PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PERSONAL CONFESSION

by

Robert Saltzman, Ph.D.

copyright Robert Saltzman 1998

All Rights Reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT..........................................................................
......................iv

INTRODUCTION
..................................................................................
.... 1

I. FREUD AND JUNG

.................................................................... ......... 6

The Freud-Jung Break

..................................................................... 6

The Metapsychologies of Freud, and Jung ............................... .....19

II. HEINZ KOHUT, AND THE INVENTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC

SELF PSYCHOLOGY.................................
...............................................39

Kohut The
Freudian..........................................................................
...........40

The Move Away From Freudian

Theory......................................................42

The Making of an
Apostate............................................................ ........
...48

The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.

.................................................................. ....50

Was Kohut Mr. Z?

..................................................................................
.... 56

Why Did Kohut Need Mr. Z?

.................................................................... 60

III. ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PSYCHOTHERAPY AND

METAPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY .......................................................66

Regarding Analytic Objectivity

................................................................. 66

The Example Of Astrology

........................................................................78

Does A Psychotherapist Need Theory?

......................................................85

Deliteralizing Imaginal
Psychology............................................................96

IV. PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PERSONAL CONFESSION. ...................103

Faith, Religion, and

Numinosity............................................................... 103

Psychotherapy As Personal Confession

....................................................116

CLOSING INVOCATION
..................................................................................
................................ 127
.

REFERENCES........................................................................
..................128

ABSTRACT:
PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PERSONAL CONFESSION

The roots of depth psychotherapy in the early work of Freud, Jung, and Adler are
reexamined with particular attention to understanding the eventual collapse of
relations between Freud and Jung not as the outcome of theoretical differences,
but personal ones. The crucial points of Jung’s metapsychology are surveyed with a
view towards discovering how Jung’s theoretical ideas reflected his personal
experience, metaphysical inclinations, and religious faith.
The neo-Freudian Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut is given detailed exposition and
explanation, including a careful scrutiny of its linchpin case study, the Case of
Mr. Z. Through interviews with Kohut’s colleagues and contemporaries, it is shown
that the ideas of self psychology were a distillation of Kohut’s own psychological
organizing principles, that is, a personal confession.
The relationship between metapsychological theory and the practice of clinical
psychotherapy is investigated with attention to the possible advantages and
disadvantages of bringing a firm theoretical stance into the consulting room. A
deliberation of astrology as a theoretical basis for understanding human character
illustrates how commitment to a theory may develop regardless of evidence for the
theory. Some of the presumptions of archetypal psychology are shown to have become
literalized, and its metaphors reified, notwithstanding the very insistence of its
founder, James Hillman, that all is fantasy, and that nothing be understood
literally.
The connections between trans-personal experiences and personal experiences are
explored with particular emphasis on the uncertainty of those connections. It is
argued that such uncertainty implies that only a metapsychology that is understood
to be a personal confession can provide the compassionate matrix necessary for
effective therapeutic work.

