Incest Fantasies and Self-Destructive Acts

Jungian and Post-Jungian Psychotherapy in Adolescence

Mara Sidoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351512855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Mainstream analysts working in the Jungian tradition have largely neglected adolescents. Mara Sidoli and Gustav Bovensiepen remedy that omission by showing how and why psychological and physical abuse suffered by young children erupts in violent and destructive behavior against the self and others. Using clinical material, they establish the link between archetypal imagery, disturbed behavior, and instinctual drive.

Drawing from all schools of analytical psychology, the authors, along with several associates, focus mainly on severe neurotic disturbances and behavioral problems occurring in adolescence. Because most disturbances originate in the body, the contributors concentrate on self-destructive behavior: suicide, self-mutilation, and other self-damaging acts. Focused heavily on the treatment of these adolescents, the text has selections from an international group of contributors, providing diverse accounts of both theoretical and technical approaches to therapy. The case histories illustrate the relationship between the analyst and the adolescent patient as it develops in consultation. Interweaving the concepts of Jung, Freud, and others makes this volume a unique contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis. It will be of sustained interest to psychoanalysts, child psychotherapists, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists.

Part I


Individual Adolescent Psychotherapy in Private and Clinical Practice

SECTION 1


A Jungian Approach

Introduction to Section 1: Jung's Contribution to the Understanding of Adolescence and A Review of the Literature

Gustav Bovensiepen

Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul incapable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

— James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man¹

It is only in recent years that the adolescent phase of life has aroused a broad interest among Jungians. Although Jung included in his early writings numerous clinical vignettes from the therapy of adolescents or young adults, his emphasis was on the psychology of the second half of life and on individuation as his key conceptual contribution to the theories of personality development.²

Adolescence is often described as a transitional phase from childhood and family life to adulthood and the collective world in terms of ego development and social adaptation. However, the developing and unfolding of the self—what Jung calls individuation—takes place concurrently as an inner process.³

In this chapter I will examine some of Jung's writings, especially those from his early and middle periods, because they contain some ideas that help in the understanding and conceptualization of the adolescent individuation process. In our attempt to understand adolescent development and therapeutic approaches to working with adolescents, it is important to distinguish between analytical psychology and psychoanalysis.

Adolescent States of Mind

When approaching adolescents, whether as a psychotherapist, a teacher, a father or mother, we can draw on memories of our own youth as well as our adult experience. Both in everyday life and therapeutic settings, the range of typical states of mind experienced by the adolescent vary in the extreme. The remarks below do not describe psychopathological states of mind, but rather the normal spectrum of adolescent emotional experience. Adolescent moods frequently alternate between high spirits and utter despair; typical is an abrupt change from anxiety and feelings of inadequacy to a form of grandiose certainty of omnipotence. Mindless states are common and lead sometimes to manic behavior that can be interpreted by the parents (who are identified with the adolescents' projected superego) as the adolescent's complete refusal to take responsibility for his actions. At times adolescents suffer also from intense feelings of shame resulting from the fantasized morbidity, ugliness, and insufficiency of their bodies; for the first time they become consciously aware of their own mortality.

Painful pricks of conscience are common when the adolescent simultaneously condemns and idolizes the parents, sustaining the faint hope of being completely understood and accepted by them. In psychodynamic terms, these complex and often confusing states of mind clarify the adolescent's task, which is to separate from mother and father and to leave the infantile relationship behind. In this situation they may feel as if they are "drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon."

The large majority of adolescents manage to cope with these inner and outer conflicts without any serious signs of mental breakdown. Analytic psychology attributes to the self the forces that hold together the adolescent's inner world, a world threatened by fragmentation. Whether or not the self will be able to develop with sufficient strength and effectiveness to maintain cohesion depends on a person's early childhood experiences. The adolescent must succeed in maintaining an inner continuity in a phase of life during which many inward and outward changes are taking place.

Thanks to an enormous capacity for acting out, most adolescents manage to cope with these changes. The defensive significance of acting out represents an externalization of an inner conflict and is, therefore, of great importance. Unlike the process of separation in children, adolescents have to separate psychically from infantile parent images and ties that they have, to a large extent, already internalized. It is not unusual for this process of separation to be accompanied by a great upheaval in the ego-self structure, which has already taken considerable shape by the time of adolescence. Acting out is a form of inflation of the ego by collective fantasies.⁴ These fantasies are manifest in a personalized form as such archetypes as the powerful hero/ heroine, warrior, or victim. If the identification of the ego with these archetypal fantasies is accompanied by feelings of omnipotence and uniqueness, or a sense of unworthiness, the ego is disturbed in its relationship to reality. Most adolescents find these collective fantasies, in their peer groups or in society outside the family, facilitated by the mass media. Adolescents tend to "solve" their inner conflicts by projecting them into the outer world: they identify with these fantasies and often act them out. The adolescent's identification with unconscious collective fantasies disrupts the ego-self relationship, bringing about the archetypal images of death and rebirth, concretely experienced by the adolescent. This disruption can lead to the age-typical increase of psychopathological behavior such as psychosis, drug addiction, severe eating disorders, and suicide attempts.

