Supervision and the Circumcised Heart

By William J. Ventimiglia, D.Min.

William J. Ventimiglia, D.Min., is an analyst in private practice in Topsfield and Boston, MA, President of the Training Board of the C.G. Jung Institute ofBoston, an adjunct faculty member of Andover Newton Theological School, and former President of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts. At the C. G. Jung Institute of Boston, we recently held a day-long symposium titled Issues in Supervision. Along with several others, I was asked to prepare a talk on the subject. This was a welcome invitation. Not only do I feel that there is always room for greater clinical awareness among those of us who practice supervision, but I also feel that the whole subject of supervision as well as analysis needs to be grounded in what Jung recognized as the religious function of the psyche. A truly ethical practice of both analysis and supervision will be grounded in a consciousness of the religious dimension of human experience. In the Judeo-Christian tradition such consciousness has historically been conveyed through the symbol of the circumcised heart.1The circumcised heart provides a useful image which may help us to value the fear with which trainees often approach those elders of their training institutes with the responsibility for initiating them into their profession. It also gives us a key toward the goal of working with patients and trainees in a therapeutic as opposed to a destructive frame. Genesis 17:9-27 ascribes the origin of circumcision to the time of Abraham. Among Jews circumcision is mandated as a ceremony to be performed on the eighth day after birth, as a sign of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel. Yet the ritual probably didnt originate with the Jews. We know that circumcision was practiced widely in antiquity. It was practiced by the Egyptians and by most of the ancient Semites. . . . Of the peoples living adjacent to the ancient Hebrews only the Philistines did not practice it, and were contemptuously referred to by the Hebrews as the uncircumcised. 2 In Asia Minor, the priests of the Great Mother would sometimes castrate themselves in an orgy of worship to her.3 In an excellent book titled Masochism, Glick and Meyers remind us: Familiar variants are found in the initiation rites, forms of submission, and minor mutilations that occur in almost all societies. By accepting the communitys requirements for a pars pro toto partial castrationfor example, through scarification in primitive societies, or through the demeaning, humiliating experiences of fraternity initiations, or even symbolically (viz. the knighting of the young squire by the kings sword carefully touching only the youths shoulder)they obliged the powerful authority to grant the supplicant all the rights of an adult (including sexuality) while pledging his omnipotent protection and favor. In some cultures these customs extend to young girls also. It is possible to consider that young adolescent girls in our own society who pierce their ears are unconsciously also acknowledging a similar rite de passage into adulthood; so too in many Moslem sects where the girls are subjected to clitoridectomies. A similar meaning can be discerned in the vows of chastity required by some religious orders as obedience to God the Father. In these instances the threat of sexual competition is removed in a non humiliating way,

although the symbolism remains the same. That the punishment for breaking this contract is death or actual castration is perhaps best known from the cautionary tale of the mutilations of Heloise and Abelard in the twelfth century.4[My italics.] The Jewish custom of circumcision is [of course] the . . . best known example. In return for dispensing with Akedah, the ancient sacrifice of the first born as an act of fealty, Abraham and God the Father accepted circumcision as a substitute. The son would wear this symbol of submission to the Father and in return would be assured of His protection as one of the chosen people.5The correspondence to training analysis and supervision should be obvious. What impresses me personally about this metaphor is the tremendous power differential that is set up power based on promises of admission to adult membership in a professional society on the one hand, and fear of shame, humiliation, failure, loss of professional standing, and even loss of self on the other hand. We all want to be members of a chosen people. As children we need to feel chosen by the parents who conceived us. Likewise, as adults, there is a deep, life-long need to be special and to build for ourselves a secure base in the family of a professional society. However, there is an equally real fear, especially for trainees: a fear of separation, a fear of exclusion, and a fear of condemnation for either real or imagined and projected personal inadequaciesmeaning shadow contents that training analysts may not adequately appreciate. Trainees submit to the alchemical solutio and mortificatio of their training in an act of trust with profound vulnerability. Mario Jacoby, for example, in an article titled Supervision and the Interactive Field,6mentions examples where he had strong feelings that a certain candidate was unsuitable for the profession, only to realize later that he was seeing a candidate through a countertransferential lens that distorted his vision instead of offering greater accuracy of perception. Training requires circumcision, but there is always a risk that the process will go wrong, or go too far. The process may fall victim to the unconsciousness of the elders. The process can regress to something akin to the killingsacrifice of the firstborn as an act of fealty to the fathers, to the elders, to the tribe. Obviously, physical killing is not the issue, but a psychological sacrifice can and does occasionally go wrong. There is the risk that what is dissolved will be a trainees authenticityhis or her true selfand that there may not be a coagulatio, or a putting of Jack and Jill back together again. That is one reason why training candidates sometimes learn to grow a formidable persona that mirrors the philosophy and needs of their elder-inpower rather than risk more vulnerability. The elders are narcissistically supported and gratified, but the initiation turns destructive. This is one reason for unspoken terror and rage in training candidates. We run the risk of training clinicians who are unaware of the possibility of living and working out of the Self. The pearl without price is lost. I am reminded of the dangers of the split archetype that Guggenbhl-Craig outlines in his book Power in the Helping Professions. Many children are nearly destroyed by believing that they must live up to parental fantasies which are not appropriate to them,7he writes. Is this any less true of patients in analysis or trainees in supervision? Moreover, the Jungian analyst cannot escape the fact that analysis is an asymmetrical relationship. And it becomes progressively more asymmetrical as the analyst gains in age and experience. . . . There are, however, genuine wounded healers among analysts; they are therapists in whom the archetype is not split. They are, so to speak, themselves constantly being analyzed and illuminated by their patients [and trainees!]. Such an analyst recognizes time and again how the patients difficulties constellate his own problems,8 and vice