INTRODUCTION

In at least two places in his voluminous writings, C.G. Jung stated that any
psychology is a “personal confession” (1935/1980, p. 125, and 1929/1979, p. 336).
But if a psychology is a personal confession, why do so many theories of human
psychology and personality, including some of those called “Jungian,” present
themselves as if they were factual accounts of how the “mind” works, instead of
what, according to Jung, they are: conjectures that reflect the personal
subjectivity of their makers? Recent critics of psychotherapy, such as James
Hillman, who wrote about the fictional quality of case history, and the necessity
of listening to therapeutic dialog as one hears literature, and Robert Stolorow,
who tried to show that the therapeutic situation is always a discourse between two
subjectivities, have attempted to show that attributing facticity to therapeutic
findings is harmful to the patient, to the therapist, and to the culture at large.
Nevertheless, the training of therapists, and the practice of therapy still
continue as if various theoretical representations of intrapsychic “structures”
were not metaphors, or models, but objectively witnessed, universally consistent
phenomena, like some of the findings of hard science. This continues even
irrespective of poststructural attitudes towards the limitations of language, and
the postmodernist deconstruction of truth-claims.
At last count, there were over four hundred systems of psychotherapy (Corsini and
Wedding, 1995) ranging from classical Freudian psychoanalysis to Lowenian
bioenergetics, and from the existential psychotherapy of Rollo May, to the
rebirthing of Stanislaw Grof. Each of those more than four hundred modes of
addressing the human condition therapeutically rests upon a set of psychological
presuppositions, that is upon
a theoretical metapsychology which then implies how therapy should be conducted.
To choose one example, the rational emotive behavior therapy of Ellis (1973) is
predicated upon the cardinal premise that the chief feature of human beings is
their potential to be both rational (self-constructive), and irrational, (self-
defeating). In that conception, neurotic problems are imputed to irrational modes
of thought and behavior. Accordingly, Ellis suggested a psychotherapy directed
towards changing irrational thoughts and behaviors into rational ones, which he
proposed be done by exhortation, cognitive reframing, homework assignments, and
projects of self-discipline. In rational emotive behavior therapy, the
relationship between the therapist and the client is held to be inconsequential;
nothing matters beyond changing irrational thinking and behavior into rational
thinking and behavior. When that work is done, no matter how, according to Ellis,
problems disappear.
Depth psychology would not agree, for the depth perspective moves below the
surface appearances of manifested thoughts and behaviors, and into what Hillman
(1975) called “the unconscious levels of the psyche—that is, the deeper meanings
of the soul” (p. xi). In that panorama, Ellis’ tidy division of rational thought
from irrational thought appears to constitute a distinction without a difference.
From the depth perspective, that is, “from the night side,” as Hillman put it, or
“from the wrong side,” as Guggenbühl-Craig (1995) phrased it, thought itself is
irrational because all thought implicates material from the unconscious levels of
the psyche. In other words, however logical, or self-constructive an idea may
look, ultimately it expresses far more than a simple literal meaning. For every
denotation there are manifold connotations. Any notion, however straightforward it
may appear, contains, enfolded inextricably within itself, complexities,
intimations, latencies, and inferences, which express the soul meanings that were
ancestors to the logical enunciation of the idea, and which then travel with it
forever as soul sisters to its conspicuous, or rational, meaning. For Jung, that
understanding began with his word association experiments which suggested that
even individual words deeply touch the psyche, and came to maturity through
prolonged experience of his own depths, leading Jung (1929/1979, p. 337, and
1935/1980, p. 125) to say that any psychology is a personal confession.
A psychology is a personal confession because the concepts and images of
psychology, willy-nilly, constitute a language of the soul that conveys, or at
least intimates, the deepest personal needs—the soul needs—of its maker, even
beyond the conscious intentions and self-reflective awareness of that person. And
while the concepts and images of one person might usefully stimulate another to
look more deeply into his or her own interiority, ultimately those concepts and
images best serve only their author, since true psychological thinking cannot be
founded upon belief, but only upon experience. For a psychotherapist, it is vital
that this be understood. When it is not understood, psychological ideas are
borrowed from others and used as if they were one-size-fits-all, ultimately
wounding both the patient, and the therapist, not to mention weakening the
community at large, which draws its strength from diversity, not blind conformity.
This is not to say that a therapist ought to avoid exposure to the psychological
theories of others. Following that prescription would be impossible. Training in
psychotherapy is based upon reading treatises, often argued with persuasive
rhetoric, which attempt to express complex metapsychological notions. Frequently,
such works are illuminated by intriguing, dramatic, and sometimes lurid case
histories chosen by their authors as ideal exemplars of their psychological
hypotheses, and painstakingly interpreted to substantiate the value of those same
hypotheses. Besides reading and listening to lectures, comprehensive
psychotherapeutic training, particularly in the depth psychotherapies, often
requires an exhaustive personal psychoanalysis conducted in line with the
psychological conceptions of the analyst. In that emotionally charged setting,
psychological ideas take on a puissance and authority even greater than when they
are read or heard in a classroom. But each item in that impressive onslaught of
ideas must be deconstructed, and none simply accepted as a comprehensive “truth.”
Otherwise all is lost.
How is that crucial work of deconstruction to be accomplished? How can
psychological discourse be moved beyond the bailiwick of science, and into the
realm of literature, as Hillman recommended? How can the practice of psychotherapy
be liberated from the old model of interpretations by an objective analyst met by
the patient’s subjective resistance, and shifted into the domain of relationships
between two subjectivities, as suggested by Stolorow? How does one arrive at
seeing and hearing a patient not so much by way of theory, but in spite of it?
In the dissertation that follows, with a view towards deepening my understanding
of Jung’s assertion that any psychological theory is a personal confession, I will
examine the psychological ideas of Freud, and Jung, the primary psychological
theorists of this century, the ideas of Heinz Kohut, the originator of self
psychology, a major movement in late twentieth century psychotherapeutic practice,
and the ideas of James Hillman, a radical critic of psychotherapy, and passionate
advocate for extending Jung’s ideas beyond the symbolic, into the imaginal.
Chapter I reviews the roots of depth psychotherapy in the early work of Freud,
Jung, and Adler with particular attention to revisioning the eventual collapse of
relations between Freud and Jung not as the outcome of theoretical differences,
but personal ones. The crucial points of Jung’s metapsychology are surveyed with a
view towards discovering how Jung’s theoretical ideas reflected his personal
experience, his metaphysical inclinations, and his religious faith.
In Chapter II, the neo-Freudian Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut is given detailed
exposition and explanation, including a careful scrutiny of its most famous case
study, the Case of Mr. Z. Through interviews with Kohut’s colleagues and
contemporaries, I will show that the ideas of self psychology were a distillation
of Kohut’s own psychological organizing principles, that is, a personal
confession. In particular, I will offer new evidence that Kohut’s
metapsychological model, which he declared to have been based upon two five year
analyses of “Mr. Z,” really was Kohut’s own self-analysis. Since the case of Mr. Z
has been read as a linchpin of Kohut’s theory, this evidence calls into question
Kohut’s professed methods of collecting data as a “factual” basis for a universal
metapsychology, and suggests that systems which claim to treat psychic distress by
using conjectural models of intrapsychic functioning may say more about the world
view of their creators than about psyche in general.
Chapter III investigates the relationship between metapsychological theory and the
practice of clinical psychotherapy. Must a psychotherapist have a theory? What are
the possible advantages and disadvantages of bringing a firm theoretical stance
into the consulting room? How does commitment to a theory develop, and how can
such commitments be recognized and managed? A deliberation of astrology
illustrates how commitment to theory as a basis for understanding human character
may develop even without good evidence for the theory. An examination of the
archetypal psychology of James Hillman shows the strength and subtlety of the
human tendency to literalize metaphors and reify ideas, including Hillman’s,
notwithstanding Hillman’s very insistence that all is fantasy, and that nothing be
understood literally.
Chapter IV explores the correlation between the personal and the apparent trans-
personal, with particular emphasis on the uncertainty, and ambiguity of that
relationship. The paradoxical connection between the conjectural objective reality
suggested by numinous experiences, and the manifest subjectivity of psychological
experience, which seems to remain always equivocal and particular, is discussed
with reference to the ideas of Jung, Hillman, and my own psychotherapeutic
practice. It is argued that the problematic relationship between faith and
knowledge implies that only a metapsychology that is understood to be a personal
confession can provide the compassionate matrix necessary for effective
therapeutic work.

