbering over a period of training, maintaining the discipline of attentiveness and work. The ability to move with ease between these levels, remembering where one is placed and in relation to what, is 'the art of cosmoplasticity' which speaks of the therapeutic adept. The extensive palaces of art and culture provide complex yet intuitively ordered memory theatres which guide and progress this plasticity, for in such an ancient and archetypally informed cosmology, space has long been infolded as site which in turn has been unfolded as many places to visit, over many centuries, with many more to be built. The possibilities for phenomenological exploration are limitless. There are perhaps three particular characteristics of this new cosmologised 'archetypal integrative training' which should be emphasised, simply because it is so difficult to escape from the sedimented imaginings of fixed and negative senex. They can be thought of as three 'firmamentals' of cosmoplasticity, and refer to simultaneity, elevation and polarity. Simultaneity

The levels described are not a grid or a system, but 'a display in the art of thought' to be entertained. Each of these levels of discourse is simultaneously present, and there is a full Tree of Life in each level. Each level is a cosmos containing all the levels. Hence, the physiological aspect of any level/cosmos will give direct sensate awareness; the emotional level will give response, impact and atmosphere; the nominative will shape words and images to name it; the normative will give cultural artefacts to connect it; the rational will use concept and metaphor to analyse it; the theoretical will explain its place in story and cosmos; and the transpersonal will open the doorway between the microcosm and the macrocosm at that point, in one of the multiple modes of the sublime. Taking the transpersonal level itself as an example, it is easily seen that the transpersonal as transpersonal is ineffable and incommunicable; but there can be stories and meaning to place it, and concepts and metaphors can be used to analyse it. There are particular ways it is accepted and constructed by different cultures and social groups, and a multitude of names for it. There are ways in which it has impact and is responded to, and ways in which it manifests as tangible, immediate presence, known in the body of the individual or in the body of the consulting room. Elevation

A confusion between elevation and distance is a major problem in work with the sublime, and reflects problems of perception (Merleau-Ponty,

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

35

1962). Naive spatialising is as rigid as a child's drawing, in which items are sized according to impact, and the strip of blue that represents the sky never meets the strip of brown that represents the earth. The sublime can be cut off in the same way, imagined as wholly remote, elevated and inaccessible. But what if such sets of levels were simply presenting perspective? Students of drawing quickly discover that to make something look far away it has to be drawn at once smaller and higher up the page. This use of Height .does not denote superiority, but simply increased distance. If the whole Tree of seven levels was set out on the horizontal plane rather than the vertical, then it could be imagined like a great shadow, attached at the physiological level of the feet, and stretching away to a mysterious horizon. The horizon is not intrinsically superior to the place beneath one's feet, but it is further away. Nor is it fixed, for a horizon is an expression of where we stand in relation to a place, not a place itself. Introducing the temporal dimension indicates that what is on the horizon can be known, if you travel there, with the acknowledgement that once there it becomes the ground beneath your feet, and there is a new horizon (or, looking back, what was once known is now, itself, on the far horizon of the past). Polarity

The Kabbalistic principle of polarity genders the powers of action and reception and sees in them an alternating expression. Each level is thereby receptive to the one above it and dynamic to the one below it. This means that its power is relational rather than fixed. This has an interesting application in the consulting room, for it implies that whatever level is being worked with directly will appear as tangible. If working in the physiological level, then physiology is experienced as tangible, and everything above this is perceived as dynamic and experienced as forces or powers. However, if the work moves to a different level, then the experiences at that level become tangible, and so, for example, a guided fantasy or active imagination produce an 'objectification of the vis-a-vis' by shifting the level of consciousness, and what was previously only known as emotional atmosphere, for example, can be encountered as tangible places and personifications (to be taken seriously but not literally, if senex and puer are both in the making). This is the heart of much therapy work, and is understood by the principle of polarity. If levels of culture, analysis and theory-making/narrative can be attained, they too can become the tangible, and so can the transpersonal. Whether the level is experienced as intangible powers or as tangible people and places is a question of relationships. There are no doubt many other principles and examples to guide an emerging discipline of 'archetypal integrative work', but these will have to await further explorations of the various displays of the Sapphire Tree,

36

On the Sublime

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

and the application of insights derived from its architectonic of images, symbols and correspondences.

A cosmology for placing the sublime within integrative work: a preliminary phenomenology of an archetype of integration In figure 5 each level has been described in terms of its Images of the Sublime, Cosmos of Discourse and style of Therapeutic Relationship. A start has been made in relating the level to some of the traditional languages of the imaginal (but a fuller exposition will need to wait for a longer text). As a conclusion, the descriptions are summarised in a single architectonic image.

The Horizon of Eternity (Space/Time)

Images of the Sublime - First Swirlings, Nem Transpersonal

- Zodiac/Uranus (Cosmos), Saturn (Mythos); Cosmos of Di - Horizontally within the Self, through Active Imagination (Image of

0 MOVING (hidden level) Images of the Sublime - Sirius/Pluto; Cosmos of Discourse - Movements of macro/microcosm between insight language; Therapeutic Relationship - I/Thou, relating Self & Other (Image of the Abyss)

into the personal cosmology.

and

S USING

Metaphorising [ma

7 Conceptualising yy

of the Subli

- Jupiter (Conceptualising), Mars (Metaphorising); Cosmos o Discourse - Rational; Thera tic Relations p Horizontally within the self, through Intelligences (Image of a Soak

4 CONNECTIN Images of the Sublime - the Sun; Cosmos of Di

- Normative Therapeutic Relationship - Reparative.

0 MOVING (hidden level) Images of the Sublime - Rainbow; Cosmos of Discourse - Movements of macro/microcosm between person and

group/cu

Transpersonal Cosmos of Discourse and the Transpersonal Therapeutic Relationship The willingness `to perceive beyond the known' characterises this discourse of non-dualist possibilities. It is a doorway opening on to the unknown, not the substance of the unknown. To take the involutionary journey is to begin with the firmamentals; the top of the cosmological Tree, called 'the Hori2on of Eternity'. This is a dynamic site of incoming, for the horizon is traditionally called the edge of the Unmanifest. Manifestation begins with the Veils of Negative Existence — progressing from Nothing, to Limitlessness, and then to Limitless Light (Scholem, 1969, p.103). The Veils provide the essential Gestalt principle of background against which a foreground emerges. Since the life-force, id, Physis (Clarkson, 1996), eternally pulses from the Unmanifest to the Manifest, this horizon is an intensely dynamic site, akin perhaps to the bow of a ship constantly moving forward into new waters. It is aligned with the archetypal world, of incoming dreams, mysteries and the essential paradox of something out of nothing. It is the place of the 'aim' response which marks the coming-in of a new insight

rse - Transpersonal; Therapeutic Relationship -

. 6 MAKING Mythos of the Subli utic Reis(

Level 7: Opening The Neptunian Sublime, or the Sublime of the Primum Mobile (First Swirlings) This is the sublime experienced in obscure intimations, first appearances, vague yearnings, synchronous moments, wonder, and the simple Gestalt of awareness set against a background. From these qualities derives its virtu, which perceives both the very beginning and the very end of the cosmos simultaneously. Hence, the virtu of this mode of the sublime is that of 'Attainment and Completion of the Great Work', traditionally attributed to experiences of 'the Mystical Union with the Divine'.

37

c Relationship - I/Thou, relating Self & Ego (Image of the Veil or.Gul

3 NAMING Names

Images o

me - Venus (Names), Mercury (Images); Cosmos of Discourse - Nomin Relationship - Horizontally within the Self, through Imagination (Image a Mouth).

erapeutic

RESPONDING Images of the Sublime - the Moon; Cosmos of Countertransference.

Images of the Sublime - the Earth; Cosmos of Alliance.

scourse - Emoti al; Therapeutic Relationship - Transference and

SENSIN iseourse Physio gical; Therapeutic Relationship - The Working

Figure 5. 'Placing the Sublime: an architectonic image of an integrative archetype for the consulting room'. M.L. Angelo 1996.

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On the Sublime

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

39

Level 6: Making

The Movement from one Cosmos of Discourse to another which is Radically Different can be identified here. On the tree the top two

A dual image: the Zodiacal Sublime or Uranian Sublime, and the Saturnian Sublime

levels are separated from the other five by a gap known as 'the Abyss' or 'dark night of the soul'. Epistemologically the Abyss separates the insight-based, transpersonal and theoretical discourses from the language-based discourses of rational facts and mores. In Jungian terms it represents the difficult and shadowy shift between axes of typology, from the irrational intuitive to the rational thinking and feeling functions, and vice versa. A different version of this radical movement exists further down the tree in the form of a Gulf or Veil which separates the Connections of level 4 from the lower part of the Tree (see below). Epistemologically, this 'lesser dark night of the soul' separates the person-centred discourses from the group or culture-centred discourses. In Jungian terms it represents the difficult and shadowy shift along the ego-self axis, from the Lunar to the Solar.

These two modes of the sublime are experienced in vastness and intricate grandeur, and in the sense of tragedy, mystery and 'world-sorrow', distant and remote. The traditional virtues are Devotion and Silence respectively, and the experiences attributed are 'the Vision of God Face to Face' and 'the Vision of Sorrow'. They are the parents of cosmology; the Zodiacal belt of the fixed stars which makes the boundary of the concentric cosmology, and the Saturnian Centre to the Cube of Space.

Theoretical Cosmos of Discourse The making of meaning through cosmology and myth characterises this discourse of theory. This is the dual level of theory as both the display of cosmos and the narrative of mythos. It can be considered a level of panorama and paradigm, making the worlds through symbolism, story and metaphor assembled and formed into wholes. Only here can the script change and a different story be told, a different cosmos be inhabited.

A Within-Self (Intrapersonal) Therapeutic Relationship can be identified here, which brings the two modes together within the individual. There are three of these sites on the tree, each a pathway linking the two parallel worlds of their respective levels. At this level the symbolism (from the Hebrew archetypes) is that of a Doorway between the objective and subjective worlds. It is the pathway of successful active imagination, that identified by Jung as 'one of the highest forms of psychic activity' (Jung, CW6, para.714), and described by him to Barbara Hannah as 'the touchstone as to whether [the patient] wanted to become independent, or . . . to remain dependent on him as a sort of parasite'; a point he asked her to quote, 'whenever you can'(Hannah, 1981, pp.12-13). Level 0: Moving (the hidden levels)

The Plutonian Sublime or the Sirian Sublime This quintessential mode of the sublime is experienced through power, darkness, ancient mysteries, and implosive, sometimes apocalyptic strength. The archetypal site on the Tree of Life was not recognised in earlier writings, but its terrible and hidden qualities have more recently (and perhaps somewhat too lightly) attributed with Detachment, Perfection of Justice, and the application of the Virtues untainted by personality considerations. Its virtu is Confidence in the Future; the experience attributed is 'The Vision across the Abyss'. It has a lower analogue, known as the Gulf or Veil.

I-Thou Therapeutic Relationship or encounter with the Other. The simple listing of levels does not show up these hidden places of movement and relationship, but they are important sites of encounter between cosmologies. Neither the old attribution of Sirius, nor the more recent one of Pluto refer to celestial bodies which are within the cosmos - they are external and Other. The ability to be open to the Other is thus, in relationship terms, the basis for a genuine person-to-person meeting. Across the Gulf this relationship is within the self, across the Abyss, it is between the self and Other. Level 5: Using

A Dual Image: theJovial Sublime and the Martial Sublime These modes of the sublime are experienced in exaltation, nobility, and rhetoric, and in the wild, fierce, dangerous and dynamic. The traditional virtues are Obedience and Courage respectively, and the experiences attributed are 'The Vision of Love' and 'The Vision of Power'.

The Rational Cosmos of Discourse The factual analyses of concept and symbol characterise this discourse of rational analysis. What goes before has been intuitive-based, but now the modes have changed to become language-based, led by this archetypal site. We have moved from the crown of the tree to the trunk; in anthropomorphic terms from the head to the shoulders and arms. The mode is usually described as conceptualising, but I would argue that metaphorising also belongs here. Images of intellect have been dominated by conceptual.. ising and propositional thinking, but metaphorising and imagining is

40



On the Sublime



also an epistemology, providing an insight into the intelligence of feeling (Best, 1989, pp.70-85). Both thinking and feeling are intelligent activities capable of travelling an educational distance which enables them to become ennobled, precise, powerful and informative. A Within-Self Therapeutic Relationship can be identified here, which brings the two modes together within the individual. This is the second of the pathways linking two parallel worlds and pertaining to the inner relationship between objective and subject-ive. At this level the symbolism is the image of a Serpent, suggesting powers of intelligence to be raised and worked with care.

Level 4: Connecting The Solar Sublime This mode of the sublime is experienced in awe, and contains the high vision of prophecy. It is carried in cultural artefact and art, and is also cosmo-politan, a shared spectacle of the group and community rather than the individual. Its traditional virtu is Devotion to the Great Work, whilst the experiences attributed are 'the Vision of the Harmony of Things', and 'the Mysteries of the Crucifixion'. The Normative Cosmos of Discourse The individual in the context of cultural, social and group norms characterises this discourse of the normative. This level represents the heart of the Tree of Life, and is the archetypal site of the day-star which sheds its light on everything 'under the sun', particularising and contextualising into culture and social group. Developmentally-needed or Reparative Therapeutic Relationship This is the beneficent image of re-connecting with the culture to replenish and 'correct'. Although this has been seen largely in terms of child development and regressive methods for re-visiting the past, the traditional images of this archetypal site have the unique triple characteristic of Child, King and Sacrificed God. This not only denotes a cycle of birth and rebirth, but points beyond the child to the socioculturalsymbolic responsibilities of Kingship, and the religious and philosophical mysteries of sacrifice, in its meaning of `to make sacred'. There are connections to be restored with each of these images, not only that of the Child. Level 0: Moving (the hidden levels) Here on the Tree is the site where the hidden Moving level of the Gulf or

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

41

Veil begins to be seen, separating the Connecting level from those below of Naming, Responding and Sensing. One of its images is the Rainbow, linking Earth and Heaven, so although it is an analogue of the dark Sirian/Plutonian Sublime, it has more colourful possibilities. This is less gothic and more romantic, suggesting the mysteries of destiny, gifts, and divine intervention. However, it is still 'the lesser dark night of the soul'. This is seen particularly clearly in the long ego-self pathway from the Lunar world of level 2 to the Solar world of level 4, shown on the Portae Lucis. Each of the many connecting paths of the Tree has traditionally been personified via the picture-images of the Tarot, with various patterns (as reviewed in Cavendish, 1975), and this central axial path is seen as an angel pouring water or wine between two cups (sometimes one is gold and one is silver). The gulf or veil is set also between the words and images of level 3 and the two paths by which they connect to level 4. These have been personified in the specially challenging Tarot images of the Devil and Death.

Level 3: Naming A dual image: the Venusian Sublime and the Mercurial Sublime These modes of the sublime are experienced in the rhapsodic, passionate and romantic, and in the mathematical, lyric, and ephemeral. The traditional virtues are Unselfishness and Truthfulness respectively, and the experiences attributed are 'the Vision of Beauty Triumphant' and, 'the Vision of Splendour'. The Nominative Cosmos of Discourse The awareness and labelling of experience through the language of word and image characterises this discourse of the nominative. These are the names and images which form the content of conceptualising and metaphorising and are used to carry out the analysing and the connecting. This mode of language use is often taken to mean only spoken language, but there are visual languages also, of Sign (Sacks, 1990) and image. A Within-self Relationship can be identified here which brings the two modes together within the individual. This is the third of the pathways which link two parallel worlds, and pertain to the inner relationship between subjective and objective. At this level the symbolism is the Mouth, giving speech to what was previously subjective, as the imagination gives form to what was previously formless experience.

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On the Sublime

Level 2: Responding

Placing the Sublime: Cosmology in the Consulting Room

43

cannot be told or shown but must happen in the here and now This is the existential present, displayed in every detail.

The Lunar Sublime

This mode of the sublime is experienced with strong affect, and with particular reference to omens and portents, often of pain, death and alienation, but also of ecstatic trance. It has vague, shadowy outlines, and fragmentary images of steep and deep. It may be perceived in response to moving, dancing and the 'little death' of orgasm. The traditional and hard-won virtu is Independence, and to it is attributed 'the Vision of the Machinery of the Universe'.

Without this relationship there can be no therapy, so it is the primary and most essential, containing all the others. Together these levels add to the display of the Sapphire Tree which is at once the macrocosm and the microcosm. It is a way of placing the sublime and (pace Jung) of 'dreaming the cosmos onwards'.

The Emotional Cosmos of Discourse

References

The non-verbal intensities of experience characterise this discourse of direct response. This is not the site of the differentiated and articulated feeling function which is one of the modes of Analysing in level 5. This is the domain of powers and forces expressed in compelling atmospheres. It is the Lunar world of magical influence, for good or ill, the power-house of the ego, and the domain of dynamic or energic psychologies.

The Transference/Countertransference Therapeutic Relationship is the focus here, in which the therapist works directly with manipulative powers carried over from the past and operating invisibly in current situations. Level 1: Sensing

The Earthly Sublime This mode of the sublime is closely linked to level 2, but refers particularly to what is sensed directly within the body. It sounds a deep and resonant note in which the sublime becomes the subliminal, known only by its resulting effect on the body's responses. It is the sublime which knows the terror of nature, and nature's bliss, through visceral empathy and participation. It is also the mode in which every detail is noted and the smallest 'grain of sand' may be a way in to the sublime. The traditional virtu is Discrimination, and to it is attributed 'the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel' (so close in image to the 'necessary angel', Wallace Stevens 1960).

The Physiological Cosmos of Discourse Awareness of the non-verbal participation in the physical world characterises this discourse of physical observation. The final expression of the cosmology is Earth, the tangible, which is the biology of 'first nature' and matter. These are the things which

The Working Alliance Therapeutic Relationship

Angelo, M. (1994) 'Jung's active imagination: the rise and fall of the waking dream', in Imagination, conference proceedings of the Jung Studies Day, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury. Angelo, M. (1997) 'When the gods were intelligent and education was enchanting', in Self and Society, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 24, (6) 12 17. Arnheim, R. (1970) Visual Thinking. London: Faber and Faber. Assagioli, R. (1975) Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. London: Turnstone Books. Bernal, M. (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation. London: Free Association Books, Vintage edition 1991. Berry, P. (1982) 'An approach to the dream'. In Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology. pp 53-79. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Best, D. (1989) 'Feeling and reason in the arts: the rationality of feeling', in P. Abbs, (ed) The Symbolic Order: A Contemporary Reader on the Arts debate. pp 70 85. London: Falmer Press. Bloom, H. (1975) Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press. Burke, E. (1756) A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime -

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and Beautiful: with an Introductory Discourse concerning Taste and Several Other Additions (World's Classics edition 1906, reprinted 1925) London: Oxford University Press. Casey, E. (1991) 'Getting placed: soul in space', in Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology, pp 290-309. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Cavendish, R. (1975) The Tarot, reprinted 1986. London: Chancellor Press. Clarkson, P. (1995) The Therapeutic Relationship: in Psychoanalysis, Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy. London: Whurr. Clarkson, P. (1996) 'Physis: The Soul of Nature - our nature'. London: Harvest 42 (1) 70-93. Cooper, J.C. (1978) An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. London: Thames and Hudson. Hannah, Barbara (1981) Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by CG.Jung. Boston, MA: Sigo Press. Hardy, J. (1987) A Psychology with a Soul: Psychosynthesis in Evolutionary Perspective. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hillman, J. (1972) The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. London: Harper Colophon Books, Harper and Row.

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Hillman, J. (1975) Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper and Row. Hillman, J. (1979) 'Senex and puer: an aspect of the historical and psychological present', in Puer Papers, ed. Cynthia Giles. pp 3-53 Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1983) Inter Views: Conversations with Lauro Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination, and the State of the Culture. New York: Harper and Row. Hillman, J. (1989) 'Cosmology for soul: from Universe to Cosmos', from a conference presentation In 1986, in Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, 2. pp 17-33. Hillman, J. (1991) 'Oedipus revisited', in Karl Kerenyi and James Hillman, Oedipus Variations: Studies in Literature and Psychoanalysis. pp 87-169 Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1996) The Soul's Code. London: Random House. Hillman, J. and Ventura, M. (1992) We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And the World's Getting Worse. New York: Harper Collins. Jung, C.G. (CW6) Psychological Types, first published in German in 1921, trans H. G. Baynes, revised trans. 1971 by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jung, C.G. (CW12) Psychology and Alchemy, first published in German in 1944, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 1953, 2nd edition 1968. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jung C.G. (1961) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, trans. R. and C. Winston. London: Collins and Routledge and Kegan Paul. Longinus (1972) On Sublimity, trans. D.A. Russell. in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translation. eds D.A. Russell and M. Winterbottom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, trans C.Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Moore, T. (1990) The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino. First published in 1982, Associated University Presses. Revised edition, Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press. Paley, M.D. (1986) The Apocalyptic Sublime. London: Yale University Press. Ponce, C. (1974) Kabbalab: An Introduction and Illumination for the World Today. London: Garnstone Press. Ramazani, J. (1990) Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy and the Sublime. London: Yale University Press. Regardie, I. (1970) A Garden of Pomegranates. St Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications. Sacks, 0. (1990) Seeing Voices. London: Picador Edition, Pan Books. Samuels, A. (1995) The Political Psyche. London: Routledge. Scholem, G. (1955) Major Trends inJewisb Mysticism, from a series of nine lectures given at the Jewish Institute of religion in New York in 1938. London: Thames and Hudson. Scholem, G. (1969) On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Schocken Books. Stevens, Wallace (1960) The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. London: Faber and Faber. Weiskel, T. (1986) The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilber, K. (1983) Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Yates, F. (1964) 'Hermes Trismegistus and magic', and 'Pico della Mirandola and Cabalist magic', in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. pp 84-116. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yates, F. (1966) The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Sublime Moments in the Body of the Double Pelican

Chapter 3 Sublime Moments in the Body of the Double Pelican In memory of Helen Chadwick

ALAN BLEAKLEY Arcana publicata vilescunt ('secrets that are published become cheap' - motto used by the fifteenth century alchemist Christian Rosencreutz for his The Chymical Wedding). . . . though body life is always concrete, it is not necessarily literal.' (Hillman, 1975, p.137).

1. Prelude: the resurrected body Each body is inscribed by its culture and its historical moment. Often, the inscriptions put the body to sleep, and further inscriptions have to be suffered before the body reawakens or resurrects. The resurrected, consciously inscribed body is currently the fashionable body: pierced, branded, tattooed, the object of cosmetic surgery, the product of the gymnasium. This body is also the primary object of contemporary art: eroticised, fetishised, commodified, pathologised - 'Grimness and gore have lately become the familiar motifs of cutting edge art . . . ' observes Searle (1996). Bodies at the edge and pushed to their limits; and bodies displayed at the limits of tolerance, often through what itself has been marginalised - freak shows, fringe theatre and performance art. From a functional, medical psychotherapeutic perspective (whose goals are well-being and normalising), body mutilations such as the selfharming common among young anorexics offers a symptom profile to be cured through eradication. The body artist Orlan - a professor of art at the School of Fine Arts in Dijon - chooses to film plastic surgery performed on her own body as the ultimate offering in somatic art. She has had implant surgery on her temples (two small horns), and her chin, eyelids and lips have been injected and moulded in a conscious echo of other works of art such as Botticelli's 'Venus'. She is gradually creating 46

47

an otherworldly being out of her own physical substance, that she does not see as mutilation, but as mutation. The self-mutilating anorexic who refuses food so that she can shape her body like a wafer and feel no sense of weight or internal distension, makes dozens of incisions on her arms with a razor blade in a ritual scarification. To the medical and psychotherapeutic community she is clearly a suitable case for treatment. But can we read these scarifications and this self-starving as aesthetic or religious 'Statements, as ritual denials of the normalising forces of the culture? Can we read these 'symptoms' as we would read an art work, not as pathologised and in need of cure, but as statements inviting appreciation, and then questions of meaning and understanding? For this, first we would have to push through the culturally adapted medical response that health and well-being, characterised in terms of development and improvement, are automatically good, valuable and desirable. Second, we would have to challenge the conventional psychological response that normality and adjustment - a strong ego - is automatically good, valuable and desirable. Third, we would have to push beyond the conventional realms of aesthetics in art (that beauty is automatically good and desirable), to the world of the sublime, whose business is extremes and extremities that challenge conventions of the good, valuable and desirable. The cutting edge of art some time ago abandoned preoccupations with aesthetic and beauty, and took up an engagement with the sublime. Psychotherapy, however, is still pondering whether or not questions of aesthetics have a legitimate place in its theories and practices. Meanwhile people, especially the young, will continue to `symptomise' in ways that in other cultures or other periods of history may well be read as attempts at religious or spiritual initiation, or as attempts to configurate one's identity aesthetically (rather than in a utilitarian way, such as defining ourselves by how much we earn, or how much status we have acquired in a profession). Both the spiritual and the aesthetic configurations, with their literal inscriptions such as scarifications or piercings, create value in the eyes of the participants, and question normative ideas and practices of beauty through an introduction of the sublime. Is the anorexic recreating the angelic body - so light that it floats; so sensitive that anything ingested feels dead weight; so exteriorised that the interior must be opened up to air, light and space; so disgusted with its raw meatiness that it must be blanched, starved of colour? The body then slips its earthly chains to achieve the purity of the angelic, in a continued refusal of what is seen, or rather tasted, as poisonous and disgusting - matter itself. Orlan promotes herself as having achieved 'sainthood' through the sufferings of her body, and so to have resurrected the body - this is familiar from the practices worldwide of ascetics, yogins, fakirs, and shamans. She has died to mundanity, and her

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On the Sublime

postmodern relics - bits of her flesh preserved in formalin - are sold for large quantities of money as art objects to believers. There is no conclusion implied in these remarks; they are at this point observations. The obituaries marking the recent untimely death of one of our leading artists, Helen Chadwick, remind us that she . . . was one of the first British artists to develop what has now become an almost obsessional preoccupation with the human body as a means of exploring identity.' (The Times, 19/03/96). Other tributes reiterate this concern: 'Her work focused on the body: on sexuality, disease and unease, growth and decay.' (Searle, 1996). Chadwick . . . from the mid-Seventies .. . tapped into her own physical form to extend and dissolve accepted limits of physical and mental existence.' (Buck, 1996); and 'In her exuberant, wild, open imagining of sex, she blazoned all manner of unmentionable parts with a kind of smiling pleasure in the peculiar character of desire and the sheer lumpy, bloody fleshiness of flesh.' (Warner, 1996). Shifting from the body beautiful to the body sublime she disturbed expectations by using animal flesh and innards to imply the human body and its sexuality, stressing the peculiar eroticism of the inner body, of soft tissue (Chadwick, 1994). A recent touring exhibition - 'Art, HIV And You' - offered Barton Benes' assemblage of 144 red AIDS charity ribbons coated with the ashes of a recently dead HIV-positive woman prostitute and drug addict. Benes, HIV-positive himself, filled plastic water pistols with his own blood and caged them behind chicken wire and glass. Blood squirts innocuously/dangerously in a thin stream from each nozzle. Ron Athey, also an HIV-positive performance artist working with live audiences, stabs his head with needles, and hangs from a meat hook. (Many tribal cultures involve such body piercing and the suffering of extreme pain through mutilation or scarification in their rituals.) A recent article in Time Out (17-24 April 1996) on extreme activities advertises 'bodypiercing excursions', where you might' . have the opportunity to fish hook yourself all over, thrust skewers through your tongue and cheeks . .. ' via participation in the Malaysian religious festival of Thaipusam! No tongue-in-cheek offer, but the promise of a skewered cheek or tongue. The performance artist Karen Finlay smears her naked body with chocolate, and then explains that this act is inspired through hearing of the discovery of a murdered 16-year-old girl who was smeared with her own faeces and dumped in a plastic sack. In another performance, Finlay expressed breast milk on to black velvet in a spoof on action painting. A parody of striptease reverses the process, so that Finlay begins naked except for shoes and hat, and erotically puts on her clothes until fully dressed. A review describes her feminist, body-based, performance art as expressing 'what women really want, as opposed to the . . . idea that what (women) need is caring, sharing and aromatherapy.' What Mona Hatoum wanted was to film an endoscopic exploration of her body's

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interior, set to a soundtrack of sucking and gurgling intestine. In a scathing attack on the current interest in 'the body' in cultural theory Cunningham (1996, p.15) suggests that 'Our insistent bodiliness is a necessary consequence of secularism.' Yet the examples above seem to challenge this view. To offer the body as ultimate signifier, in the way that these artists do, seems less a search for personal identity and represents more an interest in the sublime and its associations with spirituality as a 'limit' phenomenon - the awe-fulness of Pleasure, and beauty as terrorising. Such a 'fashion' may actually be deeply eniaged with the sacred. The re-inscribed body, that is a body resurrected (or possibly a body exhumed) and not a body ascended, is one that has been (literally) terrorised, affected, shaken to its roots by the immensities of particular life events, or scrutinised beyond conventional limits. This resurrected body is not then the literal body, the first-born flesh (but the lateral body, the coming body, the embodiment of desire): 'Literal meanings are spirits solidified into matter . . . like . . . stone maidens, Caryatids', suggests Brown (1966, p.223). The resurrected body is not 'passion petrified', in Lingis's term (1983, p.67), but matter eroticised. Literalism kills the body, suggests Brown (1966, p.223), but 'The incarnation of symbols gives us a new heart, a heart for the first time human, a heart for the first time, or is it the second time, made of flesh.' This resurrected body is for Brown a body conscious of spirit, a body inspired, that is realised or made by spirit; a body rediscovered through the word, a poetic body: 'A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will give you a heart of flesh' (II Corinthians III, 7). Hillman (1975, p.174) calls this . . a subtle body - a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights . . . concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.' The sublime moment is not then a sublimation (spirit ascending) but a desublimation (flesh inspired, body on fire, stuff realising its nature through passion; the body mapped, pocked and etched by its fantasies) leading to the experience of . . . the body here now, as an eternal reality . . . ' (Brown, 1966, p.214). This is the body recovered in love, or resurrected through the erotic imagination. Brown calls this ' . . . divinity in the body. . . ' It is a movement . ..as psychoanalysis might say, from the abstractions of sublimation to the reality of the body', as . . . incarnation not sublimation.' (ibid., pp.221-2). This is not a body inhabited by pale ghosts, a sex-negative body (Reich), but a winged body whose bloody self presentation is poetic and sexy, and a body that concretely draws breath. These attempts to resurrect or reinscribe the body may be more attempts to exhume a sleeping body, a sleeping giant, a sublime body that is neither signifier, signified nor self-signifying, and moves in a space beyond cultural inscription. Nancy (1994, p.24) describes such a

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On the Sublime

'corpus' as 'given', prior to subject and discourse. Such a body . . . has the same structure as spirit, but it has that structure without presupposing itself as the reason for the structure.' Is this a body without theories — perhaps Artaud's 'body without organs'? Certainly there is one place and time where and when the simultaneous gravity and levity of such a body is felt — at the timeless and sublime moment of orgasm. The first-born body is resurrected and inscribed through an erotic imagination — indeed through what Susan Sontag, bravely, in 1967 called 'the pornographic imagination'. First, let us nip in the bud knee-jerk responses to that word 'pornography', which refers to sacred prostitution. When we talk of 'pornography' in disparaging terms, we usually mean 'obscenity' — literally 'senseless' or 'out of the senses'. Senseless violence, negation of the aesthetic in ugly town planning, utilitarianism in general, are then as obscene as exploitative sex (Hillman, 1995). However, Sontag (1983, pp•205-33) in discriminating between kinds of pornography, articulates a pornographic imagination that is a legitimate vehicle for art, as it aims for 'psychic dislocation' in the viewer through treatment of . . . extreme states of human feeling and consciousness . . . ' that in fact are our common birthright in the sense that we are all sexual beings. The pornographic imagination as Sontag describes it is not exploitative, nor does it point to sexual deficiency or lack, but celebrates the possible in desire through ' . . . the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness . ' Expression of this erotic imagination is also not a secular indulgence, but offers a 'spiritual risk' and involves one in the ... dark and complex vision of sexuality (that) is far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture', by which she means the orthodoxies of well-being and social adjustment. Sontag fully recognises the moral obligations we bear in the maintenance of social order through 'humane contact with other persons'. Yet this should not stifle the imagination in art, whose purpose in general is not to entertain but to make complex, to refuse, to confuse, to raise difficulties and questions, to shock sensibilities: . . . one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.' (Sontag, 1983, p.212). By and large, such a task has been abandoned by mainstream psychotherapy, where the therapist now attempts to cure or normalise those who would wish to take such forays. Art would criticise psychotherapy for its insistence upon 'adjustment', and for its general cultural timidity. And, as contemporary art rather than psychotherapy tends to engage the sublime, we might characterise such engagement by Sontag's term — 'spiritual risk'. It was Sontag who, as long ago as 1964 in her well-known polemic against interpretation, suggested that 'in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' Since then, an erotics of art has not just blossomed, but

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exploded. Perhaps the mainstream of depth psychotherapy could consider that its fascination with interpretation may well be occluding the potential value of an aesthetic/erotic imagination; and we do not need therapy on imagination, but through imagination.

2. Bodies in the rose garden ROSARIVM

Figure 1

Figure 3







PH1LOSOPHORVM

Figure 2

Figure 4

On the Sublime

52

Figure 5a

Sublime Moments in the Body of the Double Pelican

53

Figure 5b Figure 10

Figure 6

Figure 7

paiwwigss IIIP•P• •

wwwwalztuwzt.iazi

Figure 8

Figure 9

The illustrations in Figs 1-10 — the series that constitute the pictorial side of the Rosarium Philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550, revised in the Basel text of 1593) — will be familiar to those who know Jung's (CW16, 1966) classic work on the transference. (An alternative sequence to this series is given in Fabricius, 1989.) Let us put these illustrations into historical context, rather than using them to inform modern psychology as Jung does. Second, let us interrogate Jung's psychological reading, which lacks an aesthetic or appreciative approach to this illustrated western tantric text. From the positions of the couples' legs we see that disengagement takes place between Figure 5a (Coitus) and Figure 5b (Fermentatio), where in the latter there is clearly tension release after sex — the faces and bodies of both partners are relaxed and they tenderly touch. The angelic wings offers a marvellous image of the afterglow following orgasm. In prepolitical-correctness film sex, this is where the couple share a cigarette; in tantric sex, this is where the couple feel the ferment of postcoital reverie. Visionary capacity expands, and the couple may feel as one, reborn within a common body in a sublime moment, creating the alchemical vessel known as the 'double pelican' (Figure 11). The 'single pelican' (Figure 12) is based on the form of a mother pelican pecking her own breast in order to raise blood from her body to feed her young, a symbol of introverted self-sacrifice. The single pelican vessel works as a sublimating flask, in which the operation is contained wholly within the one vessel. The double pelican is a dual vessel that offers circulation between flasks. In the partnership of the double pelican, one sacrifices to the other, to create a third — the relationship. The relationship is then Other, constituted by the mourning of the deaths of individuality on both sides of the partnership. Hence the conjunction, death and rebirth of the couple in Figures 6-10 above in the 'rose garden' series. In this double

54



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Sublime Moments in the Body of the Double Pelican

55

Spirits . . . ' Indeed, the 'spirits' are . . . the thin and active part of the blood . . . ' (Donne, 1971, Sermons 11, 261-2). Where Bonus generalises the body as the secret alchemical Tincture, Donne focuses us upon the Renaissance convention that the spirit 'inheres in the body', specifically in the blood. Jung (CW16, para.398) notes that the Tincture is sometimes referred to as 'a spiritual blood'. A seventeenth century alchemist, John Pordage, in a letter to his soror mystica, or Sister in the Work, Jane Lead, gives explicit location for the Tincture of the alchemical Work: This sacred furnace ... this secret furnace, is the place, the matrix

Figure 11

Figure 12

sacrifice, a common vessel is created through which energies circulate or are exchanged in extended lovemaking, tangibly and non-verbally as sexual fluids, pheromones, and electrical phenomena at the skin's surface; and through conversation in sharing of images and ideas. So, the couple undress, bathe, make love, share postcoital reverie becoming as one body in a shared experience, and then die to that experience, to resurrect through the common body of relationship. This is not a reductive or concretistic reading of the Rosarium, but a plain reading of the already erotically sublime. What the 'rose garden' series suggests, as a tantric text, is that actual sex, bodily awareness and the abandonment of individuality to the commonly felt (and commonly made) relationship can become sacred endeavours, producing a 'child' of the shared imaginations arising from desire, that must 'rise' to be appreciated, and must descend back into the bodies to be experienced. This child can be taken as the birth of creative impulse and expression, out of the consciously sacred sexual act. A sixteenth century alchemical text notes that: It is the body which retains the soul, and the soul can show its power only when it is united to the body. Therefore when the artist sees the white soul arise he should join it to its body in the same instant, for no soul can be retained without its body . . . The body is stronger than soul or spirit, and if they are to be retained it must be by means of the body. The body is the form, and the ferment, and the Tincture of which the sages are in search. (Petrus Bonus, in Nicholl, 1980, p.127). The English poet John Donne (in 1612) says spirit 'cloth inhere in the body' ('Philosophy of Love'), while ' . . . our blood labours to beget/

or womb, and the centre from which the divine Tincture flows forth from its source and origin. Of the place or abode where the Tincture has its home and dwelling I need not remind you, nor name its name, but I exhort you only to knock at the foundation. Solomon tells us in his Song that its inner dwelling its (sic) not far from the navel, which resembles a round goblet filled with the sacred liquor of the pure Tincture. (in Jung, ibid, para.507). Just what does Solomon tell us in the 'Song of Songs', that wonderful liquid love poem and celebration of eroticism denying the Old Testament's normally desiccative, patriarchal morality? The Song refers to 'navel' as a round goblet filled with a sacred wine: 'Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor' (7:2) this is the 'navel' of the Queen of Sheba which Solomon compliments. Shuttle and Redgrove (1978, p.20) suggest that 'navel' is a modesty, and that the writer is referring to . . . "pudendum", "vulva" or "cunt".' Recall what Pordage sensibly translates for us — that the source of the Tincture is not literally the navel, but 'not far from the navel'. The Tincture is neither a unicorn in a grove nor an elaborate koan, but entirely of the body, sexually sited and cited as sexual, not secret but secretion. The sublime moment for Donne is the infusion of the spirit into the sexual body, not the escape from bodily desire into idea. Donne describes lovers 'whom love's subliming fire invades' ('Valediction: of the Booke'), and in 'The Extasie': 'To our bodies turne wee then, that so/ Weake men on love reveal'd may Tooke;/ Love's mysteries in soules do grow,/ But yet the body is his booke.' Thus, suggests Nicholl (1980, p.128) Donne . . . draws down spiritual meanings into the sphere of sexuality . . .' Donne's poem links sex and death in the same manner as the Rosarium series. For Nicholl (ibid., p.127) 'The Extasie' ... is not just a celebration of love as a mystic union of souls, but rather a highly philosophical incitement to love as a sexual union of bodies.', where . . . it is sex that consummates the mystic ecstasy . . . ' (ibid., p.124). Donne reads spirit sensually and erotically. 'The Ecstasy' is spirit illuminating body in —

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descent, not spirit escaping the confines of body: `So must pure lovers' souls descend/ To affections, and to faculties,/ Which sense may reach and apprehend,/ Else a great prince in prison lies.' 'The Ecstasy' offers a manifesto for engaging the sublime through sexual alchemy - ecstasy as a revelation of the unity of spirit and body (whose site is the 'blood' or passion) achieved through sex and the erotic imagination, as the creation of one body out of two, a body that is eternal: 'My body then doth hers involve .. ('The Dissolution'), for the body of love . . . hath no decay' ('The Anniversary'). The coniunctio, the alchemical hermaphrodite, is echoed in a Madrigal from 1539:' .. . then bound/ With her enfolded thighs in mine entangled;/ And both in one self-soul placed,/ Made a hermaphrodite .

3. The sublime - out of mind? The first century AD treatise by Pseudo-Longinus on the sublime as a literary form emphasises the ecstatic (literally 'out of place'), the out of body - the mind, the idea. The sublime is characterised using on the one hand metaphors of ascension, spirit, height, transcendence, the metaphysical; and on the other, freedom from contamination, impurity or taint. Longinus equates the sublime with the 'expression of a great spirit', that itself is associated with flame, the flare-up of genius, a rising aerial spirit, the flame that destroys the body or reduces matter. The sublime works . .. to raise our faculties to the proper pitch of grandeur.' (Longinus, 1965, p.99). This conforms with the standard dictionary definitions, that stress height: 'lofty', 'towering', 'belonging to the highest regions of thought, reality, or human activity.' (Shorter OED). There is already a contradiction in the 'sublime', for the word has two possible roots. The first is consistent with 'raising up': the Latin sublimare, `to elevate'. The second, however, offers the compound 'sub' and 'limen': literally 'below, or close up to the threshold', cognate with 'subliminal'. This second etymology orients us to what is below the threshold, what is down, deep, undiscovered, or what is pushing from below to reach a threshold (a perfect description of the 'unconscious', or the workings of absence upon presence). When heating a substance, say the alchemists, keep your eye on the nature of the fire and the changes to the material being heated - do not be caught by a fascination with what is given off from the substance - the vapours - for this will distract you and you will let the fire die or flare up excessively, ruining the work. In psychotherapy, keeping one's eye on the fire and the changes to the substances of the work, rather than getting distracted by what is given off (the vapours) is 'attention'. There are two possible equivalents in therapy to getting distracted by the vapours given off during heating. The first is to mistake theories informing the work for the work itself. The second is excessive fascination with fantasy images, or, in Jungian terms, anima fascination. Such

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distraction by the purity of the heights leads to fascination with the allencompassing theory, the revelation of the symbol, the 'click' of the insight, and the oh-so-brilliant piece of 'analysis', dry as dust but crystal clear, blinding - and inflated. These are pathologies of spirit in the realm of the Holy Fool, who steps out confidently at cliff's edge, trusting in the lightness of being, and reminding us of Paine's point in The Age of Reason that 'The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again' (1981, p. 179). Note Paine's movement: upward, ever upward. Spirit, suggests Lingis (1983, p.118) offers the death knell to Nature - thought abstracts itself from matter in order to rule over matter and preside over its death: 'This spirit of negativity, this negativity which is the spirit, no longer lives for material sustenance, earthly food and safety and comfort, does not seek pleasure or happiness. It requires truth.' Is this the spirit that starves the anorexic body? Similarly, for Lyotard (1994, p.55), the spirit is' . . . fascinated by its own excessiveness . . . ', caught by its own inflations. The Fool is also a windbag. .Longinus (1965, pp.100-102) does, however, warn us that although the / sublime is realised in 'elevated language', it needs 'ballast' and is not 'high flown'. Early in his text, Longinus equates 'sublimity' with 'profundity', and we are suddenly plunged into the depths, as the dictionary definitions of 'profundity' suggest: 'Depth, in a physical sense', 'the deepest part of something', 'an abyss'. This can mean depth of thought also. No longer lofty abstractions and aspirations, but sinking, abysmal experiences: ballast, anchor, fear of falling, the pits. During the Enlightenment, in which Reason claimed dominance over Passion, the German philosopher Baumgarten (1714-1762) nevertheless established aesthetics as a legitimate study within philosophy, stressing a sensory and feeling basis to aesthetic judgement, or resisting a grounding of aesthetics in mind. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), a political reactionary, distinguished between the aesthetic and the sublime, where the sublime is predicated upon affect, particularly terror. In Burke's account, the solely beautiful is not sublime. When terror is introduced into beauty then the sublime is experienced; indeed terror is a necessary component of the sublime. Thus, Baumgarten and Burke follow the vertical axis downward, equating the sublime with the profound not as spiritually uplifting but as a terrible or awe-inspiring occasion revealing depths, offering a strange, polluted pleasure. Depth resists the sweetening of the sublime, but more so, it automatically taints the purity of experience. Contemporary accounts of the sublime such as that of Lyotard (1994, p.228), follow Burke in describing the sublime as a movement swinging from ' ... joyous exaltation to terror . .. ' Kant (1790, paras.23-9) also distinguishes between the beautiful

'Y

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On the Sublime

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(aesthetic) and the sublime, but predicates the sublime in the mind, not in passions. Kant says that beauty depends upon the (necessarily limited) form of an object in nature, where the sublime is provoked by 'limitlessness'. Such limitlessness, often realising a 'negative pleasure', is not in the object itself, but in the mind as it conceptualises the object: .. . the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason. Indeed, suggests Kant, the sublime operates only . . . because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality' (para.23). What cannot be apprehended sensually is limitlessness, which, as an idea, excites the mind at its highest level of intensity. But this is to make a rift between the sensual and the sublime, and to restore the fantasy of ascent: the sublime again as spiritually uplifting, as the finality ( If idea _located in the person and not discoverable in the worl d. us Kant concludes that 'Sublimity, thereore, does not rest e in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind . . . ' (para.28), in a . . . faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense.' (para.25). Lyotard (1994) notes that Kant at least orients us to the limits of aesthetics, and it is at this limit that the sublime may appear. The sublime is powerful because it is liminal, or subliminal. The forceiafshesubligle ilagiip iot resent comfort or spiritual sweetness, but ' . . . the feeline of something monstrous.' • a • :0 • .ca • • is hen nec saril involved with transgressi29: I eat o and rule is the cat _iseofiliefeeliiaof-tlaz_sublime; (ibid.). us, the sublim , revealed in sudden immensity, equates with a sudden withdrawal of the known, the rule-bound. It signals . . . the death of God.' (ibid. As a negative ) capability, the sublime may then be characterised as a su den, intense, absence of all that is dependable and predictable, all that gives comfort he sublime can also be seen not as an absence of 'God', where that very absence leads to terror, but as an overwhelming presence of the terrible deity — a fearful surplus. In Tantra, this dreadful face of deity is experienced, paradoxically, through celebration of the erotic. One must sacrifice to Her as Other, not defend against Her in heroic stance, and so the sublime is not experienced through tension but relaxation — the parasympathetic rather than the sympathetic nervous system; the looselimbed rather than the pumped-up; the bliss of sacrifice rather than the pleasure of battle. In a Tantra of the left-hand path — a sexual Tantra — as Lingis (1983, p.49) observes, the sublime moment . . . spreads immensity over the small but so troubling and decisive spasm of love . . . offering a . . . communion in the immense, at such a moment of -

.

-

-

59

common pleasure . . . ' Thus, 'Making love with his wife, a Hindu thinks of God of which she is an expression and a part.' (Michaux, in Lingis, ibid.). Where, asks Lingis, might we find a historical example of a culture in which eros is not conceptualised but lived in a loose-limbed manner of everyday pleasure, that would offer An eroticism that would sensualize the mind . . . that would infect the political order, that would intensify through artifices and in art, and that would be nowhere dissimulated or dissimulating, but discover its climactic intensity in the most sublime forms?' (ibid., p.58). His answer is the tenth- and eleventh-century Hindu temples of Khajuraho in Central India, remnants of the Chandella Kingdoms, whose friezes offer a variety of sexual activities depicted in such a natural manner that this may have been, ventures Lingis (ibid., p.59) . . . a society .. . where sexual repression was once, but completely, unknown.' What Lingis sees in these tantric temple friezes is not an enshrining of the biological, but a recognition of a ' . . . supreme degree of intelligence, thoughtfulness, beauty, capable of entering into or assembling the cosmos.' (ibid., p.61), that is based upon sexuality as a spiritual form, and a form of nobility that is 'physiological', 'vital' rather than based in 'civic virtue' (ibid., p.62). The assumption is that the Gods themselves make love, passionately, and by this means is the cosmos created and maintained. It is by grace that humans participate in this world creating/destroying event. It is surely this grace that Jung (CW16, para.469) refers to when he says that the coniunctio is not 'personal' or 'subjective'. The sublime moment is the sexual intensification of the vibrant field that is at once body, relationship, and cosmos. At this moment, the sexuality of one partner is defined by the other: 'There are Tantric bronzes in Nepal and Tibet where one would see, if one separated the embraced couple, the man now bearing vulva and the woman penis.' (Lingis, 1983, p.67). This moves significantly beyond Jung's conceptual model of contrasexual types.

4. Those women? With reference to alchemical texts, Jung (CW16, para.518) says that 'Unfortunately, we possess no original treatises that can with any certainty be ascribed to a woman author. Consequently we do not know what kind of alchemical symbolism a woman's view would have produced.' He remarks, however, on notable partnerships in alchemy such as John Pordage and Jane Leade, and Peronelle and Nicholas Flamel (ibid., para.505). Did Jung not see his own relationships as alchemical, as contributions to the Work? He dedicates The Psychology of the Transference to his wife Emma. Surely women with whom he had

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intense relationships would have demonstrated to him 'a woman's view' in the alchemical Work? Recent critical and intellectual biographical interest in Jung (for example, Kerr, 1994; Shamdasani, 1990, 1995) offers an alternative to a previous generation of biographers who lionised Jung, raising him to the status of prophet, or saint. Hall (1988, p.13) describes 'those women' who gathered around Jung as acolytes, maenads to Jung's Dionysos, as a ' . . . fiercely maintained community of believers . . . ' In contrast to these women as followers, there is an emerging focus upon other women who acted as leaders, as inspirational, as sexual muse, from whom Jung derived significant ideas for his psychological theories and therapeutic practices - and an experiment in living. In the case of the latter influence, Toni Wolff was . . . for nearly thirty years more or less openly Jung's mistress . . . ' (Kerr, 1994, p.138). In 1915, during a near psychotic phase in Jung's life ' .. . Jung's condition had so deteriorated that his wife allowed Toni Wolff openly to become his mistress and sometime member of the household, simply because she was the only person who could calm him down.' (ibid.) Women, it would seem, for the man who 'discovered' the 'anima' for psychology, were potentially dangerous, not to be trusted: . . . the anima .. . seemed to me to be full of a deep cunning.' says Jung (1977, p.211). He recalls an early childhood feeling connected with being troubled by his mother's absences through illness and subsequent hospitalisation: 'The feeling I associated with "woman" was for a long time that of innate unreliability.' While he goes on to say that 'Later, these early impressions were revised . . . ', he nevertheless concludes: 'I have mistrusted women . . . ' (ibid., p.23). Jung's first analytic case in private practice, as an orthodox psychoanalyst following Freud, was a woman - Sabina Spielrein. She is said to have first introduced the idea of 'anima' to Jung. They fell in love within the confines of a continuing therapeutic relationship. Appignanesi and Forrester (1992, p.204-205) suggest that Spielrein was Jung's ' . . . first analytic muse and mistress, in a relationship which moved unevenly between sexual and mystical registers.'; and Kerr (1994, p.230) notes that ' . at one point Jung had tried, astonishingly, to introduce Spielrein into his own household.' There is evidence that Jung had an affair around 1912 with Maria Moltzer, who had also analysed him. Moltzer led him to his 'discovery' of the intuitive type (Shamdasani, 1995). From this analysis Jung claimed to be free from neurosis. Freud wrote to Ferenczi: 'The master who analyzed him could only have been Fraulein Moltzer, and he is so foolish as to be proud of this work of a woman with whom he is having an affair.' (ibid. 1995, p.128). Jung thus fell in love and had an intense erotic relationship with his first private client, and subsequently had an affair with what he describes effectively as his most successful analyst. Much

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later in his career Jung (CW16, para.464) warns against such potential entanglements and ... too much therapeutic enthusiasm'. At the time of his relationship with Spielrein, Jung was under the influence of Otto Gross, with whom he conducted a mutual analysis. Gross was a sexual libertarian, and Jung became during 1907-8 'a fervent sexualist' (Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, p.210). Kerr (1994, p.507) suggests that Jung had to 'sublimate' his relationship with Spielrein, lest he go mad, because he had seen a 'truth' from her..This 'truth' may have constituted Spielrein's initiation of Jung, consciously or unconsciously, into a new kind of sexual awareness, into appreciating sexuality as a spiritual endeavour, essentially a tantrism, and as a basis to creative inspiration in the circulation of images and ideas between partners bound in erotic tryst. Such a tryst is the very thing one must sublimate in the ethical exercise of one's duty as a psychotherapist. So, the very thing one must displace in psychotherapy, Jung and Spielrein embraced as the most therapeutic of activities and interests, and thereby resisted its sublimation. Some time after their relationship had ended and Spielrein was pursuing her own career as a psychoanalyst, in a letter written to Jung in 1918 she raises objections concerning the potentially sublimatory nature of analysis itself: . . . analysis of the "unconscious" can rob the analyzed material of its energy . . . ' She makes a crucial distinction, that . . . the subconscious can be encouraged to work through a problem in either a real or a sublimated form.' (ibid., 1994, pp.484-5). Jung (CW16, para.328) was later to say that . . . what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated ... ', although we can suggest that this is precisely what his later alchemical psychology does. Spielrein's own career appears to have led her to take more seriously than Jung (or more concretely) the place of bodily sexuality in analysis and this is why she ultimately rejected Analytical Psychology for a Freudian approach. As Jung in 1907 is attracted to the radical sexualism of Otto Gross, so in mid-1907 Spielrein comes across a book by Auguste Forel - The Sexual Question (1905) - in which Forel discusses eroticism in the arts. Forel uses the word 'poetry' to describe 'amorous intoxication', and for Spielrein, this becomes the code word for her intimacies with Jung. Kerr (1994, p.227) suggests that . . . "poetry" was Spielrein's word for what happens when a couple, both enamored of mysticism, move backward from it to a sexual realisation - and keep psychoanalyzing.' Recalling the relationship between poetry and sexuality in John Donne's work mentioned earlier, 'poetry' is actually a rather beautiful expression for a consciously adopted sexuality informed by the spirit. The implication is that Jung and Spielrein fell into an intense erotic relationship which could be read generously as a sacrament, and cynically as a confused therapeutic entanglement. Spielrein eventually developed a view that ' . . . the creative process itself was sexual' (ibid., 1994, p.506), and that the creative does not arise

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out of sublimation of sexuality, but offers a celebration and expression of sexuality: 'The basic process of artistic creation mirrored lovemaking . . . ' (ibid.) What gave Spielrein's view an interesting twist was that she saw sexuality as at once both constructive and destructive, life and death drives intermingling in the one act. She brought sex and death together (before Freud's formulation of a 'death wish' or thanatos). The eros or life force had to encounter the death of the ego in sex, where the private self is destroyed in a fusion or identity with another, or the making of relationship through the sexual act: . . . out of the destruction (of two individuals) a new one arises. That is in fact the sexual drive, which is by nature a destructive drive, an exterminating drive for the individual' (ibid., 1994, pp.217-18). In love, suggests Spielrein (in Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, p.218) there is a ... dissolution of the I in the lover . . . The I lives anew in the person of the lover.' Spielrein stresses the immanence of the sublime in the sexual act: 'It is the sexual drive that forces individuals to transcend and transform themselves, impelling them towards inevitable creativity, destruction and death.' (ibid.) In 1908, Spielrein had expressed the desire to have a 'child'. Jung interpreted this literally, that she wanted to have a child by him. They code-named this child 'Siegfried'. In 1912, Sabina Spielrein wrote to Jung: 'Dear one, Receive now the product of our love, the project which is your little son Siegfried.' (Carotenuto, 1982, p.48). For Spielrein this is a child of the imagination, the product of the circulation between the couple of images and ideas. 'The project', the 'child', is a paper by Spielrein entitled `Destruktion', which puts forward her idea of the 'death instinct'. Spielrein recognises her idea as arising out of the erotic intensity of relationship. Jung makes no such acknowledgement of the influence of significant relationships as he marks a watershed in his life: All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912 . . . ' (1977, p.217). In 1912 Jung enters what he later calls his 'confrontation with the unconscious', a period of semi-psychotic disequilibrium out of which he establishes his main therapeutic technique - active imagination. In 1912 he receives from Spielrein the news that the 'child' of their relationship has finally come of age. In 1912 he allegedly enters into an affair with Maria Moltzer. Spielrein is now left to bring up this child of the imagination on her own, and develops her progressive ideas concerning the links between sexuality and creative life. On Christmas Eve 1913 Jung (ibid., p.204) has a dream in which he and an unknown 'savage' kill Siegfried, the solar hero. Jung's interpretation is intrapersonal not interpersonal - that his own heroic ego must be sacrificed to the primacy of the unconscious. He does not relate the dream to Siegfried the 'son' of his encounter with Spielrein, yet it may be that in killing Siegfried in this dream, Jung also finally shatters the 'double pelican' vessel that he had created with Spielrein, that had

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contained and intensified his desire, leading perhaps to some of the

most important formulations of modern psychology. Some of these cannot now solely be attributed to Jung and his 'dangerous' introverted journies (the received wisdom of Memories, Dreams, Reflections), but appear to be products of dangerous liasions, in which erotic partnerships there is inevitably a circulation and swapping of images and ideas, a cross-ferment and comingling.

5. Does Jung abandon the left-hand path? In Tantra there are two paths - the right-hand path transcends or denies the realm of the senses in the pursuit of asceticism. The left-hand path remains within the realm of the senses - in the sensual and sexual, in desublimation and embodiment. Jung knew of this Tantra of the left hand. In a description of the 'King and Queen' (Figure 2 of the Rosarium, above), Jung says that 'The two give each other their left hands, and this can hardly be unintentional since it is contrary to custom. The gesture points to a clearly guarded secret, to the left-hand path,' as the Indian Tantrists call their Shiva and Shakti worship.' (CW16, para.410). This path unfolds to reveal the secrets of the biological realm (no `secret' at all, but our common birthright). Jung (ibid., paras.411-12) says that the text to Figure 2 gives a warning that . the secret of the art . may not be revealed to all and sundry.', and that this secret is . the work of Nature and not of the worker'. The alchemical text that Jung compares to Tantra is, however, from the sixteenth century and European. Is Jung then pointing to a western tantric tradition known to Renaissance alchemists, or is he retrospectively projecting a knowledge of Tantra on to this alchemical text? Jung would surely have recognised the biological secrets of Tantra, for he quotes the Rosarium, that as the Queen and King make love, so 'In the hour of conjunction the greatest marvels appear.' (ibid., para.458) - at the sublime moment of climax, visionary capacities expand. 'Sexuality does not exclude spirituality, nor spirituality sexuality . . suggests Jung (CW14, para.634) in his last book, written between 1941 and 1954. He warns the reader against the dangers of abstract, psychological or mystical readings, as 'one-sided interpretations'. In some occult texts, Jung observes that we will find explicit reference to sex, and that this should not be read in a sublimatory manner. We should not assume that ' . . . the obviously sexual language has no basis in real sexuality.' As Jung (CW16, para.455) confirms, what is uppermost in the Rosarium is ' . . . the sexual libido which engulfs the pair . . . ' The text is explicit: And yet you need me, as the cock the hen.' And the gloss: 'White-skinned lady, lovingly joined to her ruddy-limbed husband,/ Wrapped in each other's arms in the bliss of connubial union,/ Merge and dissolve as they come to the goal of perfection:/

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They that were two are made one, as though of one body.' (ibid., para.457). However, such remarks, while they constitute our focus in this discussion relating the sublime to sexuality, actually constitute only a small part of Jung's overall account of the alchemical coniunctio. Mainly his interest in the concrete is overwhelmed by the incursion of the sublimatory voice of conceptual psychology that he himself has helped to establish. His interests in the bodily and sexual as the reality of the alchemical coniunctio — or perhaps his and Sabina Spielrein's 'Siegfried' — are for the most part soon abandoned. In the foreword to Psychology of the Transference (ibid., p.164) Jung already says that 'sublimation' is ' . . . a process closely connected with the transference.' And Jung concludes that the sex displayed in these alchemical illustrations is not 'real'. These two bodies making love are 'really' . . . aerial beings, creatures of thought.' (ibid., para.459). The transference is read through a sublimatory (conceptual) imagination, not with an aesthetic eye that would recognise the already sublime in the erotics of transference within a sexual relationship. The mind is not allowed to think what the eye sees. The 'real' meaning of the pictures is `Goethe's 'higher copulation" a spiritual coupling whose bodily representation is really a dissimulation (ibid., para.462). In this representation of the coniunctio . . . the sexual aspect . . . deludes our judgement.' For Jung, ' . . . the more . . . one concentrates on the sexual aspect . . . the less attention one pays to archetypal patterns.' (ibid., para.534). Now Jung is the alchemist watching what is given off from the substance being heated — the vapours — and losing touch with the transformations of the substance itself. He is in the grip of an anima fascination of his own invention. In privileging the theory over the experience that the theory is supposed to explain, Jung drives a wedge between what the alchemists had always seen as inseparable — the work of the library and the work of the laboratory. The Jung who elsewhere hints at the secrets of sexual alchemy, of the Tantra of the left-hand path, now suggests that 'The real secret lies in the union of the right hands . . . ' (ibid., para.411). This . . . solves the problems created by the "sinister" contact . . . ' as a ' . . . revelation of . . . higher meaning . . . ' (ibid., para.416), where the union of King and Queen is taken to reveal the Anthropos, the original androgynous or biune being prior to sexual division. The 'secret' is revealed as the discovery of the contrasexual type — woman in man, man in woman, anima and animus. But this conceptual revelation has now been severed from any basis in experience. Further, the 'secret' is personal individuation and not individuation of the relationship; the 'incest' shown in the coniunctio . . . symbolises union with one's own being . . . ', and ' . . . means individuation or becoming a self . . . ' (ibid., para.419). Characteristically, Jung then proceeds to contradict himself,

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or perhaps reclaim the ground he appears to have lost, for the individual is never complete ... unless related to another individual.' (ibid., para.454).

6. Praxis — transference is everyday 'The transference itself is a perfectly natural phenomenon which does not by any means happen only in the consulting-room — it can be seen everywhere . . . ' observes Jung (CW16, para.420). A recent article on psychoanalytic practice, written for the general public (Brearley, 1996) states authoritatively that: ' . people ... see others in ... personal ways (which derive from our versions of earlier figures in our lives) . . . ' Do people really see each other in this way, restrospectively, derived from significant figures in childhood? Of course you do if you are a psychoanalyst — this is the cornerstone of that theory. But a life predicated upon such theory (any theory) could be seen as not a life lived, but a life interpreted. Theory and theory making are absorbing. However, one does not theorize a relationship in the face of its dual passions, its unpredictabilities, its confusing torque, in the manner that a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist would theorize the practitioner-client relationship. When such therapists 'resolve the transference' they are in fact acting out the normative narrative of psychoanalysis — confirming, not contradicting, its central conceptual tenets, and shoring up their practices. The satisfaction of the desires of theory may take precedence over the unexpected, which is absorbed into that theory (interpreted by its tenets). As Nietzsche suggests, the ethical question is not how we might be responsible for the future (the impact of theory upon life, realised as goals, or developmental plans, or strategies for living), which psychotherapy tends to educate; but how we might be responsible to the future, which must take into account the unpredictable, the unknowable, life's aporias. The classical model of the transference introduces a theoretical account of relationship that basically nullifies the 'perhaps', the uncertainty, indeterminacy or unpredictability of events. The slow but inevitable movement towards the analysis of the transference as a resolution (making conscious what is temporarily projected on to the analyst) brings the therapeutic relationship into the realm of calculation (decision with no risk). Psychotherapy itself then becomes a practice of sublimation. Psychoanalysis paradoxically may offer an institutional system of surveying, controlling, dissolving, or concealing the unpredictable while claiming to raise unconsciousness to consciousness — in order to minister utilitarian 'happiness'. Brearley (ibid.) suggests that `To analyse, the analyst ... does need to be able to give himself room to think, and not get entangled. In everyday life, both parties bring their own problems and idiosyncracies.' Precisely — 'everyday life' is necessarily inclusive of the messy tangle and does not

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reduce relationship to a technical calculation. Of course the analytic relationship is a particular kind of relationship. But is it one that necessarily admits the sublime? The sublimatory language of analysis places emphasis upon purity, upon lack of contamination or poisoning in the relationship (the technical dread of countertransferential blunder): .. . the analyst needs to be, in certain ways, unobtrusive. Only by this means is there a chance of a sufficiently uncontaminated field of enquiry.' (ibid.). Surely here is the critical difference between a technical relationship (the transference and its analysis in therapy) and a lived relationship (the transference and its indeterminacy in couples): in psychotherapy the relationship offers an 'uncontaminated field of enquiry'. If you brought that phrase into therapy to describe your intimate relationships, you would be diagnosed as emotionally insulated! An early seventeenth century alchemical text (quoted in Jung, CW16, para.499, n.20) says that the magical child of the sublimation .. . clothes itself with heavenly nature by its ascent, and then by its descent visibly puts on the nature of the centre of the earth.' The coniunctio involves the reanimation of the body, so that an identification of body and spirit is achieved. Jung notes that numerous sublimations are necessary to create the corpus mundum, the purified body, so that the body may be united with the soul. He compares this work to a psychological 'self-education', and says that As alchemical symbolism shows, a radical understanding of this kind is impossible without a human partner. A general and merely academic 'insight into one's mistakes' is ineffectual, for then the mistakes are not really seen at all, only the idea of them. But they show up acutely when a human relationship brings them to the fore and when they are noticed by the other person as well as by oneself.' (my emphasis, ibid., para.503). Here then is a lay analysis between partners, where ... confessions made to one's secret self generally have little or no effect, whereas confessions made to another are much more promising.' (ibid.). The spiritualising of the bodies is achieved through a circulation between them, in preparation for the entry of the soul, through which medium spirit descends back into body as a resurrection and re-inscription of what the alchemists call the body's 'form' and 'ferment'. We have seen that the entry of the soul is possible when the 'double pelican' vessel is made between two partners in sexual relationship, and that this offers a fertile ground for the creative impulse. Jung (ibid, para.504) suggests that 'The 'soul' which is reunited with the body is the One born of the two, the vinculum common to both. It is therefore the very essence of relationship.' It is remarkable how analysis may displace everyday life, instead of becoming an aspect of life, or offering itself up in postmodern times as

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redundant or quaintly narcissistic in the face of the development of a virtually therapeutic culture (Bleakley, 1996). Yet we find highly respected analysts such as Jacoby (1984, p.105) grudgingly admitting that a love relationship outside analysis can be a 'fuller experience' than analysis itself, . . . and might have even more impact on the individuation process.'! Jung (CW16, para.471) admits that . . . knowledge of one's partner . . . ' is essential to the opus psychologieum, the individuation process, and that this goes hand-in-hand with 'self knowledge'. But here is the essential difficulty in psychotherapy's pursuits, in contrast to the pursuits of art. Whereas the kind of art discussed at the beginning of this essay seeks to engage the sublime through sacrifice of the personality, psychotherapy generally defends against the sublime through sublimatory moves, the central one of which is the realisation of the personality, and the bolstering of the 'person's' fragile unity in the face of overwhelming powers of disintegration.

