Analysis, Repair and Individuation

Kenneth Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429910777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An exposition on individuation including 'Archetypes, Individuation and Internal Objects' and 'The Individuation Process'

Chapter One
Individuation and the mutual influence of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology

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I have written this book as one of the first trainees of the Society of Analytical Psychology, having become an Associate Professional Member in 1950. For me, membership of that society, together with participation for over thirty years in the general analytical scene in London, has provided sustained stimulus and support. In addition, I have enjoyed, from its beginning in 1964, membership of the Freud—Jung group, convened by Dr William Kraemer in London, where analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts meet regularly to discuss clinical problems. The whole period has been one in which considerable advances have been made towards finding ways of integrating the two main strands of analytical theory and practice, which had, earlier, during the second to fourth decades of this century, developed either in isolation from or very much in polar opposition to each other. The division into opposite camps afforded, in the earlier years, breathing space wherein each could grow and develop from within. Later on, however, what with the pressure of patients’ needs on the one hand and natural curiosity on the other, analysts could be found peeping into each other’s gardens—rather more obviously in the case of the London Jungians, rather more quietly, and more by private admission, on the part of the Freudians.

Such a splitting process, with the results just mentioned, has probably proved in the long run to be to the advantage of analytical theory and practice. In the shorter run, however, it was rather less of an advantage to analysts trained in the earlier days, not only in respect of their own analyses but also of those they offered to their patients at that time. That, of course, is a function of the problem of being born rather too early in the century—a matter of fate, certainly, but perhaps, after all, not entirely a bad thing provided analysts keep themselves alive to new developments and participate regularly in clinical discussion and controversy.

It thus turns out that, as our understanding has increased, so more and more people have found it incorrect to consider the relationship between the two schools as inherently and permanently one of incompatibility, particularly to the extent of engendering mutually destructive hostility. Objectively speaking, the relationship at the present juncture is better described as one that is becoming complementary. Even the original personal clash between Freud and Jung, so often seen in the past in terms of temperamental or personality-type incompatibility, appears less strong today and more a matter of differences in background and family circumstance.

These can promote or evoke different conceptual patterns of what is psychiatric health or damage in a way that is much better understood now. The differences seem therefore today to occur over matters of emphasis, often generational in origin, rather than of total incompatibility of philosophy or temperament, though Jung emphasized typological differences between himself and Freud (Jung, 1963), while Winnicott much later, in his well-known review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, felt that at that point in analytic history it would have been hardly possible for the two men to understand each other, so different were their personal problems (Winnicott, 1964).

In so far as theory and clinical practice are concerned, one way of demonstrating the complementariness in question to a contemporary mind is to use contrast. This can be done by columnizing some of the points traditionally conceived of as illustrating the fundamental incompatibility between the schools. I shall attempt to do this, and then describe shortly the ways in which the two schools have, historically, out of their inner logic and the pressure of clinical need, been able to surmount these apparent barriers and to draw closer to each other. My columnization, which must not be misunderstood as referring to the contemporary situation, runs as follows:

Some Attitudes of Classical Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology According to the Traditional models