CHAPTER I
FREUD AND JUNG

The Freud-Jung Break

Students of depth psychology are familiar with the standard historical explanation
of the invention of psychoanalysis. Briefly, Sigmund Freud’s technique of
psychoanalysis is said to have derived from the theory that hysteria—an illness
marked by the presence of symptoms such as paralysis of a limb, inability to
speak, or blindness for which no organic cause could be discovered—might have its
etiology in unconscious wishes or forgotten memories. French neurologist Jean
Martin Charcot, with whom the young Freud studied, attempted to cleanse the mind
of such harmful ideation by means of hypnosis, but his “cures” were not permanent.
Freud went on to work with Viennese physician Josef Breuer, who apparently had
cured a hysterical patient, Anna O., not with hypnosis, but simply by asking her
to empty her mind through telling him about all her thoughts and feelings.
Together, Freud and Breuer refined this “talking cure” as Anna O. had dubbed it,
which they renamed “catharsis,” and went on to publish their results in 1895. Soon
thereafter, the story goes, Breuer became alarmed by the clinical implications of
Freud’s growing insistence that not just any unconscious wishes, but specifically
sexual drives were the basis of neurotic symptoms, and the two men parted company,
leaving Freud alone to further develop the talking cure into a system of “free
association” in which the patient was instructed to express whatever came to mind.
As Freud worked with patients, he came to notice that their free flow of
associations seemed to be stifled at times by what he posited were their
unconsciously motivated resistances to revealing certain repressed thoughts and
memories, especially sexual and
aggressive ideas. Later, Freud theorized that the memories and wishes blocked from
conscious awareness by such resistances might be understood and made conscious by
the attention of the analyst to the transference, that is the recapitulation in
the analytic relationship of emotions, attitudes, and desires that belonged to
earlier important relationships, primarily those with parents. Thus,
psychoanalysis was born.
In this account, which by now has acquired, as if by the sheer weight of countless
repetitions, an aura of accuracy, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, both younger
contemporaries of Freud, are said at first to have embraced Freud’s ideas, but
later to have defected from his circle due to clear-cut theoretical disagreements
with their older colleague. In Adler’s case, it is said that he disagreed with
Freud’s absolute concentration on sexuality as the primary human instinct, having
come to believe that feelings of inferiority, culminating in a failure to find
one’s proper and productive place in society, were also an important source of
neurotic manifestations. Jung, it is said, also doubted that neurosis could be
exclusively a manifestation of the sexual instinct gone awry, and particularly
disagreed with Freud’s definition of libido as entirely sexual energy. In Symbols
of Transformation, which first appeared in 1911, Jung postulated that the myths
and archaic religious ideas that he had been studying were not simply outgrowths
of sublimated sexual, particularly incestuous, drives, as Freud claimed, but that
these myths and religious impulses were original manifestations of libido itself,
that is, Jung proposed that libido was not simply sexual energy, but rather a kind
of multi-valent life-energy that found expression in many forms: creativity, love
of nature, religious practices, intellectual pursuits, and so forth.
In the standard version of the so-called Freud-Jung break, their communication and
friendship began in 1903 when Jung, having read Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams, sent Freud the results of his own research on the word association test,
which seemed to substantiate Freud’s theory that dreams are expressions of
unfulfilled wishes and desires. It ended abruptly in 1913 when Freud read Symbols
of Transformation, and saw that it cast doubt upon his theory of libido.
After receiving Jung’s word association paper, Freud had written back, beginning
an extensive correspondence, and gradually the two men were drawn together, first
meeting in 1907, when, it is reported, they spoke uninterruptedly for more than
thirteen hours. Although some of Jung’s early letters (see McGuire, 1988)
expressed his doubts about Freud’s view that the full panoply of human culture
could derive solely from sublimated sexual instincts, gradually he seemed to
become convinced by the older man’s unshakable convictions, and dominating
personality—or at least held his doubts in abeyance—and Freud began to think of
Jung as his logical successor, as well as an important connection to the gentile
world which Freud needed to legitimize his ideas as more than just “Jewish
psychology” (Jones, 1953).
By the time of their second meeting, in 1909, the issue of Jung’s doubts about
Freud’s sexual theory had come to dominate their relationship. Jung already had
come to feel intuitively that for Freud “sexuality was a sort of numinosum” (Jung,
1965, p. 150). Jung remembered that when discussing sexuality at their first
meeting Freud had lost contact with “his normally critical and skeptical manner,”
and had spoken in an “urgent, almost anxious” tone of voice” (p. 150). Now, three
years later, Jung was appalled when Freud said to him,
My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most
essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable
bulwark. (p. 150)
As Jung recalled,
In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark against what?” To which he replied,
“Against the black tide of mud’—and here he hesitated for a moment, then added—”of
occultism.” First of all, it was the words “bulwark” and “dogma” that alarmed me;
for a dogma, that is to say, an undisputable confession of faith, is set up only
when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. (p. 150)
Then, as Jung remembered it, the conversation came to an sudden, embarrassing end.
In retrospect, Jung came to believe that for Freud sexuality had taken the place
of the godhead in which the determinedly irreligious Freud could not believe. This
shift of focus from the divine to the carnal, Jung said, may have served as a
pretext, allowing Freud to regard his own passions as “scientifically
irreproachable and free from all religious taint” (p. 151), but,
the numinosity, that is, the psychological qualities of the two rationally
incommensurable opposites—Yahweh and sexuality—remained the same. The name alone
had changed, and with it, of course, the point of view; the lost god had now to be
sought below, not above. But what difference does it make, ultimately, to the
stronger agency if it is called now by one name and now by another. If psychology
did not exist, but only concrete objects, the one would actually have been
destroyed and replaced by the other. But in reality, that is to say, in