References Appignanesi, L. and Forrester, J. (1992) Freud's Women. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bleakley, A. (1996) 'Psychotherapy stinks! - or Hekate rising', Sphinx: AJournal for Psychology and the Arts, 7. Brearley, M. (1996) 'Emotions brought to heal', The Guardian, London 03/04/96. Brown, N.O. (1966) Love's Body. New York: Random House. Buck, L. (1996) Obituary for Helen Chadwick, The Independent, London 18/03/96. Carotenuto, A. (1982) A Secret Symmetry. New York: Pantheon Books. Chadwick, H. (1994) effluvia Exhibition, London: Serpentine Gallery. Cunningham, V. (1996) 'Vile bodies', The Times Higher Education Supplement, London 08/03/96. Donne, J. (1971) John Donne: The Complete English Poems. A.J. Smith (ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fabricius, J. (1989) Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, 2nd edn. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press. Hall, N. (1988) Those Women. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1975) Revisioning Psychology. London: Harper and Row. Hillman, J. (1995) 'Pink madness, or why does Aphrodite drive men crazy with pornography', spring: AJournal of Archetype and Culture 57, 39-72. Jacoby, M. (1984) The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship. Toronto: Inner City Books Jung, C.G. (CW16) The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd edn 1966, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Jung, C.G. (CW14) Mysterium Coniunctionis, 2nd edn 1977, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Jung C.G. (1977) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Glasgow: Collins. Kant, I. (1790) The Critique of Judgement. Meredith, J.C. (trs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kerr, J. (1994) A Most Dangerous Method: The Story ofJung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

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Lingis, A. (1983) Excesses: Eros and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Longinus (1965) On the Sublime, in Dorsch, T.S. (trs) Aristotle Horace Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1989) 'Complexity and the sublime', in Appignanesi, L. (ed) Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4. London: Free Association Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1994) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1994) 'Corpus', in MacCannell, J. F. and Zakarin, L. (eds) Thinking Bodies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nicholl, C. (1980) The Chemical Theatre. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Paine, T. (1981) in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 179. Searle, A. (1996) Obituary for Helen Chadwick, The Guardian, London, 18/03/96. Shamdasani, S. (1990) 'A woman called Frank', Spring: AJournal of Archetype and Culture, 50, 26-56. Shamdasani, S. (1995) 'Memories, Dreams, Omissions', Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, 57, 115 37. Shuttle, P. and Redgrove, P. (1978) The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman. London: Gollancz. Sontag, S. (1983) A Susan Sontag Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Warner, M. (1996) 'Obituary for Helen Chadwick', The Guardian, London, 18/03/96. -

Chapter 4 Psychoanalytic Framing of the Sublime in the Creative Act TESSA ADAMS It is between the semiotic' and the body ideal that the sublime beckons our sensibilities to forsake reason. Between, that is, the representable and the unrepresentable lies our deepest and most permanent longing for the moment of transfiguration. That moment when the signifier will be irrevocably split from the signified. When bread is body and wine is blood. When the pleasure/anguish of joufssance 2 owns at once our fear and love. Is it possible to meet this fleeting awe-full pleasure of incorporeal orgasmic wonder? What are its features, how is it configurated? Certain artists of the late eighteenth century, that period in which images of death and love were intertwined, were in no doubt that an image of the sublime was achievable. A death-bed scene could hardly fail to draw the word `sublime' from the favourable critics of the day', Hugh Honour, the art historian, tells us, referring to paintings such as The Dead Marat (1793) 3 . In this painting, reputed to be one ofJacques-Louis David's best works, the death of the revolutionary figure Marat is glorified. Stabbed, leaning over the bath, Marat bears a message of salvation. With what seems like postcoital exhaustion, rather than death, the illuminated torso slumps giving way to a pallid head bearing a smile of sublime supplication. This is a painting of ecstatic martyrdom prefigured, of course, by the multiplicity of images of Christ's passion. Such is the search for the sublime which typified the later ambitions of the neoclassical period. It was the job of the artist to strive to bring the viewer in touch with exquisite feeling. It was anticipated, in contemplation of an image of peaceful death, rather than one of tortured anguish, that the highest of emotions (awe bordering on terror) would most certainly be aroused. The Enlightenment, with its insistent idealism providing a new vision of wisdom and sensibility (which later hardened into totalitarianism) voiced its ambition for the ecstatic through its critics. Diderot, in 1775, calling painters to their task, demanded of them 69

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'move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare and be enraged'. 4 This was also a time when sublimity was linked with the notion of genius, yet it was not elegance and 'beauty' alone that could be seen to transform paintings into this higher state. Diderot emphasised that the sublime work should not be too regular, stating that `to be of genius it must sometimes be careless and have an irregular, rugged, savage air'. 5 He goes on to say 'Sublimity and genius flash in Shakespeare like streaks l lightning in the long night'', thisthreatofsharnareiviattan vieur of the limitlecsnecc of the,4444444e_em)epieftee rin-whiclutsub'ect At the peak of this perceptual challenge the imagination leaps and we see the step clearly taken by Caspar David Friedrich. It is his well known painting The Wanderer above the Mists 6 which shows us that the sublime moment can be won. Nature with its imminent threat submits, death recedes and the traveller rises above the plane of 'ordinary' man. This message of individual transcendence is enhanced by the positioning of the figure in the landscape. Friedrich paints his wanderer having climbed the mountain; with back toward us he is both commander and subject of the universe before him. This is the traveller who receives the sublime blessing; in humility and wonder, confronting the power of Nature, he stands secure at the edge of the abyss. Here is the celebration of subjectivity which typified nineteenth century romanticism. It is now the time (using Marion Milner's phrase) for the artistic project to 'spread its imaginative body' 7 in the face of Reason. We can ask why the threat of annihilation has been seen to be such a necessary part of sublime experience. This is certainly documented by the unquestionable influence of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry of 1757 8 into the sublime and the beautiful, which stresses that terror underpins all sublime experience. A paradoxical position perhaps — and influence — in a century in which the actual terrors of revolution were to take their toll. However, from a psychodynamic stance, a belief in the intrinsic fearfulness of sublime experience seems hardly surprising, since, in the face of heightened emotion psychoanalysis might ask us to be mindful of meeting that terrifying arena of our own omnipotence. Looking at the work of the post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, it would seem that the coincidence of threat in the sublime (jouissance) cannot be avoided. She tells us that it is our inevitable rupture from the maternal realm (the semiotic disposition) 9 through our entry into language which brings with it a life-long fear of any further dislocation. For after all, as subjects of the symbolic order,'° inevitably we meet the fear of psychosis in the face of any tampering with the signifying chain;" a tampering on which the sublime rests with its gaping urgency that we should finally step aside from symbolic coherence. In other words, entry into the

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sublime moment is an invitation that we are bound to resist since our allegiance to 'symbolic law' the word of the Father (in Lacanian terms)" ensures our contract with the group. As 'wanderers in the mist', in the Friedrichian sense& apprehend the vastness of our vulnerability in the face of the uncontainable object. Aware of our mortality we keep our feet firmly on the ground, t how we long to submit to the sensate realm of semiotic functioning.'

Black and white version of Caspar David Friedrich The Wanderer above the Mists 6

How does Kristeva account for this principle of semiotic challenge to rational discourse? We find that she rests her case on an assumption that 'language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to mother'." It is her view that semiotic activity, exemplified by poetic language, serves to reinstate us with the lost maternal element. This is a thesis which frames the infant's initial relationship with mother as blissful symbiotic reverie, termed the 'semiotic disposition', 9 of which communications are of the body, but transcend corporeal gratification. In this context the sublime experience is seen to be situated where the artist's 'sublimated fouissance finds its basis in the forbidden mother, next to the Name of the Father'." That is

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to say, Kristeva endows the artist with considerable potential as he or she is seen to have the capacity to reach out toward primal repression, that is toward the sublime, blissful realm of maternal undifferentiation.' 6 Yet, as already stated, within the artist's plea for the sublime — the pleasure/anguish of semiotic functioning — there lies the threat of psychosis since the sublime embraces our moment of fearful helplessness in the face of the forbidden maternal realm. Kristeva forms her hypothesis by studying specific aspects of Renaissance painting. In Desire in Language (1980) she focuses on the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini in order to advance her belief that there exist two oppositional approaches to representation which seemingly dominate Western art. To one category (exemplified by Bellini) she attributes success in terms of aesthetic arousal deriving from the artist's capacity to embrace the sublime moment in harnessing maternal jouissance. 2 To the other category (exemplified by Leonardo) she attributes an aspect of aesthetic failure deriving from the artist's over-investment in refinement of technique and representation. In this latter case we are warned that the viewer's experience will be one of excitement followed by disappointment, on the basis that the work is so charged with imagery that the maternal sublime cannot but be eclipsed by symbolic coherence.' 7 It is clear that Kristeva is concerned to engage us with aesthetic debate. She stresses that the sublime moment is dependent upon the artist's ability to reach beyond his own 'symbolic power' to 'awaken' the maternal element." Work which achieves this essential 'awakening' is seen to offer the viewer the experience of ecstasy, described as 'ineffable jouissance' 9 in which the body of the mother is encountered. This means that Kristeva locates success in those cases in which the artist relinquishes a bid for virtuoso control of representation. What has to be given up, she tells us, is the search for the 'maternal phallus',' 9 a compensatory phantasy designed to mitigate the loss of the maternal body. And since we are advised that this 'giving up' requires of the subject a certain level of psychosexual maturity it follows that the artist's capacity to engage us with the sublime must be beyond conscious determination. Thus we experience Kristeva's unequivocal demand for aesthetic excellence borne, in Eagleton's terms, 'as a discourse of the body'. 2° The question remains as to how these necessary features of a gratifying work can be identified. This is to ask if it is possible to perceive the aesthetic properties of maternal jouissance? Is it possible, in other words, to discern the manifestation of this feat of 'awakening' which apparently captures the sublime of maternal signification? In order to answer this question we have to consider how Kristeva justifies her oppositional thesis of aesthetic arousal. Returning again to her analysis of Leonardo's and Bellini's paintings we find that she

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situates her argument within an interpretative framework focusing on each artist's depiction of divine motherhood. She establishes certain aesthetic criteria which are seen to engender sublime affect by contrasting Leonardo's and Bellini's attitude toward, and treatment of, the subject of the Virgin and Child. The crux of the matter is that Kristeva looks to the architectonics of a painting to hold the unrepresentable maternal element. Citing Bellini's work as exemplary, she points to the absent gaze and tactile intimacy which typify Bellini's Madonnas; in particular those paintings which show the infant clasped, deified but apparently not overtly adored. An example would be the Madonna with the Pomegranate, in which the Virgin and Child grasp the fruit yet awkwardly avert their gaze.' Kristeva's claim is that the jouissance of the sublime is not held within corporeal representation: rather it is generated by the orchestration of the painting's coloured surfaces. When we look at the way in which this dynamic is described, Kristeva leaves us in no doubt that she values Bellini's paintings as aesthetically superior to those of Leonardo. The special intimacies and adoring gazes which characterise Leonardo's work lead her to challenge his capacity. He is profiled as paradigmatic of the 'artist as servant to the maternal phallus' clinging to his (painted) objects in fetishistic terms. A painting to which Kristeva refers to make this point is Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Lamb (c.1510), with its entwined maternal figures gazing beatifically upon the infant who, clutching a lamb, responds with appropriate delight." This critical analysis of Leonardo's intent contrasts that of Bellini who is seen to be capable of creative autonomy. Bellini's accomplishment, Kristeva points out, depends on his ability to relinquish the fiction of the phallic mother and to bear the pleasure/anguish of her absence. The following passage certainly speaks of this sublime joy as fugitive in its representation: It rather seems as though he [Bellinij sensed a shattering, a loss of identity, a sweet jubilation where she is not; but without 'her' — without eyes or vision — an infinitesimal division of colour and space rhythmically produce a peculiar, serene joy." To summarise; what we have here is Kristeva's assumption that Bellini's work, by the nature of its architectonic complexity and subtleties of gaze, has the capacity to bring the viewer in contact with the unrepresentable maternal element. His achievement of 'infinitesimal division of colour and space' is presented as the necessary quality for generating the sublime of maternal jouissance. Leonardo, in contrast, is identified as essentially failing in this respect. His exceptional capacity for representation and refinement of technique is criticised as merely offering us an 'abundance of objects and bodies' which 'ceaselessly excite and disappoint', a capacity which does no more than reinforce (fetishistically) his

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own symbolic power. 24 Additionally Leonardo's presentation of maternal pleasure, in the adoring gaze, rather than awakening the sublime element is seen to deaden our sensibilities by simply portraying infant omnipotence, since Leonardo's infant is depicted as the primary object of desire. What Kristeva emphasises then, is that it is only Bellini who can engage us with sublime experience: engages us, that is, with the longedfor and forgotten experience of maternal jouissance. Let us now return to the Enlightenment view of the sublime and the images of the eighteenth century. Thinking again of Diderot's statement to the artists of that time — 'move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, and be enraged' — is this perhaps the 'ceaseless excitement and disappointment' to which Kristeva refers? In other words, is Diderot simply describing the affect of fetishistic imagery which serves to reinforce the artist's own symbolic power? There certainly does seem to be a case for suggesting that eighteenth century ambitions for sublime experience are at odds with those outlined by Kristeva. The dramatic framing of the emotions (death and love) through painting, which typify the neoclassical project, are precisely the techniques of arousal which Kristeva deplores in her evaluation of Leonardo. She describes Leonardo's legacy 'humanist realism', pointing out with regret (advocating Bellini) that this approach remains the dominant preoccupation of post-Renaissance artists. It does seem significant that Leonardo, and the progress of European painting, are charged with eclipsing Bellini's achievement; an indictment based on Kristeva's belief that throughout the centuries there has been a 'loss ofjouissance'. The artist's investment in humanist realist terms is identified as spurious in its objective: Kristeva describes its concerns as primarily 'the staging of psychological episodes centred in the desire of the body' designed to 'give the effect of representable, desirable, fetishistic forms.' 25 We could argue then that it is within this prospect of 'failed jouissance' that she would doubtless place the work of Jacques Louis David — including The Dead Ma rat. However, even if the argument for Kristeva's implicit rejection of the Enlightenment sublime is convincing, there remains a difficulty if we are simply seeking to prove that she offers an oppositional analysis. Turning again to her positioning of the sublime in the non-figurable, limitlessness of maternal signification it could be argued, also, that her ambitions are subtly Kantian: particularly since her proposition for maternal jouissance carries with it a moral imperative. In her castigation of Leonardo and the trajectory of so-called humanist realism (for the 'loss of jouissance') she makes it clear that she demands that the artist (of quality) step aside from engaging with narcissistic gratification. In principle this means that the artist should step aside from Leonardo's fetishistic preoccupations toward the accomplishment of Bellini in order to secure the 'serene joy' of the higher order of expression. Surely, in prescribing criteria for successful creative functioning Kristeva presents us with a

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paradox: her theory of ineffable jouissance, conceived as it is in antihumanistic terms (challenging the Enlightenment ideal) is hardly compatible with a position which identifies the artist's capacity to manifest this jouissance in universal, moral terms. The question which can be asked at this point is why should the practising analyst or therapist be concerned to address Kristeva's positioning of the sublime? Her theory of semiotic signification may well appear to be obscurantist with its promotionof maternal function as hidden discourse. Some therapists might argue that her discriminating analysis of Leonardo's and Bellini's depiction of motherhood has little bearing on actual work with clients. Yet surely the dynamics of creativity are of interest to all, therapist and patient alike, since the interpretation of its process is crucial to our understanding of the potential of the human psyche. What Kristeva brings to us is a debate which is more than simply a question of 'good' or 'bad' artistic practice. This is an oppositional analysis which begs the question as to the efficacy of certain artistic preoccupation. We are confronted with the possibility that the creator's intent can be either positive or negative, with the result that the creative process is either transformational (in accessing the sublime) or regressive (in reinforcing fetishistic ambition). What is at stake here is that Kristeva, in offering a theory which classifies certain artistic process in defensive terms, might adversely influence the way in which a client's creative practice is appreciated or dismissed. A point of concern is that Kristeva develops her view of Leonardo's narcissistic artistic alliance from Freud's seminal essay on Leonardo's life and work. 26 She uses Freud's premiss that Leonardo's extraordinary innovatory capacity was essentially compensatory and that the figures in his paintings (smiling Madonnas and beautiful youths) served to express repressed homosexual desire. 26 Drawing directly from this interpretation, Kristeva is able to substantiate her proposition that it was Leonardo's 'psychosexual immaturity' which ensured his failure to engage with the sublime of maternal jouissance. While Kristeva views homosexual desire as detrimental to the artist's capacity to provide us with a fully satisfying aesthetic experience, significantly, Freud does not take this position. His interpretation of Leonardo's psychopathology does not indicate that he sees the painter's work as aesthetically lacking. In fact if we consider Freud's discussion of the impact of the Mona Lisa, in which he draws upon Walter Pater's essay, it is arguable that he views Leonardo's achievement in Paterian terms; that is not only as exceptional — but as sublime. Let us consider Pater's legendary passage within this context: The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world

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On the Sublime are come', and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and the experience of the world have etched and moulded there.... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas. 27

As we can see, Pater attributes to the Mona Lisa both the ordinariness of human desire and the extraordinariness of the unrepresentable maternal element. In offering this daunting prospect of limitless gratification it is womanhood defined in Kantian terms. And surely we can say that Freud, in providing this archetypal image as representative of the portrait's affect, implies that he sees Leonardo embracing the very semiotic reverie which Kristeva finds so inevitably absent in his work. What this means is that Freud proposes Leonardo's process as governed by narcissistic desire, yet apparently he does not see this as limiting to the experience of the work itself. Yet Kristeva, as we have seen, has not taken up this flexible attitude. Rather in appropriating Freud's view of a fetishistic basis for Leonardo's practice she is concerned to propose a necessary impoverishment in Leonardo's achievement. We can presume, then, that Freud might consider an artist's psychopathology to have little bearing on the aesthetics of a work. Where does this position place Kristeva; can her concern about the failure of narcissistically motivated work be simply overlooked? Certainly we may wish to dismiss her claim since it can been argued that her thesis has reactionary implications, for within her repudiation of humanist realism she situates Leonardo's homosexual desire in negative terms. The following passage demonstrates that she is quite scathing in her belief that it was Leonardo's arrested psychosexual development which barred him from the possibility of achieving a sublime work: Thus, we have the typical configuration of a homosexual structure. Persuaded by precocious seduction and double motherhood of the existence of a maternal phallus, the painter never stopped looking for fetish equivalents in the bodies of young people, in his friendships with them, in his miserly worship of objects and money, and in his avoidance of all contact with and access to the feminine body. 28

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In the face of such apparent prejudice does this mean that we should dismiss Kristeva's thesis? She definitely presents us with a problematic in claiming that creativity can be marred by sexual predisposition. In fact she implies that she promotes the achievement of genitality 29 (a concept of psychosexual maturity in terms of heterosexual object choice) as the agency for aesthetic accomplishment. Yet we find that she is not alone in this view: there is evidence to suggest that other post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers would broadly accept her position. We can turn to Janine Chausseguet-Smirgel as a clear example, who in the Ego Ideal (1975) and Creativity and Perversion (1984) demonstrates that she might favour Kristeva situating Leonardo's work as aesthetically undermined by homosexual desire. And it is interesting that Smirgel equally presents a category of work as inevitably disappointing, deriving from narcissistic ambition. Essentially Freudian, Smirgel's quest is one of establishing creative authenticity. The artist who fails is identified as deceptive in intent, fabricating a fictional universe by which to bolster pre-genital omnipotence. At root Smirgel's positioning of the sublime is virtually Kantian in that she subscribes to notions of excellence borne of universal truths. The achieving artist is that person who has internalised 'universal law' which is defined as the infant acceptance of the 'double difference between the sexes and the generations'. 3 ° Out of this acceptance emerges Smirgel's condition for success, namely the artist's capacity to sublimate primitive instinct. Significantly it appears that Smirgel's aesthetic carries a moral imperative since she maintains that it is the artists 'conduct' toward this double difference which determines the quality of the work. Denial of the 'universal law' is seen to have an adverse affect in terms of both object choice and aesthetic judgement. This is a view which establishes the accomplishment of genitality as the fundamental principle of authenticity. We are told that failure in this respect leads merely to narcissistic investment, resulting in work which remains a compensatory product of 'perverse' desire. Since the objective of this work is that it should deceive we are warned that it can never satisfy. Smirgel tells us that such work is 'over-aestheticised' and, like the 'emperor's clothes', is adorned with 'dazzling' splendour only to excite interest momentarily before its seductive intent is revealed." As we can see, Smirgel's position in respect of aesthetic failure is surprisingly similar to Kristeva's. Both writers align aesthetic impoverishment with a failure of appropriate object choice, and although Smirgel does not discuss Leonardo directly there is certainly an indication that his homosexual desire would place him in her category of perverse denial, inevitably subject to factitious creation. We can detect a further similarity between the two analysts when their criteria for aesthetic achievement are considered. In each case genitality is promoted as the necessary condition for sublime affect; and it is the

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forfeiting of narcissistic omnipotence which is seen to enhance the creator's vision sufficiently to access primary experience. Smirgel claims that it is the artist's capacity to transform primary processes (through the agency of sublimation) which endows the work with the desired aesthetic impact. She proposes that we become aware of authentic work by the arousal in us of a 'wealth and multiplicity of emotions, affects and images arising from the primary instincts'. 32 Conceived as sublime, this flow of affect is described as a 'Long, backward-looking incline'. 33 Originally introduced by Fain, this term is used by Smirgel in her attempt to encapsulate the depth of aesthetic experience; a trajectory which must take us, surely, to the womb. In other words Smirgel presents the essential feature of creative authenticity as the object's potential to engage the viewer with a re-experiencing of the earliest moments of symbiotic pleasure. Within the following passage we are given some indication as to where we might meet with this primary arousal: A verse of Ulalume, any Paul Klee or Nicholas de Stael drawing, a few chords by Bach take us in an instant through vast areas of the psyche and leave us marvelling at the wealth of emotion poured out through a whole series of condensed images that are spread before us, all issuing from primitive instinct. Like a deep-sea diver discovering a lost Kingdom, the work suddenly illuminates the unconscious, and its light spreads right to the surface." As we can see, Smirgel experiences, for herself, the expanse of this affect in sublime terms. And how significant that she uses (most probably unconsciously) Pater's deep-sea diver to signify the lost kingdom of primitive instinct. We can be in no doubt that she would be familiar with Pater's text, if not in its original form, at least in Freud's Leonardo essay. Significant, too, is that she sees the failure to reach this kingdom as fundamental: the 'perverse' artist, we are told, through his defensive alignment with compensatory ambition, can only 'deprive us of the enjoyment of our own instincts'." Without discussing in greater detail Smirgel's analysis of the 'long, backward-looking incline' and its relationship to the capacity for sublimation, there are certain points of interest for this discussion which can be readily established. In the first place it is clear that both Smirgel and Kristeva situate sublime experience within primary process; that time when object cathexis remains unhindered by repression — the time of symbiotic reverie. From either view the artist's access to this forbidden realm of pregenital/prelinguistic experience is conceived in the context of paternal signification, yet clearly in contrasting terms. In Kristeva's case the sublime can only be achieved if the artist challenges paternal

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authority in order to meet the repressed maternal element: in Smirgel's case, however, the artist is required to submit to paternal authority in order to secure the necessary trajectory of primary arousal. A second point of interest is that, within Smirgel's explanation of this necessary impact of paternal signification on the quality of aesthetic experience, there exists her view that the perverted impulse is fundamentally a desire to 'unsettle reality' (where reality is seen as the difference between the sexes and the generations). The 'pervert', she tells us, 'is trying to free himself from the paternal universe and constraints of the law. He wants to create a new kind of reality and dethrone God the Father'. 36 It is significant that this 'unsettling' is not conceived as purposeful deconstruction, in contrast to Kristeva's concept of the unsettling dynamic of semiotic activity. Smirgel cautions that to stand outside the law is seductive, but essentially unrewarding. Internalising paternal law is presented as gain rather than loss. The 'lawless' artist, in Smirgel's terms, is seen to be subject to excessive idealisation, defending his immature vision of a fictional (Fatherless) universe which he has created. Finally, it is apparent that Smirgel justifies her proposition for factitious creation by describing 'perverse' ambition in terms which mirror Freud's interpretation of Leonardo's infancy. As we know, Freud presents Leonardo's childhood as one dominated by the 'tender seductions' of his mother and the absence of his father; resulting in a failure in paternal identification. 26 Although Smirgel does not refer directly to Freud's essay she does provide a picture of infant seduction which could lead us to imagine that Leonardo is the factitious creator whom she has in mind. Erosion of the double difference between the sexes and the generations is the pervert's objective. He is generally helped to reach it by his mother who, by her seductive attitude towards him and her corresponding rejection of his father, fosters in him the illusion that he has neither to grow up or to reach maturity. 37 The essential point is that Smirgel maintains that these circumstances result in the artist fabricating work rather than creating it, on the basis that the primary function of the art object is that it 'symbolize the [missing] phallus'. 38 It is her view that the perverse artistic project, with its over-expressiveness, is designed to maintain an illusionary infantile fictional phallus and the inevitable dismissal of the potent father. As we can see, this is another psychoanalytic view which associates aesthetic failure with the dynamic of a compensatory phallus. But in Smirgel's case, in contrast to Kristeva, it is not the search for the maternal phallus which eclipses the sublime, instead it is the search for the substitute phallus of absent paternal signification.

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It has been argued that Kristeva and Smirgel equally present the artistic sublime as dependent upon the artist's psychosexual status, of which genitality is privileged and homosexuality is repudiated. Yet it can also be shown that at a certain level their theories appear incompatible. When we consider how each writer genders the dynamic of creative achievement it is clear that there are opposing views. Kristeva indicates that aesthetic excellence derives from the impact of maternal function, whereas Smirgel favours paternal function as the innovatory factor. In other words, the fundamental feature of sublime experience is the same in each case, namely our repatriation with primitive instinct, yet the means by which this is achieved is in contrast. This can be summed up in the following way: in Kristeva's case it is the eruptions of the semiotic (maternal signification) disturbing paternal law which enable the artist to 'awaken' the affect of the primary (maternal) experience, while in Smirgel's view it is the adherence to the Law (paternal signification) which allows the artist's access to the affects and images of primitive instinct. What this leads to, of course, is the question of patriarchal or matriarchal privileging of the sublime. At first glance it would seem that Smirgel holds a masculinist position (following Burke) since she rests her case for sublime experience on a belief that it can be accessed only though paternal identification. If this is the case, could it mean that Kristeva's analysis is essentially a feminist sublime and as such remains a challenge to Burke's reputed position? Let us consider this in detail. As has been already stated, the Enlightenment view of the sublime owes its allegiance to Burke who provided an influential proposal for the gendering of aesthetic experience. For Burke, as with Kant, the sublime object is seen to be masculine, and it is the beautiful object to which Burke attributes the feminine. Beauty is conceived as predictably satisfying, in contrast to the masculine sublime which is conceived as disruptively unsettling. We find, too, that beauty is subtly discredited since it is thought to embrace the feminine quality of social sentiment. The fundamental aspect of the beautiful is that it signifies universal gratification; identified by Burke as the agency of mimesis which actively secures social exchange. I call beauty a social quality; for when men and women, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many who do) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons." This means that Burke's masculinist proposition for the sublime object, enhanced by the masculine quality of remaining powerful while defeating assimilation, is framed in opposition to the apparent avail-

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ability of the beautiful object which simply serves desire with pleasurable gratification. We can see that Burke's analysis relies on a form of gender stereotyping which Kristeva would surely contradict, since she situates the sublime within the maternal realm; implying a hidden, transcendental feminine language obscured by patriarchy. And it must be remembered that it is the subjugation of maternal function (the semiotic) by paternal function (the symbolic) which is Kristeva's primary concern: a concern which profiles the ever present dominance of masculine principle in virtual tyrannous opposition to the prospect of any restoration of feminine (maternal) supremacy. That is to say, for Kristeva, the masculine principle can only be antagonistic to the sublime. Within Burke's proposal the implication is that beauty, with its social purpose, nevertheless will fall short. This echoes Kristeva's view that Leonardo's exceptional ability for representation is finally disappointing. Burke distinguishes the sublime is offering us the seduction/disruption of awesome, masculine, unrepresentability, calling us to relinquish beauty's gentle securities. It could be argued that, although gendered conversely, Burke's analysis of aesthetic affect is strikingly similar to Kristeva's. His concept of the beautiful, with its pampering pleasures, matches Kristeva's analysis of the gratifications secured by the beautiful objects and bodies within Leonardo's work. His position for the sublime, with its disruptive, inaccessible transcendence, certainly reminds us of Kristeva's concept of 'ineffable jouissance' with its pleasure/ anguish of subversive signification situated as it is within the real (in Lacanian terms) heralding our mortality.° What brings Kristeva and Burke together is their mirroring of attitudes. We can say that each writer defines the availability of pleasurable gratifications gained from the beautiful object in fetishistic terms; whether defined fundamentally as masculine or as feminine. Similarly, in each case the sublime, although as we have seen conversely gendered, is represented as the custodian of the promise of ultimate experience: the unobtainable, unrepresentable, awe-full joy/jouissance. The question remains as to whether or not Smirgel, in appearing to profile patriarchy, is truly Burkean? Certainly she suggests that the overaestheticization of factitious creation can seduce us in much the same way that Burke points to the gratifications of the beautiful. Yet Burke does not intimate that the beautiful is inauthentic with its hedonistic delights. Instead he suggests that it holds us to social exchange with compatible pleasures. What he is concerned to emphasise, in contrast, is the transcendent, terrifying quality of the sublime. However when Smirgel's sublime is considered, although arguably masculinist (similarly to Burke), we find that it is much more containable since her ultimate aesthetic experience, with its challenge to inauthenticity, is applauded for its ordinariness rather than its possibility of offering us a glimpse of transcendent terror. It is significant that she presents the

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criteria for this far more prosaic sublime by invoking Shakespeare's Troilus, in his address to Cressida, as a means by which to accentuate her claim for the austerity of aesthetic excellence: Whilst others fish with craft for great opinion I with great truth catch mere simplicity: Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare The crown in this case is surely the crown of the lost kingdom to which she refers: the kingdom that is illuminated by the arousal of primitive instinct. To summarise, this journey into the psychoanalytic sublime within artistic practice has raised some essential questions. First, it is clear that the Enlightenment tradition has framed the responses for opposition, yet paradoxically each analysis subscribes, at least in part, to the Kantian ethic of moral responsibility. Second, the psychoanalytic concern for pathologising creative practice has been borne out. There is no doubt that homosexuality is seen to be regressive in terms of aesthetic achievement in both Kristeva's and Smirgel's propositions. And we cannot say that Burke's position, with its masculinist tradition for the sublime, is sufficiently divergent since he implies that it is only the beautiful (as feminine) which is seen to sanction erotic pleasure. 42 Finally, it would seem that object gratification through artistic representation, in these psychoanalytic terms, is problematised. It has been shown that any virtuoso control of technique and image is held in suspicion. Kristeva chooses to identify the sublime within the absence of signification, challenging our enjoyment of the legacy of Western representation. Smirgel, on the other hand, identifies the sublime within the framework 'plainness and truth', warning us of the seduction of expressiveness. This is, of course, in direct contrast to the development of elaborate representation which so typified the neoclassical period with its multiplicity of staged images seeking to invoke the sublime. Let us think again about Diderot's demand - 'move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare and be enraged' - could we say that psychoanalysis, in these instances, has in fact been compelled to 'take up its arms'? 43

Notes and references 1. Semiotic/Symbolic: these terms are used to distinguish Kristeva's two modalities of significance. The semiotic refers to infant echolalias or vocalising prior to sign or syntax; the unorganised pressures of desire that precede entry into language. The symbolic refers to sign and syntax, grammatical and social constraints. Ref. Kristeva, Desire in Language (1980) (see note 14). 2. Jouissance: maternal jouissance, Kristeva's proposition of ultimate rapture aroused by the recall of our infant experience of primary symbiotic union.

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3. David, Jacques-Louis, The Dead Marat (1793). Musees Royaux Des Beaux-Arts De Belgique, Brussels. 4. Honour, Hugh, Neo-Classicism (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991) p.144. 5. Honour, Neo-Classicism, p.146. 6. Friedrich, Caspar David, The Wanderer above the Mists (1818). Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 7. Milner, Marion Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (Routledge, London,1990),, 8. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquii-Y into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), ed. T J Boulton (Oxford, 1987). 9. Semiotic disposition: the primary 'blissful' state of early infancy in which communication between mother and baby involves a realm of preverbal inter play through bodily exchanges. 10.Symbolic order: a Lacanian concept of our language and its structure (as patriarchal) controlling all conscious communication - rational discourse. 11.Signifying chain: the chain of references which secure the gendered subject within rational discourse (the symbolic). 12.Symbolic law: see symbolic order - the imperative that we submit to the contract with the group. 13.Semiotic functioning: the dynamic of repressed maternal signification as it breaks through rational discourse, typically visible within poetry and painting. 14.Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980) p.136. 15.Kristeva, Desire in Language , p.242. 16. Maternal undifferentiation: The non-gendered realm of the maternal which stands outside language and symbolic signification. 17.Symbolic coherence: Rational discourse with its intention to secure unequivocal meaning. 18.Kristeva, Desire in Language, p.247. 19.Maternal phallus: According to Kristeva the phantasy of the phallic mother is inaugurated to instigate the loss of the maternal realm at our entry into language; the symbolic order. 20. Eagleton, Terry (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990) p.13. 21. Bellini, Giovanni, Madonna with the Pomegranate, Wood, 91 x 65 cm, National Gallery, London. 22. Da Vinci, Leonardo, Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Lamb (1510-1512), Wood, 67 x 50 in., Louvre, Paris. 23. Kristeva, Desire in Language, pp.247-8. 24. Symbolic power: the adherence to patriarchal law through rational discourse which seeks to dismiss maternal function. See Kristeva, Desire in Language, p.245. 25. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p.245. 26. Freud, Sigmund, Complete Psychological Works. Standard Edition, Vol. 11, Leonardo Da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (1910) (Hogarth Press, London, 1955). 27. Pater, Walter, Essay (1869), in Leonardo Da Vinci (Phaidon Press, London, 1966) pp 11-12. 28. Kristeva, Desire in Language, pp.244-5. 29. Genitality: a view that full maturity is achievable in a psychological sense. According to classical theory this is evaluated in terms of sexual relationship; ,

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prioritising the mutuality of orgasm with a trusted and supportive loved partner of the opposite sex. Ref. Rycroft's Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1972) London: Penguin. 30. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Janine, Creativity and Perversion (Free Association Books, London, 1985) p.12. 31. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p.91. 32. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Janine The Ego Ideal (Free Association Books, London, 1975) p.115. 33. Fain, M. Discussion of the paper by C-J Luguet-Parat, 'L'Organisation Oedipenne du Stade Genital (27th Congress of Psychoanalysis of Romance Languages, Lausanne) R.F.P. (1967) 31. 34. Chausseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal, p.115. 35. Chausseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal, p.116. 36. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p.12. 37. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion p.2. 38. Chausseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal, pp.102-3 39. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p.42. 40. The Real: Lacanian term for the realm of experience which stands between imaginary and symbolic functioning. It is that place where desire is absent which necessarily can never be secured by signification. Ref. Lacan, J., Ecrits: A Selection (Tavistock, London,1977). 41. Chausseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p.100. 42. Potts, Alex, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale University Press, New Haven,1994) p.115. 43. This is in contrast to Freud's comment 'Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms'. (Standard Edition 21, p.177).

Chapter 5 Everyday Epiphanies

GINE I 1E PARIS -

Pagan gods and goddesses did not really die. Cultural oblivion is a kind of sleep, not a death sentence. If one invites them, they spring right back to life, bringing gifts for our souls tired of two millennia of the same imagery. But how are they likely to appear in our daily lives? Let us begin with an anecdote in which the goddess Memory is the source of conflict between a couple. Some time ago I received a client whose main objective in therapy was to escape boredom. He described his ennui as the feeling that 'the colour has drained out of life', as if his life contained only shades of grey. He and his wife had just gone through two incidents of great tension. But he didn't understand what exactly had put him in such a bad mood. We looked at these two incidents, trying to find a connection between them. The first occurred on the eighteenth birthday of their daughter. Paul had gone to a great deal of trouble to install the video camera on a tripod and buy new cassettes in order to film all the festivities. But his wife, seeing him fuss with the settings, the angle, the focus, etc., became annoyed and reminded him of all the many times that, while travelling, she had told him to open his eyes wide and look around him, rather than looking through his camera. She accused him of walking through their life like a tourist. Paul could find no answer. He was capable of seeing the absurdity of tourists with cameras when he looked at them yet, on the other hand, he couldn't deny himself the repeated pleasure of looking again and again at his photo albums — precious memories for him. He put away his equipment but all during the meal he had to force himself to appear to be in a good mood. He was not able to forgive his wife for failing to participate in his video. Why, he asked himself, should he feel so much hostility in response to such a banal incident. This is a version of a paper published in Sphinx, 4, (1992), pp. 62-75.

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The second incident took place during renovations to their house. He arrived home one evening to find that the workmen, following his wife's instructions, had demolished the kitchen cupboards in preparation for installing new, more convenient ones. Paul had agreed to the project but had not realised that it would mean the demolition of the cupboards that had been made by his father twenty years earlier, when he and his wife, as newly-weds, had moved into their house. These cupboards were the last do-it-yourself project Paul had done with his father, who had died shortly afterward. To see them thrown into the garbage shocked him but he thought his reaction so absurd and sentimental that he kept his mouth shut. But his hostility increased. It is Paul's rapport with Memory that explains his attachment to the old kitchen cupboards. It is this archetype that feeds his obsession for photographs and video gadgets. Paul, like Proust, is a man in search of 'the remembrance of things past'. A birthday party seen again on video can give Paul the same emotional intensity that he experienced at the party itself. Goddess Memory occupies a major position in his consciousness. Obviously I am not suggesting that Paul must never throw anything away for fear of offending Mnemosyne, but simply that it is sometimes difficult to recognise the activity of an archetype since an archetype manifests itself differently every time. Memory is attached to the soul of things, not to their value on the antique market. She doesn't allow herself to be confined to the places that culture dictates: the history books, the museums ('the House of the Muses, the Daughters of Mnemosyne'), or, in family life, to the attics and photo albums. Jung showed how the archetypes can make our lives miserable when we deny them what they demand of us. But it is possible to respond to these demands with flexibility. Paul thought of recycling part of the wood from the demolished cupboards to make a small bookshelf. Then he thought of framing a photo he had taken of his father the first day they worked on the kitchen. But neither of these solutions made him very enthusiastic. Given the objective of his therapy (escaping from boredom) we returned again to his memories of those days. The slow and measured rhythm of his father's hammer strokes rose again to his memory. Paul heard the short slow taps when the nail is just started, followed by strong blows in faster rhythm when the nail is almost driven home. He became very excited by what happened then: the hammer blows were becoming music. He remembered the impression he had had of a fugue at the moment when he and his father began to hammer in tandem: the blows of the two hammers resonated, at times together, at times in counterpoint, at times in fugue. Paul makes his living composing short advertising jingles — to sell Canadian beer, to vaunt the cleanliness of electric heating, to convince

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people that margarine has less cholesterol than butter. He makes plenty of money, but he gets bored. After that therapy session, he decided to compose a major musical work. 'I am going to compose a long symphony,' he burst out gleefully, 'The Two-Hammer Symphony' He would do it for his own amusement. Paul worked at that symphony all winter and succeeded in transforming his memories of his father and their happy days of woodworking together, into music. He wasn't bored all winter. Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, had finally come into her own. But where is the epiphany in this story? Or, to start with, what is an epiphany? In Judeo-Christian theological parlance, the word 'epiphany' means a miraculous appearance of God in the material world. But the Greek sense of the word is less extraordinary; it means a sort of luminosity through which the divine signifies its presence. This is the sense Jung gives the word. For him, an epiphany is the same thing as a manifestation of the archetype or what he calls a numinous experience. As I intend to show further on, you might even say that experiences to which we assign the term 'synchronicity' are also equivalent to epiphanies in this pagan sense of the term. Now, using Paul's example, I would like to make clear the first point: There is no epiphany without consciousness. Paul did not resist his wife's arguments. A superficial analysis might conclude that, 'He let himself be dominated by his wife.' Or, that 'he has an assertiveness problem.' But we can just as well make the point that the reason he cannot defend his emotions is because he does not consciously recognise their archetypal foundation. Archetypal consciousness does not mean you have to be a scholar of mythology. It just means you have to be able to feel the archetypal quality of an emotion or a situation. But can mere consciousness of the archetypal quality of a moment be described as an epiphany? Not quite. There has to be a further level of conscious awareness. That brings us to our second point: An epiphany is a re-cognition. One might sum up the psychological skill of the Greeks this way: when a numinous event occurred, they asked, 'Who is there? And what does that god or goddess want of me?' When things were going badly in the life of a Greek, he or she would ask, 'What divinity have I offended and how can I give him or her his due?' Today we express this sort of thing in psychological jargon: 'What complex am I dealing with and how can I cure it?' But when you come right down to it, it's the same kind of consciousness we are looking for: re-cognition of the archetype.

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When Paul saw the link between the two circumstances he recognised the need to serve goddess Mnemosyne. Once he recognised her, he could compose his symphony. It was in that creative act that he experienced an epiphany of Mnemosyne. Now, one may feel like responding that there are a good many artists who manage to experience such epiphanies without benefit of psychotherapy. But that's exactly the point of being an artist. The artist recognises and gives expression to the divinities hidden in common events. Sometimes the recognition of an archetype is slow and difficult, as in Paul's case. Sometimes it happens immediately, as in the following example. A 22-year-old student of mine told me that toward the end of the exams for her master's degree, she began to feel dissatisfied with the ascetic life she had been leading during her three previous years of study. She wanted to enjoy the springtime and her youth. One afternoon she was brought up short by a store window in which she saw the most wonderful pair of sandals in pale green and gold. As she put it, these were 'the sexiest sandals you could imagine', if you can apply the word 'sexy' to a pair of sandals. Pearls and little golden beads were braided into the fine leather straps and the thongs criss-crossed half way up the calf to show off the legs. These sandals were pure extravagance and they cost a fortune. This serious student knew she had to buy those sandals. It was, she said, 'as if my life depended on it.' And in that phrase you can see stage one of the epiphany: the consciousness that an archetypal power is at work. That awareness made her succumb to her fascination for the sandals. Thus impelled she went into the store, bought the sandals, put them on and rolled up her slacks to show off both them and her legs. She had excellent legs, by the way. It was a nice day and she went for a walk in the park, strutting about like a peacock. And then she asked herself, 'What got into me?' 'Well,' she told herself, 'it is spring fever. It's the season for love.' Had she been initiated into the jargon of archetypal psychology, she would probably have said: 'Here comes Aphrodite'. But even though she didn't know Greek mythology and didn't identify Aphrodite by her Greek name, this young woman was nevertheless clearly aware of the archetype at work. Not only was she aware that she was giving her soul something important to its survival but she recognised full well that it was Aphrodite she needed. Only she called her 'the season for love'. Blaise Pascal borrowed from St Augustine the famous dictum: 'You would not be looking for me if you had not already found me.' But this thought applies just as well to the pagan gods and goddesses. Aphrodite has to lend you her eyes in order for you to recognise her. It was because my student was ready for an Aphrodisiac interlude that she saw the beauty of the sandals and was aware of her desire for them. Another day she would have walked by without even noticing them. One has to be

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interested in love already to see the beauty of the opposite sex, just as one has to be interested in power — that is to say, one has to borrow Zeus's eyes to recognize power games. One has to be interested in business — that is Hermes' domain — in order to spot opportunities to make deals. And so on for the other gods and goddesses. Jean Pierre Vernant (1988), the famous French Hellenist, put it this way: . In order for you to be able to discern the outline of a divine presence right in front of you, that divinity has to already have control of your eyes, has to have taken over your vision from within, has to have transformed your very manner of seeing things. The gods and goddesses want to carve out a place in our lives, to show themselves to us and to be recognised and honoured, even when they disguise themselves and put on their masks. This is the full meaning of that key phrase of archetypal psychology: 'seeing through.' To recognise a divinity means to see him or her through all disguises and other tricks. Gods and goddesses not only want to be seen but also to lend us the eyes to see through. In the epiphany of Dionysos, Pentheus asks the foreigner: 'This god that you say you saw so clearly, what did he look like?' 'He looked just the way he pleased!' And the foreigner adds: 'It's not up to me to tell him what to look like.' In other words, a god will appear in whatever disguise he pleases. It's up to us to recognise him. If the gods and goddesses have no rules with regard to the ways in which they appear, that is because there is no set form that is appropriate. That is where an archetype is different from a stereotype. Stereotypes are easy to spot since their forms have been laid down in advance. There would be no point in archetypal psychology if the archetypes were set out once and for all. There would be no need for therapy if we could control them, keep them in their place or make them keep quiet. Of course, some people try to do just that, they turn the archetypes into stereotype. Does a woman wear high heels and nail polish? She's an Aphrodite. Does a man speak in a strong, authoritative voice and does he like high-backed executive chairs and three-piece suits? Put him down as a Zeus complex. Does a young woman enjoy horseback riding? She is an Artemis! All this sounds plausible, but the point is that we lapse into stereotypes and superstition when we don't take the trouble to re-cognize. Superstition transforms symbols into signs: a black cat equals the devil, a broken mirror equals seven years' bad luck, nail polish equals Aphroditic tendency.... and so on and so on. Superstitions latch on to the image in order to stick a label on it instead of leaving the image free to make a fresh impression on us.

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Any real communication means trying to understand the other in the unique moment. The gods and goddesses, as our partners and friends, hate it when we take them for granted. We have to play the game of personification to the hilt and quit addressing the gods and goddesses in clichés. The line between archetype and stereotype is thin but crucial. I am not saying that one is good and the other is bad, but they are quite different things. Archetypes are basic values that incarnate themselves in images that are always fresh and changing. A stereotype tends to fix an image in concrete, to turn it into a sign. Archetypes are as innovative and fantastic as the unconscious itself, and we know that the unconscious seldom uses the same image to express the same emotion. A god appears when he has a role to play, he takes on the disguise that fits the circumstances and he fades into the background when his role is done. It is up to us to keep our way of looking at things ever-fresh and ever-changing so we can spot these gods and goddesses when they appear. Let's get back to our theme now: that of daily life epiphanies. The Bible and its mythology have got us used to epiphanies that are absolutely out of the ordinary: the Burning Bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the hand of God preventing Jacob from sacrificing his son. When the Apostle Paul hears the voice of God on the road to Damascus he falls off his horse. On the other hand, Joan of Arc, simple peasant that she is, gets on her horse and goes to war against the English. All this is certainly more fantastic than memories attached to kitchen cupboards. By comparison a pagan epiphany seems like run-of-the-mill stuff. Think of the expression 'Hermes is passing' that the Greeks made use of to identify a mini-epiphany of that god in the moments when a pregnant silence suddenly descends on a group of people and they look at one another because they feel something beyond words. This expression has become Christianised and some people still say 'an angel flew by' on these occasions. The wings of Hermes have become those of a Christian angel. But Christians no longer regard such an experience as an epiphany, not even a little mini-epiphany, whereas it was an epiphany for the Greeks. And a mini-epiphany is Hermes' style, by the way; he is a god who travels light, a liar, a thief, a trickster and a joker but none the less a god for all that. When God appears to Christians, the first reflex of the believer is to fall to his knees. The Christian epiphany doesn't happen at the table, nor in bed, nor in the garden. It sends you to your knees, hands clasped and trembling; it throws you off your horse. Christian mystics describe their experience as a tearing of the veil of reality, like an eruption of the holy that transports them to another place. The everyday nature of pagan epiphany devalues its importance for Hellenists of Christian tradition, as if daily occurrence equalled insignificance. They do not understand an epiphany in which the ordinary is

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illuminated from within. They do not understand a world in which the sacred transfigures daily life, rather than tearing us away from it. As in the impressionist paintings, pagan spirituality is a perception of the luminosity of life in its simplest and most routine aspects. In this sense, the artist is, psychologically speaking, always a pagan: the painter sees the beauty hidden in an object, in colour, in the light. The novelist sees the archetype behind the character, the musician reveals to us the emotions hidden in sounds, rhythms and melodies. We all have within ourselves a pagan side whith wells to the surface at the first opportunity. As an example, I would like to tell you the result of an informal inquiry I conducted into the lives of women in a remote corner of Quebec. I asked these women, who defined themselves as practising Catholics, to raise their hands if they had had the chance to give birth to a child while conscious: without drugs or anaesthesia. I asked those who said yes, 'Did you have, at the moment when the infant appeared, the feeling of experiencing a sacred event?' All, 100% without hesitation, replied yes. Yes, that moment was sacred. I asked: 'Would you say that that moment, by its intensity and its beauty attained what one might call the religious?' 'Yes indeed. Yes, it is religious.' Now, this kind of epiphany is absolutely pagan. Christian dogma teaches that physical birth is insignificant; baptism is the spiritual event, the real birth. The Catholics have added that the infant belongs to the devil until he is baptised and that the mother ought to abstain from kissing him before baptism. But the pagan in us has never really swallowed these elements of a theology that denies and devalues bodily experiences and human emotions. Faced with the beauty of a child being born, our paganism takes over. But it is an unconscious paganism, just as unconscious as some of our Christian dogma has become. For this reason, it has not given us the power to protect the moment of childbirth from the medical technocrats. This is an example of why we need to subject our cultural values to profound psychological analysis. The moment we openly recognise that birth is a sacred moment, we no longer tolerate medical arrogance in the birthing room. The artist's task of revealing the intensity, the flouted beauty and the emotion that our culture has denigrated and pushed into oblivion can also become the analyst's task: that of helping us psychologically to become conscious of our theological assumptions. Certain analysts do this for one patient at a time in the privacy of their consulting room. Others, such as Jung and James Hillman, do it for the culture as a whole. One such concept that needs to be scrutinised is the concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity, when one looks closely at it, is a good example of a pagan epiphany. Jung (CW8) defined synchronicity as a coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with an objective external event. The relationship

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between the two events is not a relationship of cause and effect, but a relationship of meaning (para.996). This definition of synchronicity fits perfectly with the pagan notion of epiphany: the appearance of a seductive pair of green and gold sandals (the external event) coincides with an emotion (the openness to spring and love and sexuality) and these two events relate to Aphrodite; they are tied together by their meaning. Jung used the word synchronicity, which he considered scientific, rather than the term epiphany, which would have been too clearly borrowed from theology. But since Jung this concept has escaped the bounds of any scientific context and has made its way into the 'hit parade' of vague New Age notions. It vacillates between presenting itself as a scientific concept and as a spiritual one, and thereby manages to escape being the object of either rigorous analysis or theological discourse. I suggest using the word epiphany for the subjective experience and reserving the word synchronicity for the statistical study of coincidence, which can then be called correlation study. Having made this distinction, I would like you to ask yourself a question: do you get annoyed by people who make too big a deal of synchronistic experiences? And do you not find it incongruous when they interpret every coincidence they encounter as having been expressly arranged for their own personal benefit? In extreme cases, people who talk like this almost seem to be suffering from at least a mild case of a sort of paranoia-in-reverse: some of my young students, under the influence of New Age notions, act as if the entire universe were scheming for their personal greater spiritual benefit. They seem to think that synchronistic coincidences are manufactured just for them. They take it 'personally'. A non-causal meaningful event does not mean the meaning is in me. What these people are doing is to take the pagan epiphany and interpret it in the context of monotheistic theology: that is, for them an epiphany is a summons from God. They absorb it into their egos and their egos become inflated. Much of the New Age stuff is in fact bornagain Christianity. To be pagan is to understand that synchronicity can be an ordinary, everyday event that can happen to anyone who does not actually block it. It is no big deal. You don't have to go mad about an epiphany, and you don't have to fall on your knees before pagan gods and goddesses. Sometimes you look into the eyes of a cat, a dog or a horse and suddenly have the impression of communication between species. This is an epiphany too! You stop, you sense the presence of the animal and the emotion aroused by this communication and then you come back to yourself. But you don't necessarily suppose that the animal intentionally looked at you that way. You realise that the animal world doesn't disap-

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pear and cease to exist just because you stop looking at it. Communication with an animal, synchronicity and pagan epiphany are the same thing. Coincidences are there, symbols are there, divinities are there. They don't suddenly well up for our benefit. The magical world of meaning goes on and on with or without us; what is sporadic is our capacity to pay attention and remain open to it. If we are not to make a new and rather childish superstition out of synchronicity, we need to understand, how to deal with a pagan epistemology. We have to reconsider a world in which the sacred is part and parcel of everyday life. Having been raised on Christian mythology, I would like to demonstrate, with the help of a few examples, how we have been acclimatised to treat the sacred not only as opposed to the profane but as opposed to the normal, opposed to the tranquillity of daily life, like peak experiences, reserved to God's chosen spiritual elite. In stories in which God appears to a faithful believer, God has to start off by reassuring the person, since such an event is so rare and bizarre. Then God has to convince the person that he or she really is confronted with God, and this is not some trick. The chosen one, once he or she is convinced of the authenticity of the epiphany, then has in turn to convince an ecclesiastical tribunal set up to authenticate the apparition. This practice of authentication also exists in Catholic demonology: at each apparition of the devil, the priests and the bishops have to decide if they are dealing with a real devil or just someone trying to attract attention. This notion of authentication is found even in Hollywood mythology, where exorcists always begin by authentication. Is this a real devil, a being of real power, truly alive, or is it just a pathological delusion of the subject? You can see that all this has nothing to do with a pair of irresistible sandals in a shop window. This obsession with authentication is characteristic of religions based upon faith and dogma, religions of the book, as opposed to religions based not on dogma but on a mythology on which there is no copyright. The idea of authenticating an epiphany is alien to the pagan experience. Let us take an example. Suppose you are a Greek engineer and you claim that Apollo has appeared to you and has inspired you with an extraordinary plan for a bridge. Let's even suppose that, somewhat like Christ, you call yourself the son of Apollo. 'Very well,' your fellowcitizens will say, 'if you are really a son of Apollo, you will build a truly remarkable bridge'. If you succeed, no one will doubt that Apollo inspired you. The more exceptional and steadfast your ingenuity, the more the world will be ready to accept you as a true son of Apollo. Archimedes was one of those they called a son of Apollo. As his inventions astonished the world and permitted them to defeat Rome, who among his fellow citizens would want to deny that Archimedes was a son

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of Apollo? The facts speak for themselves. Walking on the bridge is enough to demonstrate precisely the genius of Apollo, the divine engineer. But should your bridge fall down or should its construction be shoddy, it would also be evident that you have a swelled head and that your status as a son of Apollo is very doubtful. Your punishment would be ridicule. It is the same with most pagan gods and goddesses. The Greeks themselves considered them as symbols and not as gods in whom it was necessary to have faith. They were the first to give to the word myth the double meanings of a fundamental story and a lie. Did a leader claim to be inspired by Zeus? He was expected to be like an eagle who sees all, to carry the mantle of power with the majesty of a patriarch, to be just and powerful, to take responsibility for many people. Did a woman claim to be a priestess of Aphrodite? It was not enough to be beautiful and seductive: she had to become, for her lovers and in the privacy of the bedroom, nothing less than the gate of heaven. Only then could she say that her beauty came from the goddess. When beauty is merely in the service of the ego, it has nothing to do with the goddess; in that case, a beautiful woman is only a pretty face and certainly not an epiphany of Aphrodite. Our conception of epiphany determines our mythology of daily life and, in consequence, our conception of therapy. Certain therapies are inspired by the model of ecclesiastical tribunals. The analyst seems to have the task of authenticating what comes from the Self, a divinity central to the dogma of many current theories of personality. Patient and analyst together seek the numinous centre of the personality, a centre conceived in the image of the transcendent God. The analysis becomes a long inquiry in which the analyst, 'a pipepuffing detective' as Hillman (1975) put it, looks for clues in order to render his verdict. Is this desire a rightful manifestation of the libido or a neurotic acting-out? Is this style of behaviour part of your personality? Is this a manifestation of a legitimate god or a devil? Throughout the whole period of the analysis — or should one say investigation? — the client must avoid what is considered acting out. He is placed under observation, he is on parole. An analysis that is pagan in inspiration doesn't reject acting-out but encourages it. Go to it, get right into the myth, kick the door open and see who comes in. To encounter the pagan divinities, one has to act out. Pagan mythology is about divinities who spend more time on earth than in their Olympic heaven. They inhabit both the peaks and the valleys; they even live underground and in the oceans. They are everywhere. The way of life of the pagan divinities associates them with daily life: work, domestic life, sexuality, business, wielding power, jogging, house-

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work, cooking, — everything. When you know how to recognise them you see Apollo in libraries and laboratories, you sense Aphrodite both in your orgasms and when you are gardening, you hear the voice of Demeter in debates over organic farming, you realise that Hestia can tell us a thing or two about the quality of our home life, that Hermes plays a part in our business deals, that Zeus rises in our power trips and that Hera sticks her nose into our marriage contracts. Many of our half-conscious rituals are openings to the pagan gods and goddesses: we put certain music on the record player, we choose certain clothes, we hum a certain tune, we build a fire in the fireplace, we invite a certain person, we try to create an atmosphere. We behave just like those great works of classical literature that start off by invoking one god or another, as the Iliad, for example, begins, 'Sing, 0 Goddess.' In conclusion, let me quote a few lines by Colette, describing her mother Sido, who lived in Provence in the nineteenth century. Sido, like her daughter Colette, was a great lover of animals, flowers and plants. They were both unconscious of being pagans. Colette tells this story about Sido: My mother regularly refused to provide double geraniums, pelargoniums, lobelias, miniature roses and meadow-sweet to the temporary altar for Corpus Christi because, even though baptised and married in the church, she had no time for childishness and Catholic pomp. Nevertheless, she gave me permission to study the catechism and psalms of salvation when I was 11 and 12 years old. The first of May, along with my fellow catechumens, I laid the lilacs, the camomile and the rose before the altar of the Virgin, and later I returned home, and proudly showed off my blessed bouquet. My mother laughed her irreverent laugh and asked: And do you think it wasn't holy beforehand?'

References Hillman, J. (1975) Revisioning Psychology. New York: Harper and Row. Jung, C. G. Collected Works 8 (2nd edn, 1969) (eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, W. McGuire, tr. R. F. C. Hull), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Vernant, J. P. and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988) Mythe et Tragedte en Grece Ancienne. Vol. II. New York: Zone Books.

Reflections on Chance, Fate and Synchronicity

Chapter 6 Reflections on Chance, Fate and Synchronicity

GERHARD ADLER Aller Zufell is wunderbar, Beriihrung eines Mheren Wesens, ein Problem, Datum des tatig religiOsen Sinns. (All chance is miraculous, the touch of a higher being, a problem, evidence of the active religious essence) Novalis, Fragmente. I would like to start this chapter with a captatio benevolentiae: this chapter is first of all very personal, dealing to a large extent with personal experiences, and consequently it does not claim to be 'scientific' in the usual sense of the word. Equally, the conclusions drawn from my observations are highly hypothetical, and to say it again: highly personal. I would like to start with a very early recollection. I had started school in Berlin as usual at the age of six. I had quickly formed a close friendship with two other boys, both my age. We had become inseparable, with the intensity and immediacy that boys of that age are capable of. But about nine months later my parents decided to move to a different part of Berlin, almost diametrically remote from their previous habitation. Inevitably I lost contact with my two friends and I am sure I must have felt the loss strongly for at least some time. However that may be, the story now jumps ahead several decades, when I had been established for quite some time as an analyst. Then I met both friends separately. The one had become a Jungian analyst, the other had undergone a Jungian analysis and was deeply steeped in Jungian thought. In other words, all three boys, now being adults, had made Analytical Psychology the crucial influence and criterion of their lives. This chapter is a revised version, read to the Association of Jungian Analysts in 1982, of a contribution to The Shaman from Elko published in honour of Joseph L. Henderson's seventyfifth birthday by the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1978.

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How to explain this? It seems an inevitable thought that there must have been a much more decisive — unconscious — mutual understanding, a true and deep 'sympathy' of being, a true felix concordia and meeting of souls than one would usually connect with the friendship of three sixyear-old boys — in short that the self had played a crucial part in their relationship. I don't know what this says about children's friendships in general, but at least in the case described I find it impossible to attribute it to 'chance' or accident. Was it fate thA had had a hand in it? Were we somehow 'predestined', inescapably linked in our young relationship? (Only in parenthesis do I want to mention that another boy of my new school with whom I struck up a close friendship ended up as Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore.) Fate — but what part do young experiences play in one's own life, and what is the role of fate, and what of actual events? here I remember an early incident in my life which, at least at first glance, seems to belong to a different order, to a different arrangement of one's life-pattern. As a small child I had attended the usual kindergarten. I do not remember my exact age but I must have been under six when I started school. My own feeling is that I must have been quite a bit younger than six. We used to play in the courtyard of the kindergarten. It was there that one day I noticed a strange object inside one of the apertures in the wall, containing a hydrant (or something like that), with the opening being protected by a wire cover. When I enquired what this strange thing inside the aperture was, it was explained to me that it had been a caterpillar which had turned itself into this thing hanging there and that one day this would turn into a beautiful butterfly. So far so good — but to me it was a frightening thought that this butterfly could never come out of this hole, closed as it was with wire netting, and the poor butterfly would certainly have to die. It was a deep shock to me, but being a highly introverted child I kept it to myself instead of asking further. The story has a redeeming sequence which seems to me most significant. When I went out for the first time to analyse with Jung — it was in January 1931 — I spontaneously remembered this incident as one of the traumatic experiences of my childhood. But then and there it flashed through my mind: after all, this little wire door could be opened and the butterfly could fly out into the sun. This 'flash' was a true sator experience: a sudden freeing of frozen feeling, a sudden opening up of life's possibilities. Here again I am convinced that it was this poor imprisoned butterfly that destined me to become an analyst, to help to free souls which were captive. Needless to say the first soul to be freed was my own, but equally needless to say what I had projected into life in general. And is it not rather a play of maya that the symbol of psyche stood in the centre of this experience? Now the question is how such actual experiences relate to the story of the three boys ending up in the orbit of Jung. Is there some destiny

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within us that preforms the pattern of our life, or is it the actual experiences which shape it? Or could it be that experiences we meet with are predestined, or that they are the ones that an inner need either makes us feel so intensely or remember accordingly? Or is there a coincidence of inner needs and outer events, an interconnectedness of within and without which makes this division into the two spheres irrelevant and even misleading? I hope to return to this question later on. But first I should like to go on by relating some rather intimate experiences which may throw their own light on the problem of inner fate and outer events. I have just mentioned the story of the captive butterfly which seems to have played such a decisive influence on the choice of my work and my whole future life. But how did this inner fateful destiny become concretised, how did I find my way into the actual career of an analyst and first of all into analysis? It is a strange and highly personal story. As a young man I was very fond of dancing and particularly of fancy dress balls as they were en vogue in the Berlin of the 1920s and early 1930s. I think it was in 1928 when I had danced through two nights with hardly any sleep, and when the next morning — a Sunday — came I was pretty fagged out. Thus I was not too pleased when a telephone call from a friend — actually the later Swarthmore professor — woke me up, inviting me to a party he was going to throw that afternoon. I refused, but in the end the persuasive power of my friend won the day and I went. As I entered the room my then very susceptible eye was immediately caught by the sight of a beautiful girl. When my friend introduced me to her the introduction went like this: `Dr Adler — Mrs Adler'. This kind of thing hits one, or at least it hit me. It immediately created some unexpected interest, opening up a somewhat deeper level of communication than you expect to find at a cocktail party. So we talked quite a bit, and it made both of us curious of each other. So we decided to continue our talking on another occasion; we met again, and this first meeting, if not yet of common souls but only of common names, led to a close and most fruitful friendship. But — and now comes the crunch — as it turned out my namesake had been out to Jung and was deeply steeped in his ideas. In true anima fashion she kindled a considerable curiosity in me about this strange man and his Analytical Psychology, whereas up till then I had been much more interested in and read Freud. (This, by the way, was the fashion among educated people in Berlin, particularly among Jewish intellectuals, so much so that psychoanalysis was frequently referred to jokingly as 'Jewish Science'.) But more important: I was at that time a fairly mixed-up young man. I had taken my PhD, studied science and history, philosophy and psychology for about ten years, and had taken what would be the equivalent of an FSW training. There was one central point in my work: the interest in people. Thus I had worked with prisoners and blind children, was strongly interested in education and related stuff. Part of my living

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was earned by writing scientific reports for newspapers, and I had even been to Darmstadt to report one of the meetings of Keyserling's Schule de Weisheit where I had heard Jung speak without registering any particular reaction. In short, I had not really found my professional way of life at all, except for a rather confused interest in human beings and the world of ideas. MI this suddenly fell into place: my anima-lady made me start an analysis with James Kirsch who told meofter one year to go out to Ziirich to analyse with Jung. This I did, as mentioned, in January 1931 after Jung had replied to my enquiry that he could give me only (six) three-weekly interviews, and that for that reason I should also work with Miss Wolff. Jung's letter ended with the classical sentence, 'In case these conditions do not suit you I request your reply'. Well, he did get my reply, but it was not in the negative. This is how my analytical career started. 'This is how it started' — but what is this 'this'? What role did my namesake anima play in it? Would I have gone the Freudian way without her, or no analytical way at all? Was she the instigator, or was she the inevitable trigger provided by fate (was I destined anyway, considering the early friendship with the two boys?). Would I ever have had this chance of going out to Jung without arriving reluctantly and tired at this particular Sunday afternoon party? I can't help feeling that some divine intervention had arranged it all, or perhaps the self of which I was blissfully ignorant at that time. But if it was arranged for me in that or some other way — what did it all mean for the woman involved in this affair? How did she get into it? I have no doubt that she also did not just get into it but also got something out of it. However that may be, here the fate of two people was deeply intertwined in a complex pattern due to what in ordinary language one can only call a chance meeting. Chance, fate, taking care of an inner preparedness for change and direction — how can one disentangle them? At any rate here we can discern a 'meaningful coincidence' of inner fate and external events. Such a meaningful coincidence is of course a striking example of synchronicity. A Chinese proverb says 'When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come'. In the same way a so-called accidental meeting, as I have described, corresponds to an inner psychic situation, to a synchronistic meeting of two people in which each person is 'a significant other' to the other person. It happens when both people are at some critical point in their development and therefore deeply affected on an archetypal level by each other. To me certainly it was one of the most significant encounters in my life, setting me on a course as unexpected as vitally decisive — giving my whole life a completely new direction and new goal. The whole problem is thrown into relief by another strange experience of mine which happened early in my analysis with Jung. Then I had a dream, what one would call a 'big' dream, full of numinous feeling. In

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the dream I seemed to go through my whole life, past, present, and most important and almost uncanny, through all my future life as well. In short, I experienced in the dream the course my life was going to take, and in great detail. Needless to say that it was a most impressive and stirring dream, but when I woke up I had 'forgotten' every detail, and with it of course all knowledge of what was going to happen to me in time to come. Still, there was the absolute conviction, the inner evidence, that the dream had described my whole life from beginning to end. This feeling was confirmed to me by Jung who added that I had to forget all details, because it would have been impossible for me to live a free and creative life with the knowledge of all that was going to happen to me. However that may be, my dream seems to show that the human psyche stretches far beyond time and space, and indeed far beyond the world we know. Another conclusion is that chronological time and psychic time — or shall we say, cosmic time — obey quite different laws, belong to quite different dimensions. One is forced to the conclusion that we are, as it were, surrounded by it. We are here in the realm of what Jung has called the 'absolute knowledge of the unconscious', a knowledge of what is, what has been, and what is going to be. T. S. Eliot's (1963) lines in Burnt Norton spring to mind: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And the future contained in time past... What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. (p. 189) This dream has always stayed with me, and it has always been a tremendous problem and enigma to me. If the dream really foretold my future — and again, I had no doubt that this was so — what then about the vexed and eternal problem of freedom of will or predestination? Where lay my free decision when everything seemed fixed? Or were choices left to me in the dream, rather as an intelligent astrologer might interpret a horoscope, not predicting inevitable events, but pointing out nodal points in the curve of life, crises in which one still has one's own say by living them out in one way or another, accepting or rejecting, constructive or destructive? At least this is how I have tried to come to terms with my dream. Still, the question arises if people whom I met — to wit my analytical anima — were not inevitable carriers of fate, just as I was bound to be of theirs, if there was not an interdependence of destinies which, although it left choices open, still presented me with these very choices as predestined and inevitable patterns. Thus I might have met all the people whom I had to meet but my reaction and the mode of my relationship to them (and theirs to me) was open to choice — or was it?