Traditional psychoanalysis	Traditional analytical psychology
(1) The central interest was to analyse the psychopathology that can be related to early damage sustained by instinctual drive processes; to release normal development; and to strengthen the ego for improved handling of super-ego and id.	(1) The central interest was individuation, integration and the realization of the self. Psychopathology was understood as arising out of important elements of the self remaining unconscious ‘in the shadow’ and thus liable to function in distorted and inferior ways. Drive processes were considered to be structured and archetypal in nature.
(2) The analyst was largely a screen analyst and the transference largely a matter of the projection upon him of figures in the early childhood and the past of the patient in general.	(2) The analyst was another human being in a dialectical interaction with his patient. The transference was taken largely in terms of archetypal content, manifested in the here and now. There was a tendency to neglect the past, though reductive analysis was recognized and contrasted with synthetic analysis.
(3) The analyst was, for a large part of his time, involved within the transference in reconstructing his patient’s early history, in linking him with the emotions of his past and thereby releasing him from identifications with them.	(3) The analyst was committed to the understanding of archetypal processes in his patient that appear in the here and now and prospectively both within the transference and outside it. For this he needed knowledge of archetypal material as found in religion, mythology, fairy tales etc. His interventions could be of many and various kinds.
(4) The analyst as part of his technique was relatively passive. He needed to have the ability to listen to the patient’s mainly verbal communications. His own interventions too were mainly by verbal interpretation and strictly analytic in content and intention, at least in the long term, even when designed mainly to foster communication.	(4) The analyst was a listening participator in a dialectical intercourse with his patient. Non-verbal methods of communication were taken account of as well as painting, modelling etc. Transactions were two-way and included for the patient confession, elucidation, education as well as transformation, a process in which the analyst might also change in various ways.
(5) The couch was used by the patient. Sessions were, if possible, daily and generally 50 minutes long. For periods in the analysis a high degree of dependence upon the analyst might develop in the patient.	(5) The patient usually sat in a chair facing or a little oblique to the analyst. Sessions were not so frequent. The patient and the analyst were in some ways fellow students of the patient’s material and indeed of archetypal material, conscious and unconscious, personal and collective.
(6) Dreams were considered in terms of the patient’s defensive manoeuvres against acknowledgement of basic instinctuality. Arising spontaneously as a mode of compromise or substitute satisfaction of id and superego pressures, they could be used through the rather devious imagery employed to obscure issues for defensive purposes.	(6) Dream content was interpreted much more simply as if the dreamer meant what he said but was using the pictorial symbolic language that is typical of a side of the psyche known to poets and artists but often less developed, if not unconscious, in modern rational man. It was considered to be an important product of the unconscious matrix of personality. The interplay of archetypal images and various inner and outer figures and processes in the dreamer supplied the content and the meaning of the dream.
(7) Unconscious process was considered to be composed of repressed material and of damaged or unacceptable elements of the past—together with defences. Aspects of ego and superego were understood to be repressed as well as a great deal of the id, conceived of as unconscious, blind and undifferentiated will to survive and reproduce. Psychological maturity was to consist in strengthening the ego so that the individual’s perception of external reality (the reality principle) could be freed from distortion by pressures from the id and superego. Thus the growth of the ego would give better expression to id and superego in a way that modified stress in the personality as a whole.	(7) Unconscious process was conceived of as (a) repressed personal experiences and so far unexperienced personal potential, and (b) more structured archetypal predispositions arising from the unconscious matrix of the personality, called collective because they constituted stereotypical forms shared by all people or large or small groups of people. The unconscious aim of the psyche might be discovered to be individuation, integration or the realization of the self in terms of flesh and blood, space and time. The essential service of ego-consciousness in all this was more and more emphasized by Jung as he entered old age (Jung, 1976, p.112).
(8) The analyst needed to be analysed in order to be able to preserve his boundaries; to be as free as possible from the projection of his own personal psychology, neurotic or psychotic, illusory or delusionary, on to that of his patients; and to be sufficiently aware of his own problems and defences not to miss or ignore elements similar to them in patients. Moreover, in cases where trainees had not already been propelled into analysis by personal need, their analyses were generally discovered by them to be essential for their emotional health, as well as for their ability to practise psychoanalysis.	(8) The analyst was to be analysed not only to preserve him from delusions, illusions and blindness about his patient, but also because his own individuation and integration, vital enough for him, were also considered vital for the therapy of his patient. Interpersonal interaction and induction processes were deeply involved. In other words the personality of the analyst was felt to be crucial and of an importance prior even to questions of technique.

Now it is clearly to be objected that a columnization like this not only misrepresents but also radically over-polarizes the Freudian and Jungian contributions to analysis and neglects historical development. It would, however, have been accurate enough, and certainly less of a distortion, fifty, forty even thirty years ago. It is a measure of the change that has taken place, often, perhaps, quietly and insensibly, that many analysts and patients of either school would find the account almost a caricature of their experience, beliefs and practice, and certainly outdated. They would be on the whole right. That this is so has not, however, arisen out of any attempt on the part of the two schools to organize themselves into some sort of synthesis or integration. The fact is that most members of each school have preferred to remain attached to their original professional associations, into which, by the nature of the analytical experiences provided by them, so much of personal involvement has been invested. As a result, they have mainly extended the range of their clinical observation and developed the inner logic of the foundational discoveries made by their own psychological family. Only later, by a slow process of ingestion, digestion and elimination, have they come to terms with the other stream, whether overtly or covertly, and sometimes as the results of pressures arising from within themselves or from their interaction with patients.

It would indeed take a large book to attempt to particularize the developments in psychoanalysis and analytical psychology that have rendered my columnization so out of date, and it is certainly not the purpose of this book to do so. However, as these developments represent part of the background behind the writing of this book, I propose to comment shortly on them from a Jungian angle under the eight headings already listed.