psychological experience there is not one whit the less of urgency, anxiety,
compulsiveness, etc. The problem still remains: how to overcome or escape our
anxiety, bad conscience, guilt, compulsion, unconsciousness, and instinctuality.
If we cannot do this from the bright, idealistic side, then perhaps we shall have
better luck by approaching the problem from the dark, biological side. (p. 152)
Thus, for Jung, for whom “reality” inhered not in a world of material objects, but
in psychological experience, and for whom there was no psychological difference
between Yahweh as numinosum and sexuality as numinosum, a chief source of his
eventual break with Freud lay not so much in theoretical conflict, as one so often
reads, but much more in his personal disappointment in Freud the man. His
previously idealized mentor, in whose company Jung had felt himself to be in the
presence of genius, was not a fearless explorer of the psychic underworld armed
with an unflinching commitment to psychological truth, but a man who lacked the
courage to come to grips with the shadowy presence of his own spirituality, a man
who used his theories to finesse his fears while claiming for his ideas a
scientific facticity that, to Jung, seemed psychologically naive.
Perhaps Jung’s disappointment in Freud would not have been so catastrophic if his
first acquaintance with Freud’s ideas had come a little earlier, for then, Freud,
a struggling neurologist, plagued by profound doubts about his qualifications to
practice general medicine, and so to earn a living (see Freud’s letter to Wilhelm
Fleiss in Bonaparte, A. Freud, and Kris, 1954, p. 21), was quite candid in his
devotion to a reductionistic, materialistic metapsychology that would seem
“scientific,” and thus, “medical.” Writing in 1895, in his treatise on a Project
for a Scientific Psychology, Freud stated that
The intention of this project is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural
science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively
determined states of specifiable material particles. (1895/1953a, p. 11)
Herein we see the beginnings of the line of reasoning that reduces soul (the
psyche in psychology) to mind, and then further reduces mind to brain. Today, in
more subtly refined forms, that same reductionistic scheme, which implicates, in
my view, a classic category mistake, seems to influence many workers in psychiatry
and psychology. Freud’s “specifiable material particles” have become
“neurotransmitters.” Psyche has been downgraded to an epiphenomenon of the
appearance, maintenance, and destruction of the neurotransmitters within the
neural synapses. Chemical treatment for such manifestations as anxiety,
compulsivity, and depression—symptoms which, for Jung, asked for attention to the
conundra of soul, not the chemistry of synapses—has become almost de rigueur.
By 1900, with the publication of Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953b),
where Jung first encountered Freud’s metapsychology, Freud’s materialistic bias
was no longer so baldly apparent. After all, Freud was writing about the
occurrence of symbols in dreams, and what could be less materialistic than
symbols? But the symbols stood for unfulfilled sexual desires, which, for Freud,
were not primarily psychic, but physical. This is demonstrated in his voluminous
correspondence with Wilhelm Fleiss (see Bonaparte, A. Freud, and Kris, 1954) in
which Fleiss, an otorhinolaryngologist, proposed the theory that the genitalia are
connected to the nose through a “reflex connection,” which was overactive in
neurotic people. Fleiss claimed to be able to cure this “nasal reflex neurosis” by
applying cocaine to the nostrils of his patients. Freud concurred, and then upped
the ante by writing to Fleiss that neurasthenia undoubtedly had its etiology in a
lack of early enough sexual experience (for males), in masturbation, and in coitus
interruptus. That Freud was writing about his own sexual experience, and his fears
that he himself might be predisposed to sexually induced neurotic symptoms seems
probable in the light of his own well documented personal use of cocaine (Freud,
1974, Donohue, 1993), which he may have consumed, at least at first, as a possible
prophylaxis.
Other perspectives on the Freud-Jung break also have little to do with theoretical
differences between the two men. Most of them seem, in one way or another, to
involve Jung’s early idealization of Freud, and then the inevitable subsequent
disillusionment which Jung could not tolerate. In 1909, the two men were invited—
independently, according to Jung (1965)—to lecture at Clark University in
Massachusetts, and had arranged to travel together, along with Sandor Ferenczi,
who had not been invited to lecture, but who was accompanying Freud. While waiting
to go aboard ship in Bremen, the three men went to dinner. The atmosphere must
have been tense, since Ferenczi, who sarcastically had referred to Freud and Jung
as “Allah and his prophet,” was one of Freud’s circle who hated and resented Jung.
Later, Ferenczi, along with Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, and Hanns
Sachs, would create the “secret ring,” an association dedicated, with Jung in
mind, to maintaining the “purity” of psychoanalysis (Noll, 1997). The conversation
turned to the “peat-bog corpses,” well-preserved specimens of prehistoric people
discovered in Northern Germany, in which Jung was greatly interested. In the light
of Jung’s latter work, it seems likely that his interest centered on the idea that
these corpses were psychological “ancestors,” but Freud did not see it that way.
He seemed vexed, and kept asking Jung why he was so interested in the corpses.
Finally Freud fainted. Later, Freud explained that Jung’s interest in the corpses
indicated a death wish towards Freud.
Once aboard ship, the two psychologists analyzed one another’s dreams. Jung (1965)
dreamed of being in a house which at first seemed to have only two storeys, but
which, on further investigation, had several sub-basements, each built in a more
archaic style than the one above. In the deepest part of the house was a room
containing broken ancient pottery and two skulls. Jung imagined that the dream had
to do with a descent into the collective background of consciousness, but,
mistrusting his judgment in making such a self-interpretation, he consulted Freud.
On hearing the dream, Freud insisted that the only point of interest was the two
skulls, which indicated death wishes, and he pressed Jung to name his associations
to the skulls. Obviously, he feared that the dream, like the peat-bog corpses,
indicated Jung’s ill-will towards him. To avoid a quarrel with Freud, Jung lied,
and named his wife and sister-in-law as associations to the skulls. Clearly, Jung
felt it necessary to patronize Freud; intellectual honesty would not be possible.
When Freud related one of his dreams involving some very personal matter, Jung