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And the same would apply to life's situations, crises, and opportunities. The Zohar, the Bible of Kabbalists and of Jewish mysticism in general, has an interesting comment to make. It says that in each of the twelve houses of the zodiac there is a little door through which man can escape. Now, if Jung's and my own understanding of the reality of this dream are accepted, it says a great deal about the unconscious. Again the conclusion seems unavoidable that theTsyche can transcend time and space. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna's instruction to Arjuna is based on the concept that all the ten thousand things or events are manifestations of the same and ultimate reality, the Brahman. And all major Eastern religions are based on the perception of the unity and interrelatedness of all facets of existence and that they are all only manifestations of a basic oneness. Jung's concept of the psychoid aspect of the archetype, with its relativisation of time and space, leads to the same conclusion. This interconnectedness manifests itself in so many ways that one has to accept it as indisputable reality. I should like to mention only two instances, meant only as selected examples of general pattern: one relates to the truly disturbing and enigmatic working of the I Ching, the other to the strange coincidence of patients' dreams and the analyst's unconscious intuition, a fact which I am sure most analysts have come across in their work. Let me talk first about this latter situation, illustrating it by one single instance which happened fairly recently. One morning a woman patient talked about certain events in her daily life. Suddenly completely unconnected with what the patient was telling me, there flashed through my mind the words 'Cagnes-sur-Mer' — a place I had passed through several years ago and which had no importance to me whatsoever. There was not the slightest link to what my patient was reporting and I dismissed the words as utterly irrelevant, and so they were to this particular patient. But then my next patient arrived. He told me a dream set in the South of France and Cagnes-surMer played a part in it. So what happened here? I used before the word 'intuition' to introduce such experiences between analyst and analysand, but I think this word begs the question, How could I have 'intuited' my next patient's dream, without at that moment having any contact with him? But what else? Did my patient send an unconscious message to me before arrival? Was his thought of his analytical hour — to which at this time he was travelling in his car — strong enough for me to receive this message? Actually, even in his report this place was not really of decisive importance so that the energy of this 'thought transmission', if it was such, will hardly have been particularly high. How then did I pick it up? I want to, and have to, leave this question open. But it seems to be another example of the psyche transcending time and space, and it confronts one with the immediate experience of being outside time.

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This brings me directly to another disturbing and enigmatic point, that of the I Ching. Here we have perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the interdependence and intercommunication of psychic situations with archetypal (cosmic) patterns. How otherwise could one explain the efficaciousness of the oracle which, at least to me, is beyond doubt? First a relatively mundane but for that no less impressive example. When I returned to Berlin after my first term with Jung, I was invited to see Mrs Toni Sussmann who was the first pupil of Jung's to introduce his concepts in Berlin and was thus at the time the centre of Jungian life there. We talked about many things, mostly psychological, and in the course of our conversation Mrs Sussmann mentioned the I Ching of which I had not heard before. I was rather incredulous and expressed my reservations. Now the most marked characteristic of Mrs Sussmann was her highly developed intuition, and so she asked me if I did not possibly have a problem on which I might try out the reality or otherwise of the oracle. And indeed, I had a rather long-standing problem. I was then in love with a very attractive and intelligent girl whose whole background fitted mine extremely well. but, and here was the problem, she was as neurotic as she was attractive and intelligent, plagued by constant psychosomatic symptoms. I might have considered marriage had it not been for her neurotic side and thus I was rather torn between these two extremes. So here quite clearly was my question for the I Ching: 'Shall I marry her or not?' The answer was devastating: hexagram 44, `Kou/Coming to Meet', without a moving line. The judgement says, 'Coming to meet. The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden'. And in the commentary it adds, 'One should not marry such a maiden. This means that one cannot live with her permanently'. It is, of course, rare to receive such an unequivocal answer to one's question. I think this happened to me because it was necessary to break right through my rationalistic skepsis, to hit me with a hammer, as it were another striking example of synchronicity in that my inner situation and the outer message of the I Ching were in the relationship of a meaningful coincidence. But much more profound was another experience with the oracle which I shall try to describe now I am afraid the description will turn out rather long and will necessitate a lengthy introduction, but I don't know how to avoid that. Our friends Erich and Julie Neumann had long expected us to visit them in Israel. But as we had two children, both too young to be left by themselves, we had never been able to arrange a holiday in Israel. In 1953 we had found a reliable help whom we could trust with the children. Thus we decided at last to spend six weeks with our friends. But I was very tired and overworked, and, most important, my contact with my unconscious had become rather rudimentary on account of this overwork. My wife, more perceptive than I, had all along

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expressed her doubts about the wisdom of the journey, but I did not listen carefully enough and went on with the preparations. Then finally I was going to book the tickets. This produced a last outburst of protest in my wife, who pointed out that Israel would mean more and more extraversion when in fact what we both needed was a period of quiet introversion. So we decided to consult the I Ching. My hexagram was 38, `K'uei/Opposition', with no moving' lines. The judgement says. `Opposition. In small matters, good fortune' bui the commentary to the judgement warns of brusque proceedings and advises to produce 'gradual effects in small matters'. Although this gave no clear answer to the Israeli adventure the feeling of the oracle was not particularly encouraging. Most important it speaks of the divergence of will, of 'two movements in direct contrast', of 'opposition and estrangement' words which I could not fail to understand as referring to my being too much split off from my unconscious, conscious and unconscious not working in harmony. So my wife threw her coins and received hexagram 6: 'Sung/Conflict'. There it says, 'A cautious halt always brings good fortune. Going through to the end brings misfortune. It furthers one to see the great man. It does not further one to cross the great water'. To this Blofield (1965) comments, 'We can profit from the advice of someone truly wise, but a journey of any kind this time would be disastrous' (p.101). Although Blofield's work was not yet published then, we took my wife's oracle exactly as he comments. So the journey to Israel was off. But what next? We had arranged everything for an absence of six weeks and it seemed that such time should be put to good use. We meditated on this problem and both felt that 'the wise man' from whose advice one would profit referred us to Zurich. I threw another I Ching, asking if a journey to Zurich would be advantageous. I got hexagram 46: `Sheng/Pushing Upward', and the judgement says, 'Pushing upward has supreme success. One must see the great man. Fear not. Departure toward the south brings good fortune'. That clinched it; we were going to Zurich. We arrived in Zurich on 2 March 1953, and the next day I started my analytical work with Toni Wolff, who very kindly had reserved a daily hour for me, including Saturdays. As will be seen, all these details are important. Our work went extremely well and I immediately felt the great benefit of the renewed contact with my unconscious. This positive feeling grew all the time.On 20 March - a Friday - again, as usual, I had my analytical hour with Toni. I could tell her how I felt that all the splintered bits of my psyche seemed to have come together, how conscious and unconscious, female and male aspects, felt in a true coniunctio. It was one of those rare hours when everything seemed 'in Tao'. Toni was so near and warm and human, with a charming smile - we laughed a lot

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during this hour — that our relationship seemed closer than ever. When I left, Toni offered me another hour next Saturday morning, but I felt that she needed the weekend and refused, fixing the next hour for Monday the 23rd. I went home full of the radiance of that hour and with a profound sense of peace. When I met my wife I told her of the experience, that I had now achieved all that I had come for to ZUrich, and that my work with Toni had now really reached its true goal. We decided to celebrate it by fulfilling a long wanted trip to the Rigi and left before dawn on Saturday the 21st. This seems a long and perhaps rather boring story, with all the particular dates and other details. But this introduction is inevitable if the following events are to be understood in their proper significance. So, to repeat: in the early morning of 21 March we had left for the Rigi where we spent a beautiful and harmonious day. When we returned to Zurich late in the evening we found three messages, each telling us of Toni's heart attack and death in the early hours of the night of 20-21 March. No need to describe our feelings. When my wife and I went to Toni's funeral people were surprised to see us. How did it happen that we knew and were there? There are quite a few points which need clarification and which may lead to strange considerations and open up complex questions. When I heard the news of Toni's death I felt I would never have forgiven myself if I had gone to Israel instead of to Zurich to see her for the last time and to work with her. It seemed evident to me that all the hesitation about going to Israel was due to an unconscious knowledge and foreboding and that this had 'forced' me into giving up my journey to Israel. Then I knew why I had had to go to Zilrich. Of course this may be an arbitrary interpretation of what had happened, but is a feeling of inner evidence so easily dismissable? And then there were the other facts: my feeling, that with my talk on that last Friday I had reached the proper goal of my work, and the wonderful harmony of that last interview. I was the last person to be given an analytical hour, as if everything had led up to that sad climax, which from another angle was not sad at all but a complete fulfilment. And at least I could express my deep feelings for and appreciation of Toni in a letter to Pfarrer Schar, which he found suitable enough to read out in his sermon. It was a last expression of gratitude to a dear friend, and something I could not have done if I had not been in airich at the time. Even this little detail seemed fated. If my interpretation is right — and at least to me it is more than a mere 'possibility' — how could my unconscious possibly have known what was going to happen? Was there a deeply hidden message of an event concerning Toni of which even she could not have been consciously aware? What could have been the nature and the secret of such communication, on what level does such rapport take place?

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Again, another example of the power of the psyche to transcend time and space and thus to produce irrational non-causal coincidences between inner and outer events. Here we seem to be in the area of the deepest numinous mystery of the psyche, and the connectedness of all life and its events shows through the veil of our daily existence with all its inherent blindnesses. All the experiences which I have tried to describe in this report lead up the same conclusion: that we are all part of each other, that all life reaches out for all other life, even if we are almost always unaware of it, or only very rarely notice it dimly. It is as if we are all stones thrown into a cosmic ocean, drawing their circles, going outwards and in its movement meeting all other circles, some near and relatively clear in their interaction, some far and their meeting almost nonexistent and imperceptible. To express it from a different angle: we are, each of us, cells or particles in the corpus mysticum of a divine universe.* There are these rare moments when the meeting of two fates produces a miraculous illumination, when the veil is lifted and two destinies become visible in their interdependence. The three young boys, the meeting with my anima, the dream of my life, Cagnes-sur-Mer, the I Ching, both of the unbelieving young man and of the adult, the events surrounding Toni's death — all contain and manifest the miracle and enigma of psychic existence. They point to what Jung has maintained: that there is a 'transpsychic reality immediately underlying the psyche' (Jung, CW8, p.318) from which immediate bridges can be thrown to the latest findings of nuclear and subatomic research. The connection lies chiefly in the concept of a space-time-continuum which explains synchronistic phenomena as well as 'the knowledge of future or spatially distant events' (Jung, CW8, para.948). For this my examples seem to give a relevant illustration. Here we are in the realm of transcendental phenomena, in the realm of "'absolute knowledge"... not mediated by the sense organs' (Jung, CW8, para.948). The space-timecontinuum of modern physics is irrepresentable (Jung, CW8, para.962) just as archetypes and synchronicity produce 'a picture of the world so irrepresentable as to be completely baffling' (Jung, CW8, para.962). *Rereading what I have written about Toni's death another, very tragic, story comes into my mind. It is of a Freudian patient whose analyst died during his analysis. He went to another analyst, and again this second analyst died during treatment. Then he started analysis with a third analyst, and he also died (it was the widow of the last analyst, a well-known Freudian, who told this depressing story). It is utterly baffling. Needless to say that the patient could not find a fourth analyst! What happened here is beyond rational comprehension but seems to support the thesis of some strange unconscious rapport. I do not think that the patient 'killed' his analysts but rather than in an incredibly morbid and destructive way he was drawn towards analysts who carried premature death within themselves. Perhaps we can see here that these tragic events show that synchronicity does not only exist between outer and inner events but also beween body and psyche and that we have to extend the concept of synchronicity to include the psycho-physical order.

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And indeed, the experiences described above are utterly baffling if not deeply disturbing, manifesting the connection between the enigma of the psyche and the irrepresentable space-time continuum. Here we find ourselves in the world of the archetype, which is '"eternal", i.e. outside time' (Jung, 1976, p.46). Pauli has said that they 'function as the sought-for bridge between the sense-perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature' (Pauli, 1955, p.153). Jung himself has stated that the psychoid archetype is `the bridge to matter in general' (Jung, CW8, para.420) and that on account of their psychoid nature archetypes act as ordering factors in the physical space-time continuum (Jung, CW8, paras.493ff.). In other words, here we are confronted with the reality of the onus mundus, the place of numinous experiences. It is the common transcendental background to the microcosm of the psyche and the microcosm of physics, the 'transcendental background' on which 'the world inside and outside ourselves rests' (Jung, CW14, para.787). In this unus mundus there is `no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche' (Jung, 1976, p.400). Jung was, as we know, deeply interested in the problem of the link between psyche and matter. Modern physics, from its side, has reached conclusions similar to his in that quantum theory 'reveals a basic oneness of the universe' (Capra, 1976, p.71) and its interconnectedness. As I mentioned before, we are here also in the territory of Eastern mysticism which has always maintained the basic unity of the universe. For this Capra (1976), a subatomic physicist, gives numerous examples. He sums up as follows: 'In the Eastern view, as in the view of modern physics, everything in the universe is connected to everything else and no part of it is fundamental' (p.307). Perhaps this is how we can understand Arjuna's words in the Bbagavad-Gita (1914) when he says of Krishna 'Undivided, He seems to divide into objects and creatures' (p. 103) or when Krishna teaches Arjuna, saying, 'Who sees the separate lives of all creatures united in Brahman brought forth from Brahman, himself Brahman' (Bhagavad-Gita, 1914, p.105). All this seems to link up with the concept of 'continuous creation' as 'the eternal presence of the one creative act, in the sense that God "was always the Father and always generated the Son" — in other words that `what happens successively in time is simultaneous in the mind' (Jung, CW8, p.518, n.17). This we may understand again as the timelessness of the unconscious which only in our empirical life is unfolded into time and causality. Indian philosophy has the concept of the bindhu, the point which is the union of all opposites and contains all time in itself. Equally, to the disciple of Zen 'all action occurs in an infinite present . . . all events occur simultaneously' (Ornstein, 1975, p.107), and in Dante we find the Christian idea expressed as 'il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti' (Paradiso, XII, 17f.), or when he speaks of `la ve s'appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando' (Paradiso, XXIX, 12).

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Here we find ourselves also in the universe of the alchemists whose `theoria' rested on the idea of a psychic cosmic unity as expressed in the famous words of Athanasius Kircher (in Jung, CW16, para.384): Heaven above Heaven below Stars above Stars below All that is above Also is below Grasp this And rejoice. And the ubi, the 'everywhere' of Dante is equally expressed in the words of the Buddhist teacher Ashvaghosha: 'Be it clearly understood that space is nothing but a mode of particularisation and that it has no real existence of its own. . . . Space exists only in relation to our particularising consciousness' (in Capra, 1976, p.170). Again, to modern relativistic physics space-time is similarly a 'timeless space of a higher dimension' (Ashvaghosha in Capra, 1976, p.196). This higher dimension may correspond to the highest states of consciousness, to a 'spiritual world [in which] there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense' (D.T. Suzuki in Capra, 1976, pp.187-8. Cf. also Heinrich Zimmer, 1951, pp.450ff.). T.S. Eliot has expressed the same idea in his beautiful words in Burnt Norton of 'the still point of the turning world' and . . Except for the still point /There would be no dance, and there is only the dance' (p.191). I could go on for ever quoting from Jung, alchemy, Eastern mysticism, and even modern physics. Nor need I have stopped at my own experiences nearly thirty years ago. But I hope I have said enough to show how my fundamental attitude has been shaped by my understanding of what I would like to call Jung's metapsychology. Needless to say that it has also had a profound influence on the nature of my psychotherapeutic work. If I try to sum it up in one sentence: it is the unique experience of the miracle and enigma of the psyche, in the face of which awe and reverence are the only possible answers. But let my final words be those of a Sufi mystic, of Mahmud Shabistari, in his The Garden of Mystery: Know that the world is a mirror from head to foot, In every atom are a hundred blazing suns. If you cleave the heart of one drop of water, A hundred pure oceans emerge from it.

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On the Sublime If you examine closely each grain of sand, A thousand Adams may be seen in it. In its members a gnat is like an elephant, In its qualities a drop of rain is like the Nile. The heart of a piece of corn equals a hundred harvests, A world dwells in the heart of a millet seed. In the wing of a gnat is the ocean of life, In the pupil of the eye a heaven. What though the corn grain of the heart be small It is a station of the Lord of both worlds to dwell therein.

References Bhagavad-Gita (1914) (A. Besant, trans.) Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House. Blofield, J. (1965) The Book of Change. London: George Allen and Unwin. Capra, F. (1976) The Tao of Physics. London: Fontana. Eliot, T.S. (1963) Collected Poems 1909 1962. London: Faber and Faber. Jung, C.G. Collected Works, (eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, tr. R.F.C. Hull) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. The volumes referred to in this chapter are 8 (2nd edn, 1969), 14 (2nd edn, 1970) and 16 (2nd edn, 1966). Jung, C.G. (1976) Letters, Vol. 2 (eds. G. Adler and A. Jaffe), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pauli, W. (1955) The Interpretation of Nature and Psyche. New York: Bolligen Series. Ornstein, R.E. (1975) The Psychology of Consciousness San Francisco, CA: W.H. -

Freeman. Zimmer, H.R. (1951) Philosophies of India. New York: Patheon Books.

Chapter 7 Refathering Psychoanalysis Deliteralising Hillman: Imaginal Therapy, Individual and Cultural To the memory of Eva Loewe

MICHAEL VANNOY ADAMS The Jungian analyst James Hillman has 'ceased practising private analysis' (19916, p.95). Not only that, but he has also published, with Michael Venturi, a book with the provocative title We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World's Getting Worse (1992). According to Hillman, a century of psychotherapy has made the world worse than it once was. It would be easy to take Hillman literally — and to mistake him. It may be that we need to deliteralise Hillman. If psychotherapy is not only a talking but also a listening cure, we need to 'hear through' what he has said — or we need to 'read through' what he has written — rather than take him at his apparent word, to the letter, imitate him, and repudiate psychotherapy. What has Hillman said, what has he written? According to Hillman, as people in psychotherapy have become more 'sensitive' (Hillman and Venturi, 1992, p.3), they have become more 'passive' (ibid., p.5). Making people 'better' has made the world 'worse' (ibid., p.5). Although Hillman's co-author Michael Venturi says, 'I'm not sure it's causal' (ibid., p.5) — that Is, he is uncertain that there is a direct, cause-and-effect relation between psychotherapy and the worsening of the world — Hillman says, in no uncertain terms, that 'we're disempowering ourselves through therapy' (ibid., p.6). To Venturi he says, 'Our job is to show how psychology contributes to making the world worse' (ibid., p.151). How does psychology or psychotherapy do this, according to Hillman? Psychotherapy makes the world worse, Hillman says, because it normalises us. It reduces the abnormal, the deviant, to a norm to which 109

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we conform. 'The goal', Hillman says, 'of my therapy' - in explicit contrast to others' therapy - 'is eccentricity' (ibid., p.35). An eccentric therapy would evidently be a therapy that decentres our conventional notions about normality. Our eccentricity, Hillman contends, is the source of our activity and of our political activism. Psychotherapy, he asserts, normalises us by personalising all issues and thereby depoliticising them. It has promoted a form of subjectivism tantamount to solipsism, an orientation so inward as to be virtually oblivious to the world. Rather than becoming extraverted and 'outraged' at the worsening of the world, through psychotherapy we merely remain introverted and 'enraged' (ibid., p.11). Psychotherapy reduces us to passivity and devalues what Hillman calls 'the valuable madness in our society' (ibid., p.152), when it induces us to 'cope' rather than 'protest,' to 'adapt' rather than 'rebel' (ibid., p.156). People are mad in both senses of the word - not only crazy but also angry - and so is Hillman. If We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - and the World's Getting Worse is not only Hillman's book but also his complex, the dominant feeling-tone is anger. Hillman is mad because he believes that the world we inhabit is worse than the world we inherited, that it has gone from good to bad to worse, that it is getting worse and worse, and that psychotherapy contributes to this worsening of the world. We have had a hundred years of psychotherapy, and we have had seventy years of Hillman. Is Hillman simply indulging in an aged, tired harangue as the end of the century, the end of the millennium, and the end of a career and a life approach? Is he merely rambling, ranting, and raving about the worsening of the world? Is this ennui or anomie? If we were to imitate Hillman, would we preserve for posterity equally profound or superficial opinions? Where is that Hillman who is so suspicious of ego inflation and of instant analysis 'out of the top of my head' (1983b, p.3)? Should that Hillman who avoids 'the panel discussion, the talk show, and the interview' (1983b, p.4) also avoid tape recording and letter writing? Will bookstores now have a special section for 'worldhelp' books next to the 'self-help' books? Hillman suggests that we should 'entertain the idea that the world is in extremis, suffering an acute, perhaps fatal, disorder at the edge of extinction' (Hillman and Venturi, 1992, p.151). This is, of course, an end-of-the-world fantasy. It is, in fact, the typical, or archetypal, fantasy of psychotics, especially paranoid schizophrenics. Hillman acknowledges that We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy has no prophetic, or predictive, value. He cautions that 'we can't predict, we can't say the world is going to hell in a basket, it's too easy'. Such a facile prophecy entails 'the risk of being caught in an archetypal fantasy' (ibid., p.233). Hillman says that not only the archetypal fantasy that the world is getting better but also the archetypal fantasy that the world is getting worse are equally problematic because they both are myths that comfort us - that

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reassure us that we know how and where the world is going. Hillman

notes that the fantasy that the world is going to hell or that the world is coming to an end is not only archetypal but also apocalyptic: The Apocalypse is the myth of our culture, it's the book of our culture, it's the last chapter of the holy book, of the writ. And what it is is the destruction of the entire world. If you take that literally you get that book called The Late Great Planet Earth, which is one of the only books Ronald Reagan ever read, and which was the largest-selling book in the United States in the 1970s. (Hillman and Venturi, 1992, p.239-40) If you take it literally, I might also add, you get Daniel Paul Schreber or Charlie Manson or David Koresh or Shoko Asahara - all of whom fantasise an end to the world. Hillman suggests that we should take it metaphorically, or imaginatively. If we do that, perhaps we get Tony Kushner and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. In this sense, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy is a quite typical, if not quite an archetypal, book for the end of the century and perhaps for the end of the millennium. If we 'read through' what Hillman has written, do we need to deliteralise him, or has he already deliteralised himself? When Noel Cobb, editor of Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts (which itself is advertised as 'a fin-de-siecle journal for the turn of the Millennium'), originally invited me to present a paper on We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy at the VIIIth international conference of the London Convivium for Archetypal Studies at Cumberland Lodge in 1994, I suggested the title 'Imaginal technique in individual and cultural therapy'. Cobb dissuaded me from using the word 'technique' because he said that it was like 'a stone in the shoe'. There is, of course, nothing more uncomfortable than that. I confess that I did, momentarily, have a rather perverse fantasy of reentitling my talk, 'A stone in the shoe: imaginal technique in individual and cultural therapy'. One of the reasons I value Hillman is that he has never hesitated to make us all feel uncomfortable. Whatever else a 'Hillmanian' psychotherapy does, it does not comfort us. What if the stone in our shoe should happen to be the philosopher's stone? If our shoes are, as Jungians like to say metaphorically, our 'understandings' (Young-Eisendrath and Wiedemann, 1987, p.173), then what about those stones that somehow get between us and our inner soles/inner souls? I will not deliver a technical presentation on 'Hillmanian' psychotherapy, but I will say that what most concerns me about Hillman's apparent repudiation of psychotherapy is the possibility of an all too comfortable misunderstanding. After talking to Cobb and then reading through Hillman again, I was struck by the following sentence in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy: 'There's rocks in the

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psyche' (1992, p.9). According to Hillman, the rocks in the psyche are the things that remain the same, that do not change. Hillman says that it is the rocks in the psyche (I might say, the stones in the shoe) that make for character, for the peculiar idiosyncrasy that you are' (ibid., p.30). In this sense, our character is a certain idiosyncratic discomfort that we feel, and to the extent that psychotherapy exists to remove the stones from our shoes, the rocks from our psyches, it is non-Hillmanian or even anti-Hillmanian psychotherapy that constrains one not to 'live one's oddity' (Hillman; 1983b, p.161). For Hillman, individuation is eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, oddity. As I read through Hillman, I do not believe that he is literally advocating an end to psychotherapy. He even says, 'I want to defend therapy' (Hillman and Venturi, 1992, p.50) — but only, I would add, as he redefines it. What he proposes is a psychotherapy that would (to employ another jargon) 'deconstruct' such oppositions as subject and object, inner and outer, private and public, personal and political, psyche — or if you prefer (as I do not), 'soul' — and world. As I have noted (Adams, 1985, 1995), there are important similarities (and differences) between what Jacques Derrida calls 'deconstruction', what Hillman calls 'revision', and what Jung calls 'compensation'. In We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, Hillman is not always consistent in deconstructing — or as he says, re-visioning — these oppositions. Sometimes he seems to privilege the object over the subject, the outer over the inner, the public over the private, the political over the personal, and the world over the psyche. Sometimes he seems to imply that we should do what he has done and quite literally stop practising individual therapy because it necessarily disempowers people. Sometimes he seems to offer himself as psychotherapist to the world at large. In spite of these occasional tendencies, I believe that a proper 'reading through' of Hillman would emphasise just how arbitrary these oppositions are, would emphasise the inextricability of subject-and-object, inner-andouter, private-and-public, personal-and-political, psyche-and-world. I would also note that Hillman is by no means the only Jungian who is well aware of the world. In this regard, I would mention in particular the work of Andrew Samuels and Robert Bosnak, both of whom practise individual as well as cultural therapy. Both Samuels and Bosnak are personally and politically active. In The Political Psyche (1993), Samuels suggests that the phenomenon of countertransference may have an important political application. Political events may induce in us physical, emotional, and imaginal experiences that we should interpret countertransferentially as communications from a political unconscious. Samuels also presents the results of a survey that he conducted internationally to determine whether — and, if so, to what extent — psychotherapists consider political issues to be relevant material in therapy. The percentage of psychotherapists who say that they do already regard

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political issues as relevant material — and not merely a defensive avoidance of strictly personal issues — surprises and pleases him. Bosnak is also politically active. He has organised three international conferences on the theme of apocalypse — the first, on nuclear war; the second, on environmental catastrophe; the third, on charisma and holy war — and he plans a fourth on the millennium. In Dreaming with an AIDS Patient (1989), he has engaged one of the dominant personal and political issues of our time. I could, of course, mention other Jungians — such as Ginette Paris in The Sacrament of Abortion (1992) and Michael Perlman in The Power of Trees: The Reforesting of the Soul (1994) — for whom issues of gender and ecology are decisively significant topics. I admire and respect these efforts. I myself have recently used psychoanalysis to address a political issue in The Multicultural Imagination: 'Race', Color, and the Unconscious (Adams, 1996). Why, then, do I also feel a certain ambivalence about these efforts? I am ambivalent about Hillman and ourselves being caught, all too literally, in a meliorist fantasy — a judgmental (in the sense of a 'last judgment') fantasy of betterment, in which we presume to know better and to do better than others. It is in this sense that I believe that we must deliteralise Hillman — and ourselves. Freud was right to caution us against the notion that psychoanalysis — whether Freudian or Jungian — is, could be, or should be a Weltanschauung (1933 (19321). Psychotherapists who uncritically imagine anima mundi, the worldsoul, may delude themselves that they have a world-view politically superior to, or more politically correct than, the world-views of others. Freud said that 'there are no indications of reality in the unconscious' (1985[1897], p.264). I would emphasise that there are no indications of political correctness in the unconscious. This is a lesson that Jung himself learned the hard way when he became momentarily fascinated by the Wotanic images of the Germanic unconscious in the early 1930s. Similarly, we need to be wary of an ego psychology that imagines that it knows political reality — and a superego psychology that imagines that it knows political morality. We live in a world in which 'God' is dead but the gods and goddesses are alive. There is no one 'God' who intervenes to reveal to us what is unambiguously true or false, good or bad. There are many gods and goddesses, with a variety of foibles (Hillman would say, 'pathologies'). To imagine that the world is getting worse and that we have repressed, neglected, or ignored it is to imagine that we might suddenly become saints rather than sinners and save the world — and a salvationist psychotherapy is merely another variation on the theme of what Hillman disparages as `Christianism' (1983b). What attracts me to 'Hillmanian' psychotherapy, what appeals to me about it, is that analysing is neither ego-realising nor superego-moralising but image-metaphorising. Who are we to say that the world is not both good-enough and bad-enough?

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Are 'good' and 'bad', 'better' and 'worse', the only adjectives in our psychotherapeutic vocabulary? (These words are not even concrete images but abstract concepts.) Are our descriptive and evaluative capacities - our imaginations - so restrictive and so oppositional? What distinguishes Hillman is his ability to discern precisely where we are most unconscious - that is, where our egos are most complacent. In a sense, for Hillman, the ego is the unconscious. The ego is that sense of 'I-ness' that imagines it knows when it does not know. What the 'I' does not know is that it, too, is an image - what I call the 'ego-imago' - a figment of the imagination, a fiction, a fantasy - and not 'reality'. There are institutional as well as individual egos, as in the institution of psychotherapy. As Hillman redefines psychotherapy, it is not the translation of fantasy into reality but the translation of reality into fantasy (1985, p.95-7). That is, by this definition, psychotherapy is a demonstration that what the ego takes - or mistakes - for reality is always already a fantasy, a rhetorical device, a poetic conceit, a metaphor. A 'Hillmanian' psychotherapy is based not on any putative reality principle but on what I call the 'fantasy principle'. Where is the ego of psychotherapy today? Where is psychotherapy complacently egocentric - egoistical and egotistical - and therefore unconscious? Hillman asserts that the ego of psychotherapy as an institution is fixated on interiority and introversion. He advocates a return of the repressed, neglected, or ignored: a psychotherapy of exteriority and extraversion. Hillman urges us to get out of our egos in order to get into the world. Rather than psychotherapy for the inner child, he would presumably recommend psychotherapy for the outer child in the inner city. From my experience as a psychotherapist with African-American and Latino children in the East New York section of Brooklyn, however, I must say that translating the reality of the outer child in the inner city into the fantasy of an inner child in the outer city is hardly an activity without value. I am entirely in sympathy with Hillman's position that a strong ego rather than a weak ego is not the ultimate purpose of psychotherapy. 'The strong ego,' Hillman says, 'is also an imaginal figure' (although it does not realise that it is merely one image among many others in the psyche). As Hillman defines the strong ego, it is the imaginal figure that 'doesn't lose control, doesn't give over to what comes in' - that is, to the other imaginal figures that come in. The strong ego is 'the suppressive master of the psyche' (1983b, pp.68-9). It is defensive rather than receptive. Hillman thus defines the strong ego differently - and more restrictively - than many other psychoanalysts do. For example, Heinz Hartmann declares that the strong ego 'cannot be defined solely' (1958, p.15) in terms of conflict with the id or the superego. For Hartmann, the strong ego includes many other functions than the defensive function that Hillman emphasises. Most psychotherapists in New York City would believe that they should strengthen what

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might he called the 'ghetto-ego'. They would assume that such children have weak egos, if they have any ego at all. In my experience, these children have strong egos (at least according to Hillman's definition) that are exteriorised and extraverted. What these children do not have is an interiorised, introverted appreciation of imaginative possibilities. Outer reality is all too 'real' to them. It is an all too adult reality of sex, drugs and guns - of 'shooting off', 'shooting up' and 'shooting down'. When I proposed conducting a psychotherapy group for AfricanAmerican and Latino boys, seven and eight years old, on the topic of 'fathers and sons,' colleagues of mine were enthusiastic about my theme but skeptical about my method -which was quite deliberately (although I did not use the word) 'Hillmanian'. One of my favourite books by Hillman is Healing Fiction (1983a). My idea was to use fiction to heal, to read stories about fathers and sons to the group of boys. My colleagues doubted that the boys would sit still. (One of the most popular diagnoses was 'oppositional defiant disorder'.) My own son was the same age as the boys in the group, however, and I knew how eagerly he looked forward to my reading stories to him. With one exception, the boys in the group had either abusive or absent fathers. I did more than read stories - I served cookies and juice and sometimes popcorn, and I helped the boys draw and colour pictures, model clay, assemble toy gliders and stitch coin purses in the shape of baseballs, but mostly I read stories - and the boys did sit still. I went to a multicultural bookshop in Brooklyn and selected stories (such as Tolowa Mollel's The Orphan Boy, John Steptoe's Daddy Is a Monster, and Ruth Sonneborn's Friday Night Is Papa Night) about African, African-American and Latino fathers and sons, but I also read a version of the Odyssey to the boys. We had lively discussions about the stories - and about that other, contemporary Homer and his son Ban Simpson, as well as the 'Black Bart' variation so popular among African-Americans. I suppose that one could regard this psychotherapy group as one more example of the men's movement - or the men's-and-boys' movement. Was this political or personal psychotherapy, cultural or individual psychotherapy? Inextricably both, I would argue. I would also insist that psychotherapy need not be a process that normalises people and renders them apathetic in relation to the world but can be a process that enables people actively to reimagine psyche and world. In The Father: ContemporaryJungian Perspectives, Samuels says that 'an imaginative experience of "father" can be available to a child who grows up in a home which has no father in it' (1986, p.40). I would pluralise this proposition and say that imaginative experiences of 'fathers' can be available to boys who grow up in homes that have either absent or abusive fathers. I do not mean the 'archetypal' father but imaginal fathers, plural. As Hillman emphasises, we never experience archetypes in the abstract - we only ever experience images in the concrete.

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A father-son fiction, the Laius-Oedipus myth, is the very foundation of psychoanalytic theory. As Hillman notes, Freud placed 'the complex of the absent father' (1972, p.16) at the very centre of both the psyche and psychoanalysis. The Laius-Oedipus myth, however, imaginally exemplifies not only the complex of the absent father but also the complex of the abusive father. It is a story of infanticidal-patricidal, intergenerational conflict: if the father does not kill the son, then the son will kill the father. Even if we deliteralise this myth and acknowledge that for a son to be father to the man, he must metaphorically 'kill' the father or 'be killed' by him, this myth provides only one, very particular father-son image. In emphasising the Laius-Oedipus myth, Hillman says, 'Freud told us less which myth was the psyche's essence than that the essence of psyche is myth' (1972, p.16). It is not so much that the Laius-Oedipus myth is the wrong myth, but that, for psychoanalysis, it has been the one and only myth rather than, as Hillman says (1991a), merely one myth among many equally important myths. There are many father-son myths besides the Laius-Oedipus myth. For example, in the Siva-Ganesa myth the abusive father decapitates the son, just as in the Laius-Oedipus myth the abusive father impedes the son, but unlike Laius, Siva reheads the son that he has beheaded. In the Abraham-Isaac myth, the father prepares to sacrifice the son, and in the Abraham-Ishmael myth, the father exiles the son. In the Odysseus-Telemachus myth, the father rescues the son - and then, after being an absent father for twenty years, finally returns to initiate the son that he had to abandon. It is Heinz Kohut who confronts Freud with the pertinent question: What would psychoanalytic theory have been like if it had been founded on Odysseus-Telemachus rather than on Laius-Oedipus? If Freud had conceived a Telemachus complex rather than the Oedipus complex, Kohut says, psychoanalytic theory - and practice - would have been radically different. According to Kohut, it is the intergenerational continuity that Odysseus and Telemachus exemplify between father and son that 'is normal and human, and not intergenerational strife, and mutual wishes to kill and destroy - however frequently and even ubiquitously, we may be able to find traces of those pathological disintegration products of which traditional analysis has made us think as a normal developmental phase, a normal experience of the child' (1991 [1981], p.563). Two Greek, one Hindu, one Judaic, and one Islamic father-son myth hardly exhaust all of the imaginative possibilities. A vast, perhaps infinite number of alternative images of father-son relations are available both actually and potentially (we need to acknowledge not only the existence of a variety of old father-son images but also the continuous emergence of a variety of new ones). As I was preparing for my fathers-and-sons psychotherapy group, an article entitled `Beliefs: the story calls for fathers, but too many have written themselves out of the script' happened to appear in the

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New York Times. The author, Peter Steinfels (1992), reported that David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a research organisation in New York City, was advocating what was, in effect, an imaginal story of fatherhood. Steinfels quotes Blankenhorn as having said, 'Never before in our nation's history have so many children grown up without a father's presence and provision'. Steinfels continues: Homes without fathers can be models' of love and courage, but homes without fathers are also among the likeliest to be visited by poverty, domestic violence, juvenile crimes and teen-age pregnancies. `If current scholarship proves anything', Mr. Blankenhorn has written, 'it is that children who grow up without their fathers are worse off- economically, educationally, psychologically, every way we can measure - than children who grown up with their fathers'. Then Steinfels says: 'Yet in all the comedy and commentary inspired by Vice President Dan Quayle's recent speeches on "family values", the bulk of attention has been focused on "single mothers" rather than on the real issue of absent fathers'. According to Steinfels, Blankenhorn's argument is similar to Quayle's: His favorite metaphor in talking about fatherhood is a 'cultural script' - a social story, a set of cues, an ideal character and a classic plot line that shapes, guides and at times pressures men into a certain sense of who they are and how they should act. Like the Vice President, Mr. Blankenhorn emphasises the role of opinion leaders and cultural elites in telling or reshaping the 'prevailing story of fatherhood'. There is nothing objectionable in Blankenhorn's motivation. Like Hillman, he believes that the world has gotten worse, and he advocates a form of cultural therapy that utilises a healing fiction. Unlike Hillman, however, he appears to propose a single cultural script - a rather abstract, archetypal social story - one with 'an ideal character and a classic plot line that shapes, guides, and at times pressures men' (or boys) into being and acting in a certain way. The emphasis on 'idealism' and 'classicism' seems to me conservative, nostalgic, sentimental, and perhaps even reactionary. The word 'script' seems to me too prescriptive. It suggests a text that specifies a particular performance, a model that requires imitation in the service of normalisation. In spite of these reservations, I believe that what Blankenhom has to say about the topic of fathers merits serious consideration. In Fatherless America, Blankenhorn champions, in a style reminiscent of D.W. Winnicott, the 'good-enough' father (1995, p.18). He criticises what he

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calls the dominant 'cultural story' that characterises fathers as (1) 'superfluous', (2) 'part of the problem' (not the solution), and (3) in need of transformation from 'gender-specific male roles' to 'gender-neutral human values' (ibid., p.67). According to this script, the ideal father is the 'like-a-mother father' (ibid., p.99). Blankenhorn never once mentions Jung, but rather like a Jungian he describes several typical images of the father in contemporary America: the Unnecessary Father, the Old Father, the New Father, the Deadbeat Dad, the Visiting Father, the Sperm Father, the Stepfather and the Nearby Guy. All of these (but especially the New Father) he contrasts with the typical image of the Good Family Man, who is 'a loving husband and committed father' (ibid., p.223). The typical image of the New Father entails `an androgynous rejection of all traditional masculinity' (ibid., p.224). Blankenhorn would presumably abjure what Samuels calls 'the father of whatever sex' (1993, p.133), for the concept suggests that the function of the father is not 'given' biologically but is 'constructed' socially. Although Blankenhorn believes that cultural stories are crucially important to the extent that they constrain or even determine how we characterise fathers, it is ultimately not imaginal fathers but 'real' fathers — that is, flesh-and-blood fathers — men, not women, that interest him. In contrast to Samuels, he does not believe that women can perform the function of the father as well as men can. Where I differ from Blankenhorn is in my belief in the importance of multiple, concrete, imaginal stories of fatherhood and sonhood, manhood and boyhood (the more stories, the more imaginative possibilities, the better) to stand these boys in effective stead as they become men — and not only ideal, classic, normal stories but also abnormal, deviant, psychopathological stories, coping and adapting stories as well as protesting and rebelling stories, as comprehensive an array of narrative options, or scenarios, as possible, in all the modes: mythic, romantic, high and low mimetic (or realistic), and ironic (Frye 1957, pp.33-4). Blankenhorn is by no means the only man in New York City with an interest in fathers and sons. A 'Father's Day' article by Susan Chira (1994) in the New York Times mentions Blankenhorn (and includes a photograph of him, his wife, and their four-year-old son in Central Park) but also cites Wade F. Horn, director of the National Father Initiative, and James Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project. The title of the article provocatively declares that there is a `war' over the role of American fathers, as if the controversy over fathers and sons (or fathers and children) is merely a variation on the theme of the war between the sexes — between men and women, fathers and mothers. Blankenhorn, Horn, and Levine all insist that they are not attacking single mothers or attempting to reinstate an anachronistic stereotype of fathers and mothers and a traditional division of labour. For example, in criticising

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what he calls 'the new father paradigm', Blankenhorn says that he is merely arguing that nurturance is not the only role for the contemporary father but that provision and pedagogy are also equally important roles. According to Chira, these men who would revision 1990s fatherhood maintain that they are 'not trying to revive the 1950s father nor redraw traditional sexual roles' but are trying instead `to curb what they saw as excesses of feminism and to reward fathers for their contributions'. Fatherhood is an issue not only for white men but also for black men in America. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Striet Journal, Michael L. King (1988) argues that African-American men all too often have fathered children out of wedlock and abandoned them to single, frequently teenage mothers. He notes that more than 50% of AfricanAmerican children are now born out of wedlock (more than 90% to teenage mothers). This statistical pattern is not, of course, unique to the African-American community but is a trend in the general population. If there is a cultural script to all this, it is the quest as conquest. Too many African-American fathers, King says, are not men but boys who continue to believe that 'sexual irresponsibility is a rite of manhood'. Rather than a masculine rite of passage that results in marriage and family, this scenario all too often merely results in intercourse and pregnancy. According to King, this is an indulgence that demonstrates 'utter indifference to the dignity and feelings of other human beings'. It is a ritual that has not initiated boys as men, or fathers, but that has simply taught them 'that it was acceptable to use women like whores' — and then to abandon those women and, of course, the children, too. What King advocates instead is for AfricanAmerican men, especially 'highly visible black professionals' (of whom he as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission is one), to assume a special responsibility. They must 'lead by example', he says, and affirm the benefits of marriage and family. Samuels is right to say that an imaginal father 'is not the same as one of flesh-and-blood' (1986, p.41). We know, however, that even a fleshand-blood father who is neither absent nor abusive is never enough of a father for any son. Every son needs more than one father, needs many fathers — and not only a flesh-and-blood one, but also mythic ones, fantastic ones, fictional ones. As James Joyce demonstrates in Ulysses, that modern Odyssey in the ironic mode, the most important father to Stephen is not the material father, Dedalus, but the spiritual father, Bloom. Joyce irrevocably dissociates the flesh-and-blood father from the imaginal father. Imaginal fathers in myth, in fantasy, in fiction may be just as 'real' — and are just as necessary — to the son as any flesh-and-blood father. `I have found', Hillman says, 'that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories'. An early familiarity with stories provides the child with a

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knowledge of imaginative possibilities. The child discovers that stories create alternative, imaginal worlds and 'transpose existence into these worlds' (1983a, p.46). According to Hillman, stories are a form of active imagination: 'The person having had his stories early has had his imagination exercised as an activity. He can imagine life, and not only think, feel, perceive, or learn it. And he recognises the imagination is a place where one can be, a kind of being'. Imaginal therapy, Hillman says, 'restories life' (1983a, p.47). It was with this sense of therapeutic purpose - of 'being as imagining' - that I originally proposed the fathers-and-sons group. I did so in the conviction that the induction of active imagination through stories can also be a form of personal and political activism. I do not believe that this effort saved the world - or saved the lives of even a few boys - but I do believe that more 'realism' (and egoism or egotism) is not what the boys in the group needed. They needed not to 'get real' but to 'get imaginal'. They needed to begin to appreciate the relation between actual worlds and possible worlds, appreciate that the actual world of East New York, with actual fathers and sons, is not the only 'real' world but that there are many possible, equally 'real' worlds available to them through the imagination. They needed to begin to deliteralise the reality - and the psychopathology - of their everyday lives. They needed not to be limited to the one story that they are apparently 'really' living but to be exposed to many other stories that they might live imaginally. Paul Ricoeur says that when we read a story, we enter 'a proposed world which I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities' (1981, p.142). Through imaginative projection, we entertain propositions about our own possibilities in other, alternative worlds. 'What Ricoeur says is very similar, if not identical, to what Hillman says. According to Ricoeur, the world of the story 'is real only insofar as it is imaginary'. We are, he says, 'potentialised' by stories. (I might also add that we are 'potentiated', or empowered, by them.) Reading stories, Ricoeur says, 'introduces me into the imaginative variations of the ego' (1981, p.144). He concludes that 'some new perspectives' are needed 'on the old problem of the imagination'. He poses the following very 'Hillmanian' question: Are we not ready to recognise in the power of imagination, no longer the faculty of deriving "images" from our sensory experience, but the capacity of letting new worlds shape our understanding of ourselves?' Like Hillman, Ricoeur believes that with such recognition 'a new link would appear between imagination and metaphor' (1981, p.181). One form of imaginal therapy, with both personal and political consequences, would thus entail the metaphorical experience of multiple stories, a multitude of multicultural stories. The result would be not a single ego, one realist 'I' with no variations, but a 'multi-individual' with a potentialising, potentiating capacity continually to deliteralise and then reimagine - or re-story - the world throughout life. I do not know

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whether the world is literally getting worse or getting better - perhaps it is always ambiguously both bad-enough and good-enough - but I do know that the outer children in the inner city, the boys in East New York, those sons who will soon enough become fathers, will be among the ones who will tell whatever stories get told about it. It is their views of the world, their stories - and not ours - that will ultimately be 'telling', in every sense of the word, for better or for worse.

References Adams, M.V. (1985) 'Deconstructive philosophy and imaginal psychology: comparative perspectives on Jacques Derrida and James Hillman',Journal of Literary Criticism, 2,1, p.23-39. Reprinted in Rajnath (ed.) (1989) Deconstruction: A Critique, pp. 138-57, London: Macmillan, and in R.P. Sugg (ed.) (1992)Jungian Literary Criticism, pp. 231-48.Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Adams, M.V. (1995) 'Jungians and deconstruction', Round Table Review, 8,1, pp.3, 7. Adams, M.V. (1996) The Multicultural Imagination: 'Race', Color, and the Unconscious. London: Routledge. Blankenhorn, D. (1995) Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. New York: Basic Books. Bosnak, R. (1989) Dreaming with an AIDS Patient. Boston and London: Shambhala. Chira, S. (1994,) 'War over role of American fathers', New York Times, 19 June. Freud, S. (1933 [1932]) New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis SE22, pp.1-182. Freud, S. (1985 [1897]) The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. and tr. J.M. Masson, Cambridge, MA: and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartmann, H. (1958) Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, tr. D. Rappaport. New York: International Universities Press. Hillman, J. (1972) The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hillman, J. (1983a) Healing Fiction. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill. Hillman, J. with Pozzo, L. (1983b) Inter Views. New York: Harper & Row. Hillman, J. (1985) Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1991a) 'Oedipus revisited', in K. Kerenyi and J. Hillman, Oedipus Variations: Studies in Literature and Psychoanalysis, pp. 87-169. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1991b) 'The yellowing of the work', in M.A. Mattoon (ed.) Personal and

Archetypal Dynamics in the Analytical Relationship: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress for Analytical Psychology, Paris, 1989, pp. 77-96. Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag. Hillman, J. and Venturi, M. (1992) We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse. San Francisco: Harper Collins. King, M.L. (1988) 'Fatherhood and the black man', Wall StreetJournal, 6 June. Kohut, H. (1991 [1981]) 'Introspection, empathy, and the semicircle of mental health', in P.H. Ornstein (ed.) The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1978-1981, 4, pp.537-67. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

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Paris, G. (1992) The Sacrament of Abortion. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Perlman, M. (1994) The Power of Trees: The Reforesting of the Soul. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. J. B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samuels, A. (1986) 'Introduction', in A. Samuels (ed.), The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, pp. 2-44. New York: New York University Press, Samuels, A. (1993) The Political Psyche. London: Routledge. Steinfels, P. (1992) 'Beliefs: the story calls for fathers, but too many have written themselves out of the script', New York Times, 20 June. Young-Eisendrath, P. and Wiedemann, F. (1987) Female Authority: Empowering Women through Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford.

Chapter 8 The Phallus, Alchemy and Christ: Jungian , Analysis and the Sublime CHRISTOPHER HAUKE But the longing persisted, and, when it grew weary, the longing for this longing. Herrigel (1972), p.27

Introduction: the margin and elsewhere The greater part of this paper involves material from the analysis of a woman patient whom I shall call Elizabeth. This has been a powerful experience for us both, especially in its first year, and one which provided a tension which has sometimes stretched to the limit our individual capacity to continue the analysis. Whatever Elizabeth has brought to the sessions — her dreams, reconstructions and memories, hallucinatory images, experiences and voices, or material forms such as sculptures and gifts for me, or powerful experiences in the transference/countertransference and synchronicities — all have a quality that points elsewhere. This elsewhere might be formulated in different ways. Primarily, it is the elsewhere of the unconscious, the absolute otherness of the unconscious emphasised by C.G. Jung. It is also the margin, the space where words end but where the page has not yet been left. It signifies the end of representation — leaving a space that is not only empty but also available for re-representation. bell hooks notes how postmodern culture is particular for its ruptures and fragmentation which provides space for radical thinking; in addition she writes of the margin as a site we should stay in to discover 'the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds' (hooks, 1991, p.150). bell hooks is writing about political and social marginality when she emphasises that marginality is more than a site of deprivation, 'it is a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance . . . a central location for the production of counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in

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words.' (ibid., p.149). But in a broader sense, if the elsewhere or the margin is empty, its 'deprivation' amounts to no more than the withholding of the worn-out norms of the consciousness of modernity. For a growing number, such an absence represents not a loss but an opportunity. The Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels, for example, refers to depth psychology as the precursor of late twentieth-century resacralisation (Samuels, 1993) thus indicating its potential to subvert the dominant elements in the individual and the collective culture, by being able to address what is most fundamental in the psyche of modernity. In this site, the tectonic pressures that sustain a split psyche and keep the unconscious from dialogue with consciousness and maintain dualistic paradigms and divisive ideation, are, if not fully off, at least at their weakest. The margin, the unconscious elsewhere, directs us towards the Other in another sense — the Other of non-ordinary reality, similar to the world view offered by quantum physics, and other phenomena which is not explainable through our commonsense understanding and theories of the physical world. There can be fear, or even terror in this — the fear of death and the terror of going mad. This fear is due more to the anxiety engendered by the unfamiliar — the profound otherness of the experience — than fear of it actually causing death or insanity. Sometimes entering death or madness may seem an attractive way to resolve the gap between everday consciousness and non-ordinary realities. A fear of death or madness may function more as an emotional metaphor in this case, to help the subject keep a psychological grasp on the otherness which is experienced as so alien to 'normal' consciousness. Moreover, there is a range of intensity to this Other. On the one hand it may be terrifying to experience barely resistible sexual feelings, but at least these have a degree of familiarity, albeit at a lower intensity, in the everyday world. On the other hand, experiencing oneself, as Elizabeth has, enveloped and rocked by a rushing, penetrating wind that, rationally, must be a 'hallucination' strikes an altogether different sort of fear. The analytic work has helped Elizabeth to resist 'resolving' this fear into denial, death or madness thus allowing the elsewhere-margin to stay 'empty' — in other words, full of potential and the possibility of transformation. (Elizabeth has likened the womb to this condition of 'emptiness which is full of potential.') The elsewhere of Elizabeth's material also underlines our Otherness to each other — the consciousness of our separation in time and space which persists in a tension with the sense of being joined at some deeper level. This is the psychological state expressed by Jung's concept, derived from alchemy, of the coniunctio — the chymical wedding that marries the opposites and which leaves both transformed in the process. Needless to say, sexuality has featured powerfully in Elizabeth's material and in the analytic relationship.

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Along the lines of the margin, the elsewhere and the Other can also refer to that which cannot be spoken — to the sense that what is happening has reached the limit of what can be expressed in language. It amounts to an experience that is not representable by anything other than itself. It is an experience of the fundamental `isness', or Thatness, of things — the untranslatable, the signified without a signifier, or bell hook's 'discourse found not just in words' (hooks, 1991, p.150). In Jung's terms it might be expressed as the transcendent third, the Other that arises out of the dynamic tension between two opposites and which is not a product of either side but a discrete result of the tension between the two. However, the elsewhere, the Other and the untranslatable are very much part of our human experience. They are to be found in our worlds of imagination and, more evasively, in the dream that cannot be recalled — or rather, the dream that one knows has been dreamt but of which nothing more can be said. And yet it is part of our human condition, and our suffering, to still try to utter the unutterable and experience the inexperiencable. Indeed, it is an ethical duty to ourselves as human beings to pay attention to this part of life. I think this is close to the spiritual attitude that Jung was bringing to our attention and which he expressed in the form of psychological concepts. I will start by examining the concept of the Sublime and follow this with Elizabeth's history, her family circumstances and her starting in analysis. I continue with clinical material concerning sexual abuse and the irrepresentable, Eizabeth's religious experiences and fantasies, and keeping our boundaries to sustain the richness of the marginal space. I conclude with Elizabeth's dreams which feature the sublime prize of rebirth, but not without its attendant suffering, loss and sacrifice.

The concept of the sublime The Sublime, like so many postmodern concepts, has a variety of meanings and usages. What I have said above already hints at the way I think about it in this paper, but I need to take some space to suggest the range of its usage and justify its place in the work I will describe. The Sublime becomes key in a discussion of certain psychological material within the Jungian frame due to the emphasis found throughout Jung's writing which poses a challenge and a response to modernity and to modern consciousness. Jung makes it quite clear that despite the material and technological benefits brought about by Enlightenment reason and classical science over the last five hundred years, all these have come about at no small cost to the human psyche itself. In objectifying our orientation towards nature so as better to examine and exploit the world for our material benefit, we have cut ourselves off from that world. As Edelglass puts it 'If we systematically think of a world in which human beings do not exist (except as the

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detached observer), we should not be surprised to find ourselves creating a world in which they can't exist' (Edelglass et al., 1992, p.19). And just as we have cut ourselves off from the outer world of nature, so we have also cut ourselves off from our inner nature - the unconscious psyche. The danger of this, as Jung realised, is that, unattended and unintegrated into consciousness, the unconscious contents get projected on to the world so that, unknown to consciousness, we gradually inhabit a world of shadows, projections that fall far short of the 'objective' and 'rational' which Enlightenment thinking believed it had achieved (e.g. Jung, CW7, paras.72-5). Thus, the depth psychology of Jung may be seen as very much in harmony with the criticism of the Enlightenment project to be found in the political-historical sphere of analysis - the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). As Thomas Docherty puts it, The Enlightenment aimed at human emancipation from myth, superstition and enthralled enchantment to mysterious powers and forces of nature through the progressive operations of critical reason.... Enlightenment set out to think the natural world in an abstract form. As a result, the material content of the world becomes a merely formal conceptual set of categories' (Docherty,1993, p.5). Adorno and Horkheimer point out how with the Enlightenment, reason is reduced to one specific form, that of measure, computation or mathesis, and presented as the only legitimate form of rational thinking. 'Reason becomes no more than a discourse, a language of reason (mathematics), which deals with the 'foreign' matter of reality by translating it into reason's own terms; and something - non-conceptual reality itself- gets lost in the translation.' (Docherty,1993, p.6). I think this begins to make clear the link between Jung's critique of modernity - the oppression of the psyche developed in psychological terms - and the postmodern critique of Enlightenment rationality along political lines. In both, the focus is the oppressive nature of one form of reason where knowledge is power and serves certain ends outside the will of the subject. What both positions value in common, although it goes by many names, is the Sublime. This can be the utterly Other of the unconscious, for the analytical psychologist, 'non-conceptual reality itself', for the postmodern post-Marxist, the 'absolute absurdity of existence', for the Sartrean existentialist, or even the non-dual, the Beginning or the Void of Eastern philosophy. It is significant that Adorno maintains, in Aesthetic Theory (1984), that the experience of the Sublime is needed for us to experience the terror of the times - it is through the experience of the Sublime that we recognise we are historic-

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ally insignificant. For the Jungian, and here I would justify being psychologically reductionist as long as we retain the social critique of postEnlightenment culture, this view supports the method of Jungian analysis which involves valuing the unconscious, the bigger self, and fostering its integration with the 'historically insignificant' smaller self of ego-consciousness. The problem of what is to be regarded as the 'rational' is also expressed in the struggle between pure ? eason and practical reason, the struggle between gnosis and praxis, theory and practice, and, fundamentally, 'the relation between the realm of language and the realm of Being' (Docherty, 1993, p.7). This is where the thatness and the unexpressible of the analysis of the unconscious really enters the picture. Ludwig Wittgenstein, like Kant, wanted to understand the line dividing sense from nonsense and he approached this by plotting the limits of language; part of his thinking strongly supported the idea that our language determines our view of reality because it provides the lens through which we see things. Interestingly, 'he places religion and morality beyond the limits because they do not meet the requirements of what can be said' (Pears, 1971, p.12). Pursuing this theme of the structuring power of language, Jean-Francois Lyotard appeals to the Wittgenstein notion of 'language games', also known as 'forms of life', which provide the only realms of discourse possible, or 'allowable', and thus circumscribe the subject's 'reality'. For psychology and the present paper, we might note that what follows from this proposition is how the complementary, and unavoidable definition of 'unreality' - the discourse of the 'insane' - becomes defined at the same time. Indeed, this is a trajectory in the postmodern critique of culture, such as Deleuze and Guattari (1972) and the radical psychology of R.D. Laing (1959) and Franz Fanon (1967). The philosophical source common to both Jung and postmodern critical theory, in this area of discussion, is Emmanuel Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued it was an error to confuse the world outside of consciousness with our perceptual cognitions of that world - they do not necessarily match and 'Kant wanted to prevent any confusion between the realms of cognitive understanding and practical reason (ethics)' (Sarup, 1993, p.151). Following on from the pluralistic position of 'language games' - separate realms of discourse where none are privileged over any other - Lyotard contributes to the critique of Enlightenment rationality by claiming that it is a mistake not to respect such diversity of 'language games' by privileging one, the cognitive, over others. One of the criticisms of this aspect of postmodern thought expressed by Lyotard is that his own discourse, in which this argument is expressed, is equally not privileged over others - so, the critics say, what becomes of the argument? There is no space to develop this problem here, but, briefly, I find this ambiguity strengthens Lyotard's .

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position — it has the authentic quality of a psychic occurrence that tends to baffle ordinary conscious thinking much like a Zen koan. More fundamentally, we notice how in Lyotard, as with Adorno, the hegemony of a circumscribed and particular style of reason, is being seriously questioned. Jung begins to sound equally aligned with this view in CW7 (originally written in 1916) when he states, . . reason and the will that is grounded in reason are valid only up to a point. The further we go in the direction selected by reason, the surer we may be that we are excluding the irrational possibilities of life which have just as much right to be lived. . . It may justly be maintained that the aquisition of reason is the greatest achievment of humanity; but that is not to say that things must or will always continue in that direction.' (Jung, CW7, para.72). Jung finishes by citing the historical moment that, for some, defines the 'beginning' of the postmodern 'The frightful catastrophe of the First World War drew a very thick line through the calculations of even the most optimistic rationalizers of culture.' (Although 1914 is the moment for some, for others the significant dates are 1848 [Habermas], and 1939 with the Holocaust [Baumann], or 1968, the 'end of Marxism'.) Both the postmodern criticism and Jung's forceful scepticism of the value of a particular form of rationality seem to come together in Lyotard's treatment of the Kantian sublime. As Madan Sarup puts it, 'For Kant, the sublime is that which exceeds all our powers of representation. . . . The sublime figures for Kant as a means of expressing (by analogy) what would otherwise be strictly inexpressible.' (Sarup, 1993, p.151). For Lyotard, the sublime reminds us of the gap — the `differend' — between the irresolvable discourses, and for the Jungian psychologist this may be recognised as a position comparable to the transcendent third or other that emerges from the 'gap' that forms the tension between the opposites. The primary pair of irresolvable opposites being the unconscious and conscious psyche themselves. Importantly, 'For Lyotard, the sublime brings us up against that limit point of thought where judgement has to recognise its own lack of resources, or the absence of agreed-upon criteria, for dealing with cases that exceed all the bounds of rule-governed, "rational" adjudication' (Sarup, 1993, p.152). In Jungian psychology this 'limit point of thought' may be linked with what Jung calls the transcendent function. This is the aspect of psyche that functions — often in response to a crisis or within the intensity of the analytic vas — to heal the psyche's wounds, promote the reintegration of split off parts and aid the overall individuation of the person.What postmodern critical theory and Jungian psychology have in common is their critical attitude to modern rationality. And Jungian analysis, in particular, is able to proceed in its task of psychological and cultural healing only through a readiness to suspend the rational and the causal in the service of the unknown, the non-rational, the

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elsewhere, the marginal and the Other — otherwise known as the Transcendent or the Sublime. What follows is an example of this.