Developments in Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology and Modifications of the Traditional Models

1. The Central Interest

Psychoanalysts have begun to add to their central interest the notion of the self and to investigate the conditions that foster or damage its development at various stages in the early life of the individual. Jacobson, Winnicott, Kernberg, Kohut and Volkan are among the key figures here. At the same time Hartmann and the ego-psychologists have elaborated the nature and vicissitudes of ego-development. Indeed in all schools the precise link between ego and self is being explored.

Analytical psychologists have also continued their investigations into the self, particularly so in respect of the repair of damage sustained by it during its early development and in the analyst’s care of the whole individuating and integrative process. It has become necessary to conceive of a psychopathology of the development of the self that cannot be ignored. This has been made more observable by the implications of Fordham’s theory that, at the birth of the individual, the original self may be postulated to be an undifferentiated unity, with minimal consciousness, but carrying the potential for deintegration into archetypal drives when presented with, or when in collision with, the outer objects corresponding to them. (Fordham, 1957). We can now study, with the hope of repair: (1) damage to the process of deintegration as such (Fordham, 1976), and (2) damage to the deintegrates themselves. Further important studies of the self have been made by Redfearn, including his valuable paper (Redfearn, 1969) comparing Jung’s concept of the self with that of Jacobson (1964). Alan Edwards (1976, 1978), Rushi Ledermann (1979) and Rosemary Gordon (1980) have also contributed to the study of the problems of early narcissistic damage in connection with the work of Kohut (1971, 1977), Kernberg (1974), and Volkan (1976). In Jungian circles, there has been debate on the question of whether it is useful to work with the notion of an ego—self axis, or whether ego-consciousness may be understood as the conscious aspect of the self, except where it has been organized rigidly in opposition to the personality as a whole. In extreme contrast, we have even witnessed an attack upon the ego as such as if it were really only a false “hero-ego” and a cramping or divisive factor opposed to spontaneity (Hillman 1975, pp. xiv and 21).

2. The Function of the Analyst

In respect of the function of the analyst, psychoanalysis has greatly modified the rigorous notion of the passive, almost impersonal, screen analyst and admitted the existence of a number of interactional processes in analysis. Rycroft (1968) writes of the formation within the analyst of a disposition towards his patient that influences his behaviour. Racker (1968) spells out some of the interactional dynamism activated by the analyst’s mobilized predisposition to attend to his patient, by his concordant empathy, by his struggle to recognize within himself the operation of the talion law which blindly rewards the good done to him by his patient and punishes the evil, and by his ability to use the energy of the talionic emotion for the development of analytic insight. Winnicott describes the holding of his patient, over a long period of time when necessary, and his full acceptance of the patient’s nihilistic resistances. Balint (1968) opens out the question of the special handling needed when dealing with a case where a “basic fault” is sensed to have developed at the heart of the infant self. Bion stresses the “full interpretation” regarded as an action taken by the analyst in loneliness and full responsibility. Schafer (1973) insists upon the essentially interpersonal processes of interaction in analysis whereby resistance is understood in terms of resistance to penetration by persecution or by engulfment, not only by the analyst himself but also by the paternal and maternal images or objects transferred on to his person by the patient. All these writers emphasize the personal and interactional function of analysts in relation to their patients, involving, as they do, more than the impersonal contrivance engineered by their acting as a screen.

Analytical psychology, however, especially in London, has begun to recognize much more fully the patient’s dependency needs when in states of regression. This has been made possible as a result of the emergence of considerably increased understanding among Jungian analysts of early development, further implemented by the recently constituted training in child analysis which has begun to produce its first child analysts. It is now fully recognized that, in the adult, there can arise a need for his early childhood to be analysed both for the repair of damage, with a subsequent release of held-up development, and to enable the patient to link emotionally both with his childhood and, as a result, in more realistic ways, with the Divine Child archetype. Under these circumstances the patient discovers needs in himself to be dependent upon his analyst in an asymmetric way, which does not have to be thought of as an affront to dignity or equal human status in relation to the analyst. In this case the transference will be recognized to contain much early infancy and childhood material within which archetypal themes are discernible. The Jungian analyst, while understanding the advantages of acting as a screen, tends today to find a place for these advantages somewhat differently by taking a middle position and mai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial introduction
• Preface
• Introduction
• Dedication
• 1. Individuation and the mutual influence of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology
• 2. Personal psychology and the choice of analytic school
• 3. Individuation and the personality of the analyst
• 4. Resistance and counter-resistance
• 5. Archetypes, object-relations and internal objects
• 6. Reconstruction
• 7. Transference, counter-transference and interpersonal relations
• 8. Dreams and dreaming
• 9. The individuation process
• Postscript
• Glossary
• References
• Index