asked for his associations, but Freud refused to give them. Jung insisted, saying
that some additional details would help in making the interpretation. According to
Jung,
Freud’s response to these words was a curious look—a look of the utmost suspicion.
Then he said, “But I cannot risk my authority!” At that moment he lost it
altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our
relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above
truth. (1965, p. 158)
Again, the problem here was not one of theoretical disagreement, but of personal,
that is, psychological, incompatibility. Apparently, Freud harbored impossibly
inflated, grandiose needs for idealization, and absolute, unquestioning adherence
to his ideas. Jung had been disappointed by his own father, a cleric whose
unrelenting, dogmatic protestantism had left the father disappointed in life, and
the son spiritually undernourished (Jung, 1965). Now he found that father-son
relationship reenacted, and those childhood wounds reactivated by Freud’s
inability to tolerate any communication that might challenge his own pet
doctrines.
Before delivering their lectures at Clark, Freud and Jung, along with Ferenczi,
visited A.A. Brill, America’s first practicing psychoanalyst, at Columbia
University in New York. During that visit, another divisive incident, much less
well-known than those recorded in Jung’s (1965) reminiscences, and certainly even
farther from anything theoretical, came to pass. Freud and Jung, along with Brill
and Ferenczi, went for a stroll along the Hudson in Riverside Park. Freud, who was
bothered by prostate problems, and who had been suffering from indigestion, lost
control of his bowels, and soiled his pants. Although the other men tried to make
light of it, Freud could not accept his embarrassment as simply a medical problem.
The event seemed to remind Freud of his childhood memories of urinating in a
flower-pot in his parents’ bedroom, which had prompted his father’s condemning him
as a boy who would never amount to anything. Besides, Freud now was overcome with
fear that something similar would happen at the Clark lectures, ruining what he
thought of as “the first official recognition of our endeavors” (Rosenzweig, 1994,
p. 21). According to Goldenberg,
Jung offered to analyze Freud to help him overcome his fears, but the intervention
backfired when the disciple pressed his master for some intimate associations. An
argument ensued. “I lost, and this incident started the break between us,” Jung
later recalled. (p. 21)
This last item sounds so much like the earlier incident aboard ship that one
wonders if Goldenberg, or perhaps Jung, somehow conflated the two. Nevertheless,
it seems clear that Jung and Freud had come to the end of their partnership not
for reasons of theoretical disagreement, but because the relationship had run its
course psychologically, leaving both men bitterly disappointed, and facing an
interpersonal conflict which neither knew how to resolve. For Freud, Jung was like
a son whose questioning attitude, seen through the lens of Freud’s oedipus complex
theory, appeared almost homicidal. For Jung, the relationship with Freud had
become a replay of his troubled relations with his own father, whom Jung had
wanted to idealize, and whose approval he had dearly craved, but whose inflexible
adherence to religious doctrine (from Jung’s point of view) made him a distant,
disapproving figure. “Oh nonsense,” Jung’s father would tell him. “You always want
to think. One ought not to think, but believe” (Jung, 1965, p. 43).
“One ought not to think, but believe” was a subtext of Freud’s communications too,
and Freud’s “undisputable confession of faith,” (supra) which Jung had construed
as Freud’s needing to replace the numinousity of Yahweh with a numinous sexuality,
became the center of a quasi-religious movement. Noll (1997) adduced a collection
of scholarly opinion to demonstrate the similarities between the ceremonies of
organized religion and the early meetings of Freud’s group. Sociologist George
Weisz was cited as saying that adherence to the group was “an experience
approaching religious conversion” (p. 60). Freud scholar Frank Sulloway commented
on the “religious fervor” of the psychoanalysts who seemed to be a “secular
priesthood of soul doctors” (p. 60). The sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and
William Sims Bainbridge wrote that,
In attacking conventional religions, Psychoanalysis explicitly sought to replace
them. For many of Freud's followers, indeed, for an embarrassingly prominent set
of his most famous disciples, Psychoanalysis did develop into a religious cult.
(p. 61)
According to Szasz (1978), Freud was the “organizer and leader of his own gnostic-
messianic movement” (p. 120), and “an angry avenger and domineering founder of a
religion (or cult), rather than a dispassionate scientist or compassionate
therapist” (p. 155). Szasz seemed to suggest that Freud’s lifelong interest in
Moses, the founder of a religion, was not just an interest, but an identification,
that is, a largely unconscious process whereby Freud modeled his thoughts,
feelings, and actions after his mental image of Moses:
Righteous indignation is the mood, more than any other, that characterizes both
Moses and Freud. Moses liberated the Jews from Egyptian slavery; Freud sought to
liberate the ego from enslavement to the id. Moses took revenge against the
Egyptians; Freud, against the Christians. Moses founded Judaism; Freud,
psychoanalysis. (p. 155)
Jones (1957), writing about Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, viewed the narrowing of
Freud’s interest in “mankind in general and its religions to the more specific
question of the Jews and their religion” as Freud’s response to “the unparalleled
persecution of his people getting under way in Nazi Germany” (p. 368). But,
according to Szasz, it was Freud’s “craving for fame and power” that motivated his
identification with Moses, leading Freud away from science into religious
zealotry:
it is one thing to avenge . . . anti-Semitism as [morally and politically evil];
it is quite another to call the . . . literary result of such a revenge a science
or treatment. After all, the view that avenging great wrongs, especially against
the Jews, is reserved to God has always stood at the center of the Jewish
religion. It is articulated repeatedly in the Bible: in Deuteronomy, “To me
belongeth vengeance” (32:35); in Psalms, ”O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth,
shew thyself” (94:13); and even Paul . . . writes in Romans, “vengeance is mine; I
will repay, said the Lord” (12:19) Clearly, Freud felt that vengeance was his too.
That, perhaps, is what made him the great religious leader he was. (pp. 156-157,
emphasis mine)
Max Graf, an early member of Freud’s circle, was expelled by Freud as a “heretic”
(Noll, 1997). Later, Freud would use that same word, heretic, rife with religious
connotations, to refer to Adler and to Jung. As Graf recalled,