Entering analysis The volatile and the fixed Elizabeth's main reasons for entering an analysis were her fear of being mad and her loneliness — both of which were arising out of some disturbing and ecstatic physical and psychological experiences she had begun to experience. Elizabeth is not new to therapy, having had five years' work with a woman therapist which ended three years ago. In this therapy she feels she successfully worked through a great deal of her infantile material; this has been important for the work we are now embarked upon. Elizabeth is a working artist and teacher with a partner and two small children. And it is perhaps important to emphasise how much of the phenomena I will be describing are occurring with someone who, in many ways, is a settled, stable person — a woman who, despite her tendency towards accessing the sublime, functions well with her work and family. The 'delusional' or even 'psychotic' elements in what she brings could really only be psychiatrically classified as such if they were seen to be completely split off from the rest of her reality — or if they were the only 'reality' she experienced. This is not the case — Elizabeth's struggle is that of a modern psyche in a modern environment striving to combine the everyday with the emergence of the sublime. The reality of her relationship with her partner and her children has been important to recognise as this has helped to earth Elizabeth. Our work has often needed to pay attention to the alchemical dictat to fix the volatile and earth the spiritual, while, at the same time, proceeding carefully with the complementary task to volatise the fixed and spiritualise the earthed, which is already a strong tendency with Elizabeth. One of her first statements about herself was her recognition that 'I treat fantasy like reality, and reality like fantasy'. This was no glib reversal either and the reader may like to ponder on the consequences of living virtually as if this was true, but without this resulting in psychotic delusion. It does not mean that reality disappears — it is never forgotten at all — but rather that it is constantly toned or shaped into, and by, fantasy. In other words, archetypal shaping of personal experience, and the personal shaping of the archetypal is vividly present in Elizabeth. I provide several examples of both these expressions of the psyche later. The early environment: earth and sky Elizabeth was the middle child of an unusually large family of children and brought up in the English countryside. Her father was a weak man,

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she says, who built up a small, specialist retail business but did not make a lot of money. Her mother was from an originally wealthy and aristocratic family who had lost most of their past wealth, and she became the breadwinner of the family through writing. Her own mother, Elizabeth's grandmother, had been a successful writer, and in a similar way, writing work led Elizabeth's mother to travel abroad a good deal. This absence, in addition to her unavailability when home, was made up for by a series of nannies and au pairs. Elizabeth's life at home seems to have been characterised by a profound emotional neglect, with little opportunity for nourishment or enhancement from her preoccupied parents. She compensated for this with deep loving ties to the transitory au pairs and nannies, one of whom became particularly important to her, and whose loss she mourned deeply when she left. Elizabeth describes both her parents as needy people who could never give her the care she craved. She was used by them to look after her younger brothers and sisters and feels she was never 'brought up' by anyone herself. She emphasised the degree of material neglect too by telling me she had found out that she and her younger brothers and sister were known as the 'gypsy children' in the village due to their uncared-for appearance. Her mother would be very unwilling to spend money on the children while she was able to give to herself with ease, Elizabeth has said. As is common with sensitive, intelligent children, the emotional neglect and poor containment of her developing self led Elizabeth to devise strategies for survival very early on in life. One way was for her to become the 'carer' of the family — whereby the pain of feeling uncaredfor herself became compensated by the care she gave to her three younger siblings. Recently in a session she even slipped into referring to them as 'my children'. Parallel with this she developed a tendency to rationalise her experience through psychologising her parents' and siblings' personalities and motivations. Perhaps some parallel 'coping mechanisms' are behind the fact that two of her siblings are now therapists while another is hospitalised with schizophrenic illness. More particular to Elizabeth herself has been the conscious and unconscious compensation she achieves through magical belief and experiences of spiritual, religious and psychic phenomena. The birth of her third brother when Elizabeth was three and a half holds a painful significance for her as, at this time, she was moved out of the room she was sharing with her second brother and her cot given to the new baby. She was put in a corridor bedroom in the attic where, terrified and alone, she began to cope at first by drawing a huge man and woman on the wall to comfort and protect her in the absence of a more human protection. She was also comforted by a Sunday School picture on the wall which showed Jesus and the Virgin Mary surrounded by little animals, and remembers that this was when she began to notice spiritual and psychic effects. When Elizabeth was seven years old and again at

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thirteen there were periods of poltergeist activity in the home, the first of which she connects with her elder brother's anger. The countryside and the natural world was an important compensation for the neglect at home, a depth of relationship with the environment I have heard about from other patients who suffered abusive home lives. Elizabeth herself movingly described the extent of this when she told me how she remembers lying in her pram staring up at the sky and feeling that 'The sky was my mother'. The vast, airy ungraspableness of this sky mother suggests the difficulty she has engaging with any sense of an earth mother inside, or trusting this may be found in her relationships with others. Elizabeth's search for such a mother has led to her imagining a primitive cave-woman mother of whom she made moving drawings which she showed me. It is as if her own unsatisfactory experience of being mothered, which was revived by both the arrival of her own children and the relationship with her first therapist, have lead Elizabeth to search deep within herself for a core sense of a mother. This could be expressed as the positive pole of the archetypal mother — depicted by Elizabeth as a primitive, ancient cave-woman in her effort to gain the close intimacy of an earthed mother, a mother who is really present not distant like the sky-mother or her unavailable historical mother. The drawing of the cave-woman and her baby is the last of a series which expresses much of the duality of the mother archetype. The drawings deal with the struggle and negotiations between the greedy demanding baby and a visciously withholding, spiky breasted mother. Along the way, both experience aggression, attack, capitulation, grief and remorse as the 'feed' is negotiated. The rawness of the emotions depicted gets enhanced by the primitive directness of the images. Out of her personal suffering Elizabeth has depicted something universal — a critical aspect of our shared humanity, an archetypal quality known through affect. Her image of a naked mother—baby pair, practically devoid of all social, historical and personal reference, becomes utterly recognisable for all people and all times. It is as if Elizabeth, as so often with creative artists, can crystallise the archetypal essence out of her own particular personal experience and circumstances. Her image becomes at once intensely personal and fully universal. On the personal level it helps in her healing, but at another level it is also a sublime image which trancends the opposed poles of the individual and the universal which is one of the major sites, or gaps, of struggle for the modern soul.

The vas, the analyst and the patient I have seen Elizabeth for around eighteen months, four times a week, during which time she has supplemented our analytic conversation in various ways. She brings sketches, series of paintings and slides of her

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three-dimensional work which is mostly in metal. Her dreams are vivid, usually noted down and well remembered. They often inspire or help resolve issues in her sculptures. It is clear that she wishes to place much of herself with me, in an emotional and psychological sense, and she has emphasised this materially by giving me objects she has made for me as they have arisen out of our work together. So far she has forged a pair of keys for both of us, a small metal sword, a pottery sun and moon and a cup and saucer. There have been powerful transference/countertransference feelings and images also passing between us from the very beginning of the analysis. On the one hand these engage us erotically in the analytic work together, but they also run the risk of ending the analysis altogether. Early on, Elizabeth calmly expressed her love for me and a desire for marriage, or if not that, at least a sexual affair. For my part, I was excited by her presence, and, in a sure sign that my Anima had been powerfully engaged, my first impression had been how she was like the girls who had been my early lovers in my teenage years. At the same time as this, Elizabeth showed an awareness of the symbolic aspect to her desire when she told me how she needed the phallus for her work and sometimes imagined herself as me, or with me inside her, to accomplish some strenuous task in her studio. She has wanted me as a curative lover, the feeding penis, the healing phallus she needs to complete herself. She is seeking to fulfil both an incomplete experience of being fathered/mothered, coterminus with the integration of her Animus. Holding the tension between me as analyst and me as potential lover has been where a great deal of our work has lain. Important to this has been my drawing Elizabeth's attention to her relationship with her real-life partner and children where Eros also lies, and from which she has sought to escape in an unrealistic way. A further dimension of the analytic work has been the frequency and intensity of synchronous and telepathic events between us which seem to confirm our erotic connection. For example, as I walked up to my office door quite early in the morning before our session, an image remembered from the film That'll Be The Day came clearly to mind. In the scene, David Essex is in bed with two lovely, naked young women who are identical twins. At the time I thought that this was an odd image to pop up and could not find any relevant association within me. Half-way through our session (some fifty-five minutes later) Elizabeth recalled a dream of a 'David Essex-looking guy in an art class who had an identical twin' and she was aware of relating differently to the different person 'underneath the identical outside'. Also in the dream there was a young boy who held out in his hand a white shrew which was both vulnerable and 'in need of its mother's milk', but was also 'a wise old man'. Elizabeth associated David Essex with Jesus Christ, while I registered a Christ-like quality to the shrew — the god in his tiny theriomorphic

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form. Later, after she had said her children call me 'the funny man' who mummy goes to see, and her son had said 'I wish I could go and see a clown every morning', I recalled that David Essex had played Christ as a clown in the musical Godspell. (He played yet another sacrificed hero in

Evita

Che Guevara.) The 'funny man' linked also with the previous day's dream when Elizabeth was going to see 'John Cleese' at the same —

time that she realised she had an appointment with me. Elizabeth made an association to the 'Holy Fool' and wenoted the initials `J.C.' A further personal dimension was added when Elizabeth told me she had met David Essex when she was thirteen, 'but I must have looked a lot older', she said. It was at a wedding and other girls were asking for the singer's autograph but she did not want one. Essex called her 'blasé' and, in the session, Elizabeth understood her behaviour as a way of hiding and defending herself against needy feelings by adopting a selfsufficient pseudo-maturity. She was concerned that I too might be convinced by this and that I might then tell her: 'You are too adequate to let me help you'. Although I began by describing this session for its synchronous element, it is also typical of the twinning of the archetypal and the personal, and other polarities such as Christ and the vulnerable child, the greatness and the tininess, the male and the female and their sexual link that are central to our analytic work.

`Sexual abuse': the rational and the unrepresentable From the beginning of analysis, Elizabeth has mentioned a fear that she was sexually abused at a young age by her father. She has no memory of sexual abuse but does remember being laid across her father's knees as if for spanking, but not the spanking itself. She recalls this scene as if it was a ritual of some sort, and, indeed, although she cannot remember, her older siblings have spoken of the children being lined up for a spanking by father in a ritualistic fashion. There is also a ritualistic sense present in a dream of herself and her father where he is moving his forefinger around the circle formed by her forefinger and thumb. To Elizabeth, this dream felt very sexual as if the circle was her vagina and she thought it hinted strongly at a forgotten sexual abuse. But it clearly has a certain symbolic and ritual quality to it that may mean more. In writing about child sexual abuse, Guggenbuhl-Craig notes that one aspect of the phenomenon is the modern-day myth of professionalism, a 'collective social vision . . . (that) would like everything to be run by socalled competent professionals'. (Guggenbuhl-Craig, 1995, p.73) He finds that this myth 'in relation to the family is connected to the present day fascination for the archetype of the child' (p.74). GuggenbuhlCraig's analysis moves very close to postmodern theories which, on the

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one hand, emphasise the link between knowledge and power and, on the other, also the tendency within modernity for the subject to be made impotent by a narrow rationality which requires the repression of inner nature. The myth of professionalism involves a view that is critical and mistrustful of the family and 'The enthusiasm for fighting child abuse . . . might be reinforced by a deep desire to take away the power of the family and to leave the education of children only to professionals, the high priests of the infantilisation of humanity' (p.74). This makes me wonder if Elizabeth's suspicion of her own abuse and mistrust of her own family derives from her own 'inner professional'. It is as if her premature, emergency ego structures, which were assembled to protect her vulnerable self from narcissistic abuses at an early age, have, in part, formed themselves into a professional internal carer on the model of the paid-for carers who replaced her parents' care. Her inner world houses this critical 'professional' who suspects sexual abuse. This internal dynamic may well be expected to emerge within the context of therapy which is clearly one of the sites of modernity particularly influenced by the myth of professionalism. I have commented elsewhere (Hauke, 1996) on how anxiety engendered in the therapist and patient can seek relief in finding a causative 'answer' in childhood trauma, especially sexual abuse. In this form it constitutes the 'rational' both sought for and expected — which eschews the possibility of staying with the irrational or the unknown. Ware writes of sexual abuse as a social-psychological model and comes up with this succinct expression: At a deeper level we can speak of a dominant archetypal pattern emerging in all its ambivalence within our contemporary culture. . . . In today's world sexual abuse (incest) is such a model, promising to organise and give coherence and continuity to catastrophic experiences that confuse and destroy psychic and social structure.' (Ware, 1995, p.13). It is important to note how that quite apart from sexual abuse, such a 'loss of psychic structure and the corresponding weakening of the personality' (Ware, 1995, p.9), can also arise from other sources such as the trauma induced by narcissistic abuse. Associated with narcissistic difficulties is the tendency towards defence mechanisms of both idealisation and sexualisation. Both of these are prominent in Elizabeth's transference to me in the analysis. Apart from suggesting we have a sexual relationship, she has feared she would suffer abuse at my hands too. Rather than sexual abuse, I tend to think Elizabeth suffered a more generalised abuse and deprivation both early in life at an intimate holding, body-closeness level and also at a later stage where unsatisfactory or distorted mirroring have left her struggling with narcissistic problems.

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This hypothesis is supported by what Elizabeth has told me of a fantasy she remembers feeling compelled to repeat from the age of three-and-a-half which seems to illustrate her attempts to deal with the turmoil arising from poor parental handling of her normal grandiosity. It is a fantasy of wading through shit, piss and salad cream to reach the King. Once there, she then has to kneel on all fours so he can eat a meal off her back. Since recalling this, Elizabeth associates the 'salad cream' with semen and so the fantasy reinforcel her worries about a forgotten sexual abuse. I was most struck by the masoch(stic role she plays in the fantasy, but also by a sense of it being an infantile expression of adult sexual behaviour. It could be her infant way of understanding, and then involving herself in, her parents' sexual intercourse. Both ideas could support a view of this as the infant Elizabeth's way of dealing with her normal grandiose omnipotence which was frustrated and unacknowledged by her parents. (Compare the case I detail in Hauke, 1995.) By inverting her grandiosity into a perverse servile role in fantasy she manages to preserve a relationship with, and connectedness to, the Father-King. Affeld-Niemeyer notes how victims of sexual abuse may employ the image of divine sacrifice which serves to transform the victim's compelled adaptation to the will of the abuser into a meaningful spiritual act of resistance and deliverance. 'A kind of spiritual identity can be realised in the form of self-sacrifice' (Affeld-Niemeyer, 1995, p.27). (In this connection let us not forget the David Essex/Christ image, as detailed above.) Analysing how the perpertrator of the abuse is tolerated ambiguously as both killer and saviour, she has discovered that 'It's as if willing obedience to the sacrificial act makes deliverance the more certain' (Affeld-Niemeyer, 1995, p.28). The fantasy and the spanking memories mentioned above could well be viewed within this hypothesis, thus encouraging the view that sexual abuse had in fact occurred. But this material equally indicates a less succinct — and less attractively 'rational' explanation — that of profound and generalised narcissistic abuse, as in a similar case that Ware cites (Ware,1995, p.16). As narcissistic abuse must be a dominating aspect of any sexual abuse, this makes me wonder about the degree to which narcissistic abuse can be mistakenly translated or 'remembered' as sexual abuse in an effort to gain a more concrete grasp of the suffering. Causal explanations are highly seductive ways of reducing anxiety. In other cases, this line of thought may help towards explaining the gap, Lyotard's `differend', between the unbridgable 'language games' or 'forms of reality' that constitute a patient's apparent 'memories' of sexual abuse on the one hand, and their family's firm denial of it, on the other. The influence of a prevalent myth involving distrust of the family — Guggenbuhl-Craig's myth of professionalism referred to earlier — would then serve to reinforce this 'translation'.

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The archetype of the child However, within this discussion of sexual abuse, the rational and the irrepresentable — and at some remove from causal, reductive explanations and the focus on the pathology of the individual — lies the imagery of the child archetype which, nowadays, tends to dominate the modern psyche and especially psychotherapy (Samuels, 1993, p.274; Guggenbuhl-Craig, 1995; Hauke, 1996). In Jung's psychology . . the occurrence of the child motif in the psychology of the individual signifies . . . an anticipation of future developments, even though at first sight it may seem like a retrospective configuration. . . . In the individuation process, it anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality . . . a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole' (Jung, CW9i, para.278). Specific phenomena of this sort can be detected in the images Elizabeth brings. For example, the emphasis on her own abandonment and exposure to danger, when viewed from the perspective of the archetype of the child, are 'all elaborations of the 'child's' insignificant beginnings . . . and miraculous birth.' (para.285) which describes a creative experience leading to the emergence of as yet unknown contents. 'Child' means something evolving towards independence. This it cannot do without detaching itself from its origins: abandonment is therefore a necessary condition, not just a concomitant symptom (para.287). Elizabeth's masochistic fantasy comes to mind as one pole of the contradictory nature of the 'child' which is at the same time both helpless and heroic. The 'child' is both in continual danger of extinction and, at the same time, possesses superhuman powers or rather `a personification of vital forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind'. (para.289). 'The urge . . . to self-realisation is a law of nature . . . even though its effect, at the start, is insignificant and improbable. Its power is revealed in the miraculous deeds of the child hero, and later in the athla ('works') of the bondsman or thrall . . . where, although the hero has outgrown the impotence of the 'child', he is still in a menial position' (para.289). Jung points out how there is a parallel in alchemy where the humble, discarded stone is the materia prima, the lapis exilis insignificant to consciousness, but in fact the essential beginning point of the process of psychic transformation. Finally, it cannot be emphasised enough that the child indicates the genesis of something quite other to consciousness — the self. 'The self, regarded as the counter-pole of the world, its "absolutely other", is the sine qua non of all empirical knowledge and consciousness of subject

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and object. Only because of this psychic "otherness" is consciousness possible at all.' (para.289). This aspect of the child may help with understanding Elizabeth's religious imagery which follows. Because the genesis of the self is a 'psychic genesis, everything must happen nonempirically, e.g. by means of a virgin birth, or by miraculous conception' (para.282) and 'The symbol anticipates a nascent state of consciousness. So long as this is not actually in being, the "child" remains a mythological projection which requires religious repetition and renewal by ritual.' (para.287).

Religious and spiritual experiences Whatever the source of the perverse or premature 'structures' or internal 'object relations' or images within Elizabeth, they appear to be linked to, and to be transformed by, positive religious experience. These experiences are usually quite subjective and do not involve anyone else; they can be healing but they have also been a source of worry to Elizabeth that she may be going mad. And she has attempted to relieve such anxiety by attributing them to an outside source of psychic influence — including myself. It is significant that one such experience marked a sudden ending to her other worries that she might have been sexually abused. It is as if the religious experience provided the 'answer' to why she was feeling so disturbed; and that this was achieved through a direct experience, a sublime gnosis, rather than through the 'organising model' of possible sexual abuse as a rational idea (Ware, 1995, p.13). The first experience, five years ago now, was this: Elizabeth dreamt of her therapist (then) and a man (unknown at the time) speaking together in the church of her home village. On the 'altar' was a vase which she noticed was now clear crystal when before it had been opaque, and there were snowdrops in it. After waking from the dream she imagined the scene and situation, and, realising that she had been facing the back of the church, in her imagination turned completely about to face the opposite, 'front' end of the church (in other words the east end, where the altar would be in reality). She was immediately overwhelmed by a brilliant white light, which she movingly described as 'a blissful vision of light and love . . . which felt like a father'. I felt especially moved when she expressed her discovery that, 'I thought religion was a small thing, but I saw it was infinite.' The unknown man of the dream turns out to be highly significant as Elizabeth believes he was the man she became involved with in reality after leaving her first therapy. Subsequent to meeting him her religious experiences became more florid and she began to incorporate fantasies about the man, D., as part of them. The obsessive and worrying nature of these fantasies were what led Elizabeth to seek analysis with me.

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Elizabeth's religious and spiritual experiences tend to contain the tension between, on the one hand, an overwhelming feeling of being possessed by something experienced as other, and on the other hand, of being inflated with omnipotent grandiosity. The 'otherness' of her experience which gets projected and personified in other people may be best understood as, in fact, the profound otherness of the unconscious that is inflating her ego-consciousness — running the risk of flooding her with 'madness'. Modernity provides practically no channels of ritual or forms held communally whereby experiences such as Elizabeth's may be contained. The church has lost its ability to hold such experiences within its symbolism, and, as Jung has said, depth psychology is one of the few sites — in the margin of modernity — where such experiences in a modern European may be understood and held. Sexuality is frequently entwined with her spiritual experiences so that Elizabeth's whole being gets touched in body, mind and soul, in instinct and in spirit. For instance, she told me she was once lying on the floor of her studio when 'the god of light came into me and made me pregnant — I knew I was pregnant, and . . .' she smiled, 'it was E.' — meaning her daughter. One meaning Elizabeth found in this experience was that her daughter was an 'old soul', but her own regeneration and rebirth seems indicated too. For some months halfway through the first year of her analysis, Elizabeth was being awakened early in the morning by the sensation of a wind rushing into her and penetrating her; this preceeded an altered state of consciousness. The feeling was sometimes intensely sexual and Elizabeth was worried that the experience was being imposed on her in some telepathic manner by D. or by myself. I have encouraged her to relate to the experience as something of her own, although also wholly other, and in doing so she finds she can 'move' the sensations from the sexual into those of the spiritual white light as she 'goes with' the experience. By treating the sexual transference/countertransference with respect, Elizabeth has found I can continue to exist as her analyst — a consistent and reliable 'father' who can be connected to her, and she to him, without the need for sexual acting out and the risk of abuse. Although we do not abandon imaginatively a symbolic sexual connectedness, I believe the normal analytic abstinence from literal sexual contact enables a conservation of the sexual energy, which is also the spiritual energy, so it can be returned to Elizabeth for her inner spiritual and creative use. Elizabeth has told me that when she happily personifies me as the cause of her early morning experiences they greatly increase her loving and sexual feelings for me and give her a great sense of connectedness. She goes on: 'Sometimes it undermines the sense of an analytical relationship and sometimes it feels like the containment or space for the loving and sexual feelings which the analytic situation will not allow.' In

The Phallus, Alchemy and Christ: Jungian Analysis and the Sublime 139 other times she might have used Christ or Shiva as the personification of the source, but in using me in the boundaried and consistent role of the analyst she is able to achieve a similar conservation of the energy that provides the healing experience. She can use my phallic otherness, rather than my penis, to complete a circuit, and supply a containment, within her — through which she can begin to integrate her Animus. She also finds that 'it gives me the creative energy and inspiration for my work.' The experience of the wind and the light is often preceeded by a dream which depicts some form of penetration across a barrier. One dream was of an umbrella being put through a wall and another of a man putting his hand dematerially through glass and reaching the dreamer. Elizabeth felt that both scenes were aiming to demonstrate the immateriality of solid barriers, and, I would say, a challenge to 'normal' rational consciousness. A further dream combined images of the 'child', alchemy and sexual activity and feelings: I was at my old school and we went into a science lab where we were going to learn how to be babies again. There was a right- and left-hand side to it — the left-hand side was at the back and it was like another class were there who had already done this lesson. There was a girl lying on a table masturbating. I had E. (her young daughter) on my lap and I was moving the handle of a wooden spoon around in her vagina. It was me feeling the sexual feeling, though. The dream reminded Elizabeth of the one with her father stimulating her, mentioned before, which hints at crossing the incest barrier. The hidden room where the 'work has already been done' or is in progress is a repeated feature of her dreams and the science lab has associations with the chemical and psychological transformations of alchemy. Elizabeth's initial dream on the eve of coming to see me for the first time pictured me with long black hair and in a white coat ushering her and her partner into a room while pointing out a hidden back room where 'the work was done' and which they could not enter, 'yet'. How might we begin to understand the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual in Elizabeth's fantasies, dreams and conscious experiences? Even though, as Elizabeth has reminded me, the spiritual experiences came first — before intense sexual ones — perhaps it is as if, in the absence of a traditionally subscribed to form of ritual imagery, the genital and the sexual serve as the reference point by which a modern consciousness such as hers grasps the Other — the spiritual pole of the material-spirit continuum which manifests as opposites. The body, and sensation deriving from it, is often found to supply an organising image

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recognisable to consciousness but which is only present to direct feelings and attention to something totally other, non-material and when first encountered, not recognisable. Symptoms found to be psychosomatic are one example of this, and analysts have written of the progress that can be made through investigating the imagery that arises out of material body sensations (Schwartz-Salant, 1988; Field, 1991; Redfearn, 1994; Wiener, 1994). As Jung writes, In the last analysis the human body, too, is built of the stuff of the world, the very stuff wherein fantasies become visible. . . . The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body .. . hence the 'child' is such an apt formula for the symbol (Jung, CW9i, paras.290-1). This may go some way to explaining the prevalence of sexual imagery. Sexuality is a powerful instinctual urge which can arouse bodily and emotional sensations not experienced elsewhere in life; furthermore, the sexual instinct opens us to arousal by an other and, as such, it involves penetration of the barrier which maintains our experience of being separate, autonomous units. Having the body's material and emotional equilibrium penetrated by an other, whatever that other may be, may act as an organising image for a spiritual encounter with the unconscious other, which may — in the full sense of the sublime — not be graspable or expressible at first in any other form. This may help us understand how Elizabeth's experience of being penetrated by the rushing, rocking wind takes on a sexual meaning when she tries to understand it at first, but when this need to understand — this urge towards a particular form of rationality — relaxes and ceases to dominate, the experience becomes transformed into something else. I believe a similar struggle has been going on when she tries to understand herself from her personal relationships and history and concludes she may have been sexually abused. She finds this image can be abandoned once its spiritual correlate, or the potential it was pointing towards, is experienced. In Western culture, traditional accounts often reveal a sexual aspect to the spiritual ecstasy of religious experience. This seems to be more common for women, perhaps because of the penetrative nature of spiritual experience when encountered within the imagery of a phallocentric Christianity. It could equally be experienced as entering the other instead of being entered by the other, and in other cultures and spiritual practices this is found to be so. There is nothing essential or universal about the 'activity' of the phallus, the lignam, or the 'passivity' of the yoni — they are parts of a pair. For the Christian world, the depiction of the spiritual ecstasy of St

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Theresa in Bernini's statue conveys the sexual dimension quite clearly. And equally, Elizabeth has found her experiences being shaped and expressed in the signifiers of the Christian myth. The following episode that she related to me seems to have been both the most ecstatic and persistent but at the same time the most disturbing and delusory. It gave her grounds on the one hand, to fear for her sanity, but on the other hand, she was desperately reluctant to leave the intensity of the experience and return to normal life. At Easter time two years ago, just after she had first met D., who seems to have triggered much that followed, Elizabeth went away with her partner and the two children for a rather loosely organised holiday to a fairly remote part of Spain. All the time she felt D.'s presence with her; she heard his voice and also believed he was in animals she encountered. At the same time her senses were heightened and she drank in the ecstatic beauty of her surroundings. She did not sleep much and was not having sex with her partner. I asked her if the children noticed her being strange at all but it seems that her enthusiasm and delight in the world added to their enjoyment. She thinks it was perhaps the events of Easter that influenced her and she began to believe that D. was Christ and that he was dead. At the same time she believed firmly that she was pregnant by him although they had never had intercourse. Her breasts were tender and she felt nauseous as in her previous pregnancies. So in fact she felt she was carrying the Trinity within her: him (D. as a father/presence), his son/child, and his spirit/ghost. This was an instance of her spiritual experience being both a complete possession and invasion at the same time as inflating her to grandiose importance as the Mother of God — the vessel for the rebirth of Christ and the saviour of the Saviour. She eventually came down from this high, and claims she had an early menstruation which felt like a miscarriage. The experience clearly speaks of Elizabeth's own inner rebirth, healing and spiritual development, but, because of her tendency to project a cause into an actual other, D., the inner-Christ symbol was corrupted. By seeking such a 'rational' link, her awareness of D.'s personal and invasive qualities distorted the symbol. It was Elizabeth's awareness of this that led her to seek a male analyst whom she could eventually trust to be non-abusive or invasive, but still present in the conscious and unconscious dialogue her individuation requires.

Finally: no conclusion to speak of My concluding remarks with which I have to end are in no manner a 'conclusion'. The sublime, the unconscious and the margin do not lend themselves to final statements but rather point elsewhere so that something is always moving on. As Lyotard writes,

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This isn't a matter of sense or reality bearing upon what happens or what this might mean. . . . The event happens as a question mark 'before' happening as a question. It happens is rather . . . is it happening, is this it, is it possible? Only 'then' is any mark determined by the questioning: is this or that happening, is it this or something else, is it possible that this or that? (Lyotard, 1993, p.245). I can come to no conclusions about the work with Elizabeth except that

something is happening. I have used some of the tools of analytical psychology and an attitude towards modernity and modern consciousness that I find in myself and in Jung's writing, and, together with Elizabeth's rich symbolism, a picture has begun to build up. But, rather like the brush strokes of Cezanne, what is conveyed by or held within the entirety of these marks is more than can be said. This point of view helps us in our thinking about the emptiness or unrepresentability of the sublime which I used as part of its definition earlier. It may strike the reader that a great deal has been represented through Elizabeth's material, but the material is not the point. It is the 'spirit' - for want of a better word - contained by the 'material' that is the issue. The essence held in substance, and which can be known only through substance but is not substance. In connection with this I will mention a final dream of Elizabeth's which suggests the irrepresentable other that transcends the opposites. In the dream, she was looking down on an island at an angle of forty-five degrees. On the island were fifty men and women who were very similar in shape and size as though their gender difference was minimised. They were living in harmony and producing craft-work from materials imported from the outside. (Elizabeth has likened this detail in the dream to the way our relationship helps her in her 'craft' and how it has produced my 'craft-work' which is the present paper.) Working on this dream together, Elizabeth and I felt that the forty-five degree angle linked to the single point of the pyramid, a point which transcends the vertical and horizontal of the two-dimensional base, and the point where 'all sides meet'. The two opposed directions of the base are like the opposites of conscious and unconscious, heaven and earth and male and female. Jung finds significance in the Christian symbol of the cross for the same reason. The number fifty seems to point in a similar direction as the apex of the pyramid is the fifth angle over the four of the base. Elizabeth also noted the tradition of placing the 'third eye' at the summit of the pyramid. In modern times we think we have little use for the pyramid of the ancients and the cross of the mediaeval mystic - and, even if we did, we would find there are few forms available in modem culture to serve the symbolic purposes of the psyche. As Jung has pointed out, in such times

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symbolic impoverishment it has been depth psychology and the path of individuation encouraged by an analysis that provides a site for our spiritual and psychological enrichment. Once, Elizabeth dreamt that I had built her a stone house with an earth floor. There was a new baby on the floor; Elizabeth was not sure what to do next. The house was very simple but it provided a space that was happening - and one which felt solid and safe. As in the culture, so in the unconscious, the site that psyche finds will always be marginal - and sometimes it will be sublime. of

References Adorno, T.W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory (eds G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, tr. C. Lenhardt). London: Routledge. Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1986) Dialectic of Enlightenment (tr. J. Cumming) London: Verso. Affeld-Niemeyer, P. (1995) 'Trauma and Symbol: instinct and reality perception in therapeutic work with victims of incest' Journal of Analytical Psychology, 40(1): 23-39. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking. Docherty, T. (ed.) (1993) Postmodernism. A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Edelglass, S., Maier, G., Gebert, H. and Davy, J. (1992) Matter and Mind; Imaginative Participation in Science. Floris, Edinburgh. Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks (tr. C.L. Markmann) New York: Grove Press. Field., N. (1991) 'Projective identification: mechanism or mystery?' Journal of Analytical Psychology, 36(1): 93-109. Guggenbuhl-Craig, A. (1995) 'Reality and mythology of child sexual abuse'. Journal ofAnalytical Psychology, 40(1): 63-75. Hauke, C.C. (1995) 'Narcissism and fragmentation: a revaluation'. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 40(4): 497-522. Hauke, C.C. (1996) 'The child: development, archetype and analytic practice'. San Francisco Jung Institute LibratyJournal, Spring. 15(1): 17-38. Herrigel, E. (1972) Zen in the Art of Archery. London:Routledge. hooks, b. (1991) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics. London: Turnaround. Jung, C.G. Collected Works, (eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, tr. R.F.C. Hull) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. The volumes referred to in this chapter are 7 (1943) and 91 (1951) Laing, R.D. (1959) The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993) 'The sublime and the avant garde' in Docherty, T. (ed.) (1993) Postmodernism. A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 244-256. Pears, D. (1971) Wittgenstein. London: Fontana. Redfearn, J.W.T. (1994) 'Movements of the I in relation to the body image.'Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39(3): 311-330. Samuels, A. (1993) The Political Psyche. London: Routledge. Sarup, M. (1993) Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd edn. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Schwartz-Salant, N. (1988) 'Archetypal foundations of projective identification'.

Journal ofAnalytical Psychology, 33: 39 52. -

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Ware, R. C. (1995) 'Scylla and Charybdis: sexual abuse or "false memory syndrome"? Therapy-induced "memories" of sexual abuse'.Journal of Analytical Psychology, 40(1): 5-22. Wiener, J. (1994) 'Looking out and looking in: some reflections on "body talk" in the consulting room'.Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39(2): 33-35.

Chapter 9 Countertransference, the Imaginal World, and the Politics of the Sublime ANDREW SAMUELS This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post- Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of `countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways. Then I will try to move the resultant mixture in the general direction of politics, culminating in an attempt to depict a new kind of citizen that I call citizen-astherapist. To effect the initial link between a clinical concept such as countertransference and a wider idea such as the mundus imaginalis, I will be making use of a research project I have conducted in which the countertransference experiences of nearly thirty psychotherapists have been collected, collated and evaluated. To effect the second move in a political direction, I shall describe workshops that I call 'political clinics' in which I try to operationalise this thinking. I think this is a somewhat unusual project and the empirical hands-on approach gives a firm base to my overall intent. This is to propose a theory that will, in pluralistic vein, harness together the functional realities of the analyst's profession and its implicit value system or ideology with a position statement about the relations between depth psychology and politics. There will be an interplay of technique and soul, data and emotion, questionnaire and rhetoric, process and content, relationship and image, left and right hemispheric activity. By 'politics', I mean the concerted arrangements and struggles within an institution, or in a single society, or between the countries of the world for the organisation and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power. Politics concerns the way in which power is held or deployed by the state, by institutions, and by sectional interests to maintain survival, determine behaviour, gain control over others and, 145

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more positively perhaps, enhance the quality of human life. Politics implies efforts to change or transform these arrangements and efforts to maintain them. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation to serve the interests of the powerful as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food, water or oil. On a more personal level, as feminist thinking demonstrates, there is a second kind of politics. Here, political power reflects struggles over agency, meaning the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. But politics also refers to a crucial interplay between these two dimensions, between the public and private dimensions of power. There are connections between economic power and power as expressed on an intimate, domestic, level. Power is a process or network as much as a stable factor. This version of political power is demonstrated experientially: in family organisation, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals. Where the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect or even meld there is a special role for depth psychology in relation to political change and transformation. The tragicomic crisis of our fin de siècle civilisation incites us to challenge the boundaries that are conventionally accepted as existing between the external world and the internal world, between life and reflection, between extraversion and introversion, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between the political development of the person and the psychological development of the person, between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity have political roots; they are not as 'internal' as they seem (cf. Samuels, 1993). From its beginnings, depth psychology has been interested in the world of politics. In his paper entitled 'The claims of psychoanalysis to the interest of the non-psychological sciences', written in 1913, Freud staked a claim for the proactive capacity of psychoanalysis: To throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions — on religion, morality, justice, and philosophy . . . Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. (Freud, 1913a, p.235) Jung made a similar point about the relationship of depth psychology and politics in a more reactive vein in 1946 in his preface to a collection of his essays on Nazi Germany: We are living in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame, internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of

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chaos. . . . This critical state of things has such a tremendous influ-

ence on the psychic life of the individual that the analyst . . . feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting room. . . . The psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history, even if his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not mention his duties as a citizen, which confront him with a similar task (CW10, para.11). At times, it seems that Freud and Jung were as interested in the broad sweep of cultural evolution and in an engagement with collective psychology as they were in their day-to-day work with clients. Certainly, there is a tension between their cultural and clinical projects and this is a tension that is still with their descendants today. It certainly seems that the existence of a rupture between analysis and therapy in the consulting room and analysis and therapy in the political world is once again being challenged, if not exactly closed. We can tell that something significant is going on by the existence of fierce opposition to the challenge from those who regard the clinical as an untouchable, privileged category, on the basis of its contribution to the alleviation of human suffering. Although I abhor that kind of clinical triumphalism, I do not suggest in this chapter that we should close all the consulting rooms. This is because I can see that clinical practice may be something other than a bastion of possessive individualism and 'narcissistic' introspection. It is right to criticise myopic (and greedy) clinicians who cannot apperceive that their work has a political and cultural location and implication. But it is not right to indulge in simplistic thinking that would do away with the entire clinical project of depth psychology. Without their connection

to a clinical core, why should anyone listen to analysts and therapists at all? The rejection of the clinical forecloses what is, for me, the central issue: the relations between the private and the public spheres of life. This foreclosure mimics the attitude of the most conservative, dyed-inthe-wool clinicians and mental health professionals. The high-profile apostates of therapy (Hillman and Ventura, 1992; Masson, 1989) are as terrified of exploring the relations between the personal and the political as are the fanatical professional adherents of therapy. Both groups fail to see that the critique of analysis and therapy as self-indulgent, introspective and 'narcissistic' has been causing intense debates throughout the entire history of the enterprise. It is not a new dispute. In fact, the history of depth psychology's attempt to do something about and in the world is so extensive and longstanding (the Frankfurt School, R.D. Laing, etc.) that I have suggested Hillman and Ventura's title could well have been We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy's Attempts to

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The countertransference revolution These are the words of one of the participants in the research project, writing about a client: Veronica is 20 and single. She is depressed and lives at home with her parents; she works for a bank. At school she was a model pupil and head girl. She started drinking heavily in her late teens and turned down several offers of university places at the last moment. After my third session with her, as I was getting into my car, I experienced a sharp moment of anxiety, an image of a car crash came to me and I found myself thinking, 'What'll happen to Veronica if I have a car crash?' The therapist knew that she was not going mad and that what had happened related to her client. She was an experienced worker and able to manage her shaken feelings. Her conclusion was that she was being affected by her client's massive feelings of destructiveness towards her and that her worry about the client's well-being was representative of the client's own guilt. The therapist regarded her countertransference reactions as having been stimulated by communications from the client. Though such reactions are by no means the only source of information about the client, they play a special part because of the depth and intensity of their impact upon the therapist. My concern is with this type of countertransference experience, to try to understand it and explain how such things can happen at all, and then move on to consider the political and social utility of these phenomena. People who have never been analysts or therapists are often surprised to find that clinical practice is a red-hot emotional activity. It is not usually the case that a client quietly reports a problem to an analyst who then explains its origins by reference to specialised knowledge about such matters as childhood or the significance of chains of association. In particular, the analyst's state of mind often shows signs of altered levels of consciousness and the presence of intense fantasy and aroused emotion. These may lead to disturbed bodily and behavioural functioning on the analyst's part. These central features of the analyst's experience, which are the regular currency of discussion amongst clinicians have, rightly or wrongly, been tagged as 'countertransference' (see Rayner, 1991; Slather, 1987). Those of my readers who are in clinical practice will know something of the revolution in clinical theorising that has taken place (see Clarkson, 1995, pp.62-107). This revolution has made it possible to review the analyst's subjective experience in a calm and considered way, underscoring its utility and resisting, but certainly not forgetting, the tendency to conclude that analysts are prone to mad responses to their clients. Because many readers will not be familiar with this revolution, I

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want to give a brief history of it. Although no hard-and-fast consensus exists about the use of the countertransference, something which need not dismay us (as we shall see), a definite historical trend in theorising about it can be observed. In this trend, countertransference experiences of the analyst are re-theorised as communications from the client and hence as being of clinical utility. Analysis and therapy result from an interplay of subjectivities — they are intersubjective phenomena; there is no subjectivity (no subject) without an Other (see Papadopoulos, 1991). For Freud, it was apparently, but by no means exclusively, a problem that analysts reacted to their clients in ways that suggested neurosis (or even psychosis) on the analyst's part. Freud regarded these kinds of responses as undesirable and as something the analyst should overcome by more analysis or self-analysis. In the way Freud himself worked, it is clear that he did not function as a 'blank screen', as he seems to have had a strong personal presence in relation to his clients; this is apparent in his case histories. But it is also clear that, quite deliberately, from time to time he functioned as if he were a blank screen, a person without emotion or subjective life when seen from the client's point of view. In this way, he argued, the clients' projections of problematic figures from the past could be more freely transferred on to the person of the analyst — hence, 'transference' (which was also considered a phenomenon that interfered with treatment right at the very start of psychoanalytic endeavour). By the 1950s, some analysts were, controversially, regarding countertransference as other than inevitably neurotic, seeing it as an informative phenomenon with distinct clinical value (e.g. Heimann, 1950). Nowadays there are numerous analysts who see their subjectivity, carried by the countertransference, as a central feature of the clinical encounter. Such analysts conceive of themselves as 'ready' for the experience of countertransference (Bollas, 1987, pp.201-3). There have been parallel debates in analytical psychology but there has been less of a sense of overturning the applecart because Jung constantly asserted that the analyst was 'in' the treatment just as much as the client. In 1929 Jung regarded countertransference as a 'highly important organ of information' about the client and felt that an analyst who could not let him or herself be influenced by the client's psychological emissions would be an ineffective clinician (CW16, para.163). There are many strands of post-Freudian theorising about the countertransference. One strand lays emphasis on the analyst's emotions and emotionality, meaning his or her total involvement in the analytical process. The idea is that the analyst's unconscious somehow 'understands' that of the client in an empathic, feeling manner. This view is claimed, with justification, to stem from Freud who, in spite of warning against the possibility of neurosis in the analyst, also referred to the analyst's unconscious as a 'receptive organ' in relation to the 'transmitting unconscious of the patient' (1913b, p.194). Psychoanalysts (and analytical psychologists) who have

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theorised treatment as an emotional encounter do not, on the whole, advocate spontaneous or simple (as opposed to disciplined) disclosure or sharing of their emotional states with their clients. Another strand of post-Freudian thinking about countertransference makes use of a form of communication theory. Everything that happens between the analyst and client, whether originating in analyst or client, may be regarded as a symbolic communication. This permits a further revision — in this instance, it is a revision of the role of the client. The client is regarded as a person who helps the analyst conduct the treatment, pointing out errors and misjudgements either directly or by communication with the analyst's unconscious. In the latter case, it is the analyst's countertransference that provides the means by which the client can communicate his corrections of the analyst's errors (Langs, 1978). A third way in which contemporary psychoanalysis has modified Freud's views of countertransference also makes use of a notion of communication. But in this approach communication is understood as the interplay of projective and introjective processes, the movement of psychological material between people, out of one and into the other and, maybe, back again. These processes are understood as special variants of generally occurring psychosocial phenomena and so countertransference theorising can be understood as part of a wider apprehension of how people communicate. The advantage of this theory is that it is possible to see how parts of the client's psyche crop up in the analyst's subjectivity, and vice versa (Racker, 1968). Post-Jungian theorising about countertransference has made use of similar thinking about projection and introjection. The concern and preoccupation with countertransference has reached a peak in Britain and Latin America, where it sometimes seems that analysis consists of nothing but an exploration of the countertransference. But the United States, Germany and Italy are rapidly catching up, as a review of the literature demonstrates (Gorkin, 1987, pp.81-104). The situation in France is different. Jacques Lacan criticised (quite correctly, in my view) tendencies to fashion ego-to-ego communication out of the countertransference (1988, pp.30-3). However, Lacan's view of what happens dramatically oversimplifies the experience and practices of those who pioneered a revision of Freud's methodological suggestions. Though the question of disclosure remains a pressing one, Lacan overlooks the issues of the level of the analyst's disclosure and the work he or she might do on what is to be disclosed prior to communicating it (see M. Stanton, 1977, pp. 29-47).

Research project The hypothesis Before introducing more of the research material, I want to state the

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hypothesis on which the project was based. My thinking is that there are two rather different sorts of usable countertransference — though both may he seen as communications from the client. The difference between the two is shown in this simple example. Suppose, after a session with a particular client, I feel depressed (this may be a single occurrence or part of a series). Now I may know from my own reading of myself that I am not actually depressed, and certainly not seriously depressed. I may conclude that the depressed state I am in is a result of my close contact with this particular client. It may be that the client is feeling depressed right now and that neither of us is aware of that. In this instance, my depression is a reflection of his or her depression. So I would call this an example of reflective countertransference. In time, I may be able to make use of this knowledge, particularly if I had not realised the existence (or extent) of the client's depression. But there is another possibility. My experience of becoming a depressed person may stem from the presence and operation of such a 'person' in the client's psyche. The client may have experienced a parent as depressed and my reaction precisely embodies the client's emotionally experienced parent. I have also become a part of the client's inner world. I stress 'inner world' rather than the client's actual infancy or history to make the point that I am not attempting any kind of factual reconstruction. That 'person' will inevitably also be symbolic of a theme active in the client's psyche or of a part of his personality. This entire state of affairs I have come to call embodied countertransference and it is to be distinguished from the former category of reflective countertransference. There is a considerable difference between, on the one hand, my reflecting of the here-and-now state of my client, feeling just what he or she is unconscious of at the moment, and, on the other, my embodiment of an entity, theme, or person of a longstanding, intrapsychic, inner-world nature. One problem for the analyst is that, experientially, the two states may seem similar. Perhaps some countertransferences are both reflective and embodied. 'Embodied' is intended to suggest a physical, actual, material, sensual expression in the analyst of something in the client's inner world, a drawing together and solidification of this, an incarnation by the analyst of a part of the client's psyche and, as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it, a 'clothing' by the analyst of the client's soul. If our psyche tends to personify, as Jung suggests, then embodiment speaks of the way the person/analyst plays his or her part in that. I am grateful to Neville Symington (personal communication, 1986) for suggesting that it is important to distinguish between countertransference states in the analyst that refer to the client's ego and countertransference states that refer more to the client's objects. Reflective countertransference would, I think, refer more to the client's ego position whereas embodied countertransference could refer to either the client's ego or to his or her objects, according to the specific context.

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The main point is that the problem that the analyst and client are working on can become embodied in the analyst. Now any analyst who proposes new terms must explain why he or she does so in order not to be charged with word-mongering. This is particularly the case when, as in this instance, the new terms overlap with those already in use. Fordham's concept (1957) of syntonic countertransference is one for which I, in common with many Jungian analysts, am extremely grateful. His achievement was to drag analysts out of their ivory towers, help them truly to listen to what their clients were trying to tell them, and make a reality out of pious commitments to 'the dialectical approach'. But gradually I began to feel that the term `syntonic' was distant from my experience; often one does not feel in tune with the client in these countertransferences and there may be dissonance inside oneself Later, it may be clear that one was in tune. So 'syntonic' leans too much towards an Olympian standpoint, intellectual, even technical or technological, and, hence, to radiate commitment to a mode of observation more suited to the outer world than to the empathic processes we are talking about. Embodiment, on the other hand, does imply a becoming, with its consequent involvements, and also a suggestion of a medium for countertransference communications from the client; this, it will turn out, is often the analyst's body. Again, many of these countertransference states are nonverbal or pre-verbal - and embodiment speaks to that. The unease with the notion of syntonic countertransference was a particular problem for me, as I was deliberately trying to keep my theorising on the 'low road', 'experience-near', in Kohut's phrases, using the empirical stance and data collection together with an empathic attitude (Kohut, 1982). So I chose the terms 'embodied' and 'reflective' quite deliberately, to be of help in the task of bracketing together countertransference (specific to the practice of analysis) and the mundus imaginalis, a more general, cultural term employed in archetypal psychology. It may turn out that these ideas particularise and extend Fordham's theory - paradoxically by invoking an approach with which he was in total disagreement (numerous personal communications 1976-94). The term 'incarnate', which was one of the associations to which embodiment led, has a history in analytical psychology. It was first used in 1956 by Plaut to describe how an analyst may have to let himself become what the client's imagery dictates he be. However, Plaut's pioneering paper referred to the analyst's reactions to transference projections of which he was aware, and to his control (or lack of it) of his response. For example, what to do when a woman client saw him as a remarkable teacher: should he contradict this, teach her about wise old men, or 'incarnate' the image so as to develop a knowledge of how to use it? Plaut's concern was not with states in the analyst that are apparently devoid of any causation outside of the analytical relationship.

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It should be reiterated that not all countertransference reactions are usable communications from the client. We need to bear neurotic countertransference in mind - identifying with the client, idealising the client, the analyst's retaliation to the client's aggression, his or her destruction of his or her own work, his or her attempt to satisfy his or her own infantile needs through the relationship with the client. Nor is it always immediately clear what the client's communications mean. As Jung said, the analyst may have to stay in a'muddled, bewildered state for a period, allowing an understanding to germinate, if it will. An ability to rest with the anxiety and maintain an attitude of affective involvement becomes crucial. The results I will turn now to the material that I gathered through the research project. I embarked on it because I felt a need to check hypotheses like the reflective/embodied countertransference model and did not trust myself to use my own case material in isolation. For many years, I had been giving seminars to psychotherapy trainees in which I suggested that there were these two sorts of countertransference. I contacted 32 qualified psychotherapists who had been in supervision with me during this period and asked them for a few examples of countertransference reactions of theirs that they considered to result from the unconscious communications of their clients (see Table 1 for the questionnaire). The hypothesis that there are two different kinds of countertransference was restated, and the participants were reminded of the existence of neurotic countertransference. The countertransference reaction was to be reported in detail and I asked which kind of countertransference this was thought to be and how this experience had affected the work. The final question, which summarises the intent of the whole project, was: 'Can you say how the clients may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you?' It may also be necessary to justify such empiricism to those who see it as opposed to poetic, rhetorical, imaginal explorations. An empirical base does not necessarily lead to prosaic conclusions. The findings of the project are quite the opposite. Empiricism, as expressed in this research venture, supports a poetic, metaphorical, imaginal explanation for the mysterious workings of countertransference. The 26 completed replies covered a total of 57 cases. Because some cases involved more than one example of a countertransference communication and because some countertransferences could be said to be both reflective and embodied, the total of such examples came to 76. Of these, 35 (46%) were held by the respondents to be of embodied countertransference and 41 (54%) of reflective countertransference.

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Table 1. questions I asked the participants in the research project 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Age of client Your age Marital status of client Your marital status Presenting problem(s) Brief history of client Countertransference experience in detail Is this reflective or embodied? How did this affect the future of the work? How did this affect your understanding of the history? Can you say how the client may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you? What did they say or do? 12. Any other comments?

It was abundantly clear that the participants could see how to use such a classification of countertransference. Here is an example said to be of embodied countertransference. The client was a young, unmarried woman who had presented originally with a mixture of intolerable guilt accompanied by a sense of responsibility for the spiritual and moral welfare of others. She had also had a depressive breakdown. She had had several traumatic religious experiences in childhood. This is the therapist's account: This event happened after three years of work when we were thinking of adding a second session. She was always extremely controlled, with periods in every session which felt almost autistic. She said nothing which had not already been minutely examined 'inside'. She watched my face for the slightest move, flicker of an eye, for instance, and would interpret what she thought she saw there — to herself — as me laughing at her, getting fed up with her, getting irritated by her. I suggested that perhaps one day she might feel able to entrust a bit more of what was inside to me, with the feeling that I would not change it or take it away, that I could just hold it. As I was speaking I had a very strong impression or image of a large black open-mouthed pot which was strong yet open — like a big belly. The pot was huge and black and also like a witch's cauldron (I later realised). I said to her that it would be rather like having a pot which she could safely leave things in. Her immediate reaction was that it would be like a wall which something had been hurled at violently. My instantaneous image was of a violent expelling-type vomit, running down the wall, uncontained and wasted. We were both quite staggered by the strength and opposite nature of the two images we had had.

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The therapist felt that the pot image demonstrated that the client's mother had longed to be of use to her. But the witch's cauldron and the image of vomiting suggest something else besides. The cauldron was described as big enough to swallow up a human being — and hence a sinister and dangerous part-self or splinter psyche within the client. Thus there were two aspects to this embodied countertransference: her mother's longing on the one hand and, on the other, an embodiment by the therapist of a split-off part of the client's psyche. The next illustration is an example of a reflective countertransference. This therapist found herself coming to supervision with me in clothes very much like those worn by her client at their most recent session. This was something she realised during the supervision, but, in fact, I had been struck by the clothes she was wearing the moment I met her at the door: a little-boy presentation, school sweater, crooked tie and collar, muddied, practical shoes. And, though I did not know it, she was wearing a coat of the same colour as her client's, a coat she had not worn for years until that day. As we talked, it became clear that the client had never felt able to relate closely to her mother. She was the middle of three daughters and had been 'assigned' to her father — memories of being placed, unwillingly, on his knee. She had never felt 'at one' with her mother. And she certainly could not let herself feel like her mother, like a woman. The way she had resolved this was to let herself be 'Daddy's girl' but in a way that ruled out incestuous involvement (the little-boy strategy). The therapist's behaviour, in which she became merged with her client, might have been considered neurotic. But the notion that it reflects her client's desire to be at one with her therapist, and, indeed, her whole life struggle to obtain mothering, is equally plausible. For instance, the therapist writes: 'In some ways she had been treating me like a man although she had sought out a woman therapist. I found myself being more active and penetrating than my usual style and generally more assertive.' Mattinson (1975) has written of the way in which the dynamics of one situation (therapy) are reflected in those of an adjacent situation (supervision). What I have been describing was, for me, a confirmation of a hypothesis. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to that, it was also possible to detect an overall pattern in the 76 countertransference responses and, moreover, one about which I had had no hypothesis. The countertransference responses described fell into distinct groups or categories, as follows. ,

• First, bodily and behavioural responses. For example, wearing the same clothes at the client, walking into a lamp-post, forgetting to discuss something important, a strange sensation in the solar plexus, a pain in a particular part of the body, sexual arousal, sleep.

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• Second, feeling responses. For example: anger, impatience, powerfulness, powerlessness, envy, irritation, depression, manipulation, redundancy, being flooded, bored. • Finally, fantasy responses. For example: this is the wrong client, there's something wrong with my feet, a large black pot, I killed her mother, I'm a prostitute, I feel reverence for her serious, private place, he has God on his side, all colour has gone out of the world, a car crash, he'll rummage through my desk and books if I leave the room, the client is getting bigger and bigger and is filling the room. Exposing myself to these accounts, this time without the protection of the reflective/embodied theory, made me aware that all these instances of countertransference may be said to be images, and this is true even of the bodily or feeling responses. They are images because they are active in the psyche in the absence of a direct stimulus which could be said to have caused them to exist. That is, nothing has been done to the analyst that would, in the usual way of things, explain the presence of such a reaction in him or her. A person may be conscious or unconscious of an image but, either way, the image may be regarded as promoting feelings and behaviour and not as secondary, a coded message about them (cf. Newton, 1965 or Kugler's (1982) use of a term such as 'acoustic image'). In the questionnaire, I also asked the participants what was the presenting problem of their clients. One finding is particularly interesting. It would seem that clients with instinctual (sex, aggression, food) problems are more likely to evoke reflective and embodied countertransference than other clients. What is highlighted, therefore, is the special part that may be played by the body in the client's evocation of countertransference in the analyst. This bodily proposition will have to be looked at later, alongside the earlier idea that it is the image that is the decisive factor. Here, the mundus imaginalis turned out to be relevant. In both the 'pot' example of embodied countertransference and the 'clothes' example of reflective countertransference, imagery and bodily perceptions played intermingled roles. In sum: the hope is that these findings justify a classification of usable countertransference responses into reflective and embodied, and that both terms accurately depict what happens. Further, the additional grouping of countertransferences under the headings of bodily and behavioural, feeling, and fantasy responses may also be justified.

Implications for technique A central technical issue is constellated by a vision of countertransference as a possible communication from the client: what is the analyst to do with the knowledge he or she may gain from an analysis of his or her

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countertransference experiences? Should he or she disclose them to the client? If so, how? Should the analyst weld his or her understanding of the countertransference into his or her interpretations? If so, how? Should he or she do little more than stay in touch with what is being discovered? When I first began to think about these matters, I expected to find a sharp divide between Freudians and Jungians, with the latter group being more willing, even eager, to disclose countertransference material. True, a few Jungian analysts (e.g. Stein, 1987) are strong advocates of disclosure, particularly of feelings about the client generated in the analyst. But even such an extreme viewpoint is also represented in psychoanalysis, for example by Winnicott in 'Hate in the countertransference' (1949). The comprehensive literature review in Gorkin (1987) suggests strongly that there are numerous psychoanalysts who can see occasions on which it is advisable and justifiable to disclose countertransference. In psychoanalysis much more has been written about the kind of client with whom this is appropriate than in analytical psychology. Perhaps because of the Freudian/Jungian consensus referred to above, most analysts seem to agree with Segal's position, summarised by Casement (1986, p.548): The analyst is in no position to interpret if the interpretation is based only upon what the analyst is feeling in the session. Unless it is possible to identify how the client is contributing to what the analyst is feeling, and in such a way that the client could recognise this, then it is better to remain silent. Casement notes the twin dangers of gratifying clients who want a magician for an analyst and of persecuting others with omniscience. Precisely because of dangers like these, I felt it necessary to go on with my investigations of countertransference, so as to find an ideological basis for the careful use of the tacit knowledge of the client that the countertransference can provide for the analyst. In other words, I think more is needed than an understanding of the dynamics of any one client. What is required is an understanding of how these phenomena generally tend to function. I do not mean a tight theory or categorisation, because that would defeat the purpose of utilising countertransference, but I do mean something more than clinical pragmatics. My working out of the theme of the mundus imaginalis is intended to be that kind of ideological project. Succinctly, an understanding of what it is that the analyst reflects or/and embodies can serve as a kind of resource out of which he or she fashions the actual words and images of the interpretation, rendering them fresh and, above all, related to the client — hence not 'cliché interpretations' (Casement, 1986).

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What I aim at is summarised thrillingly in this note sent by Bion to Meltzer (who quotes it in 1978, p.126): Now I would use as a model: the diamond cutter's method of cutting a stone so that a ray of light entering the stone is reflected back by the same path in such a way that the light is augmented — the same 'free association' is reflected back by the same path, but with augmented 'brilliance'. So the patient is able to see his `reflection', only more clearly than he can see his personality as expressed by himself alone (i.e. without an analyst).

The mundus imaginalis The mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, is a term employed by Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and scholar of Islam (Corbin, 1972, 1978, 1983). To use this term in an analytic context is not in itself original. Hillman's suggestion that we practise `Jung's technique with Corbin's vision' is a precursor (Hillman, 1980). This enables us to include inside the mundus imaginalis those images that Corbin regarded as a 'secularisation of the imaginal': grotesque, painful, pathological — analytical material. The mundus imaginalis refers to a precise order or level of reality, located somewhere between primary sense impressions and more developed cognition or spirituality. The mundus imaginalis (Hillman adds) enables us to speak of the location of the archetypal. So we begin to regard the psyche as structured by its images alone rather than by unknowable, irrepresentable, theoretical, archetypes (see Samuels, 1985, pp.31-2; 1989, pp.15-65). Fordham also in a sense joined Hillman when he wondered whether the conventional archetypal structure/archetypal image split in analytical psychology has any meaning. Fordham's point was that the word 'image' in the term 'archetypal image' is redundant because no archetype can be discussed or have any being without an image; hence, 'archetype' includes and implies an image (Fordham, 1970, p.297). Hillman's version of the same argument was that, as we cannot even conceive of the so-called noumenal, hypothetical, archetype without an image, it is the image that is primary (Hillman, 1980, p.33n). As Corbin sees it, the mundus imaginalis is an in-between state, an intermediate dimension, in his original French entre-deux, which may even have the meaning: 'neither one thing nor another' (Corbin, 1983, p.1). It is possible to see, therefore, how the mundus imaginalis acquired a relevance for the countertransference phenomena we have been discussing. They, too, are intermediate: in between client and analyst, and also in-between the analyst's conscious and unconscious. My use of Corbin's idea involves the suggestion that two persons, in a

certain kind of relationship, may constitute, or gain access to, or be

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linked by, that level of reality known as the mundus imaginalis. For the client, the analyst him/herself is an in-between, a real person and also a transference projection. For the analyst, the world he or she shares with the client is also the client's own imaginal world. When the analyst experiences his or her countertransference on a personal level and yet knows its roots are in the client, it is an inbetween state. To be sure, it is his or her body, his or her imagery, his or her feelings or fantasies. But these things also belong to the client, and have been squeezed into being and given substance by the analytical relationship. It would be a great mistake for the analyst to remain enmeshed in subjectivity (actually in possessiveness) or compulsive introspection or self-blame. What appeared to have happened to him or her and in him or her is truly in between the analyst and the client, imaginally real not subjectively real. My suggestion is that there is a two-person or shared mundus imaginalis that is constellated in analysis. To justify this, it is necessary to take the parallels further, and deeper, though bearing in mind what a further, literal translation of entre-deux as 'between two people' might suggest to us. Corbin refers to the mundus imaginalis as having a 'central mediating function' so that all levels of reality may 'symbolise with each other' (Corbin, 1972, p.9). The parallel is with the way the analyst symbolises something for the client. The analyst's ego is a special kind of ego, highly permeable and flexible and having as its central mediating function the operation of the sluice gates between image and understanding. Again, Corbin writes of the way 'inner and hidden reality turns out to envelop, surround or contain that which at first was outer and visible' (Corbin, 1972, p.5). The analyst's countertransference response is outer and visible; what is inner and hidden is the client's psychic reality that certainly envelops the analyst. For Corbin, the mundus imaginalis is a 'fully objective and real world with equivalents for everything existing in the sensible world without being perceptible by the senses' (Corbin, 1972, p.7). In the analyst's countertransference we see equivalents of the client's internal reality, even though the sensory data for the analyst's experience is missing. Hence, there is a further rationale for referring generally to these countertransferences as images. Of all the suggestive possibilities for analysis to be found in Corbin's work, it is his equation of the mundus imaginalis with visionary states that I should like to develop (Corbin, 1972, p.4). The experiences of countertransference, as described in this paper, may be regarded as visions. No direct sensory stimulus is involved in a vision and also the experience is not of an intellectual nature. Jung made the additional point that no deliberate act of imagination is involved either (Jung, 1963, p.327). All these facts are relevant to countertransference. Many of the extraordinarily powerful experiences and images I have been discussing are also described by Jung when he refers to visions as

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'disturbing spectacles of some tremendous process that in every way transcend our human feeling and understanding' (CW15, para.141). Jung goes on to ask: 'Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the darknesses of the spirit, or of the primal beginnings of the human psyche?' We may add to the list: visions of another's psyche, empathic visions, analytical visions. Corbin's reference (Corbin, 1983, p.1) is to 'the organ of visionary knowledge'; for an analyst, when he is doing analysis, that organ is his countertransference. The argument so far is that the mundus imaginalis functions as a linking factor between client and analyst and that some of the analyst's countertransference may be regarded as visions and hence part of this imaginal world. What I want to do now is to relate the proposed connection between countertransference and the mundus imaginalis to what emerged from the research project, in particular, to explore what the analyst's body and the mundus imaginalis have in common. Using Corbin's metaphor, the analyst's body becomes less literal, a 'subtle body', a 'being in suspense', a link between soul and corporeality (Corbin, 1972, p.9). What I am trying to convey is that, in analysis, the analyst's body is not entirely his or her own and what it says to him or her is not a message for him or her alone. In pursuance of this healing of the body/soul dichotomy, I may add to the term 'analytical visions' another: bodily visions — 'not-me possessions' of the analyst. It is not just Corbin who has explored this area; Jung, too, wrote of the in-between world, referring to it as esse in anima. And Jung also had something to say about these connections between body, sense-impressions, fantasy, and the subjective/objective dynamic. He wrote: A third, mediating standpoint is needed. Esse in intellectu lacks tangible reality, esse in re lacks mind. . . . Living reality is the product neither of the actual behavior of things, nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both (CW6, para.77). Jung went on to refer to this combination as fantasy, adding that fantasy 'fashions the bridge between the irreconcilable claims of subject and object' (my italics). Capturing what is meant by bodily visions takes me once more back to Corbin. He was interested in studying what he described as 'the organ which perceives' the mundus imaginalis; this he refers to as 'imaginative consciousness' (Corbin, 1972, p.2). The analyst's imaginative consciousness and his perception of his bodily visions, apparently so disparate, may more accurately be seen as two different ways of approaching the same goal. For bodily perception is quite different from other kinds of perception because there is no specific organ that comes to mind in connection with it. As the philosopher Armstrong puts it:

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When I feel the heat of my hand, the motion of my limbs, the beating of my heart or the distension of my stomach, and do not feel these things by exploring my body with another portion of my body, there is no natural answer to the question 'What do you feel these states of your body with?' (Armstrong, 1962, p.10). It was this argument that led Armstrong to propose that notion of 'bodily perception' and, as I hinted just now, his use of it and Corbin's of 'imaginative consciousness' are rather similar. Whichever of these terms is used, the issue that then emerges concerns the fate of the mundus imaginalis in analysis. Corbin writes that the mundus imaginalis can be useful and productive in linking intellect and sense impressions (Corbin, 1983, p.1). Or it can remain subservient to sense impressions and not serve the intellect. If this occurs, there is a resemblance to the analyst's remaining unaware of the implications of his or her countertransference; his or her bodily vision will not have a use. The link between body and image is waiting to be further verbalised. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare wrote that 'imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown' (Act 5, Scene 1). If countertransference communications are both images and bodily visions, then body and image shimmer together almost to the point of fusion. Here we may find quite another message in the word 'incarnate', that outgrowth of 'embodied'. When Plaut explained in 1970 what he had meant when he used the word in 1956, he was worried that the religious association to 'incarnate' (spirit made flesh) had been troublesome. It seems to me, however, that his intuition was reliable. In the countertransference experience, the image is being made flesh. Where that means that the Other (the client's psyche) is becoming personal (in the analyst's body), I would conclude that an analyst's countertransference may be further understood by regarding it as a religious or mystical experience. Before this is dismissed as fanciful, parallels might be drawn between countertransference and a well-known list of the characteristics of the mystical experience (Happold, 1963, pp.45-7). • First, mystical states are ineffable; that is, they cannot be fully described to one who has not experienced something similar. • Second, mystical states lead to knowledge and insight, often delivered with a tremendous sense of authority. • Third, mystical states are transient. • Fourth, mystical states happen to a person; even if he or she prepared him/herself, he or she is gripped by a power that feels quite foreign. • Fifth, there is a sense that everything is connected to everything else, an intimation of purpose. • Sixth, the mystical experience is timeless. • Finally, the familiar ego is sensed not to be the real 'I' (see Powell, 1985).