versa, and he therefore openly works not only on the patient but on himself. He remains forever a patient as well as a healer.9 But let me return to our cultural metaphor because I find it invaluable in helping me to grasp the archetypal background of what we are about. Circumcision existed in the ancient world as an act of initiation, either into membership in the tribe or nation, or into the duties of manhood.10That was its purpose. The command to Abraham and his descendants was: You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you (Gen. 17:11). Paul [later] spoke of Abrahams circumcision as a sign or seal of his righteousness (Rom. 4:11).11 Circumcision represented the removal of impurity, and thus was an act of purification. [It is significant that] the word for uncircumcised is closely associated with uncleanin Isa. 52:1. . . .12Likewise, without an individual analysis and competent supervision, trainees are experienced by their colleagues as unclean. Within our professional societies, members sometimes look askance at each other, questioning one anothers motives and competence. Projections proliferate. To say that a training candidate or a graduate of a training institute is unclean is to say that his or her shadow has not been sufficiently washed in dreamwork and through the analysis of transference. Thus, supervision is necessary not only for protecting our public reputation; obviously, our goal is to protect the public from the unconscious shadow contents of analysts who dont know what they are doing. That, to me, is the practical issue behind any professions ritual of circumcision. For us, it is the invisible sign of our initiation into NESJA, IAAP, and other sub-societies of our professional community. But let us take this discussion a little deeper. It is thought that in the ancient world circumcision was a form of sacrifice perhaps a sacrifice of the reproductive powers to a fertility deity. . . [my italics].13The idea of a fertility deity is significant: not only because of the sexual interest easily constellated by references to the subject of fertility, but also because the goal of training is to make future analysts fruitful. We are reminded that the sacrifice has been made not to the elders of the tribe. It is not made to Father Abraham, nor to the Training Board, nor even the licensing boards whose duty it is to set standards for the profession as well as police its practitioners. This, it seems to me, is too often lost on both analysts and candidates. The sacrifice is made to Yahweh himself, or to the fertility deity. The covenant was made between Yahweh and Israel, or between a candidate and Supervision and the Circumcised Heart/25his or her true Self. It is out of their successful individuation that candidates become fit for the practice of analysis, not merely their skill development. This is something much bigger than we are, and for me it raises the whole issue of training to that of a sacred responsibility. I am reminded of something in the notion of sacrifice, which means to make sacred. Lets go further: Returning to the Hebrew Bible, it is significant that Deuteronomy nowhere enjoins physical circumcision, but twice speaks of circumcision of the heart (10:16, 30:6). Jeremiah once pronounced Gods judgment upon the various nationsEgypt, Judah, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab, and the desert Arabs that were circumcised [in the flesh] but yet uncircumcised in heart](9:25-26).14 This, it seems to me, is the value and state of consciousness essential to individuals who want to do analysis and supervision. What is needed from us is a circumcised heart. We can easily imagine physical circumcision in terms of ethical prohibitions against sexual, social, and financial relations between supervisors and trainees. Our intimacies need be contained within the frame, the boundaries, or the terminos of professional contact and ought not to be acted out as though the power differential between us doesnt exist. Transference