The gatherings followed a definite ritual. First, one of the members would present
a paper. . . . After a social quarter of an hour the discussion would begin. The
last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was the
atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new
prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation
appear superficial. Freud's pupils—all inspired and convinced—were his apostles. .
. . Freud began to organize the church with great energy. He was serious and
strict in the demands he made of his pupils: he permitted no deviations from his
orthodox teachings. (cited by Noll, 1997, p. 59)
That Jung was neither a colleague of Freud’s, nor simply a psychologist who
respected Freud’s theories, but rather a member, until his disillusionment, of
Freud’s “church,” seems evident in his letter to Freud of October, 1907, in which
Jung wrote: “My veneration for you has something of the character of a religious
crush” (see McGuire, 1988, p. 95). Seen from that vantage, Jung’s retrospective
assessment of Freud as having been mired in his own rigid dogma seems to contain,
at least in part, a projection of Jung’s own shadowy needs to approach
psychological thinking with religious fervor, eschewing all but the pretense of
careful observation in favor of the uncritical attitude of the zealot.
Noll (1994, 1997) developed the idea that Jung’s motivations were primarily
religious-dogmatic, not scientific, into the stunning conclusions that: 1) Jung
intentionally falsified his evidence for a collective unconscious, 2) that Jung
was devoted to racial purity, and to resurrecting as a new twentieth-century
religion the German Volkish ideas and practices that derived from the ancient
Aryan mystery cults, and 3) that Jung intended to elevate himself to the position
of the new “Aryan Christ.” As Noll interpreted the Freud/Jung relationship, Jung
was attracted to psychoanalysis primarily because it promised to fulfill his
hunger for a new religion. In support of that thesis, Noll pointed to this
February, 1910 letter from Jung to Freud:
The ethical problem of sexual freedom is really enormous and worth the sweat of
all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something
equivalent, an irresistible mass movement. . . . I imagine a far finer and more
comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity.
I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to
revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to
transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in
this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one
purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast
of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty
and purpose of classical religion. (McGuire, 1988, p. 294, cited by Noll, 1997, p.
65)
One can only imagine how this fervid mix of Christianity and Dionysia must have
struck Freud. Freud had grown up incessantly hounded by the anti-semitism of his
childhood classmates. He had been appalled by the abject servility of his father
who, when his cap was knocked off by a man who said, “Jew, get off the pavement,”
had simply retrieved his cap and backed off. And now Jung was suggesting to him
that psychoanalysis could be the next “classical religion.” Freud immediately
answered:
But you mustn’t regard me as the founder of a religion. My intentions are not so
far-reaching. . . . I am not thinking of a substitute for religion. This need must
be sublimated. (Mcguire, 1988, p. 295, cited by Noll, 1997, p. 66)
Thus, each man somehow denounced the other for religious zealotry. Despite his
denials, Freud, it seemed, had displaced all of his religious impulses onto his
new creation, psychoanalysis, which he then demanded that his followers worship as
if it really were numinous. Jung, it appeared, had projected onto Freud, whom he
then reproached as dogmatic, his own ambition that a set of interesting
psychological observations be transformed into a cult. Less than two years later,
not even on speaking terms, the men ended their correspondence, and Jung was
expelled from the circle.
The foregoing represents one layer, albeit rudimentary, of a psychobiograpical
understanding of the relations between Freud and Jung. The next layer would
require looking into the individual psychobiographies of Freud and of Jung with a
view towards developing, for example, psychodynamic understandings of Freud’s need
for such rigid devotion to his ideas, and of Jung’s need to attach himself with
such devotion to a man who never understood him, and whose ideas seemed so foreign
to Jung’s natural inclinations. Atwood and Stolorow (1993), among others, have
attempted that level of psychobiography in case studies of both men. Regarding
Freud, they adduced biographical material to demonstrate that Freud’s need to
preserve an idealized view of his mother against a deep, unconscious ambivalence
towards her led him to develop a theory in which a child’s instinctual impulses,
not his mother’s style of child rearing, were the source of evil, and in which any
hostility the child might feel could be displaced onto the father. Regarding Jung,
they opined that his relationship with his mother was disturbed by her
intermittent depressions, so that Jung was forced to try to satisfy his needs for
an idealized loving relationship by connecting with his father instead. When that
failed, Jung was left feeling isolated and alone. As Jung himself put this,
More than ever I wanted someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of
contact, on the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, an
apprehension which robbed me of speech. (1965, p. 63)
Seen in this light, it may be that Jung’s attempt to attach himself to Freud was
the last attempt to fulfill his deepest selfobject needs (see Chapter 2, infra)
through relations with another human being before turning to what he called “the
Self” as his true companion.
In any case, such conjectures about the psychodynamic processes that underlie
words and actions should be seen, as Hillman (1983) suggests, not as “facts,” but
as a form of literature, which one evaluates not by its verifiability, but by its
power to satisfy. Accordingly, the account I have offered, featuring Freud as
authoritarian father, fearing the apostasy of his son, and Jung as the child, at
first worshipful, but later disillusioned, should be regarded not as verity, but
only as one recounting of a complex story. It is, however, in my view, a far more
satisfactory recounting than the oft-repeated version of two men estranged by
theoretical differences. That story certainly fails to satisfy. Worse, it
obfuscates the understanding that, first and foremost, a metapsychology is the
personal confession of its author, a metaphysics, not a scientifically verifiable
theory. That recognition, I will argue later, is an important precondition for
establishing an effective healing climate in the clinical practice of
psychotherapy.