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These points can be compared to the countertransference described in this paper. It is difficult to explain them to one who has not experienced them. The analyst does gain insights from them, often in a shattering way. Countertransference states are momentary. Even analytical training cannot fully anticipate or prepare for the countertransference experience. One does feel connected to one's client, in an intimacy at once beautiful and unbearable. Countertransference reactions have no sense of history; past and present are jumbled. Finally, the analyst knows his or her ego is not responsible for what is happening to him or her. Koss (1986) also suggested that states of possession entered into by spirit healers may be compared to typical countertransference experiences. Similarly, in Chassidic mysticism, reference is made to a quality known as Hitlahabut, or ecstasy. Buber held that this quality transforms ordinary knowledge into a knowledge of the meaning of life. For the Chassids, Hitlahabut expresses itself bodily, in dance. As Buber says, in dance 'the whole body becomes subservient to the ecstatic soul' (Buber, 1931, p.35). Analysis, too, is a form of dance, and ecstasy is not an inappropriate word to describe some of the emotions generated (and reported in the research project). Corbin regards the mundus imaginalis as 'indispensable for placing the visions of prophets and mystics, this is because it is there that they 'take place' and deprived of the imaginal world they no longer "take place"' (Corbin, 1978, p.4). Both reflective and embodied countertransference have their location in the mundus imaginalis, which is also the medium for their transmission. These connections between mysticism and analysis need not seem surprising. Psychology and religion cannot simply let go of each other. It is not enough to say that one explores depths and the other heights, that one is about soul and the other about spirit, one about dreams and the other about miracles, that one is concerned with immanence and the other with transcendence. It is not the case that this analytical mysticism is a mysticism of the one true God. Far from it. Analysis is a mysticism of persons — and hence polyvalent, pluralistic, many-headed, many-bodied. The idea of a mysticism of (or between) persons is one by which contemporary theology is captivated (and this in addition to Buber's work). For example, a theologian writes: 'There is no point at all in blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union' (Zaehner, 1957, p.151). The erotic dimension is introduced purposefully: transference, incest, sexuality form one spine of analysis. This is how D. H. Lawrence describes lovemaking in Sons and Lovers: 'His hands were like creatures, living; his limbs, his body, were all life and consciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves.' Throwing out an idea for a future discussion, and leaning heavily on Bion (1970), may not the analyst also function as a mystic for the wider

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group of society as a whole, or some analysts so function within their own milieux? That is why it is so important to keep avenues of communication open to psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic mainstream to make sure that imaginal, analytical mysticism has a context and does not expend itself onanistically and nihilistically. So I will return to that mainstream for a while. In the way I have been writing about it, the mundus imaginalis has similar properties to what Winnicott called 'the third area', sometimes 'the area of experience', sometimes 'the area of illusion' (Winnicott, 1974). This area of the psyche lies in between external life and internal reality but both contribute to it. Of course, there are differences between Winnicott and Corbin. Corbin writes of a pre-existing intermediate dimension, Winnicott of the intermediate as a joint creation of both poles. Corbin's metaphor struck me more forcibly than Winnicott's as far as countertransference is concerned. But Winnicott evolved his ideas out of his study of what two people experience in a very special relationship. This means he had interpersonal activity in mind as well as his concern for the internal world. This helps flesh out my suggestion that we can speak of a two-person mundus imaginalis or of a mysticism of persons. What Winnicott writes of the third area repays attention: It is an area that is not challenged, because no claims are made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated (Winnicott, 1974, p.3). I will try to anticipate a few objections to what has been proposed. These could be on the traditional ground that anything to do with the archetypal must consist of the products of the collective unconscious. Mother, the analyst's anger, walking into a lamp-post — what have these to do with the objective psyche? I do not anticipate such an objection from those who have worked more deeply on what is to be understood as archetypal. Hillman, for instance, writes that 'archetypal psychology cannot separate the personal and the collective unconscious, for within every complex, fantasy, and image of the personal psyche is an archetypal power' (Hillman, 1975, pp.179-80). There, and in numerous other passages, Hillman has reached the same place as those who, from the developmental (Samuels, 1985) perspective, regard the personal and the collective as indivisible. The distinction is that, whereas Hillman searches for an archetypal perspective on the personal, developmental writers such as Williams are committed to a personal perspective on the archetypal (Williams, 1963). A further possible objection would be that the mundus imaginalis is too precise an explanation for reflective and embodied countertransference. These, it would be argued, are merely manifestations of the self (or

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Self) in its transpersonal guise, or the result of our collective unconscious heritage. I would agree that it is our joint and mutual connection to these factors that permits us even to discuss countertransference as communication. But this is insufficient as either description or explanation and may rest upon an idealisation of the self or the concept of the collective unconscious. Although it could be said that archetypal images have a power that enables them to be experienced as collective, I would prefer to say that images that turn out to be collective then generate an archetypal power. For another group of objectors, the concept of projective identification may be sufficient to explain the aspects of countertransference phenomena I have been discussing. However, projective identification, while undoubtedly playing a part in the formation of transference and countertransference, lacks something as an explanatory theory. In fact, as Meltzer points out, 'we are still in the process of discovering what projective identification "means". Meltzer's suggestion is that projective identification is an 'empty' concept, the result of an intuition of Klein's, and requiring clinical substantiation which, in the nature of things, will in fact be based on the use of the concept itself, for analysts cannot ignore it (Meltzer, 1978, pp.38-9). The mundus imaginalis hypothesis can be used alongside the concept of projective identification by postulating on what projective identification is based, and then what it is that enables its operation to take place. Using words from other disciplines, the search is, respectively, for the 'rhizome' that nurtures projective identification and for the 'ether' that facilitates its transmission. Such factors would, by definition, be 'objective' (that is, collective or nonpersonal) and also require distinguishing from projective identification as a defence mechanism for an individual, even with an extension of its meaning to include normal, lifelong mental functioning. By bringing in the images of the ether and a rhizome, I am trying to challenge the notion of empty space. We don't need to ask why projections travel, because they don't travel — the individuals concerned are already linked. It seems that the mundus imaginalis hypothesis fits in well with theories of personality development that postulate an initial togetherness, with fantasies of oneness. The baby in a state of being and the baby's objects are one (cf. Winnicott, 1974, p.80).

The interpersonal and the intrapsychic: on persons and images Up to now, I have been acting as matchmaker for two views of analysis and therapy: one empirical and the other poetic, one in which countertransference becomes the root of the analyst's technique of interpretation and one in which such a clinical confine is anathema. Fordham's technique with Hillman's vision? The offspring of this particular

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marriage confronts us with a fascinating problem: do we gain anything from our habitual division between the interpersonal (that is, relationship) and the intrapsychic (that is, image)? What the project showed is that the interaction of client and analyst and their relationship can be placed firmly within the imaginal realm without forgetting that there are two people present. An analyst can think, feel, or behave as if he or she were the client, and also he or she can function as a part of the client's psyche so that the mundus imaginalis becomes a shared dimension of experience. When we consider or reconsider our attitude to the division between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, there is no need to fear an abandonment of the human element. In fact, I would suggest that, in the same way that our notion of the intrapsychic, internal world includes the part played by relations with other persons, our definition of what is interpersonal may also be enriched and expanded. Then internal imagery becomes seen as linking two people, the client and analyst, and as fostering their relationship. It follows that to divorce work on the apparently imaginal and work on the apparently interpersonal is conceptually in error and practically limiting. For it is no longer a question of opposing an examination of interpersonal communication to an examination of the imaginal world. If the idea of a two-person mundus imaginalis is taken seriously, then we must regard the interpersonal in terms of psyche speaking, and the imaginal in terms of an avenue of communication between two people, a relationship. Persons may carry imagery; imagery may originate in persons. It is necessary to see our field of reference in analysis as seamless and continuous so that ostensible 'images' and ostensible 'interpersonal communications' do not get separated, nor one gain ascendancy over the other on the basis of a preconceived hierarchy of importance. The coin is three-sided; to body and image can be added relationship. This overlay between an interpersonal relationship and the intrapsychic image is addressed by Jung when he writes of alchemy, particularly in The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16). Looking at the woodcuts of the Rosarium, one finds it quite impossible to say with conviction that this is solely about a two-person process. Equally, what is being depicted is not just one person's individuation. The focus of enquiry includes both — the seamless field of reference mentioned just now This led Jung to say in a letter that 'the living mystery of life is always hidden between Two' (Jaffe, 1979). Or, put another way, the soul (says Jung) 'is the very essence of relationship' (CW16, para.504).

Countertransference and politics The title of this section is a bit enigmatic, so I will give my main argument in a nutshell. Psychotherapists and analysts have in their

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possession a precious attribute of which they may themselves be unaware, something that would deepen and enhance our idea of the political. I am referring to the evolving body of clinical knowledge and practice that I have been describing in the previous sections concerning the countertransference. I mean especially the clinical valuing of a practitioner's subjectivity as a royal road to the client's psychic reality. Now I am going to detach the countertransference and theorising about it from its clinical moorings and insert this professional jewel in a different setting: in the world of politics. I am going to politicise the countertransference. By so doing, I will reframe and revision clinical practice: as a

potential link between depth psychology and society and not as the source of an isolation of depth psychology from society (which is how critics of depth psychology usually depict its clinical project). The clinical can be a bridge to a new way to express and theorise political dissent. It will be a radical version of the clinical. Deconstruction of the opposition between the disciplines of depth psychology and politics leads to the advocacy of their occasional hybridisation. I hope to indicate a practical contribution that depth psychology can make to working through, in a positive but critical spirit, the insight of contemporary feminism that the personal is also political. That insight supports a political valuing of a citizen's subjectivity as a royal road to the culture's social reality. I want to underscore the analogy I have made: in the world of the consulting room, as we have seen, the move is from the analyst's subjectivity to an understanding of the client's psychic reality; in the world of politics, the move is from the citizen's subjectivity to an understanding of the culture's social reality. We can take a sentence from a clinical text like this one of Christopher Bollas's (1987, p.208) and rewrite it in more political terms: 'It is essential to find some way to put forward for analytic investigation that which is occurring in the analyst as a purely subjective and private experience.' It becomes: 'It is essential to find some way to put forward for political investigation that which is occurring in the citizen as a purely subjective and private experience.' Several art and literary critics have referred explicitly to providing therapy for an art work or text (Kuhns, 1983; Spitz, 1985). Some historians also seem to regard themselves as offering therapy to their topics of interest (Figlio, 1988). And the imagery of psychotherapy already permeates the environmental movement (ecopsychology). So it is not

absolutely necessary to have a client in human form in order to do psychotherapy and analysis. It seems clear that one cannot simply

evacuate the clinical element from so-called academic depth psychology. The clinical is the distinguishing feature of depth psychology. As John Forrester puts it, 'the conceptual system of transference-countertransference is built around the questions: What is an analyst? What is his or her desire?' (Forrester, 1990, p.240).

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I want to relocate the very idea of countertransference so that it lies

between clinical analysis and political analysis. For instance, I would say that, just as in clinical analysis, in political analysis the analyst's bodily reactions are an important part of the picture: the body is an organ of information. Bodily reactions to the surface of modern life, its sounds, smells, textures and shapes; bodily reactions to the demands of modern life, its crush, bustle, hassle and artery-blocking stresses. Bodily reactions, worked on and distilled in ways familiar to the clinical analyst, lead the political analyst to the heart of the 'culture and its political problems. The body of the political analyst leads in a spontaneous political analysis. Bodily reactions and an understanding of them are starting to figure in the clinical literature on countertransference. Can the body be an instrument of political analysis? If so, then it is to the 'wisdom' of the body that we must turn as one way of politicising what we know about countertransference. In existing political discourse, there is no psychologically valid account of how we can take fear, disgust, a sense of contamination, anger and all the rest of the somatic lexicon as indicators of our political judgments. It is up to depth psychologists to provide such an account, an account of the body as a discourse of power, even a record of power (especially in the case of the female body). Though a body-based analysis of political themes and problems will take place spontaneously, it is nevertheless possible to sketch out three stages or rather levels of a somatic analysis of the political. First, a thorough exploration of the bodily state, both the body as a whole and its constituent parts. I think this requires practice and training and an atmosphere and setting that is friendly to the enterprise. Second, we have to learn the particular language of the body when it engages in political discourse. We need to focus, clarify, differentiate and describe the somatic vocabulary and the bodily imagery. Third, we would make explicit the implicit meanings of such imagery in an act of interpretation. I believe a start has been made on each of these three stages or levels within the relatively new discipline of dance movement therapy (Chodorow, 1991; K. Stanton, 1991; Wyman, 1991, personal communication). I am arguing that analytic and psychotherapeutic method serves as a base for a form of political analysis, or approach to political problems, that goes far beyond the rationalistic limitations of much political theory. Political analysis that is infused with depth psychology is a way to make the personal political, highlighting the relationship between individual and society. Affect, bodily sensations, wild fantasy, are all reframed and re-evaluated as the tools of political analysis — just as, via our theorising about countertransference, they have been reframed and reevaluated as the tools of clinical analysis. Up to now, having empathy with a political problem has been seen from the standpoint of conventional politics as having an 'emotional'

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reaction to the problem (and nothing kind is meant by the word emotional in this context). Being emotional about politics is too often seen as being biased, unreliable, 'unsound', and sometimes even as having a 'feminine' attitude to politics (again, nothing kind meant by feminine here). My position is that, by accepting the parallels with countertransference in clinical analysis, the realism and utility of a politics that incorporates a subjective (and maybe an irrational) enquiry is established. There are many implications in the advocacy of a subjective politics, a politics over which hovers that charged word 'feminine'. A subjective politics is available to both sexes — as is an 'objective' politics — but this recognition needs to be coupled with a sense that one of the features of a subjective politics is to back up the necessity for women to find a collective voice in relation to a male-dominated social reality. A subjective politics, in which women may have a significant role, must surely mount its challenge to injustice and oppression in diverse ways according to personal, socioeconomic and other circumstances. This diversity lessens the chances of replacing one hegemony by another. Making a subjective politics enables us to look at how women are denied access to political power as well as working out how to marry subjectivity to political discourse. To paraphrase Juliet Mitchell, if femininity in politics is by definition subjective, feminism is the demand for the right to be subjective in politics (Mitchell, 1984, p.117). The 'masculine' cast of so-called objective political analysis may have its roots in the psychological need of children to move away from a dependent relationship with either mother or father or both. To help themselves achieve personal boundaries, some individuals tip over into a rather rigid attitude to the world with an accent on distance and precision. This comes through as political 'objectivity' and is experienced as incontrovertibly objective even when its objectivity is exposed by others as being a disguised subjectivity. There are many in politics with such an outlook which I see as having been adopted for identity-saving reasons and not as a rejection of the mother or of femininity (though it can look and has been theorised like that). The feeling of being politically objective imparts a bleak political strength. But those who continue to maintain their political objectivity are uncomfortable with feeling deeply involved in social and political problematics. They fear that muddled feelings will inevitably lead to a return to the parental corral. So politics can only be approached from outside, as it were, because staying outside avoids a merger with the parent/political problematic — a merger that is experienced as identity-threatening. Subjective politics will or will not come into practical being depending on whether the psychological seductions of political objectivity can be overcome. A question is bound to be raised concerning the untrammelled use of subjectivity in political discourse. Does this not lead to undesirable mass

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hysterias, such as Nazism or racism, or to markedly populist leaders such as Mrs Thatcher? And you want more of this? As far as mass movements go, I think the exact opposite argument can be made: that they destroy rather than foster the space for subjectivity in politics, in that mass movements are hostile to whatever is peculiar to an individual subject and his or her psychological functioning. Thinking of populist leaders, if one sees them as therapists of the world, then they resemble those guru-like therapists who approach their clients with assumptions as to what constitutes well-being and how to achieve it. We know that those kinds of therapists are not working out of countertransference at all, and nor are populist leaders like Mrs Thatcher. They are not responding to the client; they're imposing something upon the client out of their own systems of belief. Just as guru-therapists often get good results in the very short term, so, too, populist leaders seem to offer quick solutions to political problems. But, in both instances, before very long the complexity and incorrigibility of psychological or political problems defeats these magical cures. You could say that the problem starts to resist a solution that does not arise from itself — its history, its distinguishing features, its needs, its goals, and so forth. ;

Subjectivity and the politics of the sublime I believe that we can make an explicit link between how therapists and analysts actually work and what is needed in today's political world. My belief is that developing a psychological take on politics is not just an issue for the educated, chattering classes or for New Agers. Many people want to know how they can translate their heartfelt emotional, imaginative and bodily responses to Bosnia, to ecological disaster, to homelessness, to poverty everywhere, into action. How can they begin to make use of their private reactions to public events? Could citizens become therapists of the world, citizens-as-therapists? Closing the gap between private vision and public policy is almost the key background political issue of our times. It is certainly something mainstream politicians should pay attention to. But how can we translate our passionately held political convictions — shall we call them political dreams? — into something that actually works on the ground? Over the past few years, I have been running workshops and conferences on psychological approaches to politics in several countries. In this work and in my daily clinical practice I have concluded that people are much more 'political' than they thought they were. They know more about the political events of the day than they think they do — though this knowledge does not always take the form of a grasp of statistics or history. Gradually, participants discover that, all their lives, they have been living in a political world about which they had always been

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informed at some level. It has been fascinating hearing about people's first memories of political events, their first recognition that there is something one could call a political system, the first time that they had to face up to the fact that there are many competing ideas about how to run that system. Similarly, what often emerges in these events is that people do have more and stronger political commitments than they knew about — a kind of 'repression' has been in operation. These commitments need time to emerge and are not always found by signing petitions, going on demonstrations, or voting. These hidden, buried, silent sources of political wisdom lie in the private, secret 'countertransference' reactions everyone has to what is going on in the political world. Yet these private reactions have no ready outlet since they are all too often dismissed as 'subjective'. For example, at a workshop in New York, shortly after the Los Angeles riots in the 1990s, I asked a largely non-professional audience to dig up and record their emotional, fantasy, dream and physical responses to the riots. Unexpectedly, just doing this in a contained setting had a cathartic effect. The participants said that they had often reacted in a bodily or other highly personal way to political events. But they feared these responses would not pass muster in everyday political discourse. Their conception of politics fitted in with how our leaders would like us to define politics — as if it were an objective activity. At another workshop in Santa Barbara, California, the group chose to work with the theme of 'Homelessness in America'. That is, as citizensas-therapists, they were confronted with a client called 'Homelessness in America'. The audience on this occasion contained several people with backgrounds and experience in housing and related social policy areas. One thing that emerged is how rarely we do feel 'at home'; homelessness is, in a way, the more 'normal' state. Yet in industrial cultures, the fixed and stable home is always regarded as 'where we start from', in T S. Eliot's words. The process of the workshop destabilised this assumption as the participants renormalised homelessness. As far as policy went, it was felt to be essential to provide for periods of homelessness by, for example, making it easier rather than more difficult to drop out of emergency accommodation or housing programmes. Moreover, swapping arrangements would be needed allowing nomadic citizens to use temporary shelters geographically distant from programmes with which they were registered. (Such arrangements do not presently exist, we were told.) Other practical proposals included free depositories for possessions and some kind of ride-sharing scheme. These ideas came out of discussions that followed the citizens-as-therapists segment of the workshop. One other workshop on racism in Britain comes to mind. There were some specialists in race relations present. We started to get countertrans-

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ference images of pristine environments, such as mountain tops, beaches, lakes, all places where there were not only no black people, there were no people at all. The group started to reflect on this collection of similar subjective responses to racism as a 'client'. The group became aware of something more profoundly anti-human in racism than they had been aware of before. Most of the group adhered to a standard psychodynamic explanation for racism. You put your bad bits, the bits you would like to eliminate, into another person or group, thereby cleaning yourself up. But we found that racists actually want to eliminate themselves — either as well, or as a primary wish. It has been experiences like these that have led me to start to speak of the psychological citizen and of citizens-as-therapists. The aim has been to work out ways of exploring how things that are usually regarded as supremely private — early experiences in the family, dreams, fantasies, bodily sensations — may be reframed and turned into useful and even transformative political ends. Individual and society both benefit. In the workshop, the group chooses a political theme on which they want to focus. They relax, maybe lie down, and pay attention to their breathing. One person acts as a scribe. The participants say whatever comes into their mind in relation to the political theme, thoughtful, playful or fantastical, and also do their best to concentrate on and verbalise any bodily reactions they are having in response to the political theme. They should not censor anything but say whatever it is that comes up regardless of its irreverence, irrelevance or lack of political correctness. The scribe tries to write all of this down. Then the results are scanned and anything that is obviously rational (no matter how seemingly right) gets discarded. What is left may or may not fall into strands of imagery or ideas. Either way, the group discusses what is left and see if there is a pattern. When they have done this, they then have an 'ordinary' discussion on the political theme they have chosen, paying attention to what the exercise has contributed in terms of a greater sense of empowerment to deal with the problem. Notions of citizenship have changed quite dramatically over the past few thousand years. I think that what is emerging may be termed 'the politician within'. Similarly, the idea that citizens can (and do) approach the problems of the world in which they live as if they were its therapists and it was their client can be seen as a radical metaphor for a further shift in what we expect or imagine a citizen to be. One could say 'I am going to do my politics like an architect, acknowledging the need for foundations.' Or 'I am going to do my politics like an artist, seeking the image or phrase that opens up the door to a larger perspective.' Why should one not try to do politics like a therapist? This will be a difficult idea to stay with because it rests on imaginative notions such as that political problems want to communicate with us, their potential therapists. The problems are talking to us, the street is

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talking to us, the housing crisis, the problem of unemployment, civil strife — all are talking to us. Like any therapist and his or her client, both sides of the relationship — citizen and political problem — very much inhabit the same world. Instead of regarding the citizen as the client, which is what often happens when psychologists discuss politics, we can make the radical step of regarding the citizen as the therapist. The citizen then accesses whatever power therapists have. Moreover, recasting the citizen as a therapist means that the citizen is entitled to use whatever therapists do use in relation to their clients. When we start to look at people's spontaneous reactions to politicians, political events or just to the nature of the political in modern societies, what we start to see is that there is a kind of tacit, private, secret political intelligence and wisdom at work. There is a narrative and a critique of the world locked up in people's personal experiences of it. That is what feminism taught us. But this whole point becomes greatly expanded when we add that there are images and experiences of the world that we do not know we are having or have had; these take us even deeper into the political psyche.

Concluding reflections In this chapter, I have started to look at what depth psychology can contribute to an understanding of politics, working the field between the personal and the political. Depth psychology has always been interested in the world of politics and that the interest has burst into bloom in recent years as part of a more general attempt to resacralise and transform culture. The underlying fantasy is of providing a therapy for the world, and, if this is not taken too ponderously or concretely, the apparently inflated fantasy has considerable social utility. However, it is not in models of the psyche nor theories of development that the utility is found. Rather, it is clinical method in general, and the use of countertransference in particular, that depth psychology has to contribute to political discourse and to share with other disciplines. Countertransference theory is a validation of the subjective element when engaging with a particular political problem of theme. We need to pay attention to the countertransference communications given off by any particular political problem or theme for, as with individual clients, the communications given off will vary. Depth psychology can contribute towards a politics that has new ideas about managing the irrational creatively and, in so doing, depth psychology is true to its own roots and its knowledge that there are differing modes of consciousness. Russell Jacoby points out that the potential of depth psychology to frighten the institutions of an oppressive society has leached away: 'Over the years the ghost has become a ghost of itself' (1983, p.32). I will end the paper by completely reversing its poles. Instead of merely suggesting that depth psychology offer its work on countertrans-

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ference to the political world, let us also explicitly entertain the possibility that it is joint membership of, and participation in, a political order that makes the psychological experience of a countertransference reaction to the client possible in the first place. This is a political analysis that is intended to illumine the clinical process. Analyst and client are subject to the same repressive forces. There is no personal outside of the political; the political is itself a precondition for subjectivity. That is perhaps why there is so much politics in'clepth psychology, the profession of the subjective. The work I have done on a pluralistic approach to depth psychology (1989) has convinced me that there is a benign form of the politics and practices of the profession. So often, the opponent contains or represents the missing bit of oneself or what is needed to round out one's own idea. But what of possibly malign aspects of the politics and practices of depth psychology? If it is felt that the institutions and practices of depth psychology are technocratic and apolitical, how can they promote and contribute to a libertarian and progressive politics? I am not sure.

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Papadopoulos, R. (1991) 'Jung and the concept of the other', in Papadopoulos, R. and Saayman, G. (eds), Jung in Modern Perspective: The Master and His Legacy. Bridpon, Dorset: Prism. Plaut, A. (1956) The transference in analytical psychology. In M. Fordham et al. Techniques infringian Analysis (1974). London: Heinemann. Plaut, A. (1970) Comment: on not incarnating the archetype, in M. Fordham et al. (eds), Techniques inJungian Analysis. (1974) London: Heinemann. Popper, K. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Powell, S. (1985) 'A bridge to understanding: the transcendent function In the analyst', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 30, 1. Racker, H. (1968) Transference and Countertransference. London: Hogarth Press. Rayner, E. (1991) The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis. London: Free Association Books. Samuels, A. (1985) Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Samuels, A. (1989) The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father. London: Routledge. Samuels, A. (1993) The Political Psyche. London: Routledge. Slatker, E. (ed.) (1987) Countertransference: A Comprehensive View of those

Reactions of the Therapist to the Patient that may Help or Hinder the Treatment. Northdale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Spitz, E. (1985) Art and Psyche. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stanton, K. (1991) 'Dance movement therapy: an introduction', British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 54, 3. Stanton, M. (1997) Out of Order: Clinical Work and Unconscious Process. London: Rebus Press. Stein, R. (1987) 'Reflections on professional deformation', in M. Spiegelman (ed.), Jungian Analysts: Their Visions and Vulnerabilities. Phoenix, AZ: Falcon Press. Williams, M. (1963) (The indivisibility of the personal and collective unconscious) in M. Fordham et al. (eds), Analytical Psychology: A Modern Science. London: Heinemann (1973) Winnicott, D. W. (1949) 'Hate in the countertransference', in Collected Papers: From Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock (1958). Winnicott, D. W. (1963) 'Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites', in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth (1965) Winnicott, D. W. (1974) Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Zaehner, R. (1957) Mysticism: Sacred and Profane. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Letter to my Daughter

Chapter 10 Letter to my Daughter Dedicated to my father and all the men who have shared their lives as fathers with me 19 June 1994

PETRUSKA CLARKSON I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. I have wanted to tell you my story, but I could not then, perhaps I cannot even tell it yet. I never learnt how to tell my own story and so sometimes could not listen to yours. My tongue swollen as a gutted fish, my words mute, my gestures clumsy and unwieldy against the creamy white lace of your Sundays and birthday parties. I shouted when you reached out to me with your little arms, but I had the burden of the traffic and the responsibility of destination for us all and I missed you then as you may miss me now — but I hope not now, simply because it's too late, simply because the words are in another's mouth, simply because we are here together today — on this particular day. When you were little I told you other men's stories of other men's worlds in other men's words, reading hunched over together with my large blonde forefinger moving slowly under the patterns of black on the white pages until you wrested the meaning from me and the letters and began reading for yourself — and writing too — in time. I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. I am estranged from the people I love, held in thrall by a bitter Hera who turns the faces of my little ones away from me and shelters in the arms of my sons saying to me: you the abuser, the enemy the foreigner to our country our country of lilting language and delicate shades of sensitivities in feeling like the blue and green froth of love in a mist in the garden of a morning — the garden which I grew with my green fingers as she yielded to me her fruits and her jewels, 176

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her lusciousness of beauty, lasciviousness of lust, the delicacy of her preciousness. I seeded that garden, planted those trees, pruned these roses and came in for tea and she looked at me in my difference and the distance between us was impossible. But when you were born, I decked out the hospital in flowers, blue and purple bunches of grapes — Jacaranda flowers in the heat and the fear and the gracelessness as I rushed happy and joyful — a large dog with floppy ears in a white gown — my daughter, I have a daughter, my daughter, she who will love me for me for ever and ever as I will love her ... I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. They say that I left, but rather I was abandoned. I did try when they played over the dinner table and I was clumsy wanting you to feel my power frightened that you would not and helpless watching the moment spin out — I got put on a train when I was six years old and she was a shining golden star in my every day, my heart open to her like a window, like a peony, a broken pomegranate and when I cried at night in the dormitory of the silent sullen school, the burning in my eyes bled diamond droplets of shame they laughed and teased and raped me until I shut up and shut down. Finally left her after an endless nightmare of longing and not understanding how she of the golden kisses, the tumbling hair, the secret smells of flowers and fragrant flesh could have done this to me. But since she wanted me to be brave, I was — until they found me shivering behind the barracks twenty years later screaming as if hell had gaped as it did when his head, the head of my friend exploded next to me in a brightscarlet carnation being ripped apart and scattered liquidised by the hands of a vicious God. I've never really cried again. I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. They say I was not there, but rather I was, in a different idiom, a foreign tongue. I held you on my lap like a squirming cloud of life and I wanted to touch you there and there, in all your secret places, lay claim to your being mine, being your first lover, your first love and you jumped into our bed on a Sunday morning, playing on my legs until my hardness hurt me and I shrunk inside with loathing for my self, my animal rutting around my princess. I loved your skin, your shoulders in a schoolgirl's uniform, your sudden merriment, your inexplicable enthusiasms, the way you looked at me with such glorious admiration until a new awkwardness came upon us one day — you had been touched by the ancient mothers, the rites of womanhood, red and mysterious, pungent and I was hurt by your breasts budding under my eyes, disturbed and

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fascinated, too hungry to be allowed near you and I wanted to and I could not, it was forever too far — you would belong to other men or women even, in this way never to me. I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. I reached out to you across the gulf of oppositeness, the yearning like a flame-thrower in my heart, and missed you somehow when you fell and grazed your knees like speckled eggs of a wild bird, when you came home with your knickers wet because you forgot to go in time, when you first discovered betrayal in the eyes of your friends, the disappointment of a holiday cancelled on an adult's whim — I missed you somehow while being at work with the other men and some women but no children and I got used to their ways of talking and laughing and their ways of being and when I came home you were happy to see me sometimes, but you had made another, separate history. I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. I am the father flickering in the madness of a war-torn hospital leaving you as a baby. I am the father whose constant pain needs the insidious anaesthetic of a breastshaped bottle. I am the father who comes for your nightmare call to comfort you and ends up naked solaced by your sweetness, your compliance, your compassion for my little boy neediness. I am the father whose face is stern and stone implacable in my authority, being for you as for me, anguished and broken inside, doubt like a corrosive acid eating away at my façade. I am the father who starves for his children hacking a scrap of living from a barren desert land, cursing myself and your mother for our fleeting and forgettable joys. I am the father whose bitter marriage spun in barbed vows of custom imprison and chafe. I am the father who travels on business where my value is measured in airmiles and dollars, bringing home presents which can never counterfeit for my daily presence. I am the father who goes to war or to peace or to preach to other people's children because I have been exiled from the enchanted land and I have forgotten the language of the heart. Dear daughter, I want you to know that I love you as blossoms love the spring sky, as kingfishers are blue and stars are magical, I love you — mysterious fruit of my body, fragrant flower from my flesh, I love you and have always loved you in the moments of your sadness, your longings, your victories and your laughter. I wish you gentleness and passion, and a good harvest from your ships. I wish you better joy from your sons and your daughters. Sometimes I wanted to reach out to you and my arms were stupid with disuse, my heart quailing with the terrible danger of your close embrace. Look not to the surfaces of me, listen not to the

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misshapen creature of culture I have become, feel not my anger as against you, my boredom as from your life. You bring me myself in female form. Yet you are you. In truth, you touch me more deeply than any other force on earth, but I do not know how to tell you this. I am the father in exile whom they call the absent father. I am the first face of the male. Call me back.

Sublimely Sexual: Eros and the Sublimation of Desire

Chapter 11 Sublimely Sexual: Eros and the Sublimation of Desire THOMAS MOORE On my bed at night I sought him whom I love. I sought, but did not find him.

The Song of Songs Western culture has arrived at a point where it is programmatically and dedicatedly suppressing the sublime, reducing the natural world, the human body, and all aspects of individual and social activity to materialistic explanation and manipulation. Weiskel cites Freud, who . . . was definitely and remarkably immune to the sublime moment, whose 'oceanic' and daemonic guises he brilliantly exposed. To please us the sublime must now be somehow hedged with irony to assure us we are not imaginative adolescents. The infinite spaces are no longer astonishing; still less do they terrify. They pique our curiosity, but we have lost the obsession, so fundamental to the Romantic sublime, with natural infinitude. We live once again in a finite natural world whose limits are beginning to press against us and may well crush our children (Weiskel, 1976, p.6) Many who glimpse this situation ask why: How have we come to this point of view where we are thrilled when we discover a new gene, a materialistic and reductive explanation for beauty, longevity and even romance? Why is it that we build hospitals as places primarily of chemical and mechanical treatment of the body conceived as a purely physical entity? How have we transformed education into technical training, leaving the development of character and vision to the churches, which themselves are preoccupied with the historicity of their origins, social 180

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action, political agendas, counselling and increasingly feverish sectari-

anism? As a psychotherapist I never fully trusted the explanations for behaviour or emotions offered either by the client or myself. The question 'why', in the realm of cultural analysis as well, is usually a distraction or even an outright defence against deep engagement with the issue at hand. Some are impatient with the 'why' questions and in reaction turn to plain practicality: Let's not ask why we're in a predicament, let's get ourselves out. An alternative to this unreflective pragmatism is to explore the images and fantasies, the deep stories and mythologies that steep our imaginations in the defining and delimiting spirit of the times. If we have reduced medicine, education, politics and love to a physical and technological level, it's no surprise that sex, too, should be understood in reductive biological and interpersonal terms. We refer to sex as 'physical' love, as though it had no soul and offered no avenue to transcendence. Today much of religion gives the impression that sex and the erotic life are moral annoyances or even obstacles to an ethical and spiritual life. The sublime is frozen in these contexts in an ice-solid ideal of human behaviour and placed across the divide from human emotion, passion, aberration, and eccentricity. We want everyone to follow the same rules, at the same time, and on the same schedule. A dream I once heard from a client in therapy remains fresh in my memory. He dreamed he was in a small boat, sitting anxiously on the bow, watching the water a few feet from his eyes, when suddenly a snake-dragon raised its monstrous head from beneath the turbulent waves. The dreamer was horrified and panicked at the sight. On reflection, immediately he connected the dream to his childhood as the son of a stern and moralistic preacher who constantly warned him against sex. Now in his fifties, he was still trying to find sexual fulfilment in some measure, knowing well the loud voices of caution and repression. I myself was brought up in a warm and unconditionally supportive Irish-American Catholic extended family, the kind notorious for their mixed feelings and anxiety about sex. I know in my own blood the confrontation between extravagant desire, passion, and wish on one hand, and the ever-urgent need to be morally untarnished and to all appearances asexual. Certainly that is one reason why I respond so appreciatively to the dream-snake's epiphany. I know fully what it's like to be poised at the very edge of the vital waters of experience, wanting desperately to become acquainted with the animal life of the deep, but also dedicated to the dry existence of one destined for a different notion of the sublime that is placed at the very opposite end of the spectrum between Aphrodite and Jesus. We live in a culture dedicated exclusively to a secularistic, soulless, purely physical existence, where in reaction many cling desperately to their religious beliefs that are for the most part set against the perceived

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evils of the materialistic culture. Some feel disdain for institutionalized religion and so seek spiritual fulfilment in a wide variety of experiments. Oddly, in this configuration sex often appears as an obsession and yet offers little of its spiritual and soul richness. So the task is first to find some way toward an appreciation of the sublime in a culture blind to it in all but symptomatic and too literal forms, and then more specifically to discover a way of imagining sex where its spirituality and transcendent value come into view. Or, it could be that we might discover a revisioned sexuality as the route to a culture released from the limitations of its materialistic philosophy and antierotic moralism.

Sex and the end of isolation It's commonplace in modern conversation to hear a person talk about 'my sexuality,' as though it were akin to the colour of the eyes or hair or like a personal habit or trait. The expression betrays the first of two characteristic neuroses of the time: narcissism and depression. In a world where the sublime, however one defines it, is curtained off by a philosophy of literalism and materialism, there is nothing left of subjectivity except ego. No longer do we have nature nymphs, guardians, daimons, angels or spirits of place to help us survive. Steeped in the spirit of the times, we assume that the psychologists are right who advocate ego-strength, firm ego-boundaries and, another ego favourite, self-esteem. We judge those individuals and cultures weak and undeveloped who slip readily into trance, community, passion or florid fantasy. We speak blissfully of a once golden age when order and self-control precluded individual and social disarray. Yet, our ego-formed culture is weak in areas that might be strong in a less ego-defined society. If Hollywood is any indication, we don't tell stories well, but rather create narratives that convey our agendas and hopes more as propoganda than as art. We don't celebrate terribly well either, treating holidays, for instance, merely as opportunities to get away from work and home rather than as occasions for deeply felt ritual. Western centres of ritual have almost all become museums rather than living objects of pilgrimage. We have become isolated television devotees instead of communities of local talent and creativity. We have a culture-determined fear of 'mind-altering' drugs because we have taken away all ritual, lore, and priestly authority from the use of plants and because we have no way of contextualising an individual's release from ego wakefulness and restraint. These and many other methods of stretching and transcending the ego, commonly and skillfully carried out in non-materialistic cultures, all point in the direction of the sublime. They also move away from a self identified in ego terms, toward a notion of self defined in relation to

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some other, whether that other is the community, the all-important ancestors, or an indescribable presence that remains essentially unnameable and mysterious. The very movement away from the ego implies some notion of another and generates a life lived in ubiquitous dialogue rather than in lonely isolation. If we understand sex as an experience of soulless bodies or even egopersonalities, then naturally it will appear as an obstacle to the spiritual life. In the modern world there is no medium of connection between spirit and body, and so they remain antagonistic to each other. Quite naturally we separate church and state, belief and practicality, science and superstition. We discuss the problem of matter and spirit or mind and body, but we will never get far in the discussion without a mediating factor, which the Neoplatonists called soul. But once we move past a biological or interpersonal view of sex — this latter is still an egodominated notion — then a transcendent understanding of sex becomes possible, and we might imagine a moral attitude that is not defined by its aversion to the erotic. In sex the other person is not the final object of desire, but, again in a Neoplatonic view, is the route toward a more spiritual union. Many writers, especially those going back five hundred years and more, described the human person as a microcosm, a little world of infinite dimensions. If we agree with William Blake that the body is the soul as perceived by the five senses in our time, and with Nicholas Cusanus that a person is a mundus humanus, a human universe, then we can move quickly to a view of sex as a means of approaching the sublime. Our partner is then both the loved and satisfying immediate object of desire and at the same time the occasion for further entry into the mystical reaches of love and lust. In the rituals of sex — seeking a partner, being attracted, attracting, becoming personally acquainted, undressing, touching and exploring, speaking words otherwise kept private, showing and hiding, penetrating and being penetrated — we break out of our isolation and enter a realm of vast implication and revelation. Concretely, sex opens into selfdiscovery, partnership, marriage, children, family, progeny, community and work. It teaches the ways of the body and the intricacies of pleasure. It generates tangles and problems, overwhelming emotions and impossible desires. In all these many ways, all initiations into soul, sex leads us into innumerable and mysterious dimensions of life as well as into keenly felt intimations of eternity usually associated with an increase in sexual longing whose object begins to appear as transcendental. Sex accomplishes these things, but when our philosophy of sex is dominated by biology and interpersonal dynamics of an ego sort, we cannot make an art of the sublimely sexual. The spirituality of sex may remain uncultivated or felt and imagined in the most amorphous ways. In ritual, sculpture, song, poetry, and prayer religions have often elabo-

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rated on the sublime dimensions of sex, but we focus more narrowly and fail to see sex as a bridge (a common image of intercourse) between the temporal and the eternal.

Sex and sublimation According to the Oxford English Dictionary, etymologically sublime means 'up to the lintel' and over time has denoted height, upraised arms, lofty architecture, haughtiness, emotional elation, nobility, and refinement. For many centuries, of course, the sublime has been the object of incredibly complex analysis in literature and philosophy. Rather than enter that minefield of scholarship on the sublime that is full of insight and yet overwhelming in its nicety, I prefer to consider images of the sublime and connect it to sublimation in the alchemical sense as elucidated by C.G. Jung. Jung gives several fertile images for sublimation. He pictures it, for instance, as the ascent up a ladder and notes that the ancient Egyptians used to bury a person with a ladder: The initiations of late classical syncretism, already saturated with alchemy, were particularly concerned with the theme of ascent, i.e. sublimation. The ascent was often represented by a ladder; hence the burial gift in Egypt of a small ladder for the ka of the dead. (Jung, CW12, para.66). Shamans, too, sometimes carry ladders as ritual symbols of their spiritual comings and goings. The ladder is a connecting image, something like a bridge, and therefore represents the mediating work of the soul. The problem in modern life is not that we don't have a palpable physical existence or that we lack spiritual concerns and activities — we have both in abundance. What we need is a way to keep body and spirit connected and influencing each other. The body incarnates otherwise irrelevant flights of spiritual fancy, while the spirit gives material life vision, values and understanding. The ladder, of course, has its own place and value. The laddering soul works by imagination and heart. According to tradition, it is the factor that grants us our humanity. When our physical activity breathes with vivid imagination and poetry; its soul is evident and effective. When our religious and intellectual activities are full of heart and imagination, they evoke mystery, depth and human relevance. Whenever we try to find refuge on the solid ground of materialism or in the ether of abstraction and private revelation, we are stepping off the ladder where life is human. It's the human condition to be between heaven and earth, in the midrealm between a purely spiritual or intellectual existence and a plain literal one.

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According to Jung, soul has to be released from its containment in the material world, but he argues strongly against a purely intellectual approach that seeks understanding or explanation. He prefers the alchemical rotatio, a process of distilling that involves repeated turning and circling of the material. This he calls sublimation, even though it is not a direct, linear effort to extract spiritual value or meaning: . . . a process of distillation and sublimation which takes the socalled 'circular' form: the distillate is subjected to sundry distillations so that the 'soul' or 'spirit' shall be extracted in its purest state (Jung, CW12, para.165). Nor is it a `spiritualisation of matter', a phrase one occasionally comes across in well-intentioned efforts to reconcile vision and experience. During my practice of psychotherapy, it was not unusual for a client to say to me: Aren't you tired of hearing the same old stories and the same old complaints from me, week after week?' I would reply that I was perfectly content to hear those same old themes. I would really be thrown by something new I saw the very process of therapy as a rotatio, a constant turning over and around of experiences, thoughts and emotions. I didn't look for brilliant insights or grand revelations, certainly not full solutions to problems. I was happy to notice a fresh thought or insight suddenly fling out from the telling of an old story, or to glimpse an unfamiliar emotion or detail in the telling. Rotatio is a long process of refinement, a raising of dense matter to utterable language and depictable image. The hint of the sublime in sex might appear in a similar fashion. When a person falls in love, he or she may talk endlessly about the beloved. The lovers may write more letters to each other than each has ever written before. A prosaic person might suddenly become a poet or a songwriter. These are all forms of rotatio, lifting the strong emotions into the realm of fantasy and image where they can be contemplated and deeply considered. There, on reflection, we may see hints of the immortal dimensions of our desire, love and relatedness. The formal letters of Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century Italian Neoplatonist, are filled with references to the infinite and mystical elements in our earthly loves and friendships, and the letters of Erasmus quickly move from personal anecdote to genuine philosophy. Repetition in sex may also be a creative form of rotatio, the repetitiousness creating the air of ritual so important in matters of love. Like listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, so in sex it isn't enough to do it once. Each performance offers a new, subtle revelation of oneself, one's partner, and the mysteries of human intercourse in the broadest sense. In repeated sex we find body, soul, personality, beauty, emotions of love, forms of union and self-reflection always presented with a slight epiphany. Each repetition is one piece in the work of sublimation, an

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inching toward the sublime, which by definition may always be out of reach. The ever-elusive sublime keeps the soul engaged in its bodily rites and poetry that reveal the subtle contours of one's humanity. The sublimation of sex is a civilising work that affects not only the individual but the community as well, as each individual's passions translate into art, work and broadening love. Generally the artist enjoys presenting erotic material for our contemplation, as art keeps sex on the sublimating wheel. The artist seems to know that sex is one of the rare and powerful means of breaking through the skin of social convention and literal explanations of the world. The artist doesn't merely stand in the literal world as an expert talking about sex; the artist gives us a bona fide sexual encounter with a painted, sculpted or dramatised figure, while at the same time sublimating that figure into an image for reflection. The sublime is in many ways also liminal, a threshold perception, a midrealm as unstable as a ladder where we are neither fully in life nor fully out of it. This may be one reason why our society is suspicious of it. It prefers fact to fiction, theory to art, and conclusion to discussion. To honour the sublime is to make one's way toward it, on the ladder or bridge of poetics, giving oneself to one's vision without factual certainty but with the security of one's deep intuition and openness to what is continually revealed to a guileless heart. The ancient Greeks and Romans described the Aphroditic dimension of sex as profoundly engaged in beauty, ornament, adornment, oils, garment, jewelry, coiffure, gesture, dance, precious metals and stones, colour and flowers. These are all extraordinary examples of the blending of nature and imagination, objects and poetry. Perhaps we moderns are often blind to the sublimely sexual because we overlook these elements, denigrating them as mere frills, missing the point that adornment and the rest are essential to sex. They civilise sex, wrapping it in imagination, humanizing an otherwise biological enterprise.The Kama Sutra, like many sex manuals from around the world, teaches the importance of cultivating a sexual imagination, making of sex a highly elaborated art. Imagine a class in sex education that toned down emphasis on the biology and interpersonal elements in sex and instead followed the lead of the Kama Sutra, exploring the varieties of oil, fragrance, colour and texture conducive to a sexual environment. The sublimation of sex from biology to art demonstrates a concern for the sexual sublime. We can approach the sublime through religion and the fine arts or even through business and other aspects of ordinary life, including and especially sex. We have not yet succeeded through our modernism in ridding sex of passion, fantasy and Platonic madness. It still takes us beyond the perimeters of the normal and the sanitary and allows us to glimpse the mysterious, the unexplainable and the absolutely desirable.

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Mystical sex The literary critic Harold Bloom summarises Ralph Waldo Emerson's view of the sublime in this simple sentence from Emerson's essay 'Circles': 'For every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts, — I and the Abyss' (1976, p.225). Sex allows us to peer into that abyss in at least two ways: it offers the promise of bliss and the satisfaction of desire — indeed sex is the epitome of all desire — and it often takes us to the edge of disillusionment and despair. A person may be led inta marriage, for instance, by seemingly omnipotent sexual desire, only to find in that state profound suffering and stagnation. Discussion of the sublime must lead eventually, as it does in the classical literature on the theme, to its dark side, the via negativa through pain and failure. The unfortunate side of the mystic's calling is to find divinity only after all human effort of thought, love and work have proven ineffective. Both sex and mysticism share the necessity of the soul's dark night. The mystic may try to incorporate the awareness of human limitation into the mystical process, as when the Zen master recommends a 'beginner's mind' and the complete circumvention of logic, but still the necessary initiation into incapacity comes at an emotional and ontological price. The second of the major neuroses of modernism, depression, finds its place. Without the bleak, grey, dark and black saturnine modality of depression all perceptions of the sublime stand the risk of sentimentality. Depression gives our thoughts their defining dark edges just as the sun makes perception real by casting shadows. Personally, I have found inspiring reflections on the sublime in the American transcendentalists, but also in the fiction and essays of the Marquis de Sade. Sade exposes the darkness of desire, though he has been read most often perhaps as the advocate of dark behaviour. I read Sade, as I do Samuel Beckett, as warning us not to surrender to even a modicum of sentimentality when we take on the role of adept and look for a way to see beyond the limits of human reason and prejudice. Constructively, Sade teaches us first to deliteralise evil, making a distinction between evil desire and evil action, affirming the role of dark desire in the most genteel of people. Then he instructs us to glimpse how antisocial and unsentimental desire keeps the facade of personality open, open to the influence of being itself, not to deny the power of current mythologies that frame one's sense of meaning and one's perspective, but to keep that perception diaphanous and porous. The American sublime, as Bloom points out, is sometimes imagined as the 'transparent person', who in Wallace Stevens is the one who 'in a million diamonds sums us up'. Georges Bataille plainly asserts that eroticism always requires a transgression, and not surprisingly he writes approvingly of Sade's fundamental vision:

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In human terms the taboo never makes an appearance without suggesting sexual pleasure, nor does the pleasure without evoking the taboo (Bataille, 1986, p.108). Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency. (ibid., p.92). Human culture is in part a defence against the fullness of vision that would render a portion of all our lives mystical. Breaking the rules is itself often sexually pleasurable, and, as Bataille says, sexual pleasure requires a breaking of the rules. Our defences are transgressed in moments of mystical and sexual penetration. The picture of the adept sticking his head through the perimeter of the known world is at some level a sexual image of intercourse. Worlds collide, but they also have sex. The bedroom is an oratory. It may take a pagan attitude to restore an appreciation of the mysteries of Aphrodite, Dionysos, Hermes and the other deities explicitly associated with sex and so see the role of sex in transcending the self and penetrating through cultural constructs, to esteem the sexual path to mystical vision. Having been practised, taught and theorised extensively in India, this is not a new idea, but it is one that has been egregiously and dangerously overlooked in the West. Unconsciously absorbed in modern thought, we feel two strong hungers: one for profound spiritual fulfilment and the other for deep sexual satisfaction. We don't seem to notice how close these longings are to each other or even to suspect that the pursuit of one may deal with the other. We have considered the reality behind the phrase 'sublimely sexual' as an oxymoron, and we have failed, in our distrust of eros, to recognise the spiritual potentiality of sex. The temptation is to try to fulfil both the spiritual and the sexual longings literally. We look for the right church and the right mate. An alternative is to incorporate a mystic's sensibility into our way of being, appreciating the limitations of human knowledge and human accomplishment. The right church or spiritual guide may well set us on our own path into mystery, while the right partner or mate might satisfy at a human level and at the same time feed the longing for more-than-human intercourse. We also need what many cultures have had and still have: imagery for the sexually sublime. We need the poetry that respects impossible love and ever unsatisfied desire. We need stories that show glimpses of love's transcendent possibilities. We need paintings that depict the desirable human body as a microcosm, educating our so-called prurient reactions in the transcendent sexuality of which they are embryos and intimations. At one time in European history, the naked Venus was the celestial one, while the clothed version represented the vulgar or common goddess. Salome takes off her seven veils one at a time in a lascivious dance in which some see an echo of the Gnostic myth of the soul's descent and

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ascent. Coming down into human life, the soul visits the planets one by

one, being clothed in the garments of each. To return to its original, pristine state, in an upward movement motivated by mystical longing, the soul disrobes in a highly sensual, sublimating dance that reveals the role of the sexual arts in the soul's ascent. Around the world the breasts and the vulva have been honored in art that is explicitly sacred because they have absolute importance and relevance to the life of the soul. The phallus has been central in religious art and ceremony because it, too, speaks profoundly to the very foundations of a life of meaning and emotion. Spiritually motivated perhaps, people have moralistically criticized sexual imagery of this kind, but without it, we have lost the sexual path toward the sublime. We don't take seriously what many express with perhaps too much sentimentality: the body is a temple. Do we fear sex, or are we too frightened at the prospect of the abundance of life that lies outside the perimeter of the mythology of modernism? Are we terrified by the possibility of the sublime? Which is more frightening: Life or sex? Or are they so implicated in each other, so representative of each other, that to fear one is to seek protection from the other? It isn't easy to see why we retreat from the sublimely sexual. People ask: Why do we have such a soulless culture? They also ask: Why do we place so many rules around sex? I suspect that the answer to both questions is the same. We have discovered over time that we can tame our world and feel secure by hiding from the potential vitality and vibrancy of a fully incarnated life. We can avoid this vitality through the defences of intellectualisation, technologisation and tight moralistic control of behaviour. We can imprison deviancy, hospitalise insanity and institutionalise what Jung called the instinct for spirituality. To create a culture responsive to the spontaneous imagination of the soul and to the needs of the heart would ease anxiety and diminish repression, and it might inspire genuine ethical living in stark contrast to moralistic control over desire. This erotically based culture would not see sex as an obstacle to the ordered life but as its source and inspiration. Sex would not be the enemy of spirituality but rather its major ally. Still, it's difficult to imagine Western technological culture making a fundamental shift to soul and soul's major dynamic, eros. In the foreseeable future we will likely remain dedicated to a view of nature as a commodity and sex as biology, thereby suffering the continued desexualisation of culture while continuing to repress and ignore the sublime possibilities of our sexual lives. Spirituality will remain at odds with the body and with sex. Not understanding the interplay of sex and spirit, we will continue to be mystified at the spectacle of spiritual leaders, priests and gurus being exposed for their sexual deviancies. The issue of the sublimely sexual goes to the heart of modern living. It affects everything we do and everything we make. It affects marriage,

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industry, politics, religion and art. It is implicated in every hour of psychotherapy and in every business decision. It is nothing less than the urgent task in which the body seeks intimacy with the spirit through the mediating power of the soul's sexual poetics.

References Bataille, Georges (1986) Erotism: Death and Sensuality (tr.Mary Dalwood). San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Bloom, Harold (1976) Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jung, C.G. Collected Works, Vol 12, 2nd edn, 1968 (eds H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, tr. R.F.C. Hull) London: Routledge. Weiskel, T. (1976) The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 12 Of Castles and Melts; Dickens and the Dark Sublime: the uses of creativity -

ANDREA DUNCAN On 17th July 1949, Lacan gave his revised version of 'The mirror stage' in Zurich, a suitable terrain for the strikingly Jungian metaphor he was to draw upon to illustrate the formation and limits of the subject: the formation of the I is symbolised in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium — its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips. Lacan continued: on the mental plane, we find realised the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis. .. Jung was to draw upon the same metaphor of fortification, in the form of the castle, as a repeated metaphor for the Self. Here, from the 1951 'The Structure and Dynamics of the Self' Jung writes that the castle: 'emphasizes 'the ego's containment in the greater dimension of the self'. 2 The earlier (1950) 'Concerning Mandala Symbolism' refers to the castle as a mandala in its quadratic or circular form. The mandala, as Jung points out, has the effect of 'reducing confusion to order' and 'in connection with chaotic psychic states of disorientation or panic'. 3 The castle therefore defends the hard-won ground of psychic identity against the anxiety of annihilation, a fortified place, surrounded, as in Lacan's analogy, by the detritus of death: what has been overcome or excluded in this struggle. In the current volume 12 of the complete works, Psychology and Alchemy, which is based principally on two lectures given by Jung in 191

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the mid-1930s and first published together in the present form in 1944, there is an illustration which could have been used by Lacan himself. The image is of 'baneful spirits' attacking the 'impregnable' castle. These, visualised as forces of nature: water, wind and pestilence coming from all corners, are in their equivalences not far removed from the marsh and rubbish tip of Lacan's metaphor, but with the energy of the neurosis animating the forms. Jung's castle is used, however, with reference to the Monad, and in relation to Jerusalem, which as metropolis, Jung regards as feminine: the 'mother city'. 4 In relation to the self, the distinction, symbolically, which Jung seems to be making between the castle and the city can be deduced from their historical development and function and from the underlying human predicament and aspirations which produced them. The castle defends against intrusion: it is impregnable. The city, on the other hand, is a place of exchange, a place of openings and opportunities, full of holes: pregnable. Regarding the formation of the 'I', Marina Warner, in Alone of all her Sex and partly influenced by the earlier work of Mary Douglas (as Kristeva was to be later), discusses the importance in the Middle Ages of female virginity, for it was that condition which was considered closest to masculinity, closest to being a whole, well-defended form. Warner emphasises the concomitant abhorrence of leakage — of openings and fluids, in a word, of the transgression of boundaries — the virgin was a 'fountain sealed'. 5 Kristeva was to take this up later in her development of abjection, of the powers of horror which contact brings, as in her often quoted example, of experiencing the skin forming on milk; 'the abject has only one quality of the object — that of being opposed to I'. 'This investigation of the abject mother, leads Kristeva back to the mother of prehistory, arguing: 'fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power" In the subject's efforts to separate from and exclude, Kristeva considers the 'pure' and 'impure' in the formation of the 'I' and in its social construction; if we return to consider Lacan's fortress which stands proud of the terrain, it suggests a well-defended phallic identity, which the city, with its openings and human throng, has difficulty maintaining. Indeed, street plans with their round-aboutness and doubling-back (in which the traveller can become lost) reminds one of an intestinal tract given over to commercial digestion. Historically, the city, outside tribal, religious and familial organisation, and built upon the commercial necessity of exchange, has invited a fudging of boundaries in the rough and tumble of trade. At the level of the street, there has always been the greatest threat to identity, of life at the level of the gutter. Kristeva asks '[does) defilement reveal, at the same time as an attempt to throttle matrilineality, an attempt at separating the speaking being from his body in order that the latter accede to the status of clean and proper body?. . . It is only at such a cost that the body is capable of being defended, protected — and also, eventually, sublimated'. 8

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Rituals of cleanliness relate to ritual separation and the abject is always that which raises the spectre of the Other. For Kristeva incest dread as such, for this is what we are addressing, is based on the 'uncertainties of primary narcissism . . . where the subject fluctuate[s] between inside and outside . . . find[ing] death along with nirvana'. 9 Throughout the chapter 'From filth to defilement', Kristeva is conscious of what is owed to Melanie Klein, but she refers more often to Freud and in moving her attention to ritual defilement, to whit is taboo, she considers: 'the purification rite appears then as that essential ridge, which, prohibiting the filthy object, extracts it from the secular order' thus a distinction is set up between 'the self and clean" 0 and the unclean — the abject unsymbolised Other. Neither is loss of identity in remembered union with the mother her only threat — but her very generative power through which comes her maternal authority— her ability to create again and again and to lose her offspring's identity in her very fecundity. Here, in the teeming, fragmented experience of the city, is that generative power which threatens at every point to demolish the carefully constructed castle of specific selfhood. Anthony Vidler, drawing upon Freud's development of the theme of the unheimlich, focuses upon the disquiet which the city of the late twentieth century arouses, for as it strives towards the 'clean and proper' body, so it uncovers its defilement. Vidler comments: The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the ... wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture . . . has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition. Its apparently benign and utterly ordinary loci, its domestic and slightly tawdry settings, its ready exploitation of an already jaded public, all mark it out clearly as the heir to a feeling of unease first identified in the late eighteenth century. " The 'clean and proper' organisations of the city which were undertaken in the vast constructions of the nineteenth century, with their rational and systematic solutions, always, however, included the closeness of contagion and an underbelly of detritus left behind in their wake — an effluent which persistently soiled the aspirations of the clean and proper subject. This awareness of an underbelly appears in novels from the same period. These narratives, centred as they increasingly were in the teeming metropolitan cities, raised all the unfinished business of identity's boundaries. Nothing threatened the fragile happiness around the domestic hearth more thoroughly than the unheimlich, dank horrors of pestilential pollution, or the threat of sudden violence rising like a tide from the disenfranchised masses.

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Craig Owens, writing in 1983 of the other within postmodernist culture, refers to the pluralism which 'reduces us to being an other among others'.' 2 Yet a hundred years earlier, in the teeming cities of nineteenth century Europe and America, with so many displaced populations, there was already an experience of the other as Other. Consider the shifting of populations in the Whitechapel area of London, which developed rapidly in the nineteenth century. Whitechapel, sited literally outside the city wall on damp and marshy ground was a first shore to the waves of immigration which swept in from all over Europe throughout the century. For William Acton, writing in 1857, Whitechapel was an 'atrocious slum"' an area linked to the worst levels of poverty and with it, crime and prostitution of the most miserable kind. Whitechapel was not the only area of London to combine extremes of poverty with prostitution, Henry Mayhew lists four in his 1862 survey" but between 31 August and 8 November 1888, a series of five murders took place in Whitechapel which were to link it for ever to human deprivation, and which in the definition of the word 'deprivation' as being deprived of, as loss, was to be uncannily specific in presenting a glimpse of the Victorian underbelly as female and particularly, as abject. The murders became known as those of lack the Ripper' and were characterised by a horrific level of mutilation. All the victims were women, aged between twenty-five and forty-seven. All were prostitutes and living in dire circumstances on a few pence a day — frequently without food and living on the streets when they hadn't threepence for a night in a lodging-house. All the women had known better lives, and all had either been married or had been, at one time or another, involved in long-term relationships. They all drank heavily and were known in the local public houses, which like the back-street shops and pawnbrokers' stores, remained open day and night. The murders took place during the hours of darkness, and two murders took place on the same night, 30 September. All but one involved horrific violence. Three involved the laying out of the inner parts, with the womb being the specific target. In two of the killings this was removed from the scene of the murder. Four of the women were found dead at the level of the dirt street; mistaken at first sight for heaps of rags or offal. In the concretisation of the murderer's unconscious what did each death reveal, in all its abjection, but the soft and liquid origin: the uterine fluid map where identity 'writ on water"' remains precariously insubstantial. Kristeva notes, with reference to the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine: we are seized at that fragile spot of our subjectivity where our collapsed defences reveal, beneath the appearances of a fortified

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castle, a flayed skin; neither inside nor outside, the wounding exterior turning into an abominable interior. . . . A universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of the subject and its objects, fears and struggles, abjections and lyricisms. At the turning point between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder. 16 The Whitechapel of 1888 conjures up Dickensian London, but by 1888 Dickens had been dead 18 years. Yet all the horrors of that later Whitechapel are summoned up for us in the visual mise-en-scene of Dickens' world: we cannot see Whitechapel but through Dickens' eyes. The close contagion of the other is a continuing feature of Dickens' literary style; in the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, completed in 1853, the city's unfathomable horrors are conjured up in the form of an antediluvian monster, in which the city's underbelly, as it was to be later in the Whitechapel murders, becomes flesh. In the passage here, Dickens is struggling with an unsymbolised Other: As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle. . . Fog everywhere . . . The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. . . . Thus in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. ' 7 What moves in the midst of the fog — the 'carboniferous fog' as it was described in Victorian times, before we encounter Chancery? Is it, in Merleau-Ponty's words, 'a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds'?"3 And what rises to stand above and distinct, in a similar metaphor to Lacan's, but instead of the fortress, it is more subtle: the 'High court of Chancery' stands upon the mud — and rising above it, still farther, and fully formed, the 'Lord High Chancellor'. Yet Dickens cannot avoid irony and there is a Mephistophelean play on words, between 'mud' and `mlud'. Dickens here creates an ambiguity between on the one hand, male identity and the law, and the damp root from which they spring. If we ponder on the latter, and consider this in the light of the reptilian underbelly with its vast intestinal tract to which it is for ever in thrall, we are reminded of the first underbelly and the nature of the law's curse:

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And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. 19 In this condensation of belly and the law, birth and death are united in a peristaltic embrace, for the belly which swells in mammalian pregnancy is in the gorged serpent the swelling of death. In looking closer at the belly, to the organ of confusion, where one man's meat is in process of becoming another man's poison, we return to its dampness, its plumbing, to its digestion and to its uterine backstreets and entries; to the limits of the speaking subject. If we turn our attention to an earlier work of Dickens, the novel Martin Chuzzlewit published between 1843 and 1844 when the novelist was 32 years old, we find a subterranean character who is a model of digestive rapacity: But now I says, 'my half a pint of porter fully satisfies; perwisen, Mrs. Harris, that it is brought reg'lar, and draw'd mild. Whether I sicks or monthlies, ma'am, I hope I does my duty, but I am but a poor woman, and I earns my living hard; therefore I do require it, which I makes confession, to be brought reg'lar and draw'd mild. 20 With this introduction to Sarah Gamp (the mouth opens and closes three times to say her name) there is encapsulated the range and fullness of her abjection: this Gamp between a 'laying-out 'and a 'lyingin' is nothing but belly; for the 'sicks' are the death beds she presides over and the 'monthlies' are the child-beds she attends. Gamp is, according to Dickens either at 'the close of life' or 'the other end' 21 and in his development of her the focus remains on the belly, for she eats her way from one end to the other: she is a devourer and swallower. Drunk and incapable, she presides at both ends of life as she does at both ends of the person, at what Kristeva would call: 'the doors of the feminine'. 22 Furthermore, Gamp is dramatically set up as impure; she does not recognise defilement. Dishevelled and dirty of person, she eats in the presence of fever, uses the pillow of the infectious sick for her own comfort and in laying the dead out, takes their clothes. All her considerations are material ones — the whole focus of her life is material and in material we return to the mother's root — to mater. Gamp takes her place in a long line of slovens who reach back into antiquity. Semonides, writing around 600 BC, has already located her in muck: God from the first created diversely The minds of women. One from a bristly sow

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He made, within whose house the goods and chattels Lie filthy, tumbling higgledy-piggledy, While she, the slattern, dressed in dirty clothes Sits in her muck and fattens. 23 In Gamp [her name rhymes with 'damp'] the slattern reappears with no sense of the clean and proper body, no sense as Kristeva remarks of the 'pure/impure distinction [which] orgahises differences, shaping and opening an articulation that we must indeed'call metonymic, within which, if he maintains himself there, man has a share in the sacred order.'" Gamp is a defiler, denying man his proper dignity. We are introduced to her amidst another character's discomfort; a Mr Pecksniff, gentleman and architect, who must fetch this crone for the purpose of attending to the dead. Dickens places Pecksniff, a stranger, in a compromising place, surrounded by women in the street, all of whom assume Pecksniff to have found himself in this back alley consequent to some earlier connubial partnering; a coupling which has resulted in the woman now being upon childbed. At every point he is confused and confounded and from every direction comes female advice:

Knock at the winder, sir, knock at the winder. Lord bless you, don't lose no more time than you can help; knock at the winder !' Acting upon this suggestion, and borrowing the driver's whip for the purpose, Mr. Pecksniff soon made a commotion among the first floor flower-pots, and roused Mrs. Gamp, whose voice — to the great satisfaction of the matrons — was heard to say, 'I'm coming'. 'He's as pale as a muffin', said one lady, in allusion to Mr Pecksniff. 'So he ought to be, if he's the feelings of a man.' 25 This scene, which was illustrated by Phiz, so replicates anxieties underlying the sexual act itself, done as it is here in public and for the delectation of a wholly female audience, that it farcically encompasses male confusion — at the door of the feminine. It also reverses the exalted male clean and proper body— the fortress, in an inversion; Pecksniff [his name might give a clue] is submerged in the detritus of the street — awash in a sea of low-class women. This archetypal scenario, and the farce which relieves its darker anxieties, was already encapsulated in ancient Greek comedy. Vase painting of the fourth century BC depicts comic scenes of this kind in which, for example, Zeus and Hermes struggle with a ladder to climb up to a woman's window and from which she can be seen smiling knowingly. In these comedies the usually firm and muscular gods are represented as soft and flabby; the same folding shrinking stuff of abnormal transformation discussed by Lacan in Anamorphosis.26

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Interestingly, in Pecksniff's nineteenth-century encounter, the ladder is replaced by a whip. Dickens' discomfort with Gamp expresses itself in humour," but his horror of her emerges real enough. Later in the novel, she stands at the bedside of the sick and feverish Lewsome: Mrs Gamp solaced herself with a pinch of snuff, and . . . By degrees, a horrible remembrance of one branch of her calling took possession of the woman; and stooping down, she pinned his wandering arms against his sides, to see how he would look if laid out as a dead man. Hideous as it may appear, her fingers itched to compose his limbs in that marble attitude. Ah!' said Mrs. Gamp, walking away from the bed, 'he'd make a lovely corpse' 28 .

