Archetype, Attachment, Analysis

Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind

Jean Knox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135453961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is the first book available that ties Jungian analysis with the current hot topics of attachment, evidence-based practice and neuroscience Anthony Storr (very well known and respected psychiatrist/Jungian analyst, now deceased) was very impressed with the book at proposal stage First author to address this subject explicitly since Anthony Stevens

Chapter 1
Introduction

It is impossible to understand contemporary analytical psychology and psychoanalysis without knowing something of the fault lines that characterized the early days of depth psychology. In geology, tension builds where segments of the earth’s crust are moving in different directions from each other, creating fault lines which give rise to sudden and violent seismic shifts. It is a metaphor which seems particularly appropriate to the world of depth psychology, which has experienced many such earthquakes in its history. The first of these occurred in 1913 when, after a period of increasing tension as Freud and Jung moved in different directions, they finally severed their relationship, creating a rupture between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology that persists to this day (Hayman 1999: 164). Furthermore, within each school, further fault lines have developed so that a multiplicity of theories, trainings and clinical practice sit uneasily alongside each other and occasionally give rise to further violent fractures. Within analytical psychology, these fault lines, marking major divisions in theory and practice, have been extensively mapped in Samuels’ account of the main theoretical and clinical distinctions between the archetypal, classical and developmental schools and in Kirsch’s history of the Jungians (Samuels 1985; Kirsch 2001).

The dilemma, which faces every practising analyst and psychotherapist, is that our clinical work requires both a highly developed hermeneutic understanding, a capacity to relate to and explore the subjective meaning of a patient’s conscious and unconscious communications, and also a reasonable grasp of the current scientific evidence about the information-processing mechanisms that underpin subjective experience and meaning. The art of being an analyst requires us to attend to the intuitive, poetic, symbolic narrative that emerges in an analytic session. Peter Levi (1977) has described the way in which a good poet can help us to hear our language, just as an eighteenth-century sailor ‘could pick out intuitively the sound of every strain or creak or squeak in a great ship at sea’, a metaphor which could equally well describe the intuitive listening of a well-trained analyst or psychotherapist during a session (Levi 1977: 12). It is an art which requires years of personal analysis, training and supervision to nurture the capacity to resonate with the multiple and sometimes contradictory threads of the patient’s narrative.

It also requires a deeply ingrained respect for the symbolic process. For example, analysts who enter into sexual relationships with their patients not only abuse the patient physically and misuse the power accorded to them by the patient’s transference but also are engaging in a fundamental violation of the fragile coconstruction of a symbolic space, a psychological abuse which may destroy the last hope that patient has of finding the symbolic ‘holding’ that is a prerequisite for individuation.

However, the art of sensitive responsiveness to a patient’s subjective experience is necessary but not sufficient for clinical practice, because our interpretations are shaped, not only by the patient’s material but also by the theoretical models that we draw on to understand that material. Unfortunately, both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology have insulated themselves for too long from the influence of empirical research in the evolving disciplines of developmental psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and attachment theory. The result has been that the depth psychologies, while rich in hermeneutic understanding, are impoverished as empirical sciences and carry diminishing authority as scientific models for understanding the human psyche. There has been a huge gulf between depth psychology, with its focus on subjective experience, and academic psychology, rooted in experimental observation, which neither side has wanted to bridge until recently. Whittle (1999) has also used the metaphor of the fault line to describe this divide and suggests that some observers see it as an intellectual scandal. Until recently academic psychology has largely neglected the study of subjective experience and has therefore seemed sterile and irrelevant to many practising analysts and therapists. Psychodynamic models have therefore become increasingly out of touch with the wealth of recent experimental evidence which provides new insights into the ways in which the human mind registers, stores and accesses information about the world around us. Psychodynamic psychotherapists of all orientations were, until recently, mainly content to remain largely ignorant of the huge strides made by cognitive scientists in understanding the workings of the human mind. Many therapists to this day even seem proud of their ignorance of these other areas of study. They argue that the analytic session is itself a sufficient research tool and that therapists share their clinical experience and evidence with one another in seminars and in published clinical papers, believing that this provides accumulating knowledge about the human mind and the way it works.