The Metapsychologies of Freud, and Jung

Freud’s early formulation (1900/1953b) theorized that within each person lay
hidden all of the wishes, fantasies, urges, and desires that are part of the
instinctual nature of human beings, but which are not acceptable in a civilized
society. In order to live a civilized life, one had to repress knowledge of these
unacceptable passions, partly because, should they be known, controlling them
would be impossible, but also because knowing them would be incompatible with the
view of “oneself” that civilized people needed to have. But such repression could
go too far, Freud hypothesized, and if it did, various psychological problems,
manifesting as symptoms, could result. Freud’s treatment was gradually to make the
patient conscious—through analysis of the communications between patient and
therapist—of certain parts of the repressed material, so that some of the
repression could be lifted, and a portion of the newly revealed psychic contents
be accepted by the patient.
By 1923, Freud had developed his metapsychology into a tripartite view of the
structure of the mind. Ego was the rational, conscious side of the mind that most
people thought of as “myself.” Id was the instincts, particularly aggressive and
sexual drives. Superego was the shared values of the cultural surround, often
unexamined, and at best only partially examined, transmitted primarily through the
medium of interactions with parents. Since these three constituents were
constantly in conflict with one another, the personality was a house divided,
pulled asunder by strife outside the ken of ordinary consciousness. In this
conception, analytical treatment aimed at helping the patient to understand
something of the struggle among the three parts of the self, and to intervene
consciously to balance them to his or her own betterment.
From our present vantage, it is easy to criticize Freud’s idea that the mind had a
structure, a kind of subtle machinery that he called the “mental apparatus.” After
all, from the poststructural perspective, states of consciousness can be described
phenomenologically without attributing them to a fictitious entity called “mind.”
But that retrospective quibble appraises Freud too harshly. Because language
subtly implies that things named exist, naming psychological states (ego,
unconscious, etc.) without somehow hypostatizing them is not so easily
accomplished. Freud may have used the ordinary hydraulics jargon of his era, which
sounds dated, but the larger ramifications of his metapsychology were distinctly,
and radically, postmodern: we are strangers to ourselves. Our individual
personalities, and their collective expression as culture, spring from mysterious,
hidden, irrational sources. We know not, and ultimately cannot know, who we are or
why we do what we do. As Barratt felicitously put this:
Psychoanalytic process indicates the falsity of any belief in a mastery of
consciousness and communication, for the process divulges the unsurpassable
eccentricity of the subject of consciousness, for example, the extent to which the
“I” of enunciation never thinks just what it thinks it thinks, and never simply is
what it thinks it is. (1993, p. 5)
Moreover, even today, researchers who reject the word “mind” as a category
mistake, or who call it a “ghost in the machine,” an entification not very
different from the seventeenth century materialization of the homunculus within
the man, still search for the areas of the brain that they presume responsible for
various thoughts, as if consciousness of ideas were a purely physical processes
(see Greenfield, 1995). To me, this seems no less a reification—perhaps much more
of one—than Freud’s positing a tri-partite mental apparatus.
Hillman (1983), who suggested that case histories be understood as a variety of
fiction, criticized Freud not so much for his materialism, but because his theory
universalized the source of pathology, imputing it to only one complex—the oedipal
—leaving only small scope for plot variations, so that Freud’s theory may sound
scientific, but makes for bad literature. Freud’s master plot, a causal sequence
in which repression leads to formation of symptoms which then are treated by
analysis of the repression, is much the same for everyone, but this seems to be
more than just oversimplification. His exigent desire for unquestioning acceptance
of his theory suggests also a personal urgency to preclude consideration of more
than only one particular plot. If other plots were allowed to emerge, then Freud’s
own story would have to come to light. His idealized mother would turn out, as the
narrative unfolded, to be unworthy of idealization, and Freud could not brook
that. It was far better to believe that one was neurotic because civilization
itself, not one’s particular ambivalent relations to one’s particular mother
demanded repression of instincts. For example, In Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud averred that “aggression . . . forms the basis of every
relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps,
of the mother’s relation to her male child)” (1930, cited by Atwood and Stolorow,
1993, p. 58). In making that parenthetical exception, which he then softened by
saying “perhaps,” it seems likely that Freud needed to fashion his metapsychology
into a shield against any real analysis of the mother-son dyad. Further, even when
Freud was able to step far enough outside of his theoretical blind spot so that he
could begin to notice the complexity and ambivalence in a son’s relationship to
his mother, he expurgated those threatening observations from later published
accounts. Zetzel (1966, cited by Atwood and Stolorow, 1993, p. 58) observed that