A few sentences further on and Gamp is ordering pickled salmon and cucumber [which she pronounces `cowcumberl a 'wakeful' ale and her allowance of a `shilling's worth of gin'. Michael Slater in his Dickens and Women refers to biographical material, which, with regard to the above scene, I find relevant here. Slater quotes from a letter Dickens wrote to a friend referring to a dying servant and describing the attentions given to the sick man by his wife: that diabolical wife and her sister, being left last night to watch him, got blind drunk together on Gin - omitted everything they had undertaken to do - dropped Gin and God knows what over his poor dying figure. . . . I tumbled her out of the sick chamber just now, and will at least . . . have done with that abominable wretch. 29 Slater points to Dickens' particular use of 'diabolical' and `abominable' and with regard to Kristeva's investigations of purity and defilement this use of language is significant. A further point can be made: Dickens' horror at this obvious defilement overshadowed any concern he might have for the wife and her place at the husband's deathbed. In this he regards the wife no higher than the fictitious Gamp: dispensable, one of an itinerant band of immoral women who for sums of money would place themselves in positions where affection and family responsibility should have caused a loved and respectful member to be. Interestingly, William Acton describes the prostitutes of the Whitechapel brothels as similarly 'stupid from beer or fractious from gin, they swear and chatter brainless stuff all day'. 3 ° In Dickens' reaction to his servant's wife's behaviour, is it the drunkenness which produces the defilement? or is it the subsequent `dropping of Gin and God knows what over his poor dying figure'? Dickens seems to conflate Gamp and the woman described above, reading their similar behaviour as portentous of

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something more deeply fallen and irredeemable. Kristeva in her chapter `Semiotics of biblical abomination' points to the crucial element of the dietary domain in the system of differences and further, connects this in a relationship to the purity of place in any masculine approach to the inner sanctum of the temple. Kristeva refers to Leviticus: `Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee . . . that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean'. 3 ' Neither blood may be brought in,- or strong drink, to the inner temple. The wife and the fictional Sarah Gainp therefore personify defilement - impurity in the presence of the clean and proper. With Gamp, the pure/impure distinctions which define difference break down. Those necessary distinctions, as Kristeva has argued `within which, if he maintains himself there, man has a share in the sacred order'. Gamp compounds this defilement with the unclean aspect of the childbed and its reference again to the belly of origin. Not only does Gamp attend the childbed, but she embodies matrilineal 'dietary abominations' 32 and brings them with her, literally and metaphorically soiling the male place [all her patients are men], with her irreverent eating and drinking. The `dropping of gin and God knows what' sums up the moment of man's greatest vulnerability - a defilement which so unnerved Dickens in its anticipation of events: in the slipping away of life towards corruption. Man's vulnerability in the hands of the Great Mother is finally presented as a strange comic mockery in the scene in which Dickens has Sarah Gamp dressing the invalid Lewsome. Her cruel handling of the young man in support of Mrs Prig [again a name to conjure with] includes poking at his eyes in the rough adjustments made to his hair and collar. Lewsome, still weak from sickness, remarks that he feels he is in someone else's clothes and Gamp is accused of having, regarding Lewsome, 'odd notions of a gentleman's dress'. 33 (At this point we might remember the state in which the Whitechapel women were found: their skirts hauled up above their waists, nothing but heaps of rags and offal.) Yet Gamp contains, in her depravity, a conundrum: in her swallowing and rapacious belly is an analogy with the alchemist's pelican vessel; the distilling vessel. As Jung reminds us, The purpose of distillation in alchemy was to extract the volatile substance or spirit, from the impure body . . . It might have taken place in the vessel called the Pelican where the distillate runs back into the retort. This was the 'circulatory distillation' much favoured by the alchemists. By means of the `thousandfold distillation' they hoped to achieve a particularly 'refined' result." Gamp is nothing if not persistent in her imbibing and is forever involved in 'circulatory distillation', but it remains a diabolical one. If we begin to

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look upon her as an archetypal structure living at the level of the everyday (I use Andrew Samuels' phrase"), then Gamp takes on a different hue. Horrifying hag though she is, by her very energy and ability to turn her own face towards the abject she offers herself as a redemptive figure; remaining forever lusty in life while so much death is all around her. She is that which endures while she is that thing which cannot be endured. Represented as a superb hypocrite throughout the novel, completely blind to her own weaknesses, Gamp is routed at the end in a devastating denunciation by the elder Martin Chuzzlewit. This eponymous novel which has throughout dealt with two Martin Chuzzlewits at odds with one another, fulfils in the denouement the redemption of both men. That there is no redemption for Gamp, suggests that in creating the character, Dickens raised the problem of the other (and that which lurks unsignifiable below) but could not resolve it. Instead, Gamp is excluded from the general largesse - and the jouissance of familiarity in the novel's final pages. Dickens' own clean and proper self emerges in the finality of the denunciation, and the relish and satisfaction of these fictional ostracisms echoes the moral outrage of the letter quoted by Slater. The drama of justification in which Chuzzlewit the elder is able to stand - a pillar of sober redemption, but still a 'fortress surrounded by marshes and rubbish tips'- with Gamp the excluded in/other finds correspondences in the later Bleak House where the marsh, the rubbish tip with which we began - the maternal belly as I have suggested, materialises on the opening page, as the underbelly of the city in the shape of a long-buried primitive form. In the earlier Martin Chuzzlewit the maternal belly already promenades as Gamp, able to both devour and defile, yet so close to the prima materia of the alchemical work - the raw material of the transformation which, as Jung defines it, is: 'cheap as dirt and can be had everywhere, only nobody knows it. . . . And the worst thing is that without it the work cannot even be begun . . . it is the most despised and rejected thing, 'thrown out into the street,' 'cast on the dung-hill', 'found in filth'. 36 This could stand as a description of all five Whitechapel women; Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes and Mary Kelly. Consider William Acton's reflections upon the prostitutes of Whitechapel taken from the 1860s; the alchemical analogy is a striking one: . . as a heap of rubbish will ferment, so surely will a number of unvirtuous women thus collected deteriorate . . . In Jung's reference, he so clearly links alchemical process with the abject in as he says 'coming to terms with the unconscious . . . ' 36 that it seems, perhaps, a Lacanian blind spot on Kristeva's part to miss this material in Powers of Horror. Dickens also misses the opportunity to address the other - for Gamp is thrown out into the street - a rejected 'defective inner healer'. 37 The evidence that she beckons towards a conjunctio in her emergence from Dickens' creative process is supported, however, by a particular scene in which the figure of Mrs Prig first appears. Mrs Prig is

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to day nursing as Mrs Gamp is to night nursing. On relieving Prig one evening at the Bull in Holborn, we find Gamp entering a room in which a sick young man lies in bed. A fireplace will soon be set with a fire so that a kettle can be boiled, and on the mantelshelf, the physic bottles are lined up. As Prig leaves she advises Gamp: The pickled salmon ... is quite delicious. . . . Don't have nothink to say to the cold meat for it tastes of the stable. The drinks is all good. 38 Dickens also informs us that Prig 'was of the Gamp build, but not so fat; and her voice was deeper and more like a man's. She also had a beard.' 38 No conjunctio takes place, however. And although the signboard at Gamp's lodging reads 'midwife' we do not attend any births but must assume that her profession has taken her from one death-bed of infection to attendance on yet another birth. Dickens creates in Gamp a close proximation to the midwife-cum-witch, in this case, willing infection upon all for the sake of her fee and carrying infection with her - from birth to death and back again, while herself remaining throughout in rude good health. Yet with Gamp's and Prig's predilection for salmon, we can surmise beyond the reference Jung makes to the fish as a devouring mother in the form of the Lamia - the voracious fish discussed in Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth" The fish is also a redemptive form - which is hinted at, yet diabolically hidden in the 'pickled' salmon immersed in vinegar. 'Vinegar' is an alchemical acid: There is in our chemistry a certain noble substance, in the beginning whereof is wretchedness with vinegar, but in its ending joy with gladness." In this alchemist's understanding of vinegar's capacity to both corrode and change, there is an interesting correspondence in the description Lacan gives of a patient's dream: I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose aggressive drives took the form of obsessive phantasies; in the dream he saw himself driving a car, accompanied by the woman with whom he was having a rather difficult affair, pursued by a flying-fish, whose skin was so transparent that one could see the horizontal liquid level through the body, an image of vesicle persecution of great anatomical clarity." The vinegar of the alchemist could be construed as that 'liquid level of vesicle persecution' - the digestive juices which in the case of the pickled salmon have emerged on the outside to torment the fish. The

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same aggressivity underscores the wretchedness in Gamp's condition — and Dickens thrusts upon her all the horrors of the unsymbolised Other, reducing her to the condition of an 'old bag'; like the patient's fish she is nothing but a digestive container, and being abject, is without identity, as transparent as this flying-fish. In Phiz's opening illustration to Martin Chuzzlewit, Gamp is seen without a face — a bag on legs. Such finality, in placing a bag where the head should be, raises the belly-bag which has come down to us as the bag of Blindman's Buff but, traditionally, the bag placed over the head of the corpse at death. 42 Here we might remember that in the final Whitechapel murders the faces were so mutilated as to be unrecognisable. Beyond and behind anatomy, that old map of destiny, there lurks the shapeless thing, which has no anatomy and into which the whole world might fall.

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November. When she was next seen, nine hours later, it was by a man sent to collect her rent who finding her door locked, looked through the broken frame of her window. What remained of her was still on the bed; her breasts, internal organs and her entrails were on a table nearby. The flesh on the inside of her thighs had been cut back to the knees and the femur, described as white and gleaming, was exposed. Her uterus was missing. Also, besides her throat being cut back to the spine, the nose had been severed from her face." How would he have approached Mary Kell}, on that bed where she finally rested — was it as a laying-out or as a lying-in? and what was it he carried away with him? Is the question appropriate? is it even acceptable in the encounter with such abjection? Blood, impure:

inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together" In Sarah Gamp, Dickens the literary magician is unable to rescue the midwife from her devouring aspect of the mother. Perhaps because her sexuality, like the serpent's wisdom, is both too mysterious and too easy — a creative genius given over to darkness and devoid of anatomy. On the afternoon before her death, Mary Kelly had bought a halfpenny candle; it was probably later used by her murderer to light him to his work:

Women, you know, they wane by candle-light, they spoil, melt, twist and ooze ! The end of tapers is a horrible sight, the end of ladies, too, . .

Dickens and the dark sublime; 'the shapeless t hing 46 9

Figure 12.1: Sarah Gamp as she appears in the frontispiece to Martin Chuzzlewit by Phiz (detail)

The final Whitechapel murder victim, Mary Kelly, was also the youngest. The murder took place in her lodging room, at the back of Miller's Court, between one and two o'clock on the morning of Friday 9

Charles Dickens' childhood, like that of Mary Kelly, was not in London but in more rural surroundings, and he was to be brought to London by the same need as she; by poverty. Charles' happiest memories were of the area of Chatham and Rochester in Kent. A sickly boy, small for his age and never involved in the organised games which other boys played, he remembered later being happy in a fantasy world of his own. He was always to regard these years at Chatham as the place of rural and idyllic childhood and they found a specific locus years later when he was able to buy the house at Gad's Hill near Rochester which had held his atten-

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tion as a boy — the fine house which his father had promised him he might one day live in, 'when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough'.' 7 These years in Chatham ended when the family moved to London sometime between 1821 and 1823 when Charles was between nine and eleven years old." In London, with the family debts rising, their eldest son Charles' education abruptly ended and when work was offered to him the family readily agreed. Dickens became a child labourer among other child labourers at Warren's Blacking Factory standing on a site near the Strand at old Hungerford Stairs on the Thames edge. The years at Chatham, in which Charles, the precocious and marvellous puer, 49 conjugated Latin verbs, or `elevated on chairs and tables's ° enchanted his mother and sister with songs and dances, now sank without trace in the rat-infested wooden factory that reeked of rotten timber and the dank Thames bed. Words were always to fail Dickens when attempting to describe the experience: [I] felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written." It was a `wonder' to Dickens that his parents saw nothing to concern themselves in his changed position. It seems that in their financial predicament, they were glad to have him off their hands. So much so, that while the family remained together, ensconced though they were in the debtors' prison, Dickens was ejected into lodgings. Within a few months, however, Dickens was removed by his employer from the dark factory to a shop window in Chandos Street where he continued to carry out the same labelling and wrapping of bottles. This mortifying and now public employment was ended abruptly when his father saw him in the window, the object of common entertainment for passers-by. Furious and indignant, Dickens' father terminated the employment. This was not, however, without the efforts of Dickens' mother to get Charles back to work, and she did her best to patch up the quarrel between their friend Lamert, Charles' employer, and her husband. Dickens was to remark much later 'I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back'. 52 The episode of the blacking factory employment was over in less than a year yet it ended Dickens' childhood and it was to be twenty-five years before Dickens was able even to allude to it in confidence to his friend

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John Forster. Later, the semi-autobiographic David Copperfield (1850) was to describe some elements of it in a fictionalised and romantic way. Yet the works which were written after Copperfield became known as the `dark period' and suggest that, in Copperfield, the earlier, buried and unfinished business of his childhood began again. Dickens had a horror of the blacking factory experience which was both geographical and sensate: For many years, when I came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I was once. It was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak. 52 In Dickens' literary 'dark period', images of catastrophic and apocalyptic gloom, in which there is actual or threatened death and destruction, frequently begin the narrative and threaten to engulf the reader. Written immediately after David Copperfield, Bleak House opens as we have seen, with wet lowering darkness and a megalosaurus. Frequently there is a particularly noisome quality in the descriptions of buildings, which hem the reader in and produce an experience of dereliction; of structures infinitely degraded. While Dickens' social conscience can legitimately be seen as a driving force in the creation of such mise-en-scene, one of the enduring characteristics of the development of his novels is the relationship of such enclosed, engulfing environments to the figure of a small child, usually a boy but sometimes a girl, and the drama which revolves around their fight to survive and rise above the detritus, both human and inanimate, which threatens to smother them. The misogyny of Dickens' crone-women; the Sarah Gamps who are both midwives and layers-out of the dead present this horror in a specific body, but it is in a scene from Bleak House that Dickens comes closest to distilling all of the inexpressible experience of the blacking factory in some remarkable images of rending. The scene, which can only be described as one of sublime horror, foreshadows the image seen through Mary Kelly's window, in which, enframed and displayed, was a body both absent and grotesquely present; a shapeless thing. Bleak House opens with a damp fog; one which, as John Forster commented, pervaded the narrative from beginning to end. In the opening section, as we have seen, Dickens draws a comparison between the high Lord Chancellor at the High Court of Chancery and the shapeless but all-pervading fog of the streets; between a presence and an absence Dickens places the narrative: between the presence of effectiveness — the Chancellor and Temple Bar's decision-making power — and the absence of it; both in the often empty judgements made and in the

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people and things whose fate it is to be acted upon. Throughout, there is this indeterminate semi-fluid thingness which is neither solid nor liquid, and the fog of the streets which is also the fog of interminable courtroom wrangling; the slow saturnine grinding of the law. Yet in the fog itself something stirs, the vast megalosaurus and her equally vast belly; and 'the gas looming through the fog'" already provides a warning of a coming event of some kind, even if it is to be an event of grotesque digestion. In this coming together of heat and cold, of inflammable gas and what is in effect, the mare nostrum" there is, despite references to combustion, a pervading alchemical coldness; the 'carboniferous' fog of Victorian England with its smudged and sooty echoes of an ancient buried sunlight and the coal gas which only eerily dilutes the darkness; of fire sunk deep into matter. Within the first few pages, and in one of the most significant changes of style Dickens was ever to attempt, he speaks from the woman's place; speaking through the diary of the heroine, Esther. Forster's reflections on this shift of gender are quite specific: The autobiographical form of Copperfield was in some respects continued in Bleak House by means of extracts from the personal relation of its heroine." 'The stomach is the alchemist' says Paracelcus 56 and we begin to feel in this Bleak House a dyspeptic movement and regurgitation of some kind, and a slow uneasy chewing of the cud with Dickens, over and over. Bleak House was to cause Dickens immense creative difficulties and in the portrayal of a passive, self-denying Esther, Dickens could not easily ignite his genius. 57 We understand why from Esther's opening remarks: I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that." For Dickens to lay down his mercurial quickness and creative genius, which by 1852 had become almost universally acknowledged, and write from the position of this woman so unconscious of herself, must have soon felt like an exercise in purgatory. Yet it is Dickens who creates the Esther who then cannot produce sparks; who is so different from Dickens himself, so self-denying, that he cannot make her vital. Rather, in the course of the novel, it is her bovine-like calm which presents a still centre around which mysterious activity, unrequited longing and final and terrible denouements circle. And so it is that the gassy fog continues to pervade the novel to ignite suddenly and unexpectedly elsewhere, in the minor character of Krook. This figure of Krook is so overburdened with the detritus of the past, that all the weight of Dickens' and his character's personal history is

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about to implode in upon him. Krook runs a tumbledown shop with the title 'KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE' but it is called 'Chancery' and Krook is called the 'Lord Chancellor' in derisory fashion by the locals. Krook explains the reason for this sobriquet to Esther on her first visit to his shop: You see I have so many things here.... wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that's why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old parchmentes and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I can't abear to part with anything I once lay hold of ... or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill name of Chancery." Before Esther leaves he writes words on the wall which he asks her to decipher for him. lie writes the letters from the bottom up, 'What does that spell?' he asks Esther; the letters form 'BLEAK HOUSE' and, by way of explanation, Krook tells Esther 'I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write.' 60 What he has written is significant but neither he nor Esther comprehends its importance; neither is sufficiently clever or quick to do so. Although the main dramatic suspense of the novel hinges on the suit in Chancery, an inheritance and a missing will (which at that moment, unknowingly, Krook and Esther have before them), the true suspense — the root suspense which is to end in sudden conflagration — focuses on a bundle of papers which Krook has yet to come by. And it is to this character Krook that Dickens entrusts a secret of his own which he cannot bear. Like Sarah Gamp, Krook is that which endures and yet cannot be endured. Unlike Gamp, as she is wet, so Krook is very dry; 'I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs'. The secret at the very heart of the novel's mystery is the bundle of old papers, love-letters, sent by a woman to a man, who have, in the dim past, made a child together. Born out of wedlock and given away, the child is Esther, though she and Krook know nothing of this when they first meet in his rag and bottle shop. Nor does either suspect that Esther's natural father is living in one of Krook's rooms above the shop, earning a poor living as a copier of legal documents. The mother, now Lady Dedlock (such a name for the incest taboo to conjure with, it also rhymes with wedlock) lives not far from Bleak House, where Esther will shortly settle. As the narrative develops, Lady Dedlock comes to know that the letters still exist and she must have them back or suffer the mortification of them becoming public. Mr Guppy, a young and ambitious solicitor's clerk, has promised to retrieve them for her. From Krook's own admission, we know of his illiteracy, yet he realises he holds

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something of immense value in the letters — although he can glimpse only fragments of their meaning. At the very midpoint of the novel, Krook offers to hand them over to Weevle, the new occupant of the room in which Krook found the letters; the room in which the stranger, Esther's father, has lately died. The letters are offered only in order that Weevle should report back their content to Krook. As the scene unfolds, Weevle and his friend Mr Guppy sit waiting in this sombre room for midnight to strike, the appointed time for the assignation. Uneasy about sitting in a dead man's quarters, Guppy is particularly upset by the amount of oily soot which seems to hang about in the air and the vague smell of burning which pervades the house. Distracted, Guppy notices resting on the mantelshelf, a portrait of Lady Dedlock and only he is aware of the significance of the portrait in this particular room. Meanwhile the two men sit conscious of the fact that Krook is below, where Weevle last saw him a few hours before, standing by the fire and holding the letters in his hands: Mr Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr Guppy start as if his heart has been stirred instead. 'Fah! Here's more of this hateful soot hanging about' says he. 'Let us open the window a bit, and get a mouthful of air.' 6 ' And so Guppy sits at the window with Weevle, 'half in and half out of the room' 62 until, in horror, he draws his hand away from the sill: 'What, in the Devil's name', he says, 'is this! Look at my fingers!' A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder. . . . When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips, and creeps away down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool. 62 St Paul's bell strikes midnight and 'all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says: 'It's the appointed time at last. Shall I go?' 62 Weevle descends the stairs to return in a moment in a state of terror. Holding one another, both men go down: There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. . . Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of

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burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here it is — is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? 0 Horror, he IS here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.' 63 The body has so evaporated as to be infiriltely dispersed — the sublime infinity of which Burke says 'the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so'. 64 And yet this body is still all too horribly present; reduced to oily soot and ooze, it is everywhere. The full sublime horror is in the vast nature of its physical dispersal and how the once clean and proper has been so degraded to matter to its nth degree while still remaining strangely vital; as Burke remarks elsewhere: as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter. . . when we push our discoveries yet downward . . . and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as well as addition... 65 '

If we consider how Krook's spontaneous combustion is to be closely paralleled in the fever of Esther's smallpox and juxtaposed with it, her description of its hallucinations becomes here, regarding littleness, intimately and terribly related: Dare I hint at that worst time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads!" Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror that Freud did not sufficiently explore the origins of incest taboo in 'Totem and Taboo'. While Freud focused on the murder of the father, Kristeva, in returning to the issue of incest taboo, looks to primary narcissism and focuses on the instability of the ego at this stage: 'Narcissism is predicated on the existence of the ego but not of an external object. . . the non-constitution of the [outside] object as such renders unstable the ego's identity. . the ego of primary narcissism is thus uncertain, fragile, threatened'. Later, she argues that the function of rituals of defilement 'based on the feeling of abjection and all converging on the maternal. . . ward off the subject's fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.'67

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For Dickens, at the stage of his own puberty, this sinking became real; although his memory of the Chatham period continued to present the loving, caring early mother with all its portents of a secret incestuous reciprocation evident in the remembered mighty manikin of the tables and chairs, this same mother was later to render him down in the economics of her own squalid survival. When Dickens in after years blushed at the memory of those early elevations upon the furniture and the productions of his high squeaky voice, it may not have been the adult in the man who blushed, but the child who discovered his own earliest fiction in the mother who in fact was 'warm' for him being sent back to the window in Chandos Street. Thus, with particular regard to Dickens' experience, the following words of Burke written long before Kristeva's, have their meaning inverted and unheimlich: The authority of a father, so useful to our well-being and so justly venerable on all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence.'" Dickens was not 'melted down' through fondness; if we also consider that this debtor father had no authority to raise him up, we begin to suspect Dickens's spiral of degradation. We must forever see Dickens's mother as he recognised her, not warm in the melting warmth of love, but warm with an avaricious and consuming heat. In Krook's spontaneous combustion, we come to the annihilation of the fortress in its final and vast dispersal; the liquefying of being 'that slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks'. This fire has not caused light but final darkness; an already rendered candle-identity, now turning into a 'stagnant sickening oil'. And why, so close to the book's meridian, is there this human sunspot? and Guppy's efforts to reach through the window for air? Did Dickens base this window on the window — the window of Chandos Street? and is Krook the ancient spellbound form of the child labourer who sat in it? When Dickens' father looked through that window what did his father see? and what did the child labourer feel? First experienced as a common object of speculation, then, as the mysterious behaviour of his father unfolded, what sublime imagining was left to fill the windowframe of what his father saw? Dickens saw what his father saw; and confided to Forster 'I wondered how he could bear ie. ® These words, having an almost poignant empathy, capture the experience of the omnipotentpuer wholly dissolved in the final mortification of Chandos Street. An experience from which this father could not retrieve him into manhood, being in terms of his own maleness an imposter — a condition which both recognised in this window/mirror gaze.

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His parents never again uttered one word about Chandos Street, yet in the secrecy which descended to cover and conceal, it must have occurred to Dickens that his life would have been very different had his father not seen him in that window, abject and other, and displayed to the public in that first rag and bottle shop of his youth. In the year which surely marked his passage from boyhood, it was not to he that Dickens 'came to be a man'. Bleak House demonstrates another failed conjunctio within Dickens's creativity. In the scene of Krook's room, yet again the combustion flies up only this time to descend and form oily smears on Guppy's sleeve, a crisis which Esther, suffering her own combustive fever, cannot attend and put to rights. This failure is already threatened when Guppy moves to the window, half in and half out — as though Guppy would move out, through and away. 7 ° The window, however, offers not 'air' but this final and defiled liquid. Although Dickens can conjure up a world and fill it with his own forms, his creativity does not produce him a frame of escape; like the efforts of the alchemists with their own bottled manikins; here the will to be twice-born ends not in a coming-into-being but in a desperate failed experiment and like Faust's homunculus 'his bulb bursts and he disappears in flames'. 71 Yet Dickens' attempts to trace his way back were real enough; when Krook writes his letters for Esther to read, he writes them from the bottom up, 'copying from memory That memory of Krook's surely belongs to Dickens, the child labourer, sitting in a coffee-shop in St Martin's Lane: in the door there was an oval glass-plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR EEFFOC [as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie], a shock goes through my blood. 72 Entering puberty and surrounded as he must have been by the rough and public sexual trade of the streets, Dickens made no reference to Foster of his own sexual awakening during this time, and he does not do so in the novels. In this reminiscence, however, we find the little gentleman inverted; in the shock of the moor eeffoc — an anamorphosis as shocking as the death's head in Holbein's Ambassador?' and one which continues to display itself in Krook's educational paralysis before Esther — attempting forever to write from 'the bottom up'. The dark sublime for Dickens, the foreclosure, was not, as Kristeva suggests, the threat of a returning incestuous jouissance. It was rather its opposite — the rumination that it had never been — ever. Let us think

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then of Lacan's fortress as a dream in itself and remember the view which Guppy had through the window of a rendered Krook - which is the view Dickens had of Dickens' father's view of himself; 'I wondered how he could bear it'. Dickens' attempts to speak through Krook; and to plead to the 'not clever' Esther to read what is written; the moor eeffoc which haunted him, does raise the wonder of how Dickens ever did 'bear it '. The successful writer was to feel dogged all his life by his parents' lack of funds and, with vexation, supported them in many financial ways until their deaths, but this vexation seems a displacement, given how much Dickens was earning in his maturity. The displacement almost fails in the close proximity of Krook and the rag and bottle shop to the High Chancellor and Chancery and that metaphor's proximity to Dickens's own fraudulent father, who looking through the glass, saw himself. For the boy, was it here that the hole was made: 'formed simply by the effect in the imaginary order of the vain appeal made in the symbolic order to the paternal metaphor?' 74 Yet Dickens presents a theatrical, cathartic moment which may yet be affective in his own psychological life; the therapeutic aspect of Krook: searching in the letters for some clues to that earlier existence. The secret Krook/Dickens is searching for in the letters is not any simple explanation of the primal scene" symbolised in the mother and father figures of Lady Dedlock and her now dead lover (as Dickens' own father was now recently dead) but what lay both before and after: how the relationship between the mother and the mighty manikin of Rochester that first unspoken love - suffered the terrible reality of being rendered down in the year of his sexual awakening, and was after all, a fiction. In Charles' enduring, first, the fate of the blacking factory and then the Chandos Street window; to have himself seen there, in the way that Dickens' father saw him, to be seen in this way, was to be seen both before and after. What Dickens' father saw in the window - his own emasculation - the boy had recognised. This recognition; of seeing himself seeing himself, 76 led Dickens to both the proof and death of his own fantasy - in the round 0. That 'primary conflict between identification with, and primordial rivalry with, the other's image'n has a cruel ironic twist here; particularly in terms of all the creative reconstruction that would subsequently be done. Dickens was later to be very specific about its effect. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. 79

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In Krook, Dickens came closest to a figural compression of himself, his father and the feminine. He could not however, make creative leap of transcendence; Krook was too abject a form and the anima, as Esther, had been both given away (as Charles had been) and blinded: in the final sentences of the preceding chapter Esther realises she has smallpox - as she falls ill, the first manifest symptom is her blindness. Besides the clear connotation of symbolic castration (in this case in a specific relationship to Freud's interpretation of Hoffman's 'Olympia') the immediate implication is that she cannot read the letters for Krook (as Dickens's mother first read for him). Esther, as she is, can never effect change in his condition. Finally, this relationship in Dickens' fiction with the facts and memories of his childhood, raises an interesting parallel with the case of Judge Schreber79 first discussed by Freud and later by Lacan in his seminar of 1955/6. Schreber, in a study of his own psychosis, wrote an autobiographical account published in 1903. It began eight years after a first nervous illness and at the point when Schreber was about to become a judge to the Supreme Court of Dresden. He very soon had dreams that his illness had returned. The hiatus point came when one morning, between waking and sleeping, he dreamt 'that it would be beautiful being a woman submitting to copulation'." Lacan's focus centres upon the developing psychic drama in which: the unconscious very soon warned the subject that, incapable as he is of being the phallus that the mother lacks, he is left with the solution of being the woman that men lack." The parallels are uncanny; Schreber's illness is triggered by his appointment as that very phallic form; which Dickens has already prepared us for; the judge who sits at the high court of Chancery, but who sits, in Dickens' view, over the great fog of the law, and is nothing but a hollow shell embracing corruption, the 'abominable interior' Julia Kristeva refers to in discussing the borderline patient. Using the same metaphor as Lacan with which we began, Kristeva argues that the borderline patient is fortified like a castle, but a castle which is, in its essentials, empty. 81 In Krook Dickens gets much closer, much 'warmer' to the specific impasse of his own; those fictions woven around the first relationship which had to be faced at the moment of the son's looking upon the failed emasculated father of the sexual act and seeing himself watching himself. Krook: has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your

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Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally — inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only — Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died." In this meridian spot," !Crook, whose name rhymes with 'look' perhaps dies, after all, in an apotheosis of momentary self-knowledge in which he

could not remember being a man. . melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." 'Wasting away and going to rack and ruin' were Krook's opening words to Esther on her entering his bottle shop, and the final mute message is that it is the bottle and not the mighty manikin which is left behind standing on the table in the fat-lined room. In Schreber's own courtship with emasculation his psychosis furnished him with an affecting compensation, as Lacan describes it: It is around this hole, in which the support of the signifying chain is lacking in the subject, and which has no need, one notes, of being ineffable in order to be awe-inspiring, that the whole struggle in which the subject reconstructed itself took place, In this struggle, he conducted himself with honour, and the vaginas of heaven. . . the cohort of miraculous girls who laid siege to the edges of the hole provided the counterpoint, in the clucks of admiration from their harpies' throats:"Verfluchter Keil! What a lad!' In other words: what a ram ! Alas! It was by way of antiphrasis. 85 At Gad's Hill, on 25 December 1869, Dickens as usual celebrated Christmas with his children. This house, sitting as it did prominently in its own grounds, had become for Dickens 'the crown of his success as an established gentleman — a status to which his father never ceased to aspire'." As always, on this day, the writer's children gathered to play parlour games in the evening and despite Dickens' being unwell, they began after dinner to play 'the memory game'. Dickens first watched the

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proceedings and then offered to play. At the end of the long threads of successfully remembered words he added something of his own, it meant nothing to his children, but his son Henry remembered the strange inflection in his father's voice when he said, 'Warren's Blacking, 30 Strand'." Kristeva reminds us that the writer's task 'is to be not only the one who separates, a father, as it were, but also the one who touches, the son and the lover, even taking the place of the feminine. The One and the Other and by that very token neither the One nor the Other, [but] a person Removed.' 88 Within six months of this Christmas party Dickens would be dead. In the shapeless thing which rose up from the memory game, however, he was never so completely removed nor so sublimely present.

Notes and references 1. Lacan, Jacques (1949) in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A Sheridan (London, Routledge, 1977) p.5. (First presented in 1936). 2. Jung, C. G. (1951) in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, ed. Herbert Read (London, Routledge, 1959) p.224. 3. Jung, C. G. (1950) in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Herbert Read (London, Routledge, 1959) p.360. 4. Jung, C. G. (1944) Psychology and Alchemy, ed. Herbert Read (London, Routledge, 1968) p.110. 5. Warner, Marina Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, Picador, 1976) p.58, quoting Saint John Chrysostom `To The Fallen Monk Theodore'. 6. Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans.L.S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press New York. Reprinted 1982 with permission of the publisher p.1. 7. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.77. 8. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 78. 9. Kristeva, Powers of Horror,. pp. 63-4. 10.Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 65. 11.Vidler, Anthony (1992), from The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, quoted in James Donald 'The city, the cinema: modern spaces', in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London, Routledge, 1995) pp.77-8. 12. Owens, Craig (1983) 'The discourse of others: feminists and postmodernism' in Postmodern Culture, ed.Hal Foster (London, Pluto Press, 1985) p.58. 13. Acton, William, quoted in London's Underworld: Henry Mayhew, ed. Peter Quenell (London, Bracken Books, 1983) p.24. Mayhew's work was originally pub-

lished in1862. 14.Mayhew, London's Underworld. Mayhew lists four: Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Wapping and Shadwell. see p.85. 15.John Keats (1795-1821): his own epitaph 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water', is included in The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, ed.J.M and M.J Cohen (London, Penguin, 1960) p.219 16.Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.135. 17. Dickens, Charles Bleak House. (Chapman & Hall, London, 1853) pp.1,4.

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18. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, quoted by Johnson, G.A (ed.) in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1993) p.38. 19.Holy Bible, Genesis Ch.3 v.14 (King James version) 20. Dickens, Charles Martin Chuzzlewit. (London, Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1844) p.334 21. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 257 22. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.155. 23. Semonides of Amorgos, 'Women', in Greek Poetry for Everyman, ed. F.L Lucas (London, Dent, 1951) p.239. 24. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 95. 25. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 257. 26. Lacan, Jacques (1973) 'Anamorphosis' the seminar on phallic distortion in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London, Penguin, 1979), see pp. 87-8. 27. For discussion of humour in Dickens' work specifically in relation to his female characters see Slater, Michael Dickens and Women (London, Dent, 1983) 28. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, p.339. 29. quoted in Slater, Dickens and Women, p.307. 30. Quennell, Peter, quoting Acton, London's Underworld p. 24. 31. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.97. 32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.100 33. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, pp.384-5 (my italics). 34. Jung, C. G. (1942) in Alchemical Studies, ed.Herbert Read (London, Routledge, 1967) p.148. 35. For extrapolation see Samuels, Andrew 'Archetype and complex', in hisfung and the Postfungians (London, Routledge, 1985) pp.23-54. 36.Jung, Alchemical Studies, p.170. 37. Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, p.234 para3. 38. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, p.338. 39. Jung, C. G. (1916) In Symbols of Transformation (London, Routledge, 1956) p.248. 40. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy ,p. 273. 41. Lacan, Jacques (1948) 'Aggressivity in psychoanalysis', Ecrits, p.12. 42. For discussion of this see Onians, Richard Broxton (1951) in The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988) p.510. A contemporary reference to the belly-bag was the paper bag which Brunnhilde wore over her head in act 2 of the Royal Opera House's 1995 production of Gotterdammerung (director Richard Jones). Humiliated in the house of her enemies, she faces Gunter without a face. 43 Descriptions of the murder scene appear in the many publications on the subject; see for example Sharkey, Terence Jack the Ripper: a Hundred Years of Investigation (London, Ward Lock, 1987) p.63. 44. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.96 45. Celine, Louis Ferdinand, quoted by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, p. 169. Insubstantiality and its anxieties have been expressed in culture continually; in this passage from Celine, the condition has become the exclusive property of woman. The most eloquent general statement remains Prospero's speech from Shakespeare's Tempest (see this text, below). 46. This is a phrase of Charles Dickens'; used to describe a repeating childhood nightmare and which Peter Ackroyd, in a perceptive analysis, connected to some anxi-

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ety in relation to identity. See his Dickens (London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990) p.50. 47. Ackroyd, Dickens, p.32, quoting John Foster, Dickens' first biographer. 48.John Forster has Dickens removed to London at the age of nine years, but this may be Dickens' memory of his painful immaturity rather than actual age. 49. Puer: Jung's development and understanding of a puer aeternus the eternal boy. In von Franz, the puer suffers from a particularly strong early attachment to the mother. I am suggesting that Dickens experienced early omnipotence through this attachment. For reference to Hillman's later development of the Auer see note 56. 50. Forster, John The Life of Charles Dickens. (London; Waverley Book Company, 1873) Vol.1, p.10. 51. Forster, Life of Dickens, Vol. 1., p.24. 52. Forster, Life of Dickens, Vol. 1., p.35 53. Dickens, Bleak House, p.1 54. 'The sea (mare nostrum) of the alchemists is their own darkness, the unconscious': Jung, Alchemical Studies, p.146. 55. Forster, Life of Dickens, Vol. 2, p.123. 56. quoted in Severson, Randolph (1979) 'Puer's wounded wing' in Hillman, James The Puer Papers (Dallas, TX, Spring Publications, 1991) p.145. 57. Dickens described his writing of Bleak House as an inability 'to grind sparks out of this dull blade' see Forster, Life of Dickens, Vol. 2, p.134. 58. Dickens, Bleak House, p.9. 59. Dickens, Bleak House, p32. 60. Dickens, Bleak House, p.36. 61. Dickens, Bleak House, p.278. 62. Dickens, Bleak House, p.279. 63. Dickens, Bleak House, p.280. 64. Burke, Edmund (1757) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ourldeas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Boulton J.T. (1958) (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987) p.73. 65. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 72 The present writer remembers a discussion during a programme of seminars on Jung and Religion (London, 1987) in which one participant, when offered the floor, and recalling a severe illness accompanied by a high fever, remembered an experience of infinite minuteness. She experienced being smaller than a corpuscle and flowing through her own bloodstream. She could still recall the sheer terror of this reduction. 66. Dickens, Bleak House, p.300. 67. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp.62,64. 68. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p.111 69. Foster, Life of Dickens, Vol. 1, p.34. 70. Guppy, psychologically, is a 'younger' version of Krook, for Guppy loves Esther although, like Krook, he will have no lasting hope of attachment to her. Guppy the character, is probably based on a shadow form of Dickens - the street-wise, nineteen-year-old House of Commons transcriber. Guppy also has some of the linguistic affectations of Dickens' father - and, ditto, desires to be a gentleman. Within Dickens' creativity therefore, Guppy is a more vital form of the unconscious activity constellated around Krook but just as historically doomed. Guppy too, wants to have access to the letters, but in this scene he wants to get out through the window - and away from the bottle shop. However, Krook's 'oily smears' attach themselves to him; he therefore embodies, in a more youthful incarnation, the twinned fate of Dickens and son in the Chandos Street window.

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71. Jung, C. G. (1929) in Dream Analysis Part 1, ed. W.Mcguire (1939) (London, Routledge, 1995) p.189. 72. Forster, Life ofDickens, Vol. 1, p. 27. 73. See Lacan in Four Fundamental Concepts for full discussion of anamorphosis in relation to this painting. 74. Lacan, Jacques (1955-6) 'On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis', in Ecrits, p.211. 75. Ackroyd refers to the existing scholarly speculation around the events relating to the Chandos Street window and the possibility of a 'primal scene'; but this present writer disagrees with Ackroyd's own interpretation (see Ackroyd, Dickens, p.94) and understands the event as a failure of the paternal metaphor — which both father and son recognise. See note 76. 76. 'I see myself seeing myself. The privilege of the subject seems to be established here from the bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon asl perceive, my representations belong to me': Lacan in Four Fundamental Concepts, p.81. By way of creative amplification, this writer would refer the reader to Ackroyd who refers to several of Dickens' boy characters' fear of being seen (see Ackroyd, Dickens, p.94). 77. Benvenuto, B. and Kennedy, R. 'The mirror stage', in The Works ofJacques Lacan: an introduction (London, Free Association Books, 1986) p.58. 78. Pope-Hennessy, Una (1945), quoting Dickens, in Charles Dickens (London, Reprint Society, 1947) p.11 (present writer's italics). 79. Judge Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness discussed in Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 179— 225. 80. quoted in Lacan, Ecrits, p.207. 81. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 135. 82. Dickens, Bleak House, p. 280 (present writer's italics). 83. A meridian spot perhaps, not the blind spot of Lacan'sAnamorphosis. 84. Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1. 85. Lacan, Ecrits, p.205. 86. Wilson, Angus, The World of Charles Dickens (London, Seeker and Warburg, 1970) p.43. 87. Quoted in Ackroyd, Dickens, p.1057. 88. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 161.

Chapter 13 Conditions for Excellence: the coincidentia oppositorum of the inferior function PETRO SICA CLARKSON Jung's typological differentiations (the feeling, thinking, intuitive and sensation functions whether introverted or extraverted in attitude) are dynamic structures which contain the seeds of their opposites. Contrary to the usual counsel of concentrating on the development of the inferior function, this chapter proposes a reversal (or alternative) of attitude which suggests that if the superior function is developed to its fullest extent, it will tend to an enantiodromia — a turning into its opposite. This means that there can come into being a natural and even superior manifestation of the inferior function which is more of the hallmark of gift or genius or extraordinary talent than the prescription for the linear and incremental development patterns more usually associated with the development of the inferior function

per se. This hypothesis is offered here with some indicative clinical and historical examples for discussion, exploration and testing by students and colleagues in terms of their own subjective life experiences, their experiences of personality fulfilment in therapy and analysis, and even perhaps empirical validation. Simply stated, it allows for the cases where dominant function is not inhibited, but allowed to flourish in their extreme, that the so-called 'inferior function' may manifest at a higher order of complexity, functionality and excellence. Thus thinking function may manifest as feeling function in excelsis or in its apotheosis. Similarly, feeling function transforms into a higher order of thinking when fully unfolded. Sensation likewise yields in its extreme the development of intuitive or even psychic insights, and intuition finds its enantiodromic peak in sensation function outcomes of remarkable acuity and success. 219

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'Dealing seriously' with the inferior function The concept of 'dealing seriously' comes from von Franz (1971b, p.59). Jung, in his 'masterpiece' Psychological Types (1944) defines the inferior function as the term used to denote the function that remains in arrear in the process of differentiation. . . . Very frequently, indeed as a general rule, a man identifies himself more or less completely with the most favoured, hence the most developed, function. It is this circumstance which gives rise to psychological types. But, as a consequence of such a one-sided process of development, one or more functions necessarily remain backward in development. Such functions, therefore, may be fittingly termed 'inferior' in the psychological, though not in the psycho-pathological, sense, since these retarded functions are in no way morbid but merely backward as compared with the more favoured function. (pp. 563-4) Von Franz (1971b) writes that 'Jung found that active imagination was practically the only means for dealing with the fourth function' (pp.63-4). Jung says that the process [of individuation] seems not to tend toward perfection but towards completeness. This means, I think, that you cannot get the thing up to the upper level (of the diagram) [see von Franz, 1971b, p.60], but you have to come down, and that means a relative lowering of the level of the personality. If you are in the middle, the one side is not as dark, and there is more a tendency to constitute a kind of completeness which is neither too light not [sic] too dark. (von Franz, 1971b, p.67) She says that 'going to it and staying with it, not just taking a quick bath in it, effects a tremendous change in the whole structure of the personality' (p.59). 'For instance, remaining with the difficulty for a long time, giving up other occupations in order to have enough time and energy for this main problem, practicing a kind of asceticism' (p.65). She goes on to liken this effort to the discipline and rigours of monastic life. Also, in conversation with many of my colleagues, the received wisdom is that the inferior function needs to be developed, paid specific and painstaking attention to, and nurtured. One of the images is to treat it as the 'learning disabled' brother in the fairy stories — 'the devil in the corner' (p.66) of one's life.

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Of course, it is often just this despised, unfavoured, symbolic brother who finally discovers the secret or the treasure. Furthermore, the inferior function has the 'strange character of wholeness, the mystical aspect, which the inferior function often has. . . . [It]is connected with [the individual's] deepest and greatest concern' (von Franz, 1971a, p.36). Its deep-rootedness in the unconscious' and its reluctance to come into the 'order of the day', its sometimes dogged and always hermetic ways of hiding from the harsh light of analysis or being 'forced' like bulbs for Christmas, is a problem only if it is a psychotherapeutic imperative that 'where unconscious was, consciousness should be'. Under such a regime, this 'regressive' function must be made to go to school, sit still and concentrate and perhaps, against his natural inclination, even be made to learn how to write with his right hand. If, however, we see the unconscious not only as a storehouse of personal memories, painful conflicts and repressed contents, but also as a treasure-trove containing all the richness of all cultures, archaic repositories of wisdom well beyond our capacity to imagine, and the very taproot of the sublime, then the so-called inferior function contains the alchemical secret of magical, immediate and totally transformative processes which can not only turn around the direction of individual lives and collective history, but also birth the genius in each one of us, or in all of us together. According to von Franz this transformative moment often has the character of 'suddenness [which] snaps into the opposite'. The inferior function cannot be assimilated within the structure of the conscious attitude; it is too deeply implicated and contaminated by the unconscious. .. Touching the inferior function resembles an inner breakdown at a certain crucial point of one's life. It has the advantage, however, of overcoming the tyranny of the dominant function in the ego complex (von Franz, 1971b, p.59). Von Franz (1971b) says 'the fourth door of your room is where the angels can come in, but also devils!' (p.72). Jung, von Franz and others have written well about that aspect. 'The inferior function, located as it is within the shadow [the part of the psyche not in the light] will find its place where it will not remain subordinated as do all the vicissitudes of the positive aspect of the shadow; usually this is in a concrete (prosaic) fashion; for example an intuitive type may be a good gardener, or a feeling type may play bridge rather well. This is not to be confused with the dynamic of excellence in the repressed function which is outlined in this chapter.' (Adams, 1996, personal communication). I want to concentrate for a minute on how the angels can suddenly come in.

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Enantiodromia It is likely that this form of discontinuous, non-linear second-order change in the manifestation of inferior function can characterise the sudden emergence of great gifts in individuals and the collective. It is similar to notions such as the 'flip-over effect' in chaos and complexity theory and the concept of the enantiodromia of Heraclitus which Jung also used. These ideas are born from some twenty-five years of work as a psychotherapist, educator and supervisor of psychotherapists with a particular interest in and experience of working with highly creative, successful or gifted individuals with whom I have engaged in the intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts, limitations and agonies of their personality development and their particular role in our collective evolution. In this sense, what I have to say will apply only to a small percentage of the population and then only to a small number of psychotherapists. On the other hand, if we look at the problems of the few through a prism which sees individual problems as the problems of the collective writ small, we can consider that the work of the few is also the work of the many, perhaps just in smaller or different scales. As above, so below' read in terms of 'as inside, so outside' or 'as for the one, so for the many' (or fractal images on the computer, or patterns in the heavens). An enantiodromic perspective has implications for how clinicians and educators view their task. It may even alleviate some of the iatrogenic distress caused by these professionals as well as the familiar and collective disapproval which so often tries to normalise, pathologise or regulate those who are 'the torch-bearers, chosen for that high office by nature herself' (Jung, CW17, p.145). Enantiodromia means a 'running counter to'. In the philosophy of Heraclitus this concept is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events, namely, the view which maintains that everything that exists goes over into its opposite. . . . I [Jung] use the term enantiodromia to describe the emergence of the unconscious opposite, with particular relation to its chronological sequence. This characteristic phenomenon occurs almost universally wherever an extreme, onesided tendency dominates the conscious life; for this involves the gradual development of an equally strong, unconscious counterposition, which first becomes manifest in an inhibition of conscious activities, and subsequently leads to an interruption of conscious direction. A good example of enantiodromia is seen in the psychology of Saul of Tarsus and his conversion to Christianity; as also in the story of the conversion of Raymond Lully; . . . in the transformation of Swedenborg from scholar into seer. (Jung, 1944, pp.541-2)

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The 'archaic attributes of the inferior function would erupt when an

abaissement du niveau mental (lowering of consciousness) occurs, whether it is due to stress fatigue, or illness' (cf. Stein, 1963.) Yet, it may be that it is through these moments of lowering of consciousness, the emptying out of ego, that the angels erupt. I suppose all of this is arguable, but I would like to propose these ideas, grounding them conceptually in Jung's first work and the work of von Franz. I think they are quite simple ideas, but with some potential. Wholeness is not achievable. Yet we are always whole. Always a cycle, like alchemy. And where one leads, the inferior will follow; and where the inferior was the inferior, it can become the superior. He who is last shall be first, and he who is first shall be the last. Not comprehensive, only an idea. Examples are not meant to be exact or comprehensive, just indicative or suggestive. But sometimes because it becomes possible to see something, or the language develops a word, it becomes possible to see things (or ideas) which have always been there right in front of our eyes and perhaps to use them in a new way. I am not going to summarise or discuss in detail matters about the typologies which are familiar (perhaps almost too familiar) to people in our field. This knowledge of the literature will be assumed in the following overview, as too will be the experience of some of the limitations imposed by clinical practice and personal experience on the received view when dealing with exceptional situations or exceptional people. In the absence of having at least felt or identified these problems, this way of intuiting a solution of practical use may simply not make sense enough to be useful.

A dynamic typology Thus Jung's typology is reconceived as a dynamic system akin to the Taoist concept of change where the extreme of passive becomes an active and the extreme of active becomes a passive. In the words of the I Ching, the old Yang becomes a young Yin and the old Yin becomes a young Yang. Too often Jung's typology, as it is used in practice, describes a fixed mode where the direction for development is frequently indicated as the development of the inferior function and the restraint or moderation of the superior function. The desired goal of such a conception tends to be wholeness, or a kind of homeostatic outcome — certainly 'consciousness'. In several places in Psychological Types (for example, as quoted above, Jung, 1944, pp.563-4) Jung uses the term inferior function in a sense which stresses that it is in 'arrear', regressive, and also of course its relationship with the shadow. He prescribes bringing the inferior function to consciousness, thus providing it with a new possibility of development. Yet there are also places and times where he says:

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Then the 'deviation' from the mean 'takes place [not only] . . . in the heights and depths of the same individual' (CW17, pp.143-4.) but also in our world. In this chapter the perceived goals will not be directed toward developing inferior functions painstakingly to greater and greater consciousness — although this is quite an acceptable and fruitful route at times for some people. The potentiality signified here is toward the nourishment of superior functions to a stage of development (or a moment) where they transform to their opposites at a higher level of complexity or wholeness. It is as if the grammar of the inferior function may be deficient at one level, but capable of great poetry at another — but we have to conceive of such a possibility . Exploring the possibilities of this perspective on typology opens the way to understanding more about the psychodynamics of creativity and genius in historical personalities, as well as new directions and emphasis in the analysis and the enablement of patients of great gifts. Often very creative personalities feel that analysis restricts and contains them. (This is of course not always true and many benefit greatly.) It is possible that in such cases the principles outlined here were unconsciously followed. It is also probable that conscious choicefulness about these possibilities can increase the flowering of the unique process of individuation where excellence in particular endeavours is the criterion. Always, another perspective may hold even a seed for more profound depths of understanding and greater achievements. It is only by sharing these ideas tentatively and in preliminary form at this stage, that other minds can begin to weigh in on this matter and help to refine and purify them. The modifying influence and effects of the attitudes, extravert or introvert, on the functions as they are here used will have to wait for discussion in another paper. It is well recognised that Jung was concerned with the dynamic of extraversion and introversion and its impact on typological functioning; in this [present] chapter the focus is unhampered in this respect, since post-Jungian thought has revisioned this troublesome dichotomy. Even so, it is certainly worth emphasising that enantiodromia may be more prevalent in coincidence with introversion, since the dynamic of reversal depends on an emphathic original repression of the inferior function; a proba-

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bility in those cases where the dominant function is less modified by social exchange. (Adams, 1996, personal communication) Naturally these ideas will be further verified, modified, found wanting or developed theoretically, clinically, experientially in our professional community.

The enantiodromia of the dominant thinking function becoming superior feeling Definition of thinking function Jung (1944) wrote that 'thinking is that psychological function which, in accordance with its own laws, brings given presentations into conceptual connection' (p.611). It tends to be associated with lawyers, with analytical, linear, causal, logical, sequential styles of problem solving and dealing with the challenges of life. Dominant thinking function is most often (according to Jung, always) paired with inferior feeling — an inferiority of the 'subjective process' (p.544). Typical professional examples When I use 'typical professional examples' in this chapter as an illustrative device, I obviously do not mean that 'all lawyers, or all physicists, or all entrepreneurs, or all detectives are. . . — I use these as imaginative bridges for readers to fish for their own more real, more true, and more individually unique examples. The profession which commonly is considered one of the exemplary manifestations of thinking function — the legal profession — has its training characterised by rote learning, by memory of many cases, the enhancement of reasoning to exclude subjective factors, mental exercises of logical rigour sometimes more demanding and punishing or rewarding because of its currency of financial assets, lives, freedom than philosophers in academia. The stereotypical judge in our culture, the wise woman or elder of the tribe in other cultures, represents the very storehouse of all the knowledge of the law and the reasonable application of those laws. The culmination of legal expertise, the apotheosis of the profession (whether this is always true in fact or not) is embodied in the position of the judge — the great interpreter of the law and the functionary in the society which judges the veracity of facts, the indisputability of evidence, the 'just' verdict based on all the empirically established reasoned arguments. Thinking function at its highest — or? Are the great judgements of the great judges indeed made on fact, or are they required to be made at the very borders of facticity, at the end of

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all proof, in the regions beyond which intellect can no longer stand on its own feet? Where the knowledge of law ends, when we no longer know 'what to think', where does it go? When Solomon dispenses justice, he considers all the facts, all the evidence, the stories of both mothers, but his judgement rests on feeling - a very superior, gifted, exceptional kind of feeling. And the other woman said, Nay, but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king. ... And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, 0 my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, let it be neither mine nor mine, but divide it. The king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.'(1 Kings, 3, 22-7) At the far frontiers of thinking and reasoning, feeling culminates, the epiphany comes in the idiom of the opposite. Thinking reaches enantiodromia in feeling. Jung (1944) says: Hence feeling is also a kind of judging, differing, however, from an intellectual judgement, in that it does not aim at establishing an intellectual connection but is solely concerned with the setting up of a subjective criterion of acceptance or rejection. (p.544) So let's listen to Dworkin (1986) on legal judgement: If the raw data do not discriminate between . . . competing interpretations, each interpreter's choice must reflect his view of which interpretation proposes the most value for the practice which one shows it in the better light, all things considered. (pp.52-3) (And value is what feeling does - as we are reminded in the definition below.) But the story is something more besides; it is also a story where the sublime, propriety, self-sufficiency, decency - that is, religion and law - are never fully grasped, and are always kept at a distance. . . . Texts, including narratives of space, but especially narratives of the spacing of the sublime, open out perception to

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the space of narrative and the spaces in between, the elements that signify what the unknown signifying intention cannot intend. (Douzinas, Warrington and McVeigh, 1993, p.182) It is possible that the truly great artists, of which Leonardo da Vinci is an outstanding example, were dominant thinking types in the first place. Of course we can never analyse historical figures - but we can imagine. It is not hard to countenance the idea I am postulating here, if we see Leonardo in the legacy of his work as a scientist; as an engineer, or as an early chaoticist studying water turbulence. But what he is most truly remembered for, where he found the culmination of his enormous gifts, was in the transcendent 'finality without any end' of the painting whose name is now so famous that we can hardly pronounce it without honouring the angel. The angel who, however much we analyse the radioactive substrata of the paint pigments and preliminary scratchings, has simply mesmerised generation upon generation of those whose feeling functions only rose through education or inclination by incremental developmental trajectories to emulation or criticism or utter awe. Clinical example To end this section, I will let a patient - a so-called dominant thinking type - speak: one who spent many fruitless (by his account) years in analysis. I felt I was constantly being harangued to have my feelings, to respond from my subjectivity about my life, my marriage, my work. If I had dreams, they remained boring meanderings around my office, my feeble attempts at active imaginations more embarrassing than helpful. All along I subtly sensed that my analyst agreed with my wife (who had also gone into training as a psychoanalyst) that somehow I was lacking, failing in some important way because I did not have the emotional sensitivity, the affective intelligence which allowed them to assess situations easily and quickly by their emotional tone. I somehow felt their disapproval of my pre-occupation with conceptual and intellectual processes, and felt vaguely sick and defensive when accused of 'talking shop' over the dinner table with my friends who were working in quantum physics and complexity theory. I loved these discussions and felt exhilarated and valued for days afterward - until her disapproval blemished and tarnished whatever joy they had given me and whatever feelings of self-esteem and pleasurable discourse I had derived from them. She felt we had to be telling jokes or stories about

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our holidays with our friends if we were 'mentally healthy'. I always felt wrong, deficient, diagnosed and rejected in those aspects of my life I valued most highly. Years of an Oxbridge education don't come cheaply or easily and I had loved the life of the mind — if I can say it in such a way — with all my heart. I simply felt impotent when my wife raged at me to 'show my feelings', to weep or rage, when all I wanted to do was understand what she wanted from me. When I shed a tear, she wanted me to weep, when I restrained myself from shouting at her or the children, she warned me about the likelihood of developing cancer. When I read about Klein and went to courses on psychoanalysis, my analyst interpreted that to me as wanting to control her through my mind from my envy of my mother's fecundity. I got better and better at anticipating my analyst's interpretations and more and more depressed. I felt my greatest virtues, my mind, my intellect, my excitements were devalued and worthless whereas I would never ever be able to achieve the states of being which seemed so natural to others such as my wife. I was successful, but my life lacked meaning. Too often I would sit in a pub at 11 o'clock wondering what it was all about and calculating rates and times of suicide by various causes. I had originally gone into psychotherapy for liberation, but become progressively more oppressed. Not only the sites of my old injuries hurt, but weekly I had to assimilate new ones. I tried and tried to stop thinking and start feeling, but every attempt left me more demoralised and less confident that I would ever succeed. Finally I worked with a therapist who was intellectually my equal or superior with what I felt was due respect for the arts and crafts of the intellect. She offered me the opportunity to discuss with her the outer reaches of my intellectual imagination as I wrestled with the beginning of time, the architectural reasoning of the starry skies, the imponderability of 'what happens in a coffee cup when the cream goes in'. She also happened to have trained in Zen and gave me koans until my mind was exhausted. It happened suddenly one day in the middle of a meeting, the world opened and my mind cracked open, not breaking down, but breaking through. Impossible to say what happened, but the light just simply went on. I adore my new wife. We laugh and cry together and when I think, she joins me; when my thinking crashes into its barriers, we switch on the computer with its library of fractal images. I still worry too much sometimes, but the big prize came to me within two years of fully feeling the edges of my mind in this way. I don't know if, after all this time, I understand the 'meaning of life' any clearer. I know that Ifeel the meaning of life in my work and in my love.

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Of course, there are many many ways to use psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to imprison, oppress and standardise or normalise. This is only one man's (fictionalised) story. Zen does not attempt to be intelligible, that is to say, capable of being understood by the intellect. The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only thinking about; . and then it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand, conceptual contact with reality, and first-hand experience. (Watts, 1960, p.19) Sometimes it happens just so. And miracles sometimes follow.

The enantiodromia of the dominant feeling function becoming superior thinking Definition of feeling function Jung's (1944) definition of feeling is as follows: Feeling is primarily a process that takes place between the ego and a given content, a process, moreover, that imparts to the content a definite value in the sense of acceptance or rejection ('like' or 'dislike'); but it can also appear, as it were, isolated in the form of 'mood', quite apart from the momentary contents of consciousness or momentary sensations. (p.543) And this concern with value is characteristic of so many great physicists. What then, is in our opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of them all, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described. . . . In the brief impressive rhetoric of Plotinus, And we, who are we anyhow?' (Erwin Schrodinger in Cropper, 1970, p.98). Typical professional examples In the preface to his book The Quantum Physicists, Cropper (1970) writes, theory [of quantum physics] emerges, from all the accidents, mistakes, and controversies which brought it into

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being, like a great painting materializing from the chaos of the artist's studio, with pure beautiful lines and magnificent vision (p.viii).

Many theoretical physicists of world-class level have tended to do badly at school, fail A-level mathematics and in such ways show their distaste, disorientation or distance from what would usually be considered good or very good thinking function (as displayed by individuals who tend to do academically well within Eurocentric cultures who value this capacity). Theoretical physicists, mathematicians or theoretical scientists in the new sciences of chaos and complexity theory are for many of us the quintessence of thinking types. Yet the road to achievement in this area runs notoriously, often and strangely enough, through heightened incremental development in feeling function and then a sudden leap into 'a way of thinking' which is described or experienced as strangely discontinuous with ordinary thinking. For example, Schrbdinger (in Cropper, 1970): As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large scale experiences can ever be 'true'. A completely satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be more precise, we can, of course, think it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a 'triangular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion'. (p.4) When he read Planck's theory, Einstein (in Cropper, 1970) said, 'It was as if the ground had been pulled from under me, with no firm foundation seen anywhere upon which one could have built' (p.7). This is a good description of the vertiginous experience of enantiodromia — in this case, when feeling reaches enantiodromia in thinking of a very superior order. It was clear from childhood that Einstein, a mediocre student, was hardly what we would now call a 'dominant thinking type'. His teacher was sure that he would 'never amount to anything'; he was refused admission to the Hochschille in Zurich, and passed many of the next exams 'with the help of a friend'. When he writes about his criticism of the educational system it is in feeling function terms. 'The coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year . . .' [italics added] (Einstein in Cropper, 1970, p.18).

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One of the masterpieces of world literature — Marcel Proust's — Remembrance of Things Past sprang from fully feeling into the aroma of a piece of madeleine biscuit soaked in a cup of tea. The laborious and detailed writing down in novelistic form of several thousand pages, in three monumental novels, which resulted from one fully experienced moment, required sustained thinking and logical concentration of a very superior kind. In particular, it drew on the rich resources of memory which can be the downfall of the feeling type (Mann, Siegler and Osmond, 1968) but transforms what could be only a felt state into a work where beauty blends with logic, and the thoughtful and intelligent construction of a whole life emerges aesthetically, but also particularly intelligently. It is salutary to reread the whole 'overture' to feel and empathise with his struggle of transforming feeling into a thoughtful act of creation. It is not an avoidance of the superior function of feeling, it is an immersion. What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day. (Proust, 1983, p.49) In more of his own words: And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. . . . And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it; I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowing; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed. . . . Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and my hopes for to-morrow, which can be brooded over painlessly. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. (pp.49-50)

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Notice again the experience of 'emptying out', the enormous effort of will to feeling - fully and the 'sudden-ness' of the transformation from this apotheosis of feeling into very superior thinking in 'a higher octave'. Joseph Beuys is also a very good example of a person with superior feeling function whose apotheosis in thinking led to the eventual recognition of his status as the seminal conceptual artist of our time. Much of his art, too, drew from his memory of the past, the times when he was very seriously burnt in a wartime aeroplane and people from a Tartar tribe found him and kept him alive by wrapping his body in animal fat and felt until he had healed. This became a fractal image for his art. Beuys - the artist and the teacher of artists - displayed a clear superior feeling function, finding and enabling transformation into thinking. Sacks (1995) described how he helped students who 'were unlikely to have "made it" as professional artists; in an exam system, measured on the quality and quantity of their products they would have failed' (p.57). But he reminded at least one of them to begin with her pain, her depression, her feeling. You can only begin with this, as you yourself have found. You cannot go beyond this. The work that you are forcing yourself to do is contrived, without motivation, unloved. Don't ask yourself where it will lead, don't pressurise yourself, just enter your world. Write down, draw, document everything that you think, that you do, that comes to mind. Write down what you feel and what you see, what you imagine, what you hope for. Then let us see what happens. (p.56) The works of art Beuys produced relied heavily on an enjoyment of evaluative contact with the unconventional materials he used (e.g. fat and felt) significantly of value to him from his own past history - which he himself always kept alive in significant ways in the materials he used for his work. However, his prominence as a great innovator in twentieth century art comes from his conceptual work which involved what appear as highly developed, complex thinking processes such as the various 'happenings' - staged events presented as works of art - where a strange leakage from the unconscious into reality was allowed to occur. Bearing in mind that the inferior function is that process which remains partially submerged in the unconscious, Beuys' conceptual art can be seen in terms of these complex thinking processes manifesting at the superior extreme of his feeling function abilities. In his educational work we can see how he does not force the feeling person to develop their thinking, but he encourages, even prescribes, a total and complete immersion in feeling, trusting that from that something new might happen of far greater quality than had been made hithertofore.

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Clinical example She had always kept diaries, many dozens of them. Her attic held them, brightly covered in colourful pictures representing the phases and moods of the time in which they had been written; little locks and little keys kept them from prying eyes, and handmade ribbon stained with the blues and crimson of organic dye tied the bundles. She said she 'had written her heart out in these journals', her soul was contained in them. Of course she had been sexually abused as a child by her father since she was (perhaps?) four years old. Maybe he had used her mouth for fellatio since she was a baby. Her dreams told her these things, and her body ached in many places and was always hungry no matter what she ate or how. She always acted on her feelings, judging friends and acquaintances by their taste, their beauty, their expression of the values she held dearest. If we were using astrological imagery, we might say that she had many planets in Libra and Venus rising. She was admired by all her friends for her exquisite and appropriate gifts at birthdays and Christmas time. Her previous marriage had been to a brilliant but ruthless man, large in the city, but very absent at home. He provided well for her and her children, but was painfully insistent on unloving sexual intercourse which, if she refused, seemed to abandon her to a desert of excusing phonecalls. None the less she needed him. 'I like being a wife', she said and was devastated when he finally left after another one of his numerous, nonsensical, 'unimportant' affairs. Her reaction was cataclysmic and suicidal. She experienced the terrors of birth, of childhood abuse, of archetypal hurricanes obliterating the known and loved world - the destruction of the known universe. Often she could identify with the terrorists or the deathwreaking storms in active imagination. She painted and wrote in her diaries and spilled out her feelings in art therapy, but it always remained 'carthartic' art - an expression of affect, bold, beautiful even, but unworked, untransformed, unshaped in a peculiar way - attractive, but ultimately personal. Pictures of little girls left to die in the snow, pretty girls sitting on fences, androgynous amazons scaling mountains in cumbersome boots. Too personal to be shared by others, and not unconsciously collectively personal enough (so to speak) to be universal. She was beautiful and the first analyst she went to fell in love with her. Never had he experienced such beauty of feeling, such rawness of emotion, such translucence of soul in a woman. She wanted help, but she also wanted nurture and protection. Anyway there was always something wonderfully entrancing about being loved by a man who is for the very first time emotionally moved by the force of a sexually desired vulnerable woman - open to his influence in all ways. To be his anima. To help him find the woman in himself. Made him write poetry again. Took the pain away for a little. New feelings - well, same feelings new again.

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When she became suicidal because the analyst would not leave his wife for her, he stopped the analysis. She phoned and wrote letters and poems and sent him pictures — but none of it seemed to matter any more. He felt she was demanding, trying to 'devour' him, expecting more from him than he could realistically commit to at this moment in his life. She ended up in a psychiatric ward. He did not come to see her or contact her at all; he had decided to pay more attention to his family and his wife was not very well. She kept their affair secret even though she had ECT in the hospital and lost consciousness many times. His collection of poetry came out, she lost custody of the children. Hell. The abyss. The chasm. The place where God forsakes and is forsaken. The dark night at the centre of the world forever. Dreams of revenge from time immemorial. Burnt witches. Trapped in a body flayed but bandaged in barbed wire. Agony every day. A hand to hold on to. Don't try to be different. Be fully who you are. Now Fully present in the pain. All of it. Time passes. More. Eventually a moment of illumination. An embarkation on a Ph.D. programme — a desire to know, to study, to discipline, to have some of those cool, clear boundaried frontiers, knowledge of how to protect and how to avoid falling. The power and potency of having fallen. Success. Great success. Life goes on of course, but reason carves it into international recognition for a particular expertise, a coolness more sleek than Siamese cats, but with all the fiery enchantment of Thoth.