persists long after training has ended and training candidates have joined our society. Recognizing and honoring such rules and prohibitions can easily be likened to a physical circumcision that limits and even causes pain but does not harm. In fact, it protects the covenant, the training goals and the personal yet professional relationship. The circumcision of the heart, on the other hand, is more subtle, and it is the necessary and effective condition for good practice and good supervision. Deuteronomy 10:16 expresses the injunction: Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn [my italics]. In Deuteronomy 30:6, it is stated: The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. The circumcised heart is a heart open to Gods command and obedient to Him, not closed and stubborn.15I think this has everything to do with our awareness of the ethical inviolability of the Self. It means that we need to do analysis and do supervision with a sense of reverencerealizing that there is something much more important than our egosand that we must remain vigilant in this work concerning our personal narcissistic vulnerabilities. I dont know what your experience is, but my sense is that Narcissus is alive and conflicted at many of our training institutions. This is to say that we need to be conscious of the fact that none of us are fully individuated, or always reliably put together. The shadow is always a factor in need of recognition. Self-analysis is unending. Few people (if any) enter this profession for purely philosophical reasons, and if they do, they probably arent very good at it. Most (if not all) of us become analysts because the vocation was forced upon us. It was forced upon us by the unbearable pain of our own neuroses. And so we become healers of others because we once needed to be healed and probably still do! The wounds are not completely closed. Perhaps it would be helpful to picture ourselves in our minds eye as the certifiable walking wounded. As the archetype of the wounded healer makes obvious, it is our still unhealed injury that makes us sensitive and empathic. Its what gives us powerful antennas and receivers able to pick up the nonverbal communications that come to us via our perception of body language, via our ability to contain transferences and to survive the introjects of both hostile and adoring projective identifications. Yet our woundedness remains our vulnerability, and of legitimate concern to candidates-in-training. In his article Transference Projections in Supervision,16Joseph Wakefield states: For candidates, the supervisor may represent the caring, guiding parent they never had, or the cruel, withholding parent, or even the possibility of achieving Oedipal triumph at last by becoming the favorite child, intensely if secretly loved. For supervisors, the candidate may represent the child they lost, or the child they never had, or the child in themselves to be nourished the way they wish they had been nourished.17 The possibilities for acting out transferences and countertransference are ever-present. Wakefield goes on to examine the potential pitfalls of supervision from the point of view of self-psychology. First of all, theres the idealizing transference, which may lead to the candidates overvaluing the supervisor, loss of the ability to see weaknesses and shortcomings, and a type of enslavement in which the candidate blindly follows his or her ideal while attacking analysts who have different points of view.18Second, theres also the mirror transference, in which the projector wants to be idealized and may become enraged if this is not done. Either supervisor or candidate may project such a transference upon the other.19 And finally, we should not neglect the twinship transference, manifest in the supervisor who

acts as if we are all equal, as if no power differential or gatekeeper function exists.20 We can thank Heinz Kohut for articulating these subcategories of transference. However, I also wish to highlight an important Jungian contribution. All such transferences are based upon the coniunctio archetype, as Edward Edinger noted in his seminar based on Jungs Mysterium Coniunctionis. He writes: Problems are always a consequence of the unconscious manifestation of an archetype. Thats what countertransference isan unconscious manifestation of the coniunctio, the most profound and highly charged archetype in the whole pantheon. The coniunctio is the symbolic expression of the goal of the opus. . . . [And] Its a kind of infallible truth that the countertransference will hit one wherever one is weakest, in ones personal complexes and vulnerabilities.21 We all know that the coniunctio is about the union of the ego and the Selfthe Godimage. But how often do we take seriously that this is a God-image? The fact that it is a God-image makes the coniunctio archetype both profoundly addictive and tremendously inflating. That is why I insist on talking about this business of the circumcision of the heart. It is so easy for us to get our egos in the way of a therapeutic transference intended for the Self. Trainees may idealize us, or hate us. They may demand that we acknowledge their giftedness and even see their potential for greatness. They may unconsciously become seductive with Supervision and the Circumcised Heart/27subtle invitations to sexual liaisons and twinship intimacies. But it is our job not to get hooked on these multiple projections of the Self, and not to avoid our own developmental imperative to seek the Self that is our own. As Edinger states elsewhere, the love-offering of the transference is a holy offering made to God. Moreover, for the analyst-supervisor to eat that offering is anathemain biblical language an abomination to the Lord. That it is taboo to eat the sacrifice offered to the gods is indicative of whom this offering is intended for, and of the psychological and potential legal injuries that are sometimes the consequence of its violation. We are mediators of and participants in the mystery of the coniunctio, and must keep our egos from eating what belongs to God. But now I want to allow Jung to have the final word. Concerning the problem of identifying with projections of the Self, he wrote: Actually I do not believe it can be escaped. One can only alter ones attitude and thus save oneself from naively falling into an archetype and being forced to act a part at the expense of ones humanity. Possession by an archetype turns a man into a flat collective figure, a mask behind which he can no longer develop as a human being, but becomes increasingly stunted. One must therefore beware of the danger of falling victim to the dominant of the mana-personality.22 If the ego presumes to wield power over the unconscious, the unconscious reacts with a subtle attack, deploying the dominant of the mana-personality, whose enormous prestige casts a spell over the ego. Against this the only defense is full confession of ones weakness in face of the powers of the unconscious. By opposing no force to the unconscious we do not provoke it to attack.23 In 1996 Donald Kalshed came out with an important book titled The Inner World of Trauma.24Amajor idea that he develops is that for trauma victims the Self becomes negative and persecutes the ego as its best means of protecting the ego from further injury. The resistance of trauma patients to change and growth is only partly explained as intimidation by a sadistic superego. Complicating this simple explanation is the fact that the sadistic superego is also a caretaker superego, i.e., a superior inner figure who has virtually saved the patients psychological life, and this is a kind of miracle for which the patient, unconsciously, may be very grateful.25 Nathan Schwartz-Salant