However, Fonagy and Tallindini-Shallice (1993) have challenged this argument, pointing out the inherent bias of this approach, in that analysts interpret what they find in the clinical session in the light of their preexisting expectations, assumptions and theoretical orientation. This ‘enumerative inductivism’, the finding of ever more examples consistent with the model being used, is essentially flawed in that its subjectivity means that it is an approach which is not capable of eliminating false positive observations; psychotherapists and analysts who rely on this method for their understanding of the human psyche have no means of modifying or discarding their theories once they have been accepted as plausible.

The absence of any objective criteria for testing psychodynamic models also provides an epistemological breeding ground in which multiple and competing theories about the development and functioning of the human psyche can emerge, as analysts construct new models to understand the clinical phenomena they encounter in the consulting room. The problem which then arises is that, as theories multiply, it becomes less and less possible for analysts to agree among themselves about the nature of the events taking place in an analytic session; the bias produced by the analyst’s expectations reaches a point where no objective observation of fact is possible. For example, one American research project asked analysts to rate a transcript of an analytic session to see whether, in their view, an analytic process had been established. The alarming outcome of this study was that the raters, all experienced analysts, could not complete the task because they could not even agree on the criteria for evaluating whether an analytic process was taking place in the session (Vaughan et al. 1997).

This diversity of theoretical models may be acceptable from a postmodern perspective but it may be the source of considerable problems in the clinical situation. The intensely interpersonal nature of psychoanalytic work and the profound emotional dependence upon the analyst which the analysand develops results in a great vulnerability during the analysis for the analysand’s sense of self, a vulnerability which is so much greater for those analysands whose sense of psychological self is already fragile. Fonagy proposed that patients who do not have an awareness of themselves as having minds rely on the therapist’s reflective capacity to support and maintain their identities (Fonagy 1991); my own view is that this places a great responsibility on an analyst to offer to the patient a model of his or her psyche which is in keeping with the available evidence from cognitive science about the informationprocessing capacities of the human mind. I suggest, for example, that an analyst whose interpretations of the patient’s communications always arise from an instinctual drive model deprives the patient of an opportunity to gain a deep understanding of the way in which past trauma may have been ‘internalized’ and so contributed to the patient’s representational world.

Similarly, it is essential for analysts to understand that mental contents may be unavailable to conscious recall without repression being the mechanism involved. However repression is conceptualized, it always includes the idea that emotion plays a key role in keeping certain mental contents out of conscious awareness, but emotion may play no part at all in the fact that information stored in implicit memory is unavailable to consciousness. An analyst who insists that everything that is unavailable to consciousness must be emotionally repressed would be wrong theoretically; the clinical situation could also be confusing and persecutory to the patient if the analyst’s interpretations imply that the patient’s failure to remember is rooted in emotional resistance when the real reason is a failure of the retrieval process.

The dangers posed by a therapist of any theoretical orientation who has scientifically unsound models of mental functioning are most strikingly illustrated in relation to the controversial questions of false and recovered memory. Some therapists seem unaware of the complexity of memory processes, particularly the fact that memory is always a mixture of reconstruction and reproduction; they may put considerable pressure on their patients to ‘recover’ memories of past sexual abuse, without realizing that the constant focus on finding such material may lead the patient to imagine such events and perhaps eventually to come to believe that these imaginative representations are accurate representations of real past events. Other therapists may be unaware that memories can be forgotten for long periods of time and then recovered and may cause their patients distress if they fail to believe them.