The enantiodromia of the dominant sensation function becoming superior intuition Sensation, or sensing is that psychological function which transmits a physical stimulus to perception. It is therefore identical with perceptions. (Jung, 1944, p.585) Typical professional examples

A person who lives by sensation in the present, such as is often the case

with sports professionals, shows their greater gifts not in simply being faster, stronger, more practised — although all these count, of course. Sherlock Holmes baffles Watson because the sense perceptions are there for both of them to experience, yet the moment of intuitively knowing appears almost magical and discontinuous with the few grains of sand on the living room carpet. Then, like all intuitive psychotherapists, there are impressive post facto justifications to be made. Great masters of the martial arts train fully in sensation, developing it to its utmost, and then through the gift of intuition, they may 'irrationally know' the danger, the source of it, and spontaneously engage in the required action.

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Just imagine those pictures of old and frail men on the Aikido mats who can disable six or ten strong grown men attacking them at the same time. In the ultimate moment, when anticipation reaches unhesitatingly for the future opportunity and sensation transforms into 'knowing, in the way that highly developed intuitives know' for certain, suddenly and indisputably where the gap is, like the great goalscorers of footballing history. In a book devoted to the spiritual dimension of the martial arts (Payne, 1981) there is an illustration of the karate sparring exercise, developed by Master Egami, [in which] the opponents stand at some distance from each other. On the teacher's signal, they both attack; but the point of the exercise is that their actions should be simultaneous with the command of the teacher (not merely very shortly after it). This requires a spontaneity of action that transcends speed of reflex and approaches the telepathic. The participants do not react in response to some internal thought or external stimulus; their openness of mind allows a synchronistic harmony with their environment and thus a truly appropriate spontaneous action. (11 -93) Sensation reaches enantiodromic perfection in a superior kind of intuition — one which is almost psychic. We know how psychics or clairvoyants often physically handle a ring, a photograph, yarrowstalks, a hand or an astrological chart in order to enable them to 'see' the future. It is instructive to compare this with other times and other cultures. An American anthropologist with the magnificent name of Omar Khayyam Moore examined divination techniques used by the Indians in Labrador. These people are hunters, and failure to find food means hunger and possible death, so when meat is short they consult an oracle to determine in which direction they should hunt. They hold the shoulder bone of a caribou over hot coals, and the cracks and spots caused by the heat are then interpreted like a map.The directions indicated by this oracle are random, but the system continues to be used, because it works. Moore reasons that, if they did not use the bone oracle, the Indians would return to where they had last hunted with success or where cover was good or water plentiful. This could lead to overhunting of certain areas, but the use of the oracle means that their forays are randomized; the regular pattern is broken up, and they make a better and more balanced use of the land, which means in the end that they are more successful. Some kinds of magic work. (Watson, 1974, pp.298-9)

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Before we draw back too far, I also commend the reader to an introduction which Jung writes to Jaffe's (1979) Apparitions: An Archetypal Approach to Death, Dreams and Ghosts, in which prescience, premonitions and prophetic dreams, amongst other perhaps 'psychic' phenomena, are explored. An integral component of any nocturnal, numinous experience is the dimming of consciousness, the feeling that one is in the grip of something greater than oneself, the impossibility of exercising criticism, and the paralysis of the will. Under the impact of the experience, reason evaporates and another power spontaneously takes control — a most singular feeling which one willy-nilly hoards up as a secret treasure no matter how much one's reason may protest. That, indeed is the uncomprehended purpose of the experience — to make us feel the overpowering presence of a mystery (p.vii) And in order to experience mystery the prophets of old go into the desert, and experience sensation's extremes, hunger, fear, pain, illness in order to return with illumined foresights. Here follows a story told by Meade which points to this. The sweetness of life Once many years ago, there was a great hunter who knew all the secrets of the bush and its inhabitants. When his wife told him she was pregnant, he knew that this would be his firstborn son. With the help of magic formulas, he lured the unborn boy out of the womb and took him hunting in the bush. He taught his son all his knowledge of the bush: which berries were edible, which flowers poisonous. He taught him about animals and birds, how they walk and fly, where they hide and when. When they came back, the hunter's wife was asleep, and he conjured the boy back into the womb; she didn't seem to notice. The embryo was not taken out, no physical removal took place; the hunter, by means of his magical power, controlled the spirit of his unborn son. It was this spirit that accompanied him on his hunt, while the body went on growing in the womb. In this way, the spirit learned effortlessly while wandering the bush. Perhaps the spirit was really the hunter's father, about to be reborn as his son. When the days were fulfilled for the son to be born, the women of the village assembled to sing songs in praise of the firstborn. And such a big baby! After a day or two, he could speak, and he refused his mother's milk, saying he craved meat, like all men of

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his rank. The third he began to creep; the next day he stood up, and after five days he could walk and run. He was grown up. So the day after that, the son went hunting with his father, this time in the flesh. They heard the honey bird sing, and the father knew it would lead them to a tree where the bees had honey. They found it; the father told the son to receive the honeycombs as he took them from the bee's hive and put them in the calabash. 'But don't lick your fingers, for it is very bitter,' he said. The father wanted to control the honey himself, but he forgot that the son knew as much about the forest as he did. By the time the father climbed down, the son had eaten the honey. The father was enraged. He decided to test the son's power. He knew the language of animals. He called the big beasts, the elephants, the buffalo, the lions. They all came charging at the son. The son did not blink. He took up a tree trunk and knocked all the animals to the ground. The father did not blink. He said, 'Not badly done. Now I would like a fire to roast all this meat. There's smoke on the horizon. That must be a village. Go get a burning log, while I guard our meat.' The son went off toward the smoke. There was a village, but the villagers were big cannibal people, whose great noses always wished to smell delicious human meat. The son ran back as soon as he saw this tribe. But it was too late; a cannibal child had smelled him and seen him. The cannibal people all came running after him. The son came running into the clearing, shouting, 'Father, climb a tree and hide, monsters are coming after me!' The father thought, 'He is a boy, after all. What have Ito fear in this forest?' The son managed to climb the tree unnoticed. But the cannibal people fell on the father before he could move. They feasted on him, every bit of him, enjoying it and licking their lips. Then they helped themselves to the pile of elephants, buffalo, and lions. When they were absolutely full, they returned to their village. There, they drank all the beer they had been brewing and settled down to a long satisfied sleep, as was their custom. The son climbed down and followed them to the village. Once they were snoring away inside their huts, he tied shut the doors and set fire to them. They all died in the flames. Nearby, the son found men and women prisoners who were being fattened for consumption by the cannibal tribe. He released them all. They made him their king. He married one of the women he had saved. They built new huts. The queen became pregnant. The new king knew it would be his firstborn son. He lured the unborn son out of the womb and took him hunting in the bush. He taught his son all he knew of the bush. (Meade, 1993, pp.70-2)

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Clinical Example

Typical professional examples

He was a scientist born and bred. His mother was a behavioural psychologist, his father dean of the faculty of engineering at a prestigious university. Exciting early outings which he remembered with delight were to the Museum of Natural History, early experiments the dissection of rats and insects to 'see how they worked'. As a boy, he excelled in sports and sciences. If he could not experience something through his senses, such as fairy stories and church, he was vociferously contemptuous of it. His greatest fears were 'being made a fool of and 'being found out to be a fraud', notwithstanding his superior grades at school and university. He said that empiricism, in the sense of one who learns only from trial and error and rejects all 'a priori knowledge, [and whose knowledge, skills and authority] rests solely on experience and induction' (Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary), was his religion, if he had any. He even belonged to the Rationalist Society. In time he married a fine 'upstanding young woman' and his career progressed with due satisfaction until his wife was ready to go into hospital for the delivery of their baby. He was in the delivery room when after several painful hours of labour his wife gave birth. The experience of that bundle of blood and life from the body of his wife shocked him into ecstasy. 'I experienced awe, wonder, miracles, the transcendent knowing that the meaning of life was beyond the senses.' The synchronous event of his laboratory being closed down seemed to him to be the very perfection of a higher plan to him. He yielded in some fundamental way and never quite returned to the man he was before. He turned toward the study of synchronicity and what is quaintly called 'wondrous events' in psychology, and eventually became an archetypal Jungian psychotherapist well known for his remarkable diagnostic powers — bordering on clairvoyance. In his society, he became the acknowledged expert in the selection of students and in the most effective matching of prospective patients and potential trainee psychotherapist/analysts or their more experienced colleagues.

It is classically the dominant intuitive type of personalities who have inferior sensation function. They can't read maps, lose their keys, their glasses, their umbrellas. But, if they 'listen to their intuition', they often appear to be quite successful in our sensational world. Indeed it is said of Richard Branson that he is 'accident-prone' and loses his way when he is driving his car to a new destination. Apparently things to do with the sensational world often goes wrong for him. This clearly has never seriously impeded his ability, indeed extraordinary talent, to make money, to find inventive and unusual ways of increasing his fortune and thereby also create many jobs and opportunities for others. He knows what should be done in the real world, the sensational world. Many studies, of which Agor's (1984) is only one, have shown that one of the qualities effective managers rely on most seriously is their intuition. The particular quality which is valued is the capacity of intuitives to read the emerging conditions from the chaotic turbulence of world conditions, sense the shape of things to come. Body Shop managers have intuition on their lists of capabilities. It is obvious that it is the intuitives who usually 'just know' what the next fashionable colour, car shape, film genre will be, often long before and against all the advice of the thinking type accountants or bank managers. Although intuition is often spoken of in a derogatory (or envious) way as 'women's intuition', it is the function which distinguishes great strategists of war, captains of industry, the detective such as Sherlock Holmes who makes out that he 'deduces' facts from observation or the police officer who 'just smells out' whether someone is telling the truth or not. Reading the life stories of transformed criminals such as Jimmy Boyle (1977) we can also hear echoes or indications of the transformation from dominant sensation function to gifted intuitive — often the result from a sudden 'conversion'-type experience following immersion in sensation.

The enantiodromia of the dominant intuition function becoming superior sensation Here is a description of dominant intuition according to Jung (1944): It is that psychological function which transmits perceptions in an unconscious way. Everything, whether outer or inner objects or their associations, can be the object of this perception. . . . A kind of instinctive apprehension irrespective of the nature of its contents. (pp.567-8)

I have simply been on a journey and experienced terrible pain of a physical, spiritual and emotional nature and I want to stop those of my ilk from doing the same. . . . It was all of these thoughts that were racing through my mind and I hasten to add they were not all of an altruistic nature, but the complexity and intensity of them were giving me a hard time [pp.239-40]. . . . If it was the opposite and someone needed support due to some problem, then everyone would reach out and touch him, and by that I mean help him over the bad patch. Either way the group meeting was a very powerful force [p.245]. . . . I was concerned with helping myself and building for my own future but there was the wider issue in that I was now committed to helping the

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general situation on the penal and social fields. It was now that I was tasting a short spell on the outside that I realised just how committed I was to proving that people in hopeless situations like myself, who are serving very long sentences, can act responsibly and through their own experience, give something back into society (Boyle, 1977, p.257) Usually by the time they know the facts, the moment for action, decision or 'the window of opportunity' has already passed. The more gifted and successful the intuitive, whether stockbroker or psychotherapist, the less likely they are to give concurrently good rational reasons for the actions they are certain should be taken at the time of their 'irrational knowing'. If the insurance is not taken out at the time they first say so, the burglary tends to happen anyway; if the flowers are not sent to the sick friend when the impulse arises, by the time it comes again they may have died; if the phone call to school is not made, something may go wrong — there are many examples of the effective and gifted use of intuition when it crosses the barrier from irrational knowing to knowing what to do, and where and how to act to accomplish what reason has not yet had time to explain. Gifted bodyworkers and healers of all persuasions work like this when they 'just know where and how to touch', as do inventors such as Pasteur and Edison when they suddenly know to what insignificant part of the field attention should be paid. (Frequently the observers, the collective or 'the establishment' reject them. Sometimes they are simply hounded to death by disapproval like Semmelweis, excommunicated like Galileo, or called 'crazy' by the state psychiatric system or their diagnostically-minded, more mediocre colleagues. By the time that time catches up with the truth of Cassandra's prophesies, those who disbelieved her may have had their humanity or their lives destroyed.) Clinical example She was a pretty 'average', middle-class, 'county' woman who cared for her children and husband with the Demeter-like concern expected from her culture. She used to be good at maths, but lost interest around the time she started menstruating and her interest turned to English literature. She did reasonably well at university, but never excelled. She was 'averagely' happily married. She was also very sensitive to her husband's life and her babies from the beginning — as many women like her are. She would often feel sure that he was on his way home from work — and it frequently turned out to be correct. She was so empathically attuned that she even experienced the physical sensations of her children, particularly the enuretic one. She would spontaneously wake up in the middle of the night when her child needed to go to the toilet. And she

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was right. Her psychotherapist took a dim view of this symbiosis. When

her husband appointed new staff, he consulted her and she was usually right. When they argued, he said, 'You always want to be right without giving any reasons!' But the next day when he was cooler, he felt not only the 'injustice of the position' but also the injustice of not having her talent. When she said 'get the washing in before the storm', he learnt not to question, but to do it, even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky. When she said 'we'd better take out new private health insurance' even though they could hardly afford it, he did it, having learned from experience that most likely it would become clear in time why and how this had been the right thing to do at that time. When intuition reaches enantiodromia, it happens in superior sensation. When her husband died she mourned for several years. She felt she would never truly overcome her grief, but eventually it faded. She became a stockbroker because her son was studying for his MBA and living with her at home during his finals. She made millions. She built a blue-chip company. She enjoyed that too. This is the dream foreseeing the end of her analysis. I was in the presence of two older women. One of them seemed to be my 'difficult' grandmother. But she faded into the background immediately. Both women were engaged in religious and spiritual pursuits. But the stranger definitely was more level-headed. She suggested I should do an 'exercise'. I was puzzled. She called it shedding of the skin. As she was explaining it to me a young woman was in fact performing the exercise. She put her head on to her chest. And it disappeared into her body. That's all I saw. Although I was slightly scared and apprehensive I told the woman I wanted to do the exercise. So I put my head on to my chest. . . . [It] entered my body. And from then on I had to completely trust the woman. I felt her hands curling my skin across my bones. I was completely soft. Even my bones. She proceeded to peel me, turn me inside out. I felt like a sausage, with an unsavoury skin. I felt this as I was 'peeled'. I remember thinking, 'How nice to get rid of that skin'. But at the same time I still didn't know if I'd ever get out of this very awkward situation! I could get completely stuck halfway through. ... Those fearful thoughts crept through my mind as I felt my skin being pushed on my outside. I was still inside. It was awfully dark. . . And then I felt a hand quite hard pushing at my head. And I saw light. I saw it from the inside of my own vagina. And I realised I was actually born from myself. I saw the shedded skin and even the umbilical cord, which had been cut off. I can't remember how I got 'out' — but when I was OUT I had a new skin and felt very fresh all over. And glowing ...'

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Conclusion This chapter has reviewed Jung's typological differentiations (the feeling, thinking, intuitive and sensation functions, whether introverted or extraverted in attitude) as dynamic structures which contain the seeds of their opposites. Contrary to the usual counsel of concentrating on the development of the inferior function, this chapter suggests a reversal of (or alternative) attitude which suggests that if the superior function is developed to its fullest extent, it will tend to an enantiodromia — a turning into its opposite. This means that there can come into being a natural and even superior manifestation of the inferior function which is more the hallmark of gift or genius or extraordinary talent than the prescription for the linear and incremental development patterns more usually associated with the development of the inferior function per se. This hypothesis was explained by means of general examples of professionals and historical figures as well as fictional clinical examples to explore cases where dominant function is not inhibited, but allowed to flourish in its extremity. The examples indicate possibilities that the so-called 'inferior function' may manifest at a higher order of complexity, functionality and excellence. Thus thinking function may manifest as feeling function in excelsis in its apotheosis. Similarly, feeling function transforms into a higher order of thinking when fully unfolded. Sensation likewise yields in its extreme the development of intuitive or even psychic insights, and intuition finds its enantiodromic peak in sensation function outcomes of remarkable acuity. These conclusions may be of value to all people who wish to nurture their individual genius, but in particular may prove helpful to other clinicians working with those of exceptional gifts or those whose gifts and talents as children were limited, handicapped or punished.

References Agor, W. (1984) Intuitive Management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Boyle, J. (1977) A Sense of Freedom. London: Pan. Cropper, W. H. (1970) The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to the Physics. London: Oxford University Press. Douzinas, C., Warrington, R. and McVeigh, S. (1993) Postmodern Jurisprudence: The law of text in the texts of law. London: Routledge. Dworkin, R. (1986) Law's Empire. London: Fontana. von Franz, M-L. (1971a) 'The four irrational types'. In M-L. von Franz and J. Hillman Lectures on Jung's Typology, pp.22-37. New York: Spring Publications. von Franz, M-L. (1971b) The role of the inferior function in psychic development'. In M-L. von Franz and J. Hillman Lectures on Jung's Typology, pp.54-72. New York: Spring Publications. Jaffe, A. (1979) Apparitions: An Archetypal Approach to Death, Dreams and Ghosts. Irving, TX: Spring Publications.

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Jung, C. G. (1944) Psychological Types: or The Psychology of Individuation (tr. H. G. Baynes) London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Jung, C. G. Collected Works, Vol. 17 (1954) (eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, tr. R.F.C. Hull). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mann, H., Siegler, M. and Osmond, H. (1968) 'The many worlds of time', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 13(1), 33-56. Meade, M. (1993) Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men. San Francisco, CA: Harper. Payne, P.(1981) Martial Arts: The Spiritual Dimension. London: Thames and Hudson. Proust, M. (1983) Remembrance of Things Past. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (First published in French in 1913) Sacks, S. (1995) 'Joseph Beuys' pedagogy and the Work of James Hillman: the healing of art and the art of healing'. Issues in Architecture Art and Design, 4(1), 52-73. Watson, L. (1974) Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural. London: Coronet. Watts, A. W. (1960) The Spirit of Zen: Away of life, work and art in the Far East. New York: Grove Press.

Elemental Images of 'Impossible Love'

Chapter 14 Elemental Images of `Impossible Love': the Brother-Sister Coniunctio as Reflected in Art EVA LOEWE' In her Memoirs, Lou Andreas Salome, addressing herself to the imaginal presence of her great friend, the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, long after his death, wrote the following:' If I was your woman and wife for years it was because you were the first reality for me, in body and personality one indistinguishable, undoubtable reality of life itself. Word for word I could have admitted to you what you said in your declaration of love: 'You alone are real!' In this way we were married before we were friends, and friends we hardly became by choice, but because such marriages as ours take place in the underworld, a subtle world. Not two halves striving towards each other, but one surprised and trembling totality recognising itself in the unfathomable totality of the other. Thus we were brother and sister - yet as in antiquity, before incest became sacrilege. Lou's imagination here, clearly places her and Rainer in the archetypal time of the Egyptian pharaohs 'before incest became sacrilege'. This time is the mythic time where union between brother and sister is a hierosgamos or sacred marriage, as it is called in alchemy. The oldest instance of the brother-sister marriage we know is that of the twins, Isis and Osiris, who, according to Plutarch 'fell in love with each other under the cloak of darkness in their mother's womb'. Myth relates that it is this divine couple who gave humanity the arts of civilisa'This paper was first given at the 3rd international conference in archetypal psychology — 'The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet' hosted by the London Convivium for Archetypal Studies at Regents Park, London, in 1989. It was subsequently printed in Sphinx 3 (1990) and given again in Florence in 1994 at the Italian Anima conference. This complete version was collated by myself after Eva Loewe's death on 6 May 1996. — Noel Cobb

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tion; Osiris by showing men the skill of cultivating the earth, the splendour of laws and teachings on how to worship the Gods; Isis by teaching women the arts of healing, of creating domestic harmony and of grinding corn, as well as those of spinning flax and weaving cloth. 2 Thus the shocking truth of the myth is that this incestuous pair are the archetypal patrons of culture - and of what we call cultural psychology - meaning that culture itself arises from the archetypal conjunction of brother and sister - their conjoined creative imaginations. However, eros, not incest, connects the pair, that is, an erotic force comes into play, an eros which need neither be suppressed nor acted out in a concrete physical fusion.' The frustration of such concreteness and the stimulus arising out of it, can lead to startling innovations in culture. In this hour we are going to look at some examples of brother-sister relationship. Rather than being hypnotically fixated on the tabooed and vilified appearance of what classically constitutes the incestuous bond, I shall look at what the 'impossible love' of brother and sister inspires. Remember that the archetypal forces behind that conjunction are also the aesthetic shapers of civilisation! Whether this aspect is constellated or whether it brings about madness, suicide or psychological monstrosities as its children, it claims our attention as one of the most potent images of the psyche, so much so that Jung placed the brother-sister coniunctio at the heart of the alchemical opus. 4 The spectrum of contrasts in the brother-sister tandem runs from images of unreciprocated incestuous lust in its crudest form - as in Thamar and Amnon (the Biblical tale), to images of the chaste devotion to the love of Beauty found in the Romantics and Neoplatonists: from unmediated fire to refined ether.

An animated hieroglyph One of the most combustible images of brother-sister love in Western literature is found in an Elizabethan drama by John Ford, called 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. This play is a fiery pyre of defiant love that outrages all conventional morality, and, at the same time, is irresistible in its irrefutability. Giovanni and Annabella move from the ecstatic discovery of their mutual passion to more and more fateful consequences in an effort to be true to the image in their hearts: they love each other. The curtain rises on young Giovanni talking to the Friar, his tutor and confessor, about his love for his sister: Say that we had one father, say one womb (Curse to my joys) gave both us life and birth;

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246 Are we not therefore each to other bound

So much the more by nature, by the links Of blood, of reason - nay, if you will have't, Even of religion - to be ever one, One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

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tip of his dagger and watches horror dawn on the company as they realise what he has done. The husband draws his sword and is killed by Giovanni, who in turn is struck down by the banditi hired for the assassination of the lovers. Giovanni dies, with these words on his lips: 0, I bleed fast. Death, thou art a guest long look'd for; I embrace Thee and thy wounds. 0, my last minute comes! Where'er I go, let me enjoy this grace: Freely to view my Annabella's face.(V.vi.107-11)

Figure 14.1: Lovers Embracing. Pencil drawing. D.G. Rossetti. BM1954-5-8-5

This frenzy, when presented in trepidation to his sister, is met by her overjoyed avowel of the same intensity of feelings for him. She sinks to her knees before him with the words: Brother, even by our mother's dust, I charge you, Do not betray me to your mirth or hate; Love me or kill me, brother.(1.ii.264-6) To which Giovanni answers by uttering the same oath - tragic forecast of their fate. For nine months Gionvanni 'enjoys the sweet sheets of his sister', during which time she conceives and has to accept one of her many suitors as a husband in order to cover up the identity of the child. Her husband is not without suspicion and maltreats Annabella. The play ends in a dramatic paroxysm: at a birthday banquet for Annabella's husband, Giovanni seizes the initiative from his enemies and confronts them with an animated hieroglyph of Gorgonian power. Having been allowed into the bedroom where Annabella has been locked, Giovanni realises that their secret is known and that they are trapped. Embracing his sister for the last time, Giovanni plunges his dagger into her. Madly triumphant, he enters the banquet hall with Annabella's heart upon the

This is fire at its most devouring, passion at its most unredeemed. Abnegation and chastity on the other end of the spectrum, however, bring a very different imagination to the problem of 'impossible love' although not any less fiery - as we shall hear. There are modes of tandems which can be imagined in the styles of other elemental forces: earth, water and air. The primal form of brother-sister attraction always demands violent consequences. An earth dominant legend, the Finnish Kalevala, for example, tells of a brother who, upon his return from a cruel war, meets in the woods, unbeknown to him, his sister - and he rapes her. On finding out that he has 'dishonoured his own mother's child's he kills himself. This sister-rape is a direct consequence of the brother's blindness to the archetypal soul-sister. Besides fire, I wish to give air and water a special place in this deepening of certain images of brother-sister love.

The Desert of Najd The resolved manifestation of fiery frenzy emerges in a much-loved story of the Persian Orient, Layla and Majnun. 6 Immortalised eight centuries ago by Nizami, it alchemises a passion as fiery as that of Giovanni and Annabella. From noble families of different tribes, Layla and Majnun meet as schoolchildren and are immediately drawn to each other, in fact: they fall helplessly in love and, like a Bedouin Romeo and Juliet, are relentlessly foiled by fate. Layla was a lute, Majnun a viola ... What shall I say about Layla? She was a fairy, not a human being ... How shall I describe Majnun? He was a fairy's torch, alight from head to foot. Layla was a jasmin-bush in spring, Majnun a meadow in autumn, where no jasmin was growing. (tr. R.Gelpke, V29-39)

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Separated from Layla by the anger of her parents, Majnun steals a brief glimpse of her one day: 'Drunk with longing and confused by feverish thought, his lips trembled like the verses of the poem he was chanting.' Majnun's father, unable to arrange a marriage for his son with Layla, takes the boy to Mecca to cure him. But, once there, the boy hammers on the door of the temple, shouting that he has sold his life for love's sake, and that if love dies, so will he. He implores God to make his love a hundred times stronger, praying: 'Take what is left of my life and add it to Layla's. Let me never demand from her as much as a single hair, even if my pain reduces me to the width of one!' Separation from his beloved has now turned the devotee into a madman, into the poet who is himself 'the harp of his love and of his pain'. Majnun flees to the wilderness where he lives out his grief away from men.' The wild animals, recognising his pain, come, one by one, to live near him. (In Sufi tradition the wilderness is seen as the abode of metaphor; the city, the abode of the literal. It is a commonplace in Persian poetry that the city is the realm of rationality, while the wilderness is the abode of the mad, or those who have transcended the boundaries of the rational and entered intuitive knowledge — knowledge 'through the heart' rather than the intellect. For this reason the aspirant to truth and beauty must leave the rational city and venture into the metaphorical wilderness in order to encounter the archons of the other world.) Knowing no other way to face the pain of separation, Layla also locks herself into silence and secret sorrow. Like Majnun, she too is burnt in the fire of their longing, but her flames are hidden and no smoke rises from them. . . . Yet after dark she leaves her tent and stands in the moonlight, looking towards the mountains of Najd, telling her secret to the night. Sometimes she writes on scraps of paper, heading them with the words: `Jasmin sends this message to the cypress tree', entrusting them to the wind. And somehow an answer always reaches her. 'No tent curtain was woven so closely as to keep out Majnun's poems. Every child from the bazaar was singing his verses; every passer-by was humming one of his love-songs, bringing Layla a message from her beloved.' So similar were their 'voices' that when people learned their ecstatic poetry by heart, they did not know who had written it. Layla's family married her to a man she could not love. As Nizami tells us: 'Nobody had any inkling of what was happening in Layla's heart.. . however much people enjoyed her beauty Layla carried death in her soul'. And like a drunken lion Majnun roamed restlessly in the desolate country of sand and rocks. His skin turned amber; his hair grew long and matted; his feet grew hard as iron; his legs were scarred from thornbushes and stones. Yet, when people came near him, they were amazed

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at the beauty of the ghazels this madman in rags sang in praise of Layla. Nizami says that visitors often wrote down the poems and took them away to the farthest horizons and some became lovers themselves. When Majun's father seeks him out, pleading with him to return home, Majnun pleads in turn to be allowed to stay in the desert: 'A flame burns in my heart, a flame beyond measure, which has turned my being to ashes.' Broken, his father leaves, saying farewell for the last time. Upon hearing of his father's death,- Layla sends Majnun a letter in which she tries to comfort him, telling him thdt she is his companion forever. Majnun receives her letter with tears, `so great was his joy that he was quite beyond himself like a bud bursting its sheath'. He agrees to meet Layla. The great moment arrives. Layla slips out of her tent in the growing dusk to the garden where Majnun is waiting. But seeing him, she realises that she cannot go closer than the ten steps still separating them. Closer than that would bring disaster. She tells the messenger to go to Majnun and ask him to recite some verses to her. Majnun recovers his senses, having fainted at the sight of her, and speaks his poetry. But suddenly he falls silent, jumps up and flees from the garden and out into the desert. This mysterious behaviour only becomes meaningful when the story is understood as a phenomenon revealing the taboo of brother—sister love. Layla and Majnun may literally come from different tribes — and that should lift the taboo even between relatives — but archetypally they are sister and brother with all that this entails. They cannot be together and they cannot be apart. Being a woman, Layla experiences the greater torment because she is virtually imprisoned and must also keep her secret hidden from her family. Was she not,' Nizami asks, 'like a ruby enclosed in the heart of a stone?' Her husband, rejected from the beginning as a lover, grows ill and dies. Layla, according to Arab custom, must veil her face for two years, see no one and stay withdrawn from the world in her tent. At last Layla is free to give heart and soul to her beloved, but the years have taken her strength. She has become weak and transparent. A cold fever attacks her limbs and spreads dark blotches over her face. Sensing death approaching, she calls her mother and reveals her secret. She asks to be dressed as a bride when she dies, in a blood-red garment. Knowing that Majnun will come, she begs her mother to treat him kindly and to tell Majnun that the longing for him did not die with her; that behind the veil of earth her eyes are looking for him, asking: when do you come? When Majnun hears about the death of his beloved, he comes out of the wilderness like a thundercloud driven by storm and falls on her grave as if struck by lightning. `Do not ask what it looked like, his burnt-out heart!' Nizami says. Majnun speaks to his beloved in her grave, oblivious to all else:

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How changed you are! . . . suddenly you have fallen still, like water in the depth of a well. Yet, even though you are hidden from my eyes, my heart can see you and will never lose you. Majnun so longed for Layla that he could not bear to leave the grave, and 'while he was lying there, weeping and telling his grief, the animals kept watch over him, so that he should not be disturbed'. People avoided the place, fearing the madman and the attending wolves and lions. Exhausted by sorrow, embracing the gravestone with both arms, Majnun died, his lips only moving with the words, 'You, my love . . As no one dared approach the grave in fear of the guardians, no one knew that Majnun had died. For months his body lay there, protected by his animal friends. Only when the body had safely turned to dust did they abandon their watch and one after another disappeared into the wilderness. Archetypal longing. The despair and deadlock of the incestuous brother—sister bond can take lovers to the brink of suicide. Love is impossible because it is forbidden. But it can also be impossible for those who are not related by blood, yet carry the tragic guilt of incest because of their souls' incessant and ardent communication in the face of the most adverse circumstances. Usually some other marriage than theirs has taken place and proves to be a mistake. In our time, Rilke and Lou Salome, although not literally brother and sister, nevertheless felt the intoxication of the brother—sister attraction of minds, that had the consequence of bringing about their physical union in spite of Lou's marriage to another. But the very mystery of their closeness became a claustrophobic panic for Lou — something which prompted her to flee, thus initiating the young poet into a life of harrowing loneliness and austere individuation.° The brother—sister tandem obeys the principle of 'like attracting like'; love that craves 'the same', that seeks the cure from its burning desires by quenching the thirst with what 'poisoned' its pulse — an old homoeopathic principle. Annabella and Giovanni, Layla and Majnun, Tristan and Isolde, all constellate the archetypal brother—sister pair and their eternal longing. Writing about our archetypal nostalgia, or pothos, Hillman says: 'Tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealised image that drives our wandering. Pothos, as the wider factor in Eros, drives the sailor-wanderer to quest for what cannot be fulfilled and what must be impossible. It is the source of 'impossible love', producing the Tristan complex. . . . This component of Eros is the factor, or the divine figure, within all our senseless individuation adventures, . . . the mind's mad wanderings after impossibilities, our forever being at sea, and the fictive goals we must set ourselves — all so that we

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may go on loving.' 9 The Tristan phenomenon in our loving 'insists that Eros aims always at the beyond and thus cannot be realised here and now'.'°

In other words, this yearning, this pothos, leading into inevitable entanglements, is a radical path of individuation.

The fountain of the blind L'eau qui pleure et l'eau qui rit, L'eau qui parle et l'eau qui fuit, L'eau qui tremble dans nuit . Maurice Maeterlinck, 'Chanson de Melisande', from Serres Chaudes (1889) If the passion of fire is all-consuming, then that of water is all-dissolving. In the realm of water there is none of fire's pointed directives. Action is all but dissolved in an ecstacy of limitlessness. Ecstatic water — but also floating anxiety and helpless despair: intentionality in dissolution. There is one playwright by the name of Maurice Maeterlinck, who, like hardly any other, was able to create the atmosphere of dormant pools and dried-up fountains, to call forth long silences like soundless rings spreading on water, conjure up shadows and fractured shafts of light in his greatest play, Pelleas and Melisande. It was born out of the samefinde-sieclepothos in Europe which produced so many remarkable works of art (as well as the new pastime of psychoanalysis). In it we find not only the same suffocating rooms, stagnant waters, empty spaces, grottoes and dark forests which image the psychic geography of the time but also its intoxicating spirit: an Ungeist (to borrow a term from Alfred Ziegler), an undine of alluring nostalgia, a 'promising' nymph, a Lorelei. To understand the lovers, Pelleas and Melisande, we must enter the elemental imagination of water. We must attune ourselves to the vague and misty quality of Melisande who 'cannot remember' where she comes from when she is found at the edge of a pool. In short, the plot is this: Prince Golaud finds a lost and seemingly amnesiac girl named Melisande by a shallow pool deep in the forests, and brings her home to the castle where Arkel, his father, is ill. Golaud marries the girl, Melisande, who is soon with child. Pelleas, Golaud's younger brother, comes to love Melisande as she loves him, in complete chastity. Jealous and suspicious, Golaud finds them by the fountain one night. He wounds Melisande and kills Pelleas. This precipitates the premature birth of Melisande's baby, a girl. Melisande dies, neither from her minor wound nor from childbirth, but because she cannot live . . . she dies from a cold and lightless world, where people are old and dying; from having never been understood by her aging husband, and from having been inescapably drawn to his

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younger brother, who tries in vain to flee from the scene before death can reach him. There is such an evocation of water in the play that it seems as though the characters may be submerged at any moment. And, Maeterlinck does finally image Pelleas dead at the bottom of a fountain, the Fountain of the Blind, that very fountain which had perennially restored sight to blind supplicants, but which, in the play, has lost its power to do so, leaving the reigning king sightless. As an opera Pelleas and Melisande" triumphed immediately. As though touched by the same daimon as Maeterlinck, Claude Debussy made a turbulent transposition of this study in wateriness by composing music like a spring river in full spate to characterise the enraptured lovers and by dramatising Melisande's isolation as if she were an artery of the far-away, pulsing sea. Debussy's musical portrait of Pelleas is that of a youth in agonising astonishment over his unexpected love spurting forth like a brook swollen with melting snow from the mountains. Melisande is characterised by a childlike innocence mixed with a Melusine-like seductiveness which is alluring in its apparent secrecy rather than in an open gesture that seduces. Her long, flowing, blond hair plays an important role, as does her sweet voice. She is always close to water. She descends with Pelleas deep into grottoes and, more than once, meets him at the fountain. Earlier in the play she loses Golaud's ring in a pool, and, earlier still, she is found at a pond in the woods where her golden crown has slipped into the water. The only object that could have revealed her identity lies sunken at the bottom of a blind pool, but she herself does not want to know of it, nor to have it back. Bachelard' 2 tells us that the imagination of misfortune and death finds in the matter of water a particularly powerful and natural material image. Thus for certain souls water truly holds death in its substance. . . . For certain dreamers, water is the universe of death . . . No one ever recovers from having dreamed next to dormant water. . . . Water dies with the dead in its substance. Water is then a substantial nothingness. No one can go further into despair than this. For certain souls, water is the matter of despair. Heraclitus took this view even further by saying it was 'death to souls to become water'." Water is the 'universe of death' in this play, perhaps because there is so much despair. Simultaneously, the water mirrors desire. The water dreams of the lovers' desire to dissolve any obstacles that would keep them apart. Does water not carry the dream of yearning inherent in the brother—sister archetype?" The ancient Egyptians believed that the tears of Isis, wept for her long lost twin brother, flooded the Nile each year.

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The lovers reveal their love for each other only minutes before they are separated forever by the enraged Golaud. Here is their last exchange of words: 15 You love me?. . .. Since when? . . . Since always . . . since the day I saw you! . . . How you say that! As if your voice had sailed over the sea in springtime! . . I've never heard your voice before . . . it is like rain on my heart! You say it So openly, like an angel under questioning! I can't believe it . . . Melisande, why should you love me? . . . Your voice! Cool and clear as water, fresh water on my lips . . . on my hands ... I looked everywhere, I could not find beauty! You are so beautiful ! It's as if you were going to die! You too! . . . I'm about to be strangled by my own heart . . . the stars are falling down. . . On me too, on me too! With Pelleas and Melisande Debussy left the Impressionists and joined the Symbolists — who cared little about expressing fleetingness and were more concerned with the mysterious eternity of symbols — art dedicated to the universal world of Ideas. Debussy, although inspired by Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, was intent on creating an 'anti-Wagnerian' opera, and Maeterlinck's language 'punctuated with silences, relies heavily on the repetition of sounds and phrases that frequently take on a power of a litany, re-discovering in this form the original function of language, its supernatural and religious characteristics . . . ' 16 was best suited for this. Debussy translated with stylistic accuracy the silences as well as the litanies of Maeterlinck's text. Although Maeterlinck is relatively unknown to English audiences, his imagination stands significantly at the threshold of modern drama and has swept, like a flood, far and beyond the borders of its native country over the arid spaces in European culture, irrigating countless gardens of dramatic sensibility: for example, those of Antonin Artaud and Federico Garcia Lorca, to name but two of our century's dramatic geniuses. Artaud, aware of Maeterlinck's ability to unleash archetypal forces in the subtlest and yet most powerful doses, said that Maeterlinck's characters were propelled by the unconscious fatedness of the dramas of antiquity" and that he was the first amongst new writers to 'introduce into literature the multiple richness of the subconscious' in that he tried to give life to pure thought. In his compatriate, Fernand Khnopff, Maeterlinck had a contemporary of whom it was said that he, too, sought to paint the emotion of thought' 9 (among many other iconographic elucidations of Maeterlinck's texts Khnopff also made five colour lithographs to accompany a publication of

Pelleas and Melisande).

We could say conclusively about the play that deeply unconscious material is carried to the very banks of consciousness only to be washed

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away again into dream and death. How these lovers, who constantly drift, differ in their watery affinity from the crescendoing Giovanni and Annabella in their fiery frenzy! Turning to another element, that of air, we enter another image of 'impossible' love between brother and sister, that which Fernand Khnopff realised in his art. We enter the intimate world of a temperment of coolness and lunar moisture, directed by a lofty, aerated mind ... a raffine, a rare and isolated man, of whom the Viennese, Herman Bahr, said that he painted as Maeterlinck wrote. The ineffable is attempted by Khnopff, that which is inexpressible in words since — in Maeterlinck's terms — the action we show, what we do, is unimportant; it is a mere semblance beyond which reality lies concealed; on the path to speech the essential somehow gets lost... . 20 We enter a world of silence.

The Blue Wing of Hypnos y a un silence passif, qui nest que le reflet du sommeil, de la mort . . Maurice Maeterlinck Les Tresor des Humbles, 1896 21 The year is 1912. On a quiet street on the outskirts of Brussels, in one of the most elegant houses an artist ever built, the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff receives a visitor, allows entry into a sanctuary of polished white stucco only broken by lines of black, circles of gold and the odd Tiffany window. The window filters the outside light, casting blue and gold flames on the immaculate, white mosaic floor. The visitor reports: 22 A silken hanging of greyish blue, artistically faded, is raised, and Fernand Khnopff, man of the world, welcomes you. But he has hardly time to assume this worldly mask before it is laid aside .. . the personality of the 'artist' alone exists . . . you feel yourself to be far from all that is low, pen mean, and worthless; you are in the kingdom of the beautiful and in this purified atmosphere you feel a compelling need of silence in order that you may attain for a moment something of the Ideal. A long white corridor veins the house, running into unexpected niches with altars of glass or a single slender column balancing an ivory mask of Hermes, above which a chalice of cut crystal with a sprig or flower seems to be in eternal equilibrium. A logette is devoted to the divinity of Imagination: a winged ivory and bronze mask delicately suspended on a blue column which, at times, also supports a fine crystal vase. Steps lead to one of the glass altars sacred to Hypnos, the presiding deity of the household. Silk draperies and Japanese embroidery, a butterfly in

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startling blue, a shallow fountain glittering with mother-of-pearl shells, a tortoise cast in bronze a la des Esseintes in A Rebours. Everything in this white 'fortress of an individuality in perpetual defence against the World and Life', as Dumont-Wilden disdainfully described the house and its creator, 2 ' breathes a yearning for the definitive harmony. The constellation of Libra, painted on the ceiling of the artist's studio, shows us the airy dimensions of his creativity. Just beneath, on the mosaic floor, the golden outline of a 'magic circle' in which the artist stands to ponder and receive inspiration, defines his aesthetic attitude as well as his desire for attunement. (Not unlike Marsilio Ficino's archetypal arrangement of his own dwellings.) Another visitor, perplexed by the impression the house made on him, asked: 'Has the poetry of Maeterlinck become a reality?' 2 4 A bust of tinted marble with the slightly turned head of a Garboesque beauty, exuding the grace of the most perfectly balanced features, greets the visitor in an alcove. This face returns in canvas after canvas. The host does not name his sister, Marguerite, who is the muse and model in these works of art. The visitor notes that the recurring figure is a haughty woman, standing upright, draped and veiled, behind the head of Hypnos in meditative reverie, absorbed in thoughts that seem to be enveloped in sadness, in a frame that carries the single word 'Soi' (Self). After the white rooms the visitor glimpses the precious `Chambre Bleue'. Then there is the austere dining room. Nothing in it denotes the nature of its purpose. At meal time a little table is brought in only to be removed almost immediately. The density of food is too encumbering. We are in the presence of Belgium's most refined exponent of Symbolism. Desire and regret, time and care are banished from this house which is the concrete materialisation of Khnopff's vision, and yet, with every breath of its creator seemingly destined to dematerialisation. (In fact, it can no longer be visited: it was demolished soon after the artist's death in 1921 for no other reason that it was 'out of fashion'.) 25 I lock my door upon myself Earlier, in 1891, the year of his first visit to England, Fernand Khnopff produced a painting, later considered a key work of the Symbolist movement, to which he gave a strange English title. He valued Englishness, in particular the Pre-Raphaelites, and was acquainted with their Brotherhood. In this way he chanced upon a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti wherein he found the lines: . . . all others are outside myself . . . I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

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Christina was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's younger sister. The poem, called 'Who shall deliver me?' was written in 1864, at a time when Christina was pondering the destiny of women around her, such as the unfortunate Lizzie Siddal, the woman immortalised in many of Rossetti's drawings and paintings. Choosing the line 'I lock my door upon myself' for his painting, Khnopff was resonating with an archetypal image of the soul in retreat from the world: Lizzie had remained locked in a situation of impossible love with Rossetti for almost a decade, hoping that one day he would fulfil his promise of marriage, all the while languishing in a moratorium, a mimesis of consumption, which ended in her suicide. 26 This painting is of a mystery that no one has so far been able to fathom. 27 There is an array of details that invites analysis which I shall not even attempt here, but just point out the mood: a stifling airlessness, a surrender to stagnation, even of death - with the shimmering head of Hypnos, God of sleep, reigning above the young woman mesmerised in an attitude of listless waiting. Khnopff associated quite freely to Rossetti's poem, showing, rather than a Christian salvation as implied in the end of the poem," a freeing of soul through Imagination: for the bluetipped wing sprouting from the temples of Hypnos is one of the two wings of the Imagination, the visible one. The invisible one, the Zeitgeist of the fin-de-siecle, a nymph of infectious vapours, Khnopff had known since his childhood around the dead waters of Bruges." With the notion of Zeitgeist I refer to the choice of images in this chapter which, in the main, are from the turn of the last century. In so doing, however, I do not also join the then-current diagnostic perspective which would see the Hypnos-head as a literary reference to the nineteeth century practice of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria. This is to treat the image as allegory; and all allegory remains on a horizontal plane. What we are after is the vertical dimension. And, as Bachelard says, 'the image stirs the depths before it reaches the surface'. I am also not seeing these works of art - whether poetry, music or painting - through the spectacles of the patriarchal repression rampant at this time, but as archetypal images of psychological events taking place in mythic time. The Symbolists were not exploiting images, nor mocking, judging or repressing them - but crafting them in subtle forms, pregnant and exuberant with mythic meaning - in the same manner as Renaissance artists understood emblemata in the practice of the art of memory. Khnopff never illustrated a literary theme; his images were created to accompany, not imitate, literature. The emblem of Hypnos in this and other of Khnopff's paintings (and in many other forms, as, for example, in plaster moulds) has been imagined as an archetypal presence, with all the fascination, healing power and magic and 'isolation' of sleep. Hypnos is an image from the halls of Hades, the underworld - which our century has called 'the unconscious'. Hypnos ritualises the mysteries of isolation. And he is in close relationship to

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death, his twin brother, Thanatos. And as Heraclitus says: 'We share a world (kosmos) when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own.' [Frag.15] My soul is alone The oneiric remoteness of Khnopff's figures, the stretches of emptiness on his canvases: all express silence, inwardness, a halting in the rush of restless time. Looking at the woman in Khnopff's painting 'I lock my door upon myself', we sense the presence of an object of Sphinxian mystery, of a very feminine enigma. Is she Psyche, the bride who was left desolate because she wanted to know too much too soon? The hypnotic blankness in her pale eyes, the silence of her gaze staring past the observer into the lightly opened window that appears reflected in the mirror behind her . . . seem to suggest this. She epitomises Khnopff's most cherished motto: One has only oneself. ('On ne a que soi'-his accent was on 'ne', unapostrophied.) This sentence was inscribed on one of the altars in Khnopff's house where the head of Hypnos was placed on the top of a Tiffany glass cabinet. 3 ° Khnopff's friend Georges Rodenbach said: 'My soul is alone and nothing influences it. It is like a glass enclosed in silence, completely devoted to its interior spectacle.' 31 For years, Khnopff worked on paintings with his sister Marguerite as the sole model, at times creating seven versions of her in the same painting. She usually made her appearance in his canvases veiled, in almost sacerdotal gowns, a high priestess, often with the head of Hypnos nearby. Over the years her features became more stylised, more masklike, until finally, Marguerite's face blends imperceptibly with the features of one particular mask, one cast by Khnopff himself after the fourth century BC bronze head of Hypnos from the British Museum. 32 In the mausoleum-like stillness and hermetic seclusion of his villa, Khnopff enshrined this Hypnos-sister-daimon as his central soul image. His house, built to his specifications, became a true museum (Gk. 'A shrine, seat or haunt of the Muses'). The androgyne Nearly every face in Khnopff's great opus (with the exception of the commissioned portraits) bears the features of this fourth century Hypnos merged with those of Marguerite, sometimes called the face of 'une jeunne femme anglaise' (which attests his strong anglophile inclination). In a great number of his works only the face is shown, often set on shoulders clad in female attire, if not on an eagle's or a cheetah's body, 33 and its expression seems as if sealed with the secret of the androgyne forever.

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Where does this enigma lead US? In Khnopff's self-portrait of 1879 there is a distinct likeness between his own and the many female faces he drew: Faces with a limpid gaze, distant, evanescent, often half-hidden by a curtain ... faces of a certain coolness and sensuality at one and the same time. The Symbolist painter . and compatriate of Khnopff, Jean DelviUe, said that Khnopff had created a type of ideal woman. Are they really women? Are they not rather imaginary feminin­ ities? They partake, at the same time, of the Idol, of the Chimera, of the Sphinx, and of the Saint. They are daughters conceived, not from-the.-same-llesh.-b.uLfrom lhe_s.am~j)J:ain>-th.aLQLt':te_aLtJst, who created them in the mystery of the parturitions of his dream ofbeauty.34

t

Figure 14.2: Blanc, Noir et Or. Pastel, aquarelle and gouache on maroufle paper on canvas (90x30 em). Fernand Khnopff, 1901. Copyright Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts

de Belgique, Brussels.

This is Khnopff's vision of the inner sister, the perfect Sister, the soul­ sister, the one who looks like the one who looks out, into the face as in a mirror, who is avid for reflection, and who flawlessly reflects, more like himself than his literal sister could ever be: the androgyne. His Sister, naturally, is his soror mystica, the hermetic companion to his magus in the alchemical opus; thus, there is his devotion to her and the dedica­ tion to the goal that brings about the androgyne in the ultimate coincidentia oppositorum. From the time of the magnificent portrait of her in 1878 onwards, Khnopff subtly modulates his sister's semblance, varying her appearance in as much as he idealises, androgynises it, calling it 'MIHI' ('myself') in his own Ex Libris of 1892, an unequivocal emblem of his identity. In another painting, 'Arum lily' (1895), he superimposes oli Marguerite's portrait the tall lilies, botanically called gynandrous (having the stamen and styles united in a single column) and 'corrects' her oval face-line by giVing her head the more angular outline of the Hypnos mask. If we consider that 'gyandrous' in Greek means 'to be of both sexes' (gyne=woman; andro=man), we understand that the lily is chosen for its gender ambiguity to match this tall woman in white, in her chaste, pure, cerebral virgin-sister-self In Khnopff's life the image of the androgyne entered with the head of Hypnos, but he made it entirely his own. In the androgyne, the direct action of eros is impeded, becoming indirect and imaginative, says Hillman. The androgyne steers dear of involvement with the body in favour of subjective states of intensified passion. 35 Symbolism is about the visualisation of subjective states. The Symbolist. movement, following on from the Romantic movement, lays stress on individual experience over and above the collective. It embraces Neoplatonism in that it propounds the view that all material things are reflections of higher realities and are in fact symbols of those realities. (Goethe's 'Alles

_

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vergiingliche ist nur ein Gleichniss' . . . all that is transient is but a

metaphor.) The Symbolist movement coincided with a disenchantment with materialism and positivist philosophy. 36 Art was seen as the last refuge after the disillusionment of a world without God. Jeffrey Howe, in his comprehensive study of Khnopff and his contemporaries, says: 'The belief in art as the inheritor of religion was absolutely fundamental to the Symbolist movement . . . (and) Fernand Khopff was dedicated . . . to the embodiment of this doctrine of the spiritual and mystical role of art.' 37 When Khnopff painted `Secret-reflee, in 1902, he alluded to a secret: he painted Bruges, the dead city, with its stagnant canals and still water reflecting empty medieval façades, below the portrait of the androgynised sister who places a gloved hand on the lips of an icon of silence, the mask which stands for the ideal realm of thought: No words - keep silent - guard the secret. Yet it is revealed, this secret, in the reflection. Water, like mirrors, reflects the soul. After all, in the past century mirrors those which were free-standing, often on a dressing table - were called Psyche (pronounced as in the Greek) all throughout Europe. To look into one's mirror in the morning and to call it 'looking into psyche' means more than gazing at one's flat, empirical reflection: it refers to psychological depth. Khnopff's canvases likewise provided him with a perpetual mirror for soul. Every morning the artist gazed into his soul by gazing at the portraits of his sister." We do not need to hypothesize incest in order to understand Khnopff in his desire to create these images. On the contrary, if there had been literal incest, would the images not have shown less strongly androgynous character traits? Khnopff was a devotee of the Rosecrucian idealism advocated by the occult writer Josephin Madan, whose book Istar he had illustrated. In it Madan writes: 39 . . . we who seem to desire one another; my sister, we recognize each other. Yes, you are my sister since you recite so softly the hymns of the unreal that I chant at the top of my voice.. . Sisterhood, incest, virtue or sin, assumption or fall, whatever shall be the fate of our love, new born that it may raise over us a mystical aurora ... Be my sister . . . If incest one day comes to join our mouths, we will have at least made the effort of a grand fate, and we will have fought, before our downfall, against the earth and its instinctive forces. . . .

Khnopff's aesthetic alchemy enshrined the androgyne as the central image of his life and his art. And, as perfect as this resolution seems to be, we may yet wonder whether there is not a third way in which the love of brother and sister may be lived: neither denied, nor simply literalised,

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but doubly androgynised in two individuals who yet become, in Lou Salome's terms, two totalities. It seems as if, when this happens the rubedo of red passion seeps like the aurora of dawn into the sky of all things. The whole world is coloured by the lover's desire for the beloved. The world-soul and the soul of the beloved are revealed as one.

Zuleika's song Now to the last two images in this circle of brother-sister pairs of the mythic-ecstatic order Joseph and Zuleika. One, immortalised in a book of poems by Johann Wolfgang Goethe; the other, no less beautifully captured during the enraptured whirling of the Persian mystic, Jalal `uddin Rumi, in his Mathnawi, six hundred years earlier. In 1821 a song appeared in Europe, with words purportedly by Goethe, and music by Vienna's most inspired composer of songs, Franz Schubert. It tells of a young woman who feels the stirring of the east wind and wonders whether it brings good news from her lover. . . The fresh touch of its wings soothes the deep wound in her heart . . . She tells how the wind chases the dust and sends the little insect people scurrying .. . how it cools her hot cheeks and, in passing, kisses the grapes ... and the song ends: ah, the true message from his heart ... comes to me only from his mouth, his breath ... ' 40 This is one of two famous Zuleika poems set to music by Schubert. Other fine musicians, such as Mendelssohn, were also inspired to set that very poem; none quite reaching Schubert's incomparable mastery of 'tone-painting' (Tonmalerei) in which he matches the poem's breathlessly romantic mood. Brahms said of it that it was the loveliest song ever written. Schubert discovered the words in a recently published book of poems called The West-East Divan by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe." But it did not come from Goethe's pen! Goethe first published it as if it were one of his own poems, when in fact it had come from the hand of a young woman by the name of Marianne von Willemer, the twenty-nineyear-old newly wedded wife to a patron of the arts, Johann von Willemer. This song, one of several by Marianne, belongs to an astonishing group of poems written in the voice of Zuleika, the legendary lover of Joseph in the Persian Sufi tradition. They form the lyrical answers to Goethe's correspondence with her. It was in 1814, at the age of sixty-four, that Goethe met Marianne, and a deep and mutual love-bond was struck, to which the young woman responded with a mature intensity and the much older Goethe with a youthful spontaneity. Yet, their passion was to remain unconsummated; it stayed - not limited to - but, rather, freed from all limitations - in their correspondence. Their love began at a time when Marianne had recently,

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and Goethe finally, married, both to partners with whom they had already lived with for some time. In Marianne's case it was her guardian, a man closer to Goethe's age than her own; in Goethe's, it was his longstanding companion and mother of his son, Christiane Vulpius. As always, Goethe knew how to distill his ardour into poetry but, surprisingly, Marianne, from the very first exchange, answered in verses that matched the venerated master's accomplished art, joining the poet in an unparalleled duet in praise of love in which, many feel, she proved his artistic equal. Their poetry was embedded in letters that went between the two households and were even read by Marianne's husband who appears to have witnessed what they shared like a chaperone, distancing himself discreetly, so as not to disturb the process of creation. We find here the alternative to Melisande's husband Golaud, the redeeming way of accepting the irrepressible love between two beings. However, when that feverish exchange of poems had ended, Marianne did not write in this voice again, although her correspondence with Goethe continued for many years until his death. The choice of Zuleika as the name for his beloved came naturally to Goethe, for, at the time of sending Marianne his love poems, he saw himself as a humble dervish transported by the ',Much and Geist einer Leidenschaft' (the breath and spirit of a passion). 42 Absorbed in the study of Medieval Persian poetry, he called himself 'Hatem', voicing regret in one of the poems over possessing neither the youth nor the beauty of the incomparable Joseph of the legend. Who was this beautiful youth? What is his story and that of Zuleika? Joseph and Zuleika It seems that the first account of this love story was written in Greek, at the time of the Romans, by a Jew in Alexandria. 43 The twelfth century dervish, Sohrawardi, known as Shaykh al-Ishraq (`the Master of Illumination'), delighted to find it, translated and revisioned the story, giving it the kind of hermeneutic level of his visionary recitals or Sufi teachings. 44 Joseph and Zuleika are brother and sister, Logos and Sophia; they are the human manifestations of their archetypal forms; young Joseph is the personification of Beauty; Zuleika, of Love. As recounted in the Bible and in the Koran, Joseph's beauty and wisdom, in particular his talent to interpret dreams, lands him, ironically, at the bottom of a well, where his jealous brothers throw him. A passing caravan frees him only to make him a slave offered for sale in an Egyptian market. There, Zuleika, wife of Potiphar, minister to the Pharaoh, finds him. He had earlier appeared to her in her dreams, announcing himself as the 'First Minister of Egypt'. Struck by the beauty of this dream-figure, she had implored her father to marry her to the First Minister of Egypt.

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But after the wedding, she realised her mistake - she had married an `ordinary' man. She had taken her dream literally, not mastering the practice of to 'wit° - the Sufi form of the Neoplatonic epistrophe, or reversion, relating or reverting any phenonomen to its archetypal source. In the end she does not find the Beloved in her father's cabinet of ministers - Zuleika being an Egyptian princess - but in the slave market, where she buys him. But it is too late. As in Goethe's and Marianne's story, the personification of love herself, Zuleika, is already betrothed and to the wrong man. But is it a mistake? How is it that we find, in tale after tale, this triangulation so often at the core of impossible love? What does the soul want with 'impossible love'? For archetypal psychology, the answer is not to be found in transcendance; at least not in the sense of a step of recognition or, rather, shock of realisation about the nature of commitment to the Beloved, followed instantly by its denial and 'sublimation'. The path lies between those two peaks down in 'the vale of soul-making' of which John Keats spoke: the arduous sojourn in 'a World of Pains and Troubles'." One step we briefly contemplated was `to lock oneself in' or 'lock all others out', as Christina Rossetti proposed in her poem; another - now at the end of this chapter - is to turn to the world and its ensouling. Both Goethe and Marianne were able to celebrate a love inextricably mingled with the beauty of this earth. In their lyrical correspondence they resemble Layla and Majnun, imaginatively entrusting their poems to the wind. And the way their poetry was woven together and set to music gives them a poetic immortality echoing that of those archetypal lovers of Persian legend. In the last poem of the Zuleika cycle, Goethe describes his beloved as the soul of the world, the anima mundi: she is the flowery veil, the tapestry of fields, the clear rippling water of the stream; she is the ever changing bank of clouds, the clinging ivy; he salutes her as the morning sun and draws her in as pure mountain air ... 47 The legend of Joseph and Zuleika also has it that in her pining for Joseph, Zuleika brings herself to the edge of disaster: she loses her beauty, her body became brittle, her waist seemed to break in two (suffering very much like Layla in her separation from Majnun). But instead of death, Zuleika reaches voidness, a reversion occurs: after having tried in vain to seduce Joseph by building a palace of seven apartments for him, adorning the walls with images of their consummated union and awaiting him at the centre of a shrine, she realises that she has been persuing her own soul. Zuleika loves her own Divine Face, the face of her Divine Soul Brother." The Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Jalal 'uddin Rumi, imagines Zuleika discovering her beloved Joseph in everything, even the most insignific-

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ant things of her everyday world. In one of history's most eloquent expressions of brother—sister love as the archetypal initiation into the experience of World Soul, Rumi writes: 49 Learn about your inner self from those who know about such things but don't repeat verbatim what they say. Zuleika let every thing be the name of Joseph, from celery seed to aloes-wood. She loved him so much, she concealed his name in many different phrases, the inner meanings known only to her. When she said, The wax is softening near the fire, she meant, My love is wanting me. Or if she said, Look, the moon is up, or The willow has new leaves, or The branches are trembling, or The coriander seeds have caught fire, or The roses are opening, or The king is in a good mood today, or Isn't that lucky, or The furniture needs dusting, or The water carrier is here, or The bread needs more salt, or The clouds seem to be moving against the wind, or My head hurts, or My headache's better, anything she praises, it's Joseph's touch she means, any complaint, it's his being away. When she's hungry, it's for him. Thirsty, his name is a sherbet. Cold, he's a fur. This is what the Friend can do when one is in such love. Sensual people use the holy names often, but they don't work for them. The miracle Jesus did by being the name of God, Zuleika felt in the name of Joseph. When one is united to the core of another, to speak of that is to breathe the name Hu, empty of self and filled with love. As the saying goes, The pot drips what is in it. The saffron spice of connecting, laughter. The onion-smell of separation, crying. Others have many things and people they love. This is not the way of Friend and friend.

Notes and references 1. Lou Andreas-Salome, Eintragungen Letzte Jabre, (Frankfurt am. Main, Insel Verlag, 1928), 27 (tr. mine). Rilke himself, elsewhere, wrote: 'And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, . . . and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them.' (Quoted in J.L. Mood: Rilke on Love and other Difficulties, (New York, Norton, 1975), p. 35.