In contrast to these death (regressive) tendencies, there is an enormous upheaval of libido during adolescence that allows progressive potentialities and "leads the young person into life."⁵ This interplay of regressive and progressive energy is, according to Jung, an archetypal activity undertaken in the quest to reach wholeness: it is the dynamic function of the self.⁶ Psychically experienced as a rebirth, this process creates images derived from the child archetype.⁷ The child as an archetypal image contains the past, the present, and the future potentialities: the unity and the multiplicity.⁸

The Psychology of Adolescence in the Writings of C.G. Jung

In contrast to Freud, who primarily emphasized the psychodynamic parallel between puberty and the oedipal constellation (see "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"), Jung extended this conceptualization of the classic libido theory to include the pre-oedipal aspect of development. In myths and images the youthful ego's battle for a separate identity is symbolized by the "hero's battle." Jung's basic ideas on separation are found in Symbols of Transformation (1912); for example, the numerous myths of the "night sea journey" (corresponding to regression into the unconscious) of the sun god/hero (symbolizing the libido of the ego) and his reappearance (representing the expanded, matured ego) are regarded by Jung as archetypal images that represent psychic processes at the collective level.⁹ The adolescent externalizes and projects this inner psychic process onto heroes or heroines that popular culture and mass media offer. James Dean was such a hero of the fifties: Madonna is one of the eighties.¹⁰ It seems to be a tendency of the Zeitgeist to feature a child or a young person as the hero or heroine in order to transport the artistic message to the collective consciousness.¹¹

In Jung's Collected Works there are few theoretical comments explicitly concerning adolescent psychology. Jung's first scientific work (1902), was his dissertation entitled Concerning the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena;¹² it was a case study of a fifteen-year old hysterical girl. In this paper, Jung was interested in the dissociation process as a form of unconscious fragmentation of the personality.

Jung's most important early work, Symbols of Transformation is a case study of a young woman, Miss Miller. Here Jung delineates for the first time his conceptualization of the vicissitudes of the libido, which represents a departure from Freud's position on the subject. Jung states that libido is not restricted to sexual instincts; instead he postulates libido as a general psychic energy that is diversely transformed by the symbolic process and becomes manifest in various images. He emphasizes the introverted and extraverted dynamic of the libido, as well as its progression and regression.

In their essentials, these movements of the libido delineate the conflictual dynamics of adolescence. As early as 1910, in his paper "Psychic Conflicts in a Child," Jung compares the movement of libido during the oedipal conflict of four-year-old Anna with the transformation and movement during puberty:

Here we meet with an important new feature in the little one's life reveries, the first stirrings of poetry, moods of an elegiac strain—all of them things which are usually to be met with only at a later phase of life, at a time when the youth or maiden is preparing to sever the family tie, to step forth into life as an independent person, but is still inwardly held back by aching feelings of homesickness for the warmth of the family hearth. At such a time they begin weaving poetic fancies in order to compensate for what is lacking. To approximate the psychology of a four-year-old to that of the boy or girl approaching puberty may at first sight seem paradoxical; the affinity lies, however, not in the age but in the mechanism. The elegiac reveries express the fact that part of the love which formerly belonged, and should belong, to a real object, is now introverted [in the German edition in italics], that is, it is turned inwards into the subject and there produces an increased fantasy activity."¹³

The "increased fantasy activity" is the introversion of libido which, during early adolescence, can become externally manifested as a puberty depression: the young person withdraws, laments about boredom, loses interest in school performance, takes refuge in daydreams, and becomes passive. The internal conflict arises when the adolescent pulls back his libido from the primal object (the parents) but is still unable to find new objects outside the family that are available for cathexis. Sometimes the adolescent may experience a painful objectless state in which no one can do anything right in response to him.

A large amount of libido is free-floating and oscillates between introversion (fantasies) and extraversion (actions). Adolescents develop different ways of coping with this sometimes painful state. Some manage to integrate their fantasies through, for example, keeping a diary; for others, listening to music seems to have a stimulating effect on their minds and prevents them from falling into a depressive void. Still others develop manic defenses against depression by jumping into numerous extraverted in-group activities. During early adolescence, all of these activities have a primarily hedonistic character.