These examples are given to illustrate my argument that therapists can mislead and confuse their patients in the clinical situation if they work with scientifically unsound models and theories about mental functioning. Just as we ask our patients to test and modify their distorted models of the world in analysis, so analysts must also be willing to subject ourselves to the same process. We fully understand this in terms of the need for personal analysis to reduce, as far as possible, the distortions of the patient’s narrative by our own needs and anxieties. However, as a profession, we do not yet fully recognize that we also have to be open to intellectual influence, to the modifying and balancing evidence from other disciplines which can help to correct our theoretical distortions. The pioneers of depth psychology did recognize this and firmly embedded the hermeneutic aspect of clinical practice in theories about the workings of the human mind such as Freud’s metapsychology, which was based on the state of scientific knowledge then available to him. Jung went further and undertook empirical testing of his theories early in his career, in the form of the word association test. However, these models have become frozen in the scientific framework of their day and have not been subject to the regular and frequent empirical testing which defines the scientific approach.

There is an urgent need for a reappraisal of many psychodynamic concepts in the light of the accumulating evidence from other disciplines and there seemed to be a turning point with the publication of Daniel Stern’s (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant, which opened the eyes of much of the analytic community to the rich nourishment we could obtain from this kind of developmental research. Since then, both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology have begun to engage in this process, sometimes painful, of examining our theoretical models in the light of the rapid growth in scientific understanding of the workings of the human mind and brain. In this book, my aim is to contribute to this process by drawing on some of these recent discoveries to examine key areas of Jungian theory and practice. I will make particular use of research in attachment theory, which has already played a major part in the emergence of contemporary psychoanalytic models, but which, until recently, has not been used to explore key concepts in analytical psychology. Attachment theory is crucial to any examination of depth psychology because it combines the rigour of the scientific investigative method, while placing interpersonal relationships at the heart of its core concepts; it is a model which really does, for the first time, provide a bridge between the objectivity of academic and empirical psychology and the subjectivity of the hermeneutic approach (Grossman 1995). Attachment theory demonstrates that scientific understanding can be integrated with the narrative and interpersonal aspects of analytic work; the scientific and the hermeneutic do not need to be seen as contradictory, but instead the meaning-making process can itself become the object of scientific study.

Attachment theory developed out of the tensions over certain key issues in psychoanalysis, fault lines some of which were similar to those which had caused the rift between Freud and Jung so many years earlier. John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, was a psychoanalyst who became increasingly uneasy with the emphasis in psychoanalytic theory on autonomous intrapsychic processes, which seemed to him to be a solipsistic model which neglected the role of interpersonal relationships in the formation of the human internal world. He became particularly critical of the Kleinian model, which placed instinctual drive theory at the heart of psychoanalysis and which postulated that complex unconscious phantasy could arise in the earliest months of infancy as a direct expression of the libido or of the death instinct. Bowlby felt that this was a view which seemed to render the environment virtually insignificant in its contribution to the formation of psychic contents (Bowlby 1988: 43–4).

The argument over the degree to which innate processes and the environment respectively contribute to unconscious fantasy did not represent a new fault line in psychoanalysis. Ferenczi had already clashed with Freud over this issue and, in recognition of the impact of real experience and trauma on children, one of his papers was originally called ‘The passions of adults and their influence on the sexual and character development of children’ (Ferenczi 1933). The British Object Relations school, particularly Guntrip, Balint and Fairbairn, formed the definitive view that actual experience of the real world and of the key relationships in a child’s life were internalized to form internal objects. This sharply contrasted with the Kleinian position, but British object relations theory as yet lacked some of the key features which Bowlby incorporated into an object relations model, so initiating the full flowering of attachment theory.

These additional features came from outside the world of psychoanalysis. Bowlby had become aware of the developing field of ethological research and he discovered the work of Lorenz, Tinbergen and Hinde. Out of his study of their work came his conviction that attachment is a ‘primary motivational system’, not rooted in hunger or instinctual drive, but an independent instinctual pattern of experience and behaviour. Striking support for his view came from the, by now, famous experiments by Harlow, who separated monkeys from their mothers at birth and then reared them with surrogate wire monkeys. Some of these ‘mothers’ had a feeding bottle attached to them and others had no bottle but were covered with a soft furry material. The infant monkeys clearly preferred the soft cloth ‘mother’, clinging to her for long periods and only turning to the wire monkey to feed (Harlow 1958). Once again, this kind of empirical research supported Bowlby’s view of human psychological development as interpersonal, a view which has received support from developmental studies such as those of Stern and many others whose research has shown the inseparability of the intrapsychic and interpersonal.