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2. Isis is thus the patroness of the cosmetic arts of clothes-making. She imagines and creates woven patterns and designs, spinning dreams and embroidering reveries — so much a part of the sensual beauty and seductiveness which men have perennially praised and criticised women for. Also see Louise Lamy (1981) Egyptian Mysteries (London, Thames and Hudson) 3. Indeed, the myth that informs and infuses us with impossible love, is Apuleius' second century tale of Amor and Psyche. The god/daimon Eros is not supposed to fall in love with the far too beautiful mortal, Psyche. Psyche is told not to find out with whom she spends her nights, and whenshe does, when Eros is woken by the hot, spilt oil of her lamp and his exquisite beauty Ii revealed — that is also the moment in which he leaves her. Do we not have here the description of the impossible situation of sexual taboo between brother and sister? As Giovanni exclaims: no one is nearer to him, no one more lovable, than the one who is like him — and yet: most impossible of all situations! To love this sister concretely is not allowed. Eros is as beautiful as Psyche, but she has to pay dearly for seeing this with her own eyes; in fact, it 'must not' be revealed. As soon as she has beheld this beauty, she must learn how to live without it. Yet, there are a multitude of images of these archetypal lovers. And we can learn from each of them. In the Musee du Louvre in Paris — in one of the less frequented halls with an overwhelming array of life-size marble statues — Noel and I chanced upon the crouching figure of Eros delicately touching with his right thumb and forefinger a butterfly on the ground, whilst with his left hand pushing a flower, intent on bringing the two —butterfly and flower — together. This is a very different image from the Eros in the British Museum (also a youth of about the age of Tadzio —the adolescent in Thomas Mann's Death In Venice) — this time a tiny terracotta figurine. Here, Eros dangles a butterfly from his left, dropped arm, straight over a burning oil-lamp, so that the butterfly gets singed, scorched, mortified. Both depictions are images of Eros and Psyche. A third image of the immortal god/daimon and his human bride is that of their celebrated embrace, with Psyche's arms stretched over her head, encircling her husband's curly head just at the point of receiving his re-animating kiss — I describe here the couple as Antonio Canova chiselled them out of his luminous Carrara marble — an image celebrating the couple's happiness: 'Impossible love' made possible. 4. C.G. Jung, CW16, 491. He also said, 'The incest prohibition acts as an obstacle and makes the creative fantasy inventive.... In this way the libido becomes imperceptibly spiritualized ... ' (CW5, p.332). 5. Kalevala, The Land of the Heroes, tr. W.F. Kirkby (London, Athlone Press, 1985), Runo XXXVI lines 300-48. 6. Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun, tr. Dr. R. Gelpke, (London, Bruno Cassirer, 1966). 7. See: Sohrawardi, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises, tr. W.M.Thackston, Jr. (London, Octagon Press, 1982), pp.13-14. 8. R.M. Rilke/L. Andreas-Salome: Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main, Insel Verlag, 1975, 1979), pp. 53-4. See Lou's letter dated 26.2.1901 from Schmargendorf to Rilke in Berlin. Rilke, in fact, had to face many trials and tasks of the kind that Psyche undergoes in the myth. His time as secretary to Auguste Rodin was the sort of detailed, individuating work of separating and discerning that Psyche was ordered to do by Aphrodite when she was put to sort a mass of different kinds of pulses. Much later, Rilke gathered strands of hot fleece from the rams of poetry in the shade of his waning day, enjoying little good health and labouring with unending patience. And can we not see in his wrestling with the Angel of the

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Duino Elegies the attempt to gather a cup of Stygian water aided by that mythical eagle/angel? And what about Persephone's casket of beauty? How did Rilke's soul fare in the underworld? May be it is not too far fetched to see the answer in his Sonnets to Orpheus. Lou stayed away from Rilke's deathbed, without even as much as a letter to help him bear his physically painful and lonely death. But who would dare say that his quest had failed? A year before his death, he had already written these now famous words in a letter to his translator, Witold von Hulewicz: Death is the side of life which is turned away from us, and upon which we shed no light. We must try to widen our consciousness of existence so that it is at home in both spheres, with no dividing-line between them, so that we may draw endless sustenance from both. The true way of life leads through both kingdoms, the great circulation of the blood passes through both: there is neither a here nor a hereafter, but a single great unity in which the beings who transcend us, the angels, have their habitation. 9. J. Hillman, Loose Ends (Dallas, TX, Spring Publications, 1975) pp.53,54. 10.J. Hillman, The Myth ofAnalysis (New York, Harper and Row, 1972) p.70, n.70. 11. Claude Debussy's opera Pelleas and Melisande was first performed in 1896. Of course, there are many operatic images of 'impossible love' as it is rather a theme that tends to prevail in operas, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Examples are: Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Puccini's La Boheme and Tosca, Verdi's La Traviata, Strauss's Salome. Their protagonists seem to be either totally incongruous pairs or highly-charged brother-sister conjunctions. One image that almost forces itself upon our mind and memory at this point is, because of its apt naming by the librettist of Puccini's opera, that of Madame Butterfly - for most of us an acoustic image of an abandoned Japanese, Geisha-like girl-wife: an image created by Pierre Lod from a newspaper notice, the heroine of his turn-of-the-century novel, Madame Chrysanthemum. The figure in the novel is named after a flower, but the one in the opera is understood more directly as Psyche-turnedanima-figure and given Psyche's name, 'Butterfly'. Madame Butterfly ends in suicide. Unable to individuate further, impossible love makes the young woman lock her door upon herself, disappointed and let down by the world, no less than by her love. It forces her to make literal what Psyche lives as metaphor in the tale. 12. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, tr. E. Farrell (Dallas, TX, Pegasus Foundation, 1983), pp.89-92. 13. Heraclitus, Fragment 68. 14.That Pelleas and Melisande constellate the archetypal brother-sister pair is confirmed by Maeterlinck himself. In the words of Golaud in the last scene: 'I killed without reason... They kissed each other like little children... They were brother and sister.' (V.ii. 14-15). 15. For the full text in French see Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande, (Bruxelles, Editions Labor-Fernand Nathan, 1983), p.17. 16. Bettina Knapp, Maurice Maeterlinck (Boston, MA, Hall Publications, 1975), p.175, as quoted in Fernand Khnopff and the Belgian Avant-Garde (Library of Congress Catalogue, New York, Barry Friedman, 1983), p.17. 17. Christian Lutaud in 'Maurice Maeterlinck', Pelleas and Melisande, op.cit., p.108. 18. See Eric Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968). 19. See Louis Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff (Brussels, 1907), p.11. There is much

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that connects the two Belgians, Khnopff and Maeterlinck. As they were almost exact contemporaries, they were imbued with the same Zeitgeist, and they had the same stagnant waters of Bruges in their childhood background, parents of a similar status (prosperous civil servants, although Khnopff descended from Austrian aristocracy). Above all, they had the same ambitions in art. See Fernand Khnopff and the Belgian Avant-Garde (op. cit.), p.16. 20. Herman Bahr, Secession, 5, as quoted by Peter Vergo in Art and Vienna (London, Phaidon, 1975), p.30. 21. 'There is a passive silence which is but d reflection of sleep, of death . . . Maeterlinck, L.T.H. (Paris, 1910), p.13. 22. Helene Laillet, The home of an artist: Fernand Khnopffs villa in Brussels' in The Studio 52 (1912), No. 237, pp.201-206. Almost all the impressions that follow about Khnopffs house are taken from this article, in which Laillet describes her visit. 23. Louis Dumont-Wilden, as quoted in Laillet, Studio, p.206. 24. Wolfram Waldschmidt, as quoted in Cheryl Kempler, 'Fernand Khnopff and Maurice Maeterlinck: the unspoken seen' in Fernand Khnopff and the Belgian Avant-Garde (op. cit.), p.18. 25. For further reading see Jeffrey W. Howe 'The palace of art: Khnopffs villa' in The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press). 26. Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (London, Collins, 1989), pp.88-92. 27. The entry into the image is as if barred by a very large horizontal object against which a young woman leans with her elbows, her head resting on the backs of her hands. Is it a coffin? A stone ballustrade? Or a huge table covered with a black velvet cloth? Its deep folds are like furrows in a field, and out of it, beyond the lower frame of the picture, rise three fire-lilies. The three lilies are life's three stages: one in the bud, signifying life's beginning, one in full bloom, and one already shrivelling up at the hour of death. The background engages the eye with no fewer enigmatic objects -such as strange panels giving way to unlikely perspectives; one reveals a quarter of a window, another shows either a painted view of a street or a peculiar opening that allows us to glimpse an actual street far below in the evening's twilight, with a black figure walking past deeply shaded old walls. In one of the panels of the background in the picture we perceive a window reflected in a round mirror, to the right and above the young woman's tilted head. Her gaze, which is uncomfortably deep and certainly hypnotic, seems to rest on that window whose reflection is all we can glimpse. The mystery of 'who is behind that window?'- 'who is in Marguerite's mind or heart?' certainly suggests itself to the viewer. An iridescent piece of cloth over her left breast, perhaps the shimmering gossamer bodice of gauze on a blue taffeta evening dress, seems stretched out closer to her than the heavy black cloth of more sinister connotations. Is it the gown she wore while dancing on his arm, the arm of the beloved? Her own pale arms idly supporting her unsmiling face that mirrors nothing hide everything from the viewer, yet are nevertheless openly expressive of sensuality; the lingering attitude of those interlocked hands, the kind of abandon of the half-bared arm, the pallor of plump flesh forming a triangle with the mass of red hair falling over her shoulders ... all is as alluring as the song of a Lorelei. With this step into the magic of the image we are able to reappraise what the painter felt for this woman, his sister. 28. The poem ends: 'God harden me against myself,/ This coward with pathetic voice/ Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:/ Myself, arch-traitor to myself;/ My hallow-

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est friend, my deadliest foe,/ My clog whatever road I go./ Yet One there is can curb myself,/ Can roll the strangling load from me,/ Break off the yoke and set me free.' - from The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London, 1924), p.238. 29. Khnopffs paintings and pastels of Bruges (the town of his childhood) are paintings of that 'ghost town's' soul: Bruges - la - Morte, as Georges Rodenbach called it in his novel by that name and wherein he wistfully likens the city to the beautiful dead wife of the protagonist. Jeffrey Howe says: 'Bruges represents more than a relic of the past. The canal's reflected houses are 'ancient houses of his soul" [Le Roy in Noels eteintes] as quoted by Howe in 'Mirror symbolism in the work of Fernand Khnopff in Arts Magazine, 53 (1978), September, p.116. 30. For a description of the altar with this motto see Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Kbnopff (op. cit.), p.148. On another altar Khnopff appears to have 'inscribed the declaration that sleep was the most nearly perfect state of existence'. 31. As quoted by Jeffrey Howe, Arts Magazine, p.112. 32. In the Catalogue of the Bronzes in the British Museum, H.B. Walters (1899), describes the head of Hypnos thus: a youthful, male head. The hair is parted and waved on each side and gathered in a knot at the back, with two thick curls falling behind each ear over a fillet; the lips are slightly parted, and the eyes are hollow. To each temple has been added a wing, of which only that on the right side remains; it has been recognised as that of a nighthawk (cf. comparison of Sleep to a kymindis in Iliad xiv, 290). Though found in Etruria, it may be regarded as an original Greek masterpiece, 'which reveals qualities of Praxiteles perhaps better than any other ancient work.' In the treatment of the hair, the freedom and flow of the lines and the perfect mastry over the material are specially deserving of study. The head has belonged to a statue.... ' As far as Fernand Khnopffs own 'head of Hypnos' Is concerned, he may have sculpted it himself, apparently after the bronze in the British Museum. Reproducing it in his paintings, he varied the style. While the blue wing always remains the same, the head itself undergoes changes. The painting Une aile bleue ('A blue wing') from 1894, with Marguerite in the background, shows the head of Hypnos elongated but in the likeness of the BM original, whereas the same picture, painted again in 1901, and called Blanc, noir et or('white, black and gold'), shows a transformation not only of the head in that it is more stylised in the treatment of hair and facial features, with eyes set in the hollows and a fuller mouth, Marguerite's face, too, appears more stylised, taking on the features of Hypnos or the androgynous beauty that pervaded Khnopffs painting in his prime and later years. 33. W.R. Olander, 'Fernand Khnopffs art or the caresses', Arts Magazine 51 (1977) June, pp.116-21, given by Howe as the source for appraising Khnopffs astonishing painting in which a cheetah's body is shown as the Sphinx caressing Oedipus by aligning her face (clearly Marguerite's) with the highly androgynous Oedipus (an imaginal self-portrait of Khnopff). Olander concludes: 'The sensual embrace of the Sphinx ... thus represents a real or repressed desire for an incestuous relationship.' The full name of the painting is L'art, des caresses ou le Sphinx (1896). The picture normally resides in Munich's State Museum, there since its acquisition in 1893, when it is not on loan to one of the world's galleries, for it has become a much admired masterwork of the Symbolists. Howe also says: 'Of particular significance is Olander's discovery that Josephin Peladan's tragedy, Oedipus and the Sphinx, privately reprinted in 1895, may have influenced Khnopffs tableau . . . Furthermore, there is an ancient variant of the story of

Oedipus and the Sphinx, recounted by Pausanius (V.IV, Book IX, XXVI, 2-4),

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which states that the Sphinx was an illegitimate child of Laius, and thus a halfsister of Oedipus. ' (emphasis mine) The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (op. pp.47, 32, 48. 34. Jean Delville, 'Fernand Khnopff, in Annuaire de l'Academie (Brussels, 1921), p.19. 35. Hillman, Myth ofAnalysis, p.96, n.119. 36. There are many theories as to the relationship between symbolism and the society within which it appeared. That it coincided with a rejection of materialism and rationalism by the artists there is little doubt,

37. The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (op. cit.), p.53. 38. As Psyche we find Marguerite's (1887) portrait hung in IChnopffs 'Chambre Bleue' - as if it were a mirror - above the altar/dressing table, on which her brother had placed, instead of perfume bottles and hair brushes, her tennis-racquet: a 'devotional object' in memory of the sister who had left to get married. It was the racquet she held in her seven-fold appearance on the canvas called Memories. 39. Josephin Madan, !star (1888). 40. Franz Schubert, Zuleika I', D.720. In both lieder, 'Zuleika I' (with the East Wind: 'Was bedeutet die Bewegung . . . ) and 'Zuleika II' (with the West Wind: 'Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen .'), Schubert depicts the wind in the delightfully rippling piano accompaniment, whereas the voice transmits the lover's yearning. 41. Goethe's West- Ostlicher Divan was directly inspired by the 'Divan' (collection of poems) of the Persian poet, Hafiz, published in 1812-13 in Germany in a new translation by). von Hammer, which Goethe read with great admiration. (Kurt Waselowsky in his introduction to Goethe, West - bstlicher Divan (Munich, Goldmann's Gelbe Taschenbucher, 1958), p.5. 42. Goethe writes in the commentaries to the West- Ostlicher Divan in the Buch Suleika: 'This, by the way, strongest of the entire collection, ought to be regarded as completed. The breath and spirit of a passion which blows through the whole work, does not return easily, at least one has to wait its return like that of a good year of wine, with hope and humility.' 43. Henry Corbin quotes Marc Philonenko,foseph et Aseneth. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes (Leiden, Studia post-biblica, vol. XIII, 1968), in L'Archange Empourpre - Quince Traites et Recits Mystiques by Sohrwardi. (Paris, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1976), pp.330ff. In the chapter entitled, 'le vade mecum des fideles d'amour' Corbin says, `La position de these de Marc Philonenko est d'une sage reserve: Un roman mystique, ecrit en grec, a l'epoque romaine, par un Juif d'origine egyptienne.' (p. 295). 44. Corbin, L'Archange, p. 295. 45. For ta'wil, see Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, tr. Ralph Mannheim, bolingen Series, XCL, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1969) p.242, and again, p.88. 46. 'Tale after tale (the lovers tell) ... in order to make the crazy mystery of (love) endurable ... But it becomes endurable only by realising that love is the necessity of the psyche in its struggle with the concrete - for some to get more into the concrete, for others to find a way through it, but always love involves the psyche in the mad impossibility of direct concrete physicality.' - J.Hillman in Inter- views (New York, Harper and Row, 1983), p.178. 47. Goethe's words are: 'In Tausend Formen magst du dich verstecken,/ Doch, Allerliebste, gleich erkenn' ich Dich./ Du magst mit Zauberschleiem dich bedecken,/ Allgegenwartige, gleich erkenn' ich dich./An der Zypresse reinstem, jungem Streben,/ Allschongewachsene, gleich erkenn' ich dich./ In des Kanals reinem

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Wellenleben,/ Allschmeichelhafte, wohl erkenn' ich dich . — There are four more stanzas of delirious praise. 48. See also C. Jambet, 'La quete de l'Amour Heureux, d'apres Youssouf et Zoleikha', Le Desert et la Quest, Cahier de l'Universite Saint Jean de Jerusalem, Numero 8, (Paris, Berg International, 1982). I am indebted to the kind recommendation of Mme Stella Corbin concerning this article. 49. Jalal 'uddin Rumi, Mathnawi, VI 4020-43, tr. Coleman Barks and John Moyne, Open Secret, (Putney, Vermont, Threshold Books, 1984), p.82.

Chapter 15 On the Sublime: Eva Loewe and the Practice of Psychotherapy, or Aphrodite in the Consulting Room NOEL COBB Mahler was a natural neoPlatonist. He said, 'All beings in nature constantly adorn themselves for God. Every one of us has therefore only one duty: to be before God and men as beautiful as possible in every way. Ugliness insults God"

E. Loewe 'The Song of the Earth' (unpublished talk, 1991) To speak of 'the sublime' is to speak of beauty in its purest form. And yet,

it is questionable as to whether at the end of this century of travestied values we can actually speak about the sublime at all. This does not stop people from doing so, all the time, however, and without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment. Yet, without staking a claim to the high moral ground and refusing to budge, it might be worth first looking at why the sublime is such a difficult idea to approach. I hope that you would agree with me that the sublime is not an idea that should be exploited. Watch out! If it suspects a devious manipulation in the service of self-aggrandisement, it transforms, quick as Proteus, into a rabid, snarling beast. And if it is abducted from its archetypal place in the sanctuary of the Goddess to whom it rightly belongs, it immediately decomposes, leaving a nasty trail of slime. Or like an unimaginably exquisite vase lifted by divers to the surface from an ancient wreck on the sea's floor, it crumbles into common dust once brought up into the air. The mention of the sublime in an advertisement, no matter how expensive the item being offered, brings bile to the throat. Is a glass of iced Bacardi rum on a tropical island 'sublime'? Is the new Alfa Romeo 'sublime'? A perfume by Givenchy? A diamond bracelet by Tiffany? Well, 271

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apart from advertising then, is a diamond on a woman's hand 'sublime'? Or, come to think of it, is a painting by Vermeer or a sculpture by Praxiteles 'sublime' in itself? What about a Bach cantata? A late quartet of Beethoven? Is the view of the Parthenon at dawn 'sublime'? A holiday in Bermuda? A smiling baby at the breast? Yes and no, we say. It depends. It seems to depend on something utterly unplanned, irrational and not within anyone's control. It depends on the moment. Is the essence of the sublime subliminal? The sublime haunts our culture like a terrorist. Everywhere that she plants her concealed micropack of celenite superlatives, things disintegrate. And if such high explosive happenings do not frighten us from using such words, the vampiric lust of ego's greed will anyway all but suck the sense out of any sentence in which she appears. It is dangerous to get close to the sublime without adequate protection and an insulated supply of fresh air. Countless alchemists lost their wits through sublimation. Mesmerised by mercury and its scintillating, universal possibilities, they sought to bring it to its highest potency where it could, enslaved, become a gold-making Djinn to end all dreams of Djinns. Vaporising it in their laboratories up and down Europe, seeker after seeker capitulated to its insidious contamination of the air, unconsciously inhaling its toxic fumes as they dreamed of gold. Mercury molecules devoured their neurones like wasps feeding on fallen fruit. Brains rotting, they grovelled on the floors of their laboratories raving about sublime miracles. Yet this does not stop us from trying to get close to the sublime. It lures us ever on. So what can we do to protect ourselves and stop brain rot? I think the answer to that lies in the cultivation of humility. The sublime does not have its source in the personal psyche, that limited and constrained personality-complex we call the ego. It comes to us from elsewhere. Blake would have called the sublime 'a divine influx'. If the sublime does not have its source in me, then I cannot lay claim to it or possess it. If it is separate from me, it has its own autonomous reality and its own agenda. It is an aspect of the non-human, im-personal, transpersonal soul in which we have our being. I cannot claim it for my own creation. Thus, there is nothing to get puffed-up about. If we follow the thought of Plato and his great successor, Plotinus, we would say that the sublime, or the Beautiful, has two aspects, one as the higher soul, that is, Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly Aphrodite; the other, as Aphrodite Pandemos, the Earthly Aphrodite. Later, in the Florentine Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino took up this idea of there being two Aphrodites, a Celestial one and a Terrestial one, corresponding to the higher soul and the lower soul — the difference between them being that the lower soul is 'in touch' with matter and is received by that aspect of matter which is intelligible, while the higher soul does not `come down' and remains separate from matter, being real and substantial in the

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sense that everything in the Intelligible realm is real and substantial, as opposed to that which is down here. The lower soul is the artist that informs and arranges matter while the higher soul is in contact with the archetypal Forms and mediates them to the lower soul as images. Each of these hypostases, as they are called, contemplates that which is above it and generates downward into that which is below it. Of course, everything ultimately contemplates the One which is still within itself and generates everything from itself without moving. In Ficino's words, from his Libro de Amore (Book of Love): The first Venus, which is in the Intelligible Realm, is said to have been born of Uranus without a mother, because mother, to the physicists, is matter. The second Venus, which is located in the World Soul, was born of Jupiter and Dione. 'Born of Jupiter' — that is, of that faculty of the Soul itself which moves the heavenly things, since that faculty created the power which generates these lower things. They also attribute a mother to that second Venus, for this reason, that she is infused into the Matter of the world, she is thought to have commerce with matter. Finally, to speak briefly, Venus is twofold. One is certainly that intelligence which we have located in the Angelic Mind. The other is the power of procreation attributed to the World Soul. Each Venus has as her companion a love like herself. For the former Venus is entranced by an innate love for understanding the Beauty of the divine. The latter likewise is entranced by her love for procreating that same beauty in bodies. The former Venus first embraces the splendour of divinity in herself; then she transfers it to the second Venus. The latter Venus transfers sparks of that splendour into the Matter of the world. Because of these sparks, all of the bodies of the world seem beautiful according to the receptivity of their nature. (1985, p. 53) This is what I meant earlier when I referred to beauty's 'archetypal place in the sanctuary of the Goddess to whom it rightly belongs'. But, all of this would have remained interesting philosophy but not passionate experience, had I not met Eva. From the time I met her until her death on 6 May 1996, Eva never stopped teaching me and others who came into her orbit what it means to be 'in the service of the sublime'. In the early years of our life together, she began collecting notes for a work she called 'Aphrodite in the consulting room'. She had finished her full membership training as a psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and was eager to leave those all-too-obvious concerns behind. Why must the study of psychotherapy be so boring?

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In between our schedules as therapists and creators of the London Convivium for Archetypal Studies and the journal Sphinx, we somehow always managed to find time to muse about the place of beauty in our lives and the obvious exclusion of Aphrodite from therapeutic theory and practice. We were slowly articulating, for ourselves, what we meant by an 'archetypal psychotherapy' and in this entirely new form of psychotherapy we felt that Aphrodite should have a vigorous role. Eva was delighted to discover James Hillman's (1979) 'Thought of the Heart' and the later piece he gave us for Sphinx called 'The Practice of Beauty' (Hillman, 1992). These Venusian declarations by an older mentor gave her the confidence to speak about things she had been carrying alone for years — long before her work as a psychotherpist. In 1985 Eva created an alternative women's group to explore Aphroditean consciousness in everydaylife. She called it 'The New Lacemakers'. The group attracted highly original and gifted professional women who also wanted to have children and be mothers and wives. Writing about this idea in Sphinx 4, Eva said: The metaphorical quality of lacemaking was on my mind when I was just beginning my second career as a psychotherapist and wished to reach an understanding of woman's place in our world not based on an unquestioning acceptance of the dogmas of 'women's liberation'.... In my mind, the image of the Lacemaker is that of 'a woman of quality' in the sense of practising patience and choosing beauty above ordinariness (p.43) . . . . Lace has always been a metaphor for me. I think of life as lace. (p.35) .... Lace is a phenomenon of Beauty born from human imagination stalking nature (p.38) I knew that ultimately what I was after in the metaphor of lace was beauty, and in the metaphor of 'the New Lacemaker': a woman of inspiring graciousness, not intimidated by masculine bravura, who would, next to the men in her job — since I don't pretend that women should return from their place at work to the literal hearth — insist on performing with feminine elegance, not imitating male aggression, assertiveness and addiction to power. (1992, pp.44-5) Over the years of our life together, Eva seemed to deepen her Venusian eros daily. And the love she felt for the concrete arrangement of the world around her was palpable to everyone. Her care for the soul of the consulting room was something each patient noticed. But it was not only the attention she gave to the room, but to what went on in the room, what was discussed and how it was discussed. Gradually, we reached a position of trust in the aesthetic imagination to allow it to be self-steering. Aphrodite became the light in which we worked as therapists.

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We never had time enough to speak of all the things about which we desired to speak. We were now working virtually every evening. But we loved our secret conversations with each other more than anything else. And always in our mutual supervision sessions we rejoiced when a new insight on Aphrodite in the consulting room appeared. In our studies of Henri Corbin we had found the Sufi idea that Beauty is 'the supreme theophany, divine self-revelation', and this awareness of the theophanic nature of beauty became a thread upon which we could string the jewels of our reflections. It became clear to us, for example, that the way in which sessions were supposed to be conducted, according to most schools of therapy and analysis, actually prevented any incursion of the sublime let alone an awareness of theophany. It even seemed that training programmes had an implicit antagonism towards the mention of beauty, or its appearance, in the therapeutic space. On the other hand, we had to admit that 'training in the awareness of the sublime' was a patent self-contradiction. What did seem increasingly more apparent was that in order for us to create the space in which a theophany of beauty might one day occur, we had to take more risks and to cut through many of the standard, assumed notions of what should happen in a session. We also realised that everything depended on our own attunement to the imagination of beauty and to eros, which is the love of beauty. All those hours spent outside the sessions of therapy, listening to music or studying poetry and painting, sharing our reveries about the nature of beauty, were not merely ways of revivifying our own imaginations and finding nourishment for the soul, they were absolutely essential to the kind of attention we could give to individuals in our sessions with them. We understood that to practise the kind of psychotherapy we were envisioning, the therapist would have to dedicate herself or himself to this intense contemplation of the sublime outside the sessions if she or he wished to counteract the terrible absence of beauty in contemporary life and its pandemic suppression. All this time we did not forget ugliness. As Hillman reminds us, -

Therapy as an aesthetic undertaking requires an eye for ugliness — both delighting in and shocked by what we meet in the psyche — else we do not see the Gods at all. We see only secular human existence, case as case, demonstrating nothing beyond itself, the imagination captive in clinical anesthesia. . . . Following the signals of beauty and ugliness is an Aphroditic mode of imagining individuation. This mode maintains Psyche always in Aphrodite's temple all the while we go through the world making soul. Because Eva was so finely tuned to Aphrodite in all her guises, she did not need to deliberate on how to bring the Venusian mode more into

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play during her sessions. She did need to spend time with her flowers, however, freshly arranging them each day and finding where they could stand to best profit from the light. She needed to sit uninterruptedly listening to Alfred Brendel play Schubert's late piano sonata in A major or Maria Callas sing 'qui la voce sua soave' from Bellini's I Puritani. Or perhaps just to sit quietly at her dressing table looking out of her favourite bay window at the birch branches dancing in the afternoon sunlight, reading some lines from her beloved Mike. It was a great pleasure to share life with this woman who felt such devotion to Beauty. The moments of the sublime we experienced together were so intimate and precious that I cannot write about them now, and perhaps will never be able to. But those moments were what inspired us in all we did and whatever we have created that has some trace of grace or beauty. Eva was herself an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but had long ago given up any identification with her own beauty in personal terms. She knew that divine power was moving in her and through her. She studied the lives of women in whom Aphrodite had manifested in order to learn more about the individuation of Aphrodite herself. This could lead her into such apparently unrelated areas as the lives of Clara Schumann, Lou Andreas-Salome, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, Grete Wisenthal, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe. She was equally interested in beautiful women as in women with beautiful souls and women who made beauty come to life around them. But she never neglected the surroundings in which she lived for these studies. It was a delightful occurrence for me to find a different arrangement of objects on a table or a newly framed picture on the wall or some patterned silk scarves gaily thrown over a chair when I walked through the house after being away. And always flowers! She practised an extraordinary attention to the minute particulars of things, and this had its wellspring in her love of life and of the world we live in. She had no puritan mistrust of cosmetics and rejoiced when she learned that the words 'cosmos' and 'cosmetics' shared a common root in Greek, relating to arrangement and ordering, with a special emphasis on qualities like 'decently', 'becomingly', 'duly' and 'fittingly'. She felt that even though the sublime was an inherent part of life through its archetypal association with Aphrodite, one could, and should, add what one could to the enhancement of earthly beauty. On a day in late March 1995 when she was struggling with the first painful and violent reactions her body produced to an anti-cancer drug prescribed by the establishment medics, she wrote these words in a journal written for me:

Beauty! Beauty must never vanish from this life! I implore the Gods to give me the grace to preserve it in the midst of calamity. May Aphrodite be honoured to the end, may spritely Artemis know that I admire her fierce lunges into the woods, temples tempered by the cooling air of the great outdoors. May I be allowed to have a

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body again that can run free and fast as I did with my twins on each arm, dashing down the hilly Kenwood lawns. Hera! Great one with your good looks and regal posture: I have honoured thee by getting married, deepening thus the bond that was perhaps too solely set on celebrating Aphrodite! I will pay my due by being the most devoted of wives - as my dear brother is, indeed the most devoted of husbands, unlike your Zeus. Rainer! Percy Bysshe! Federico and Pablo! Stay close in this hour of hardship! Almost a year later, about to undergo a harrowing experience of chemotherapy, distressingly on the day of our wedding anniversary, Eva wrote in an empty page at the back of her address book:

Venus! Come help! I have always been your loyal servant. Now I need you to help make my venalflow of blood better - so my legs may recover! Help me with chemotherapy - not to have to give your lovely food back to the sources of the underworld and retch and vomit. Help me! Help that what will flow in as chemicals will be ambrosiacal. Heal me with your radiance. I have always loved with every fiber of my being made myself be vibrant with love in your sacred temple. I will give flowers to everyone in my life, who, like Dr. L., deserves it. I will not stop honouring you ever! May you hear my song. This is indeed a song, a unique song to the Goddess of the Sublime one worthy of the great Sappho, the passionate and lyrical priestess of Aphrodite and always a mentor for Eva. Before her body completely lost its power to follow her wish to move her limbs - on the day before she died, Eva made one last movement. In the darkened hospital room it was as if this movement became pure light. It was a simple gesture, that of lifting her arms which were lying at her sides and raising them to place her hands behind her head. It was the gesture a young girl might unconsciously make while lying in the grass under a tree on a summer's day. But the limpid grace of this image will stay with me forever. I glimpsed Eva's daughters looking in awed amazement when I caught their eyes. As in the unbearably beautiful gestures of the aging Margot Fonteyn, dancing Juliet in performance with Nureyev as Romeo, the Goddess had appeared to us there in that hospital room, in the midst of catheters and swabs, call bells, oxygen tanks, motor-driven drips and electronically-operated syringe drivers: the sublime. This is how a priestess of the Goddess dies, I thought. And when her last breath had gone out and the last strains of Schubert's trio called 'Notturno' had died away, Eva's daughter, Alexandra, a pious Catholic, picked up the blood red roses at the foot of the bed, gently

278

On the Sublime

pulled off the petals and strewed them over Eva's now lifeless body, spontaneously honouring her mother's Aphroditean essence. Effervescent streams of climbing pink roses have festooned the rough stone walls of this twelfth-century Tuscan mill and the huge clay jars of delphiniums on the terrace stand like azure angels on the threshold of the new millennium, listening with me to Eva's beloved Das Lied von der Erde, 'The Song of the Earth', with the poignant voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler's setting of the poems of Mong-Kao-Jen in a recording with Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic almost half a century ago. Eva always said that it was the best ever made. If you find a recording of it, you may be fortunate enough to play it in a moment when the immortal voice of the Goddess reverberates in and through the human voice of that lovely English nightingale. I have not ceased talking with Eva, even though she is not able to answer — in that lovely murmuring caress of a voice. Though she speaks in other ways. M in the roses around this mill house. Like Mahler, we were both so incurably romantic. I read out these lines from the 'Farewell' section of Das Lied for her — lines which she observed (in an unpublished work on Mahler) had an additional nine words added by Mahler himself. I read them out into the evening sky while the songbirds continue their loud calls and the setting June sun flashes through the branches of the tall poplar trees on the far side of the mill pond: The world falls asleep ... I stand here and wait for my friend. .. . I am waiting to bid him my last farewell. 0 Friend, I long to enjoy the beauty of this evening at your side. Where are you? You leave me alone so long! I wander to and fro with my lute on pathways of soft grass. '0 beauty! 0 eternal love-and-life-intoxicated world! Eva has died. She will no longer be around to teach us how to let go of our concepts and follow the sensuous arc of grace that impels our gestures from within or how to trust our instinctive turning away from work that is not quite good enough. But the source of all beauty and what she loved — the sublime itself, illuminated from the light which is life and unbounded glory — still exists and will always exist as long as the One itself exists. And she speaks from there.

References Ficino, M. (1985) Commentary on Plato's Symposium on love, trans Sears Jayre. Dallas TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1979) Thought of the Heart: Eranos Lecture. Dallas TX: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1992) The practice of beauty', Sphinx, 4: The London Convivium of Archetypal Studies: 13-28. Loewe, E. (1992) 'The new lacemaker: a rhapsody on the place of lace in soul-making', Sphinx, 4, 35-52.

Chapter 16 The Archetypal Situatedness of Supervision: Parallel Process in Place PETROS ICA CLARKSON In this chapter a framework is discussed which many supervisees and supervisors of varying levels of experience have found useful. It was specifically developed as a conceptual map to help both experienced and novice supervisors. It is of particular value in locating where a problem is likely to be focused and how to direct the supervisory effort more effectively within the usually limited periods of time devoted to professional development, maintenance or support. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy supervision are such complex fields that the more one learns, the more options for action open up. One of the greatest challenges for novice and experienced supervisors is to respond appropriately and helpfully to the complexity of material brought to the supervisory relationship. There is just so much to comprehend — the conscious relationship between (at least) three pairs of people (patient/analyst, analyst/supervisor, supervisor/patient), the unconscious relationship between each of them, the diagonal relationships between them in terms of mutual awareness or not of each other's unconscious material and motivations, the relationship of each one between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of their own contribution to the interaction, and of course the interplay of all of these with the specific professional or training organisation or institution on the one hand and the larger forces of life and collective evolution on the other.

The interactional field It is well known that therapists often behave in supervision in the same way the patient behaves in therapy and that in some way core dynamics of the patient/analyst issues are replicated in some way in the supervisory relationship. Thus, if a patient experiences a sense of helplessness and leans on the psychotherapist, the therapist may feel the same 279

280

On the Sublime



The Archetypal Situatedness of Supervision: Parallel Process in Place

281

helplessness as he or she leans on the supervisor, thus acting out in supervision a transient identification with the patient. This is called parallel process in supervision and parallel process phenomenon in treatment (Moldawsky in Hess, 1980, p.131). Doehrman (in Hess, 1980, p.132) investigated this parallel process by conducting clinical interviews of patients, psychotherapists, and supervisors over a period of time. She concluded that the usual understanding goes only half the way. Rather, the supervisor stirs the psychotherapist, who then acts out with his or her patients. Thus, parallel process is not reflective alone — it works in both directions. This discovery has just begun to find its way into supervisors' work. It speaks to the complexity of the patient-psychotherapist-supervisor interactions and encourages a humbleness in supervisors. I developed a theoretical map (Clarkson, 1993) that can be used to discriminate between • what the patient brings to the relationship (pro-active transference) • what the therapist brings (pro-active countertransference or therapist transference-pathological) • what the therapist reacts to in the patient (reactive countertransference-inductive) • what the patient reacts to as a result of what the therapist brings (patient countertransference or reactive transference).

As discussed, any of these may form the basis for facilitative or destructive psychotherapeutic outcomes. Therefore, because the meaning of a transaction lies in the communicative space between the dialoguing partners, it is postulated that a circular interaction serves as the dynamic field for what is called parallel

process. I showed there how, particularly with regard to reactive patient countertransference, patients may be responding to therapists' own induced material. In the same way, supervisees may be part of aprojective identification process initiated by supervisors, outside the conscious awareness of either. Hypnotists are very familiar with such phenomena and, as Conway and Clarkson (1987) discussed, there are many situations where hypnotic inductions occur in everyday life. Who is hypnotising who becomes a question. What is clear is that this complex interactional process occurs in what Langs (1976) called the bipersonal field. Jung's notion of synchronicity contributes a particularly valuable way of contextualising this frequently encountered parallel process phenomenon in supervision. It will be remembered that synchronicity was defined as an acausal connecting principle, a 'meaningful coincidence' of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected (Jung 1964). Figure 1 attempts to diagramatise it here in a preliminary way.

Figure 1: Parallel process Parallel process is therefore here conceptualised as a way to describe the pattern of the patient-psychotherapist transference/countertransference relationship or the interpersonal pattern of the dyadic therapeutic relationship as it synchronistically replicates the core dynamics of the client/psychotherapist relationship which is physically absent, but psychically present in the supervisory relationship. Thus the categories and types previously discussed (Clarkson, 1993) can be seen as the raw material for identifying parallel processes in terms of the interdependent field between patient and psychotherapist. Each category makes either the patient or the therapist the focus of attention in order to facilitate exploration, understanding and intervention design at a particular moment in the therapeutic/supervisory process. However, it must be clear that such division is intrinsically arbitrary and never 'correct' or 'provable'. Patient and therapist processes often interact out of awareness (unconsciously) in ways which may be mutually or differentially influencing each other 'hypnotically' (Conway and Clarkson, 1987). Supervision exists in order to reflect and learn from this process for the sake of the patient and the professional benefit of the supervisee. Specifically, parallel process is the interactional field of the therapist/patient field replicated in the therapist/supervisor field. Any combination of patient and therapist reactions to each other thus forms a dynamic field which is manifested in the supervisory relationship and variously referred to as parallel process.

282



On the

Sublime

Patient transference

Psychotherapist transference -.C

283

supervisory experiences to fit our perceptual prejudices or existing cognitive categories. Herbert (1985) cites the work of John Bell, a theoretical physicist, as follows:

> Patient countertransference )0-

The archetypal situatedness of supervision: parallel process in place

I

Psychotherapist countertransference

Figure 2: The interactional field in context

It is useful to understand the shape and nature of the parallel process when it gets in the way of supervision, and to use this knowledge in the prevention of difficulties and the enhancement of learning and effectiveness. It seems more accurately representative of the complexity of the patient/therapist field to represent the different forces in it in a circular dynamic relationship to one another. As we know from physics, the idea that the observer can remain neutral and not influence the observational field is quite disproved (Zohar, 1990). Similarly, it seems obvious that we cannot unequivocally lay the responsibility on the patient for transferring 'on to the psychotherapist', as if that particular transference could happen with any therapist. Equally it appears clinically correct that, for many therapists, patients present problems as if they are acutely aware of the vulnerable areas or developmental tasks of the therapist, and sometimes even to work in some strange kind of tandem. Often, as the trainee becomes more in touch with their negative transference in therapy, so the trainee's patients become more willing to express anger and disappointment to the trainee. To seek first causes in such a complex, dynamically interactive situation seems to be futile. It is more fruitful to recognise the co-occurrence of such phenomena and their prevalence in many clinical teaching situations. It is interesting to consider the possibility that a therapist draws to himself or herself the kind of patients who are most useful for the therapist's development. There is growing and disturbing evidence from modern physics that unidirectional causality is a highly dubious notion in explaining physical (or psychological) events. In fact, it seems increasingly possible that everything is connected with everything else. Jung's (CW8) concept of synchronicity enables our models to serve our ends instead of forcing

Despite physicists' traditional rejection of non-local interactions . . . Bell maintains that the world is filled with innumerable nonlocal influences. Furthermore these unmediated connections are present not only in rare and exotic circumstances, but underlie all the events of everyday life. Non-local connections are ubiquitous because reality itself is non-local (pp.214-15). Because most of these processes are also at the same time unconscious (or out of awareness) and extremely complex, it may be useful to think about the parallel process as being a fractal of the field, that is, as representing (even though in minute form) the structure of the larger whole (Gleick, 1988). No matter how small the size to which it is reduced, the essential features of the field will remain present and available for inspection. Following these analogies of fractals or even holons, it is more possible to subject the dynamic interactional transference/ countertransference field to investigation. However, it is important to avoid assigning first causes to either patient or therapist or supervisor.

Prioritising interventions in the complex synchronistic supervisory field Taking the next decision (of responding or not responding, questioning, supporting, challenging, clarifying, reflecting, structuring or interpreting) can get increasingly difficult for any supervisor. Often, the greater one's understanding of the complexity of the situations and — sometimes — of the life-and-death issues which are the daily bread of people in this profession, the greater the range of choices, decisions and understandings which inform the supervisory process. In a comprehensive textbook on Jungian analysis (Stein,1984), the word 'supervision' does not appear in the index, and it used to be the case that supervision was considered a natural result of experience as an analyst. Recent developments however have shown an increasing recognition of the role and value of training and supervision for supervisors. As the field of supervision grows and develops it also becomes clear that there are many choices facing supervisors. One of the most strategically important is probably how to prioritise: what is most important in a specific situation, how to select what to do next, to which factors to give most urgent attention. In a way, which figure to select for attention from the dynamically fluctuating background of often competing and frequently conflicting possibilities.

284



On the Sublime

The archetypal situatedness of supervision: parallel process in place

285

The supervision literature offers a variety of frameworks for selecting interventions when working with a client. The grounds for these choices are often less conscious and less clear than one would wish — particularly in teaching or training supervisors. Of course, no choice is perfect or complete and the supervisee/patient/organisational situation can also change very rapidly.

This is only a map.In the training and supervision of supervisors, this

A framework for prioritising supervisory interventions

• danger, the notion of the survival, communication and alliance issues

A useful guide for the supervisor is to categorise the focal parallel process issue primarily in terms of danger, confusion, conflict, deficit and/or development . When we think about the supervisory relationship as a system, this framework suggests that any supervisory session or parallel process issue can be categorised in at least one or more of five major ways. These are macro-sorting capacities of course and may overlap, supersede or blend in with one another or others. Furthermore, identifying the type of parallel process in terms of content or dynamics may be a primary prerequisite to help the supervisee clarify or discover which of these are the most compelling or the most avoided aspects of the supervision. However, necessary qualifications apart, the suggested framework can provide a useful way of thinking about the supervisory moment in such a way as to enable the supervisee and the supervisor jointly to explore, contract and evaluate interpretations, strategies and possibilities of relationship.The categories can then represent a sequence which can maximise effectiveness in selecting among the myriad of possibilities available to the supervisor. Casey (1991) has stressed imaginal locality and the spirit of place or `archetopology' (p.291). I believe this notion of site or archetypal situatedness can also be fruitfully employed in our clinical work. To enliven and enrich the five focal issue categories mentioned above. It may be possible, just for the sake of exploration, to imagine that the work of supervision may also take place in and around different archetypal sites or locations and that particular kinds of parallel process issues have an archetypal locale. Archytas (in Casey, 1991) wrote that 'Since what is moved is moved into a certain place and doing and suffering are motions it is plain that place, in which what is done and suffered exists, is the first of things' (p.293). In this way the supervisor/supervisee task, outcome and potential, may depend on the nature of the space in which the time is spent. It may even be that supervisory sessions, which appear to `go nowhere' or 'get stuck' are those which have 'got lost', wrenched from the appropriate and enhancing spirits of the symbolic place wherein which the supervision could most effectively have taken place. They may not know 'where to go'.

imaginary exercise of course does not obviate the difficulties of choice, decision making and responsibility. But it can perhaps expand the range and nature of the imaginary and effective realm of the supervisory venture. If we pursue this possibility for a brief while, we can use a place metaphor for

of the tribal hunting grounds

• confusion, the idea of the tensions and ambivalence of love and hate in the home or intimate community

• conflict, the imagination of the arena — place for combat and tests of strength and cunning

• deficit, the leisurely discussions, lively arguments and Socratic dialogues of the olive groves of Academia

• development, the sacred precincts of the Temple, the hermit's cave,

the silence of the inner sanctum of the buildings or the inner sanctum of the soul.

As is perhaps immediately apparent from the symbolic echoes of real life supervisory activity, the roles of the supervisor and the needs of the supervisee and patient may be quite different in the different domains. Tasks and goals may be quite different depending on what is required. In danger boundaries may be abrogated in an emergency (e.g. an epileptic fit), in the deficit stage it would depend on what actually needed to be learnt — to keep boundaries or to become more flexible about them (e.g. never ever to change appointment times or to respond to a considered and realistic request). At any one moment of time, any supervisor may need to be a Cerberus guarding the territories and boundaries, or a Psyche-sorter of the wheat and barley of primary and secondary realities, or a Zeus-like referee between warring internal or external factions, or a Chironic mentor teaching and modelling the skills of healing, or a Hestian flame of spiritual (professional?) direction. Too frequently — each of these or their variations are true at different times and for different people with different needs. We cannot be all things to all people all of the time. And of course, what is the suitable or right place for one kind of work is not always appropriate — or even safe — for another. How do we know where to go or where the right archetypal place would be for a particular issue? Of course we cannot know for certain. However, we may pay attention to images, associations, dream personifications, symbols, active imagination involving, countertransferential fantasies, physical feelings, fears and/or the general atmosphere or anima loci which the supervisory session itself evokes at an archetypal resonance — for example, bread, bed, battles, bachelor degrees or cathedral bells.

Example

As a young girl the patient had been ostracised by her fundamentalist religious community for appearing to have caused the death of a younger sibling. She believes she has the devil inside her and that only God can give her absolution

Theoretical focus, e.g. Collective unconscious/ archetypal

Primary tasks Allow space for, create a temenos or vas, enable, transpersonal dimension (not make archetypal what is individual, or individual what is archetypal)

Role

Hekate the divine as co-incidence of opposites — Nature/God

Type of focal issue in the parallel process

Coincidentia oppositorum

Locale

Nature of the problem

Table 1— continued

Development Temple

The supervisee is worried because they 'broke the boundaries' by accompanying the patient (who had been raped on the way to the session) to the police station

Corrective, reparative or developmentally needed experience

Enable or intentionally supply information, resources, techniques, access

Avoidance or denial of mystery

Ambivalence Splitting

Chiron (educator)

The patient wishes to terminate analysis. The supervisee vacillates between feeling regretful and relieved at the prospect

Lack (of information, resources, technique, experiences, skill)

Paranoidschizoid to depressive position

The client is in an erotic transference with the supervisee

that her depressed client has threatened to kill her child

The supervisee reports

Example

Academy

Resolve Surrender Integrate Reject or accept

Oedipus complex

Boundaries

Theoretical focus, e.g.

Deficit

Zeus (mediator or referee)

Analyse Separate Clarify

Minimise/ obviate danger Manage

Primary tasks

Arena

Coincidentia oppositorum

Psyche (sorter)

Cerberus (guardian)

Role

Conflict



Home/community Transference Countertransference

Confusion

Survival

Hunting grounds

Danger

Type of focal issue in the parallel process

Locale

Nature of the problem

Table 1: A summary of the archetopoi of supervision

On the Sublime Table 1 I have identified five different kinds of parallel process s. According to the archetypal implications of the situatedness for of these places or locales, there is a corresponding theme which in ibolic way echoes the nature of the problem presented for superviEach of these has a corresponding type of focal issue in a parallel .ss. As a result the supervisor may take different roles depending on ature of the problem, the archetopoi and the parallel process focal The primary tasks and/or theoretical focus will correspondingly somewhat — although of course they may always overlap and interFor each location I indicate most briefly an example of a correling kind of presentation by the supervisee of a client issue. turally supervisory exploration in depth may make it clear that a em does not belong in its original place of presentation but in er archetypal locale. Supervised supervision is a vast subject and so development of any Jungian archetypal approach to supervision. xamples shown here are simply for the purposes of initial demonm and to start a conversation, not to close it. inking, intuition, feeling and sensation naturally all have their :o play in locating our endeavours most auspiciously. And whether en we select foci in terms of the mysterious underworld or the ngly obvious, always matters of skill, experience and the deepfelt tnd medals of our personal journeys will dictate.

rences E. S. (1991) Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology. Dallas, TX: ing Publications. )n, P.(1993) 'Through the looking glass: explorations in transference and ntertransference'. In On Psychotherapy, pp.177-90. London: Whurr. r, A. and Clarkson, P.(1987) 'Everyday hypnotic inductions', Transactional lysisJournal, 17(2), 17-23. 1. (1988) Cbaos: Making a New Science. London:Heinemann. t, N. (1985) Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. London: Anchor s/Doubleday. K. (ed.) (1980) Psychotherapy Supervision: Theory, Research and Practice. York: Wiley. G. `Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle', Collected Works Vol. 8, ), pp.417-531. London: Routledge. G. (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus. 1. (1976) The Bipersonal Field. New York: Jason Aronson. . (ed.) (1984)Jungian Analysis. Boulder, CO: Shambala. ). (1990) The Quantum Self. London: Bloomsbury.

What is the Beautiful? KENNETH PATCHEN

The narrowing line. Walking on the burning ground. The ledges of stone. Owlfish wading near the horizon. Unrest in the outer districts. Pause. And begin again. Needles through the eye. Bodies cracked open like nuts. Must have a place. Dog has a place. Pause. And begin again. Tents in the sultry weather, Rifles hate holds. Who is right? Was Christ? Is it wrong to love all men? Pause. And begin again. Contagion of murder. But the small whip hits back. This is my life, Caesar. I think it is annr1 to live

;el/

3q 0

Pause. And begin again. Perhaps the shapes will open. Will flying fly? Will singing have a song? Will the shapes of evil fall? Will the lives of men grow clean? Will the power be for good? Will the power of man find its sun? Will the power of man flame as a sun? Will the power of man turn against death? Who is right? Is war? Pause. And begin again. A narrow line. Walking on the beautiful ground. A ledge of fire. It would take little to be free. That no man hate another man, Because he is black, Because he is yellow; Because he is white; Or because he is English; Or German; Or rich; Or poor; Because we are everyman.

Because the only power of man is in good. And all evil shall fail. Because evil does not work, Because the white man and the black man, The Englishman and the German, Are not real things. They are only pictures of things. Their shapes, like the shapes of the tree And the flower, have no lives in names or signs; They are their lives, and the real is in them. And what is real shall have life always. Pause. I believe in the truth. I believe that every good thought I have, All men shall have. I believe that what is best in me, Shall be found in every man. I believe that only the beautiful Shall survive on the earth. I believe that the perfect shape of everything Has been prepared; And, that we do not fit our own Is of little consequence. Man beckons to man on this terrible road. I believe that we are going into the darkness now; Hundreds of years shall pass before the light Shines over the world of all men... And I am blinded by its splendor.

Pause.

Pause.

And begin again. It would take little to be free. That no man live at the expense of another. Because no man can own what belongs to all. Because no man can kill what all must use. Because no man can lie when all are betrayed. Because no man can hate when all are hated.

And begin again.

And begin again. I know that the shapes will open. Flying will fly, and singing will sing.

Copyright 1943 by Kenneth Patchen. Used by permission of New Dire Publishing Corporation.

29-1

Index

Abraham-Isaac myth 116 Abraham-Ishmael myth 116 absent fathers 79, 115-17, 11 9, 176- 9 abusive fathers 115, 119, 133-5, 139, 233 Acton, William 194, 198, 200 Adams 221, 224-5 Adorn, T and Horkheimer, M 126, 128 androgyne 257-61 angels 1, 11, 21, 221, 223, 227 anima 60, 64, 132, 213, 233 placing the sublime 16, 19 synchronicity 98-9, 100, 105 anima fascination 56-7, 64 anima mundi 9, 11, 113, 263 placing the sublime 16, 19, 20, 23, 26 animus 64, 132, 139 placing the sublime 16, 19, 21 anorexia and anorexics 46-7, 57 Aphrodite 26, 181, 186, 188, 271-8 epiphanies 88-9, 92, 94, 95 Apollo 93-4, 95 Archimedes 93-4 Archytas 284 Armstrong 160-1 art 7, 46-51, 69-82, 91, 232 impossible love 244-64 sex 61, 63, 67, 182, 186, 190 Artaud, Antonin 253 Artemis 89 Assagioli, R 21, 23 Athey, Ron 48

Bataille, Georges 187-8 Baumgarten 57 beauty 1, 47-9, 57-9, 185, 186, 21 creativity 70, 75-6, 80-2 epiphanies 88-9, 91, 94 Eva Loewe 271, 273-8 Beckett, Samuel 187 Bell, John 283 Bellini, Giovanni 72-5 Benes, Barton 48 Beuys, Joseph 232 Bhagavad-Gita 101, 106 bipersonal field 280 birth 91, 238 Blake, William 183, 272 Blankenhorn, David 117-19 Bloom, Harold 187 body mutilations 46-9 Jack the Ripper 194, 199, 202Bollas, Christopher 166 Bonus, Petrus 54-5 boredom 85-7 Bosnak, Robert 112-13 Boyle, Jimmy 239 Brahman 101, 106 Branson, Richard 239 Brearley, M 65 Brown, N 0 49 Buber, M 162 Buddhists 107 Burke, Edmund 17, 57, 70, 80-2, butterfly in kindergarten 97-8

Bachelard, G 252, 256 Bahr, Herman 254

Cagnes-sur-Mer 101, 105 Capra, F 106 293

)- °0-1

cr

cauldron 154-5 cave-woman mother 131 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand 194 Cerberus 285, 286 Chadwick, Helen 48 children's friendship 96-7, 99, 105 Chira, Susan 118-19 Chiron 285, 286 Christians and Christianity 69, 106, 113, 222 epiphanies 90-1, 92, 93 Jungian analysis 140-1, 142 placing the sublime 22, 23, 27, 28, 30 citizen as therapist 145, 166, 169-72 Cobb, Noel 111

coincidentia oppositorum 219-41, 259, 286 Colette 95 compensation 112 conflict 285, 286 confusion 285, 286

coniunctio 56, 59, 64, 66, 103, 124 brother-sister 244-64 Dickens 200-1, 211 contrasexual type 64 Corbin, Henri 10, 158-63, 275

corpus mundum 66 corpus mysticum 105 cosmetics 16, 276 cosmoplasticity 34 cosmos 10, 15-22, 25-28, 32-4, 36-9, 43, 59 synchronicity 105, 107 countertransference 112, 123, 132, 138, 145-73

mundus imaginalis 158-64 politics 165-9 supervision 280-2, 285, 286 therapeutic relationship level 32, 37, 42 creativity 6, 61-2, 69-82, 191-215, 224 Cropper, W H 229-30 Cube of Space 23-8, 38 cupboards 86, 90 Cusanus, Nicholas 183 danger 285, 286 Dante 106, 107 David, Jacques-Louis The 69, 74 Debussy, Claude 252-3 deconstruction 112, 166

Dead Ma rat

Dedlock, Lady (Dickens) 207-8, 212 deficit 285, 286 Delville, Jean 259 Demeter 95 depression 182, 187 depth psychology 19, 23, 124, 126, 138, 143 politics 145-7, 166-7, 172-3 Derrida, Jacques 112 development 285, 287 developmentally needed level of discourse 32, 40 Dickens 191-215 Bleak House 195, 200, 205-14 childhood 203-5, 210-12 David Copperfield 205, 206 Martin Chuzzlewit 196-203, 205, 207 Diderot 69-70, 74, 82 disclosure 150, 157 Docherty, Thomas 126 Donne, John 54-5, 61 double pelican 53-4, 62, 66 Douglas, Mary 192 dreams 181, 191, 201, 227 Jungian analysis 123, 125, 132-3, 137, 139, 142-3 synchronicity 99-100, 101, 105 dualism 10, 28, 124 duende 1 Dworkin, R 226 earthly sublime 37, 42 eccentric therapy 110 ecstasy 55-6 egg diagram 21, 23 ego 8, 92, 127, 138, 151, 209, 272 castles 191 James Hillman 110, 113-14, 115 inferior function 221, 223, 224, 229

mundus imaginalis 159, 161-2 placing the sublime 16, 19-20 sex 62, 182-3 Einstein, Albert 230 elevation 34-5 Eliot, T S 100, 107, 170 elsewhere 123-5, 129 embodied countertransference 151-6, 162, 163 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 187 emotional level of discourse 32, 34, 37, 42 enantiodromia 3, 219, 222-3, 224, 225-42

Enlightenment 57, 125-6, 127 creativity 69, 74-5, 80, 82 epiphanies 25, 85-95, 185, 226 eros 7, 28, 59, 62, 132, 180-90, 275 impossible love 245, 250-1 Essex, David 132-3, 135 Esther (Dickens) 206-9, 211-14

Hestia 95, 285 Hillman, James 9, 11, 49, 109-21, ] epiphanies 91, 94 Eva Loewe 274, 275 mundus imaginalis 158, 163 placing the sublime 16-17, 1

fantasy principle 114 fathers and sons 115-21 fear 124, 129 feeling function 219, 225-34, 242, 288 feminism 146, 166, 168, 172 Ficino, Marsilio 272-3 Finlay, Karen 48 Ford, John 'Tis Pity She's a Whore 245-7 Fordham 152, 158, 164 Ford, Auguste 61 Forrester, John 166 Forster, John 205, 206, 210, 211 freedom of will 100 Freud, S 4, 5, 6, 60, 98-9, 180, 213 countertransference 149-50, 157 creativity 75-9 death wish 62 imaginal therapy 113, 116

147 Hindus 59 Hitlahabut 162 HIV/AIDS 48 Holbein Hans Ambassadors 211 homosexuality 75, 76, 77, 80, 82 hooks, bell 123-4, 125 Horizon of Eternity 36, 37 Howe, Jeffrey 260 humanist realism 74 Hypnos 254-61

incest 209 politics 146, 147 unheimlich 193 Friedrich, C D The Wanderer Above the Mists 70, 71

233 brother-sister 244-64 individuation 20, 64, 165, 220, 22 ,

Gamp, Sarah (Dickens) 196-203, 205, 207 Garcia Lorca, Federico 1, 253 gender 26, 27-8 Gestalt 7, 17, 36 ghetto-ego 115 Giovanni and Annabella 245-7, 250, 254 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 259-60, 261-2, 263 grandiosity 135, 138 Gross, Otto 61 Guppy, Mr (Dickens) 207-8, 210, 211, 212 Hartmann, Heinz 114 Hatoum, Mona 48-9 Hekate 11-12, 287 Hera 95 Heraclitus 7, 8, 222, 252, 257 Hermes 26, 89, 90, 95, 188, 254

25-8 and Ventura, Michael 9, 11, 105

I Ching 101, 102-3, 105, 223 Lahou relationship 32, 37, 39 imaginal therapy 109-21 imaginal world 145-72 incest 4, 64, 162, 193, 209-11 abusive fathers 115, 119, 133-f

Dickens 213 Hillman 112 Jungian analysis 136, 141, 143 Loewe 276 ineffable jouissance 72, 75, 81 inferior function 219-42 integrative therapy 30-43 interactional field 279-83 interpersonal and intrapsychic cc 164-5, 222 interventions 284-8 intuition 60 function 219, 234-41, 242, 288 synchronicity 101, 102 Isis and Osiris 244-5, 252 Islam 158 Israel 102-3, 104 Jack the Ripper murders 194-5, 199-200, 202-3, 205 Jacoby, M 67 Jacoby, Russell 172 Jaffe, A 236

Jesus Christ 130, 132-3, 135, 139, 141, 181, 264 see also Christians and Christianity Jews and Judaism 22, 29, 98, 101 Joseph and Zuleika 261-4 jouissance 69-75, 81 Dickens 200, 211 Joyce, James 119 Jung, C G 3, 6-11, 123-43, 199-201, 245 castles 191-2 countertransference 145, 149, 151-3, 157, 159, 165 epiphanies 86-7, 91-2 feeling function 219, 229, 242 Hillman 109, 111, 112, 113, 118 inferior function 219, 220, 221-4 intuition function 219, 238, 242 left-hand path 63-5 mundus imaginalis 158, 159 60 placing the sublime 15-21, 26-7, 38-9, 43 politics 145, 146-7 Rosarium 53-5 sensation function 219, 234, 242 sex and sublimation 184-5, 189 supervision 280, 282, 288 synchronicity 91-2, 96-102, 105-7, 280, 282 thinking function 219, 225-6, 242 transference 53, 65-7 women 59-63 Jupiter/Jovial sublime 37, 39 -

Kabbalah 21-2, 28, 30, 32, 35, 101 Kalevala 247 Kama Sutra 186 Kant, Emmanuel 57-8, 127, 128 creativity 70, 74, 77, 82 Khnopff, Fernand 253-60 I lock my door upon myself 255-7 King, Michael L 119 Kircher, Athanasius 107 Kirsch, James 99 Klein, Melanie 6, 164, 193, 228 Kohut, Heinz 116 kosmos 16 Krishna 101 Kristeva, Julia 70-82 Dickens 192-200, 213, 215 incest 209-11 !Crook (Dickens) 206-14

Lacan, Jacques 71, 81, 150, 201 Anamorphosis 197 castles 191-2, 195, 212-13 Judge Schreber 213-14 ladders 184, 186, 197-8 Laius-Oedipus myth 116 language games 127, 135 Lawrence, D H 3-4, 162 Layla and Majnun 247-50, 263 legal profession 225 Leonardo da Vinci 4, 72-9, 81, 227 levels of discourse 16, 32-3, 36-43 Lingis, A 59 Loewe, Eva 271-8 logos 3, 15, 16 loneliness 129 Longinus 2, 3, 12, 15, 56, 57 Los Angeles riots 170 Lully, Raymond 222 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 57, 58, 127, 128, 135, 141-2 macrocosm 7, 17, 20-3, 25, 28, 33-4, 43 Maeterlinck, Maurice 251-2, 253-5 mandala 19, 191 mare nostrum 206 margin 123-5, 129, 143 Mars/Martial sublime 37, 39 maternal phallus 72, 73, 76, 79 matbesis 126 Mayhew, Henry 194 Meade, M 236-7 Meltzer, D 158, 164 memoria 18-19, 21 memory 18, 85-8, 90, 133-5 Mercury/Mercurial sublime 26, 37, 41 microcosm 7, 106, 183, 188 placing the sublime 17, 19-20, 22-3, 25, 28, 33-4, 43 Mitchell, Juliet 168 Mnemosyne 86-8 Moltzer, Maria 60, 62 Moon/Lunar sublime 37, 42 m/other 192, 200 mundus bumanus 183 mundus imaginalis 145, 152, 156 7, 158-64, 165 music composing 86-8, 90 mysticism and sex 187-90 mytbos 15, 32, 37, 38 -

narcissism 182, 193, 209

narcissistic abuse 134, 135 nature 7-11, 57, 63, 70, 125-6 Nazis 146-7, 169 negative transference 282 neoclassical period 69, 74, 82 Neoplatonists 22, 183, 185 impossible love 245, 259, 263 Neptunian sublime 36, 37 neurotic countertransference 153, 155 New Agers 92, 169 New Lacemakers 274 Nietzsche 65 nightingale song 9-10 Nizami Layla and Majnun 247-50 nominative level of discourse 32, 34, 37, 41 normalisation 109-10, 115 normative level of discourse 32, 34, 37, 40 numinous feeling or experience 7, 17, 87, 99, 106 Odysseus-Telemachus myth 116 Oedipus 27, 116 Orlan (body artist) 46, 47-8 otherness 123-4, 137, 138, 139 Owens, Craig 194 Paine, T 57 parallel process 279-88 Paris, Ginette 113 Pascal, Blaise 88 Pater, Walter 75-6, 78 patient countertransference 280, 282 Pauli, W 106 Payne, P 235 Pecksniff, Mr (Dickens) 197, 198 Peladin, Josephin 260 Pelleas and Melisande 251-3, 262 Perlman, Michael 113 phallus 132, 139, 140, 189, 192, 213 maternal 72, 73, 76, 79 physiological level of discourse 32, 34, 37, 42-3 pbysis 3, 6-11, 36 Pico Della Mirandola 21 Plaut, A 152, 161 pluralism 16, 194 Plutonian sublime 37, 38, 39, 41 polarity 34, 35-6 political clinics 145 poltergeist 131

Pordage, John 55, 59 pornography 50 Portae Lucis (Gate of Light) 28, 31 41 post-Freud 149-50 post-Jung 22, 145, 150, 224 postmodernism 125-8, 194 potbos 250 1 predestination 100 Prig, Miss (Dickens) 199, 201 primary narcissism 209 primum mobile sublime (first swirl] 36, 37 prioritising 283-8 pro-active countertransference 280 pro-active transference 280 projective identification 164, 280 Proust, Marcel 231 pseudo-Longinus 12, 56 psyche 5, 8-10, 221, 272, 275, 285, countertransference 150-1, 15 172 creativity 75, 78 imaginal therapy 112, 114, 115, 1 impossible love 260 Jungian analysis 124, 125-6, 129, 143 mundus imaginalis 158, 160, 163, 165 placing the sublime 16, 23, 28 synchronicity 97, 100-1, 103, 10! psychics 235 puer 20-1, 25, 26, 35 Dickens 204, 210 -

racism 169, 170-1 rational level of discourse 32, 3 39-40 reactive countertransference-indu 280 reactive transference 280 rebirth 125, 138 re-cognition 87 reflective countertransference 162, 163 regressive function 221 religion 47, 101, 154 Jungian analysis 125, 130, 137-4 mundus imaginalis 161, 162 sex 181-4, 186, 188-90 reparative therapeutic relationshi 40

re-vision 112 Ricoeur, Paul 120 Rilke, Rainer Maria 244, 250, 276 rituals 182, 183, 185, 193 Rodenbach, Georges 257 Romantics 245, 259 Rosarium Pbilosopborum 51 5, 63, 165 Rossetti, Christina Georgina 255-6, 263 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 246, 256 rotatio 185 Rumijalal `uddin 261, 263-4 -

Sacks, S 232 Sade, Marquis de 187 Salome 188 Salome, Lou Andreas 244, 250, 261, 276 Samuels, Andrew 112, 115, 118-19, 200 Jungian analysis 124, 136 sandals 88, 92, 93 Sapphire Tree 21, 28, 33, 35, 43 Sarup, Madan 127, 128 Saturnian sublime 37, 38 Scholem, Gersholm 22, 36 Schreber, Judge 213, 214 Schubert, Franz 261 scopophilia 6 self 7, 8, 94, 136-7 castles 191-3 countertransference 163-4 impossible love 255 placing the sublime 16-20 sex 182, 188 synchronicity 97, 99 semiotic functioning 69-72, 75, 76, 79-81 Semonides 196-7 senex 20-1, 25, 26, 34, 35 sensation function 219, 234-41, 242, 288 sex and sexuality 6, 51-67, 180-90 body art 48-51 creativity 75-7 Jungian analysis 124-5, 132, 133-41' mundus imaginalis 162 Rosarium 51-5 sublimation 184-6 sexual abuse 125, 133-5, 136-40, 233 Shabistari, Mahmud 107-8 Shakespeare 70 Midsummer Night's Dream 161 Troilus and Cressida 82 Shamans 184

Siddal, Lizzie 256 Siegfried (Jung's "child") 62, 64 signifying chain 70 simultaneity 34 single pelican 53-4 Sirian sublime 37, 38, 39, 41 Siva-Ganesa myth 116 sky-mother 131 Slater, Michael 198, 200 Smirgel, Janine Chausseguet 77-82 snake-dragon 181 Solomon 55, 226 Sontag, Susan 50 soul 2, 4, 10, 112, 272-6 impossible love 261, 263-4 placing the sublime 16, 18, 23-4, 28 sex 66, 181-5, 187-90 synchronicity 97-8 space-time continuum 105-6 spatialising 15-16, 21, 35 Spielrein, Sabina 60-2, 64 spirit and spirituality 137-41 sex 54-7, 59, 63, 66, 181-5, 188-9 spontaneous combustion 208-9, 210-11, 214 Steinfels, Peter 117 stereotypes 89-90 Sufis and Sufism 22, 107-8, 248, 261, 262-3, 275 suicide 250, 256 Sun/Solar sublime 40 superego 113 superior function 219, 223, 224 superstition 89, 93, 183 supervision 155, 275, 279-88 sweetness of life 236-7 symbolic order and power 70-4, 81 Symbolists and Symbolism 253, 255, 256, 259-60 Symington, Neville 151 synchronicity 96-108, 123, 132, 238 epiphanies 87, 91-3 supervision 280, 282, 283-4 syntonic countertransference 152 Tantra 53, 58, 59, 61, 63-5 Tao 10-11, 103, 223 telepathy 132 terror 57, 58, 70, 124, 126 Thamar and Amnon 245 Thanatos 7 Thatcher, Mrs Margaret 169

theophany 275 theoretical level of discourse 32, 34, 37, 38 therapeutic relationships 16, 32-3, 36-43 therapist transference-pathological 280 thinking function 219, 225-34, 242, 288 third area 163 time 18, 23, 26-7 synchronicity 100, 101, 105, 107 transcendent function 128 transference 53, 65-7, 149, 152, 164, 166 Jungian analysis 123, 132, 134, 138 mundus imaginalis 159, 162 Rosarium 53 sex 64 supervision 280-2, 286 transference/countertransference level 32, 37, 42 transpersonal level of discourse 32, 34, 36-7 transpersonal therapeutic relationship 32, 36, 37 Tree of Life 21-3, 28, 30, 32-4, 38-41 Tristan and Isolde 250-1, 253

unconscious 102-4, 113, 221, 222, 224 Jungian analysis 123-4, 138, 143 Ungeist 251 unheimlich 193, 210 universe 183 creativity 70, 77, 79 placing the sublime 16-18, 20-1, 32, 33 synchronicity 105, 106, 107 unus mundus 106 Uranian sublime 37, 38

Veils of Negative Existence 36 Ventura, Michael 9, 11, 109, 111, 1 VenusNenusian sublime 26, 37, 41 273-5 Vernant, Jean Pierre 89 video camera 85-6 Vidler, Anthony 193 vinculum 66 vinegar 201 virginity 192 visions 159-62 von Franz, M-L 220-1, 223 von Willemer, Marianne 261-2, 26 Wagner 253 Warner, Marina 192 water 251-4, 260 Watson, L 235 Watts, A W 229 Weevle (Dickens) 208 Weiskel, T 180 Whitechapel 194-5, 198-200, 205 Wilber, K21 Winnicott, D W 163 within-self therapeutic relations) 38, 40, 41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 127 Wolff, Toni 60, 99, 103-4, 105 working alliance therapeutic re ship 32, 37, 43 Zeitgeist 256 Zen 19, 106, 128, 187, 228-9 Zeus 89, 94, 95, 285, 286 Ziegler, Alfred 251 zodiacal sublime 37, 38 Zuleika's song 261-4 Zurich 103-4