Using the peer group as a field for experimenting with new object relations is more typical of middle adolescence. In order to allow the peer group to carry this important function, the adolescent has to be more separated from the infantile ties to his parents, and enough extra verted libido must be available to be projected into the group. Jung writes that adolescence (after puberty) becomes more and more a time of extraversion of libido.

In puberty, libido not only oscillates between introversion and extraversion, there is also a regression of libido that is facilitated by the beginning sexual maturation. Jung does acknowledge the enormous effects that the physical changes ushered in by puberty have on the inner world of the child. In fact, he goes so far as to compare the beginning of sexual maturation with the eruption of a catastrophe for the ego when he writes:

At puberty there is ... already a certain personality present, which then suddenly is subjected to the shock of sexuality. As a result the conscious position is shaken, at times to a catastrophic degree .. . Something totally new erupts and confronts the Ego which had not suspected its existence."¹⁴

This comparison seems an appropriate description of the emotional experience of psychotic adolescents, particularly in the beginning of a psychotic breakdown when adolescents experience a "catastrophic change" in their internal (infantile) world.¹⁵ The ego of nonpsychotic children in latency is relatively stable and splitting is rigid. But the eruption of sexual instincts in puberty threatens the cohesion of the ego, because

there is always the danger of being overwhelmed by an emerging drive to dissolve in multiplicity. The unity of personality is lost. If one is unified, one confronts the other".¹⁶

As the ego-complex is being weakened by the increasing instinctive needs, the psychic process goes deeper into the personality of the adolescent. Jung refers here to the self ("the unity of personality") as he was to conceptualize it shortly thereafter.

What Jung describes here in abbreviated form is a developmental process similar to the process that Michael Fordham later called the "deintegration of the self." Fordham assumes a primary or original self as existing at the outset of life. The primary self contains all the innate, archetypal potentials that may be given expression by a person throughout life. From the beginning of life the integrated state of the self is changed into states of deintegration by environmental stimuli. The innate, archetypal potentials seek correspondence in the outer world (e.g. the sucking mouth instinctively seeking the nipple). The resultant matching of an active infant's archetypal potential and the mother's responses are then reintegrated to become an internalized object. Deintegration is a state in which the self is open for external or internal experiences; after successful reintegration there is again a state of integration or wholeness of the self. The rhythm of deintegration/reintegration continues throughout life. The sexual maturation in puberty (as do other instinctual needs) triggers the deintegration of the self that initially causes a confusioned state in the adolescent's mind, a state that Jung calls the "inner division with oneself."¹⁷ The deintegration of the self brings the adolescent's ego into relationship with his early (infantile) inner objects. This relationship was described by Jung with the metaphor of incest: in puberty an "incestuous" regression to the infantile mother object occurs. Jung implicitly formulated this idea in Symbols of Transformation (1912), sixteen years before M. Klein published her ideas about the "Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex."¹⁸

For many years psychoanalytic theory stated that during puberty the oedipal conflict is repeated. But this covers only a part of the adolescent psychodynamic. The more important dynamic is the activation of pre-genital stages of development in puberty, which evokes infantile anxieties in the adolescent. In Symbols of Transformation Jung modifies Freud's understanding of the oedipal complex. He understands regression not only as a defense against genital tendencies, but also as a regression to the pregenital parental imagoes in the unconscious in search of wholeness, the union of opposites, and rebirth. Jung uses incest as a metaphor to symbolize this regressive transformation of libido. Although he emphasized the creative and regenerative nature of regression, he was quite aware of the danger inherent in the regression of libido, as the following quotation illustrates:

Stripped of its incestuous covering, Nietzsche's "sacrilegious backward grasp" is only a metaphor for the reversion to the original passive state where the libido is arrested in the objects of childhood. This inertia, as La Rochefoucauld says, is also a passion... this dangerous passion is what lies hidden beneath the hazardous mask of incest. It confronts us in the guise of the Terrible Mother."¹⁹

To illustrate his argument, Jung includes a plate showing a shaman's amulet depicting the devouring mother. The incest fantasy is treated by Jung as a special case of regression to a state of merging with the mother of infancy. This regression tendency is unconsciously repeated in puberty, when the accompanying infantile anxieties are mixed up with sexual anxieties and incest fantasies. The pre-oedipal parental images become sexualized. To avoid the emotional experience of this mental state, some adolescents exhibit a strong defense (Jung's "inertia of libido") and fail to separate from their infantile ties. If the unconscious merger wish is too overwhelming, only a constricted ego can be salvaged from adolescence through pathological defenses (e.g. pathological splitting, denial projective identification). The result is symptom formation such as psychoses, eating disorders, borderline structures, and addictions. Adolescents in regres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary of Terms
• Part I Individual Adolescent Psychotherapy in Private and Clinical Practice
• Part II Inpatient and Outpatient Adolescent Psychotherapy in Institutions
• Index