arrived at a similar analysis in his study The Borderline Personality. The primary inner object for a borderline patient in the despairing state is a vampire-like energy field. Consequently, a very strange object relationship is created. This is a dangerous aspect of the coniunctio process. Frequently, it feels as if a satanic force has been set loose to cleverly convince the patient that there is no hoiope, that faith is yet untenable, and that it is best either to give up and blandly settle for things as they arefor falsenessor to die. Both choices seem to satisfy this background influence.26 What is true for the borderline is, I believe, true whenever a persons authentic self is at risk. There is a protector that will choose falseness or worse rather than exposure to fresh trauma. It is now well recognized that every analysis that goes at all deep places the patient at risk at the very place where there is the greatest hope for transformation. The compulsion to repeat invites retraumatization just as it invites therapeutic opportunity. It is my conviction that when training analysts and supervisors fall victim to the dominant of the mana-personalitywhich we are all at least somewhat inclined to do because catching projections of the Self is so addictive and so gratifyingthen everyone loses, most of all our candidates-in-training. They find themselves feeding the narcissism of wounded training analysts and supervisors, and in the process the Self that they have given into training is either eaten or goes into hiding, where it may be experienced by the analyst/supervisor as a vampire, a persecutor-protector, an abandoning parent, or an autistic inner-child figure. The trainee is freshly traumatized and cannot individuate, and all of this can be taken by the elders as signs of unsuitability for training! On the other hand, when the heart is circumcised in respect for the sacredness of our vocation, we can move toward an integration of the Self instead of feeding like sharks on the selves given to us by patients, trainees, and other analysts. Jung writes: In differentiating the ego from the archetype of the mana-personality one is now forced . . . to make conscious those contents which are specific of the mana-personality.27 Thus the dissolution of the mana-personality through conscious assimilation of its contents leads us, by a natural route, back to ourselves as an actual, living something, poised between two world-pictures and their darkly discerning potencies. This something is strange to us and yet so near, wholly ourselves and yet unknowable, a virtual centre of so mysterious a constitution that it can claim anythingkinship with beast and gods, with crystals and with starswithout moving us to wonder, without even exciting our disapprobation. . . . I have called this center the self.28 Notes 1. I am indebted to Seth Isaiah Rubin, Ph.D., for calling my attention to the importance of the circumcised heart in analytical training when we were both candidates at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich in 1985. 2. The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), p. 629. 3. Edward Edinger, Transformation of Libido (Los Angeles: C. G. Jung Bookstore, 1994), p. 77.

4. Glick and Meyers (eds.), Masochism (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1988), pp. 98-99. 5. Ibid. 6. Paul Kluger (ed.), Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 1995). 7. Adolph Guggenbhl-Craig, Power in the Helping Professions (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1971), p. 47. 8. This is to say nothing about the equally important factor of the trainee or analysands constellation of narcissistic envy on the part of the senior analyst. We cannot help but meet trainees and analysands who are more gifted in various aspects of their personalities than we are. Perhaps the most critical situation is when the trainee has achieved a more profound relationship to the Self than has their supervising analyst. At such times only an attitude of respect and even reverence can prevent the analyst from behaving in a destructive way toward his counterpart in the person of the trainee. On the other hand, this is also a wonderful opportunity for growth when the giftedness of the trainee is properly acknowledged. 9. Adolph Guggenbhl-Craig, Power in the Helping Professions, pp. 129-30. 10. The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, p. 630. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 629. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 631. 16. In Kluger, Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision, pp. 85-95. 17. Ibid., p. 90. 18. Ibid., p. 91. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 92. 21. Edward Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995), p. 317. Supervision and the Circumcised Heart/29 22. C. G. Jung, The Mana Personality, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW7,

para. 390. 23. Ibid., para. 391. 24. Donald Kalshed, The Inner World of Trauma (New York: Routledge, 1996). 25. Ibid., p. 55. 26. Nathan Schwartz-Salant, The Borderline Personality (Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron Publications, 1989), p. 48. 27. Jung, The Mana-Personality, para. 393. 28. Ibid., para. 398-99. 30/Ventimiglia