An outline of this book

In analytical psychology, one of the main points of disagreement between different schools has centred on the nature of archetypes, their role in psychic functioning and their contribution to the process of change in analysis and therapy. In Chapter 2, I examine the complex and varied ways in which Jung wrote about archetypes. Many authors have commented on the conceptual confusion these writings convey and there would be nothing new in another book along these lines. In Chapter 2, I have therefore identified four fundamental conceptual descriptions of archetypes that regularly emerge in Jung’s attempts to clarify and define them. Furthermore, the characteristics of each of these four models of archetypes can be defined by tracing their roots to one or other of a range of philosophical and scientific influences on Jung. This analysis of the four strands that are interwoven in the model of archetypes allows us then to examine how compatible they are with each other or whether, when combined, they create such an internally inconsistent definition of archetypes that it has to be modified to offer a more coherent model.

In addition, new light can be shed on the theoretical differences in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis if we bring the expanding knowledge from other psychological disciplines to bear on our differing approaches to the psyche. Indeed I will go so far as to suggest in this book that some, at least, of the apparently irreconcilable divisions between our theoretical frameworks can seem much less significant when viewed from a different perspective. In Chapter 3, I turn to the wealth of research that has emerged since the early 1990s in cognitive science and developmental psychology, which offer us new paradigms for understanding the relationship between genetic potential and environmental influence on the development of the human mind. The central theme here is that of self-organization of the human brain and the recognition that genes do not encode complex mental imagery and processes, but instead act as initial catalysts for developmental processes out of which early psychic structures reliably emerge. For example, the developmental account of archetype, which I offer in Chapter 3, lends considerable scientific support to the key role archetypes play in psychic functioning and as a crucial source of symbolic imagery, but at the same time identifies archetypes as emergent structures resulting from a developmental interaction between genes and environment that is unique for each person. Archetypes are not ‘hard-wired’ collections of universal imagery waiting to be released by the right environmental trigger, a model which would lead straight into the trap of categorizing them as innate ideas, a concept demolished by Locke long before anyone had ever heard of genes. Locke wrote:

The knowledge of some truths, I confess is very early in the Mind; but in a way that shews them not to be innate. For, if we will observe, we shall find it still to be about ideas, not innate but acquired; it being about those first, which are imprinted by external things, with which infants have earliest to do, which make the most frequent Impressions on their senses.

(Locke 1997 [1689]: 65)

This statement is breathtaking in its anticipation, more than 300 years ago, of a contemporary developmental understanding of the emergent nature of mental patterns.

The concept of mental models is fundamental to an informationprocessing approach to the human mind and this is the focus of Chapter 4. While image schemas can provide us with an information-processing model of the archetype-as-such, we also need to understand how day-to-day experience is internalized and structured into a pattern of core meanings. Research, much of it within an attachment theory framework, demonstrates that our expectations of the world are governed not by rules of formal logic but by implicit and explicit mental models which organize and give a pattern to our experience. The archetype, as image schema, provides an initial scaffolding for this process, but the content is provided by real experience, particularly that of intense relationships with parents and other key attachment figures stored in the form of internal working models in implicit memory.

Ainsworth’s studies of secure and insecure attachment patterns in children have shown that the mother’s responsiveness to her child is reflected in the child’s pattern of attachment to her, as measured by the ‘Strange Situation’ (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Jung’s various models of archetypes
• Chapter 3 Archetypes and image schemas
• Chapter 4 The making of meaning
• Chapter 5 Trauma and defences
• Chapter 6 Reflective function
• Chapter 7 The process of change in analysis and the role of the analyst
• Chapter 8 Conclusions
• Bibliography