Freud’s own clinical notes of his work with the famous “Rat Man” contained more
than forty references to a highly contradictory emotional relationship between
mother and son, whereas his published account in 1909 focused only on the Rat
Man’s father as an important real object, and included only a few unrevealing
references to the patient’s mother. Clearly the need for theory to be based on
actual observations, and for a “scientist” to report everything, whether or not it
supports his hypothesis, took second place to the exigencies of Freud’s personal
ego defenses.
But it is not just that Freud needed a theory that could help him to defend
against knowing his ambivalence towards his own mother. Freud’s entire theory of
the oedipus complex, it is widely acknowledged, was based not so much upon
experience with his patients’ material as he pretended, but much more upon his
personal self-analysis, upon analysis, for example, of his recurrent dreams in
which the real-life event of urinating in his parent’s bedroom to the scorn of his
father was juxtaposed with scenes of great personal achievements. From that
perspective, Freud’s oedipus complex theory is really a kind of autobiography, and
his metapsychology, which present-day Jungians deride as based on little more than
one complex and two drives, is the story of his efforts to make sense of his own
pain.
It could be argued that if Freud had not been so insecure about his qualifications
for medical practice, and thus so eager to legitimize his new methods of
psychoanalysis as “scientific,” he might have revealed that The Interpretation of
Dreams really was more autobiography than scientific inquiry, but I am not so
sure. In psychology the observer is the observed; everything is grist for the
mill. Once one begins to speak or write, personal privacy is hard to maintain, so
that Freud’s mode of dissimulation—inventing stalking horses for his own self-
analysis—is widely practiced by psychologists. Later we will see that Heinz Kohut,
the post-Freudian theorist who created what is now called self psychology, also
took pains to hide the original sources of his metapsychology. I know personally
of an important, recently published book whose author attributes to “a patient”
dreams which really were his own, and I must admit to having done something
similar myself in clinical situations when I have spoken of events in my own life
as if they had happened to someone else.
Jung never really bought Freud’s one-plot scenario, but, according to Noll (1997),
he was intrigued by the pragmatic, solution-oriented implications of
psychoanalysis. Jung worked in the Burghölzli mental hospital where cures were
rare, and effective treatments lacking. In those discouraging surroundings, any
method that promised an amelioration of the bizarre and tragic symptoms he
encountered daily would have been attractive. Besides, Jung feared that he himself
might be subject to psychiatric problems transmitted by heredity from his
forebears who had suffered from hysterical symptoms. Freud’s theories discounted
the biological explanations for symptomatology that were then, as now, so
prevalent, replacing them with psychodynamic ones. That shift was important to
Freud, since his own heredity as a Jew was often said to contain weaknesses that
predisposed to feeblemindedness, and insanity, but such a shift may have felt
seductively comforting to Jung too. Those factors, combined with Jung’s awestruck
idealization of Freud’s genuine genius, for a time made Freud seem almost god-
like, and imbued his theories with a seeming irreproachability. But Jung’s doubts
were destined to emerge. His background, so very different from Freud’s, and
particularly certain early experiences, demanded that he construe the formation of
personality as more than a simple matter of the vicissitudes of repressed
libidinal drives.
When Jung was still a young student, he joined in a game of “table turning” with a
group of children. His cousin Helly, a girl of 15, went into a trance, and began
speaking high German instead of her usual colloquial Swiss German. Along with the
change in language, her usually shy demeanor became dignified and confident. Jung
was fascinated, but his companions in the game were not even curious about the
change, and his parents explained it away, saying that the girl was “high strung”
(Bennet, 1966). Jung began to keep detailed records of the seances, and searched
the literature on spiritualism, but he could not explain how this one girl could
exhibit two such different selves. Although his teachers at the university told
him that he was wasting his time by studying such nonsense, Jung was not deterred
. He broadened his studies to include “that wide domain of psychopathic
inferiority from which science has marked off the clinical pictures of epilepsy,
hysteria, and neurasthenia” (Jung, 1902/1970, p. 3). Those studies, along with his
notes on the seances became the dissertation for his medical degree.
It may be that Jung was so deeply intrigued by the emergence of the girl’s second
personality because he perceived within himself two personalities of his own. “No.
1,” as Jung called him, was “a rather disagreeable and moderately gifted young man
with vaulting ambitions” (1965, p. 86). “No. 2,” according to Jung,
had no definable character at all; he was a vita peracta, born, living, dead,
everything in one; a total vision of life. Though pitilessly clear about himself,
he was unable to express himself through the dense, dark medium of No. 1, though
he longed to do so. (p. 87).
This feeling of “twoness” from Jung’s teenage years prefigured the idea that later
would become the center of Jung’s metapsychology:
the self is a quantity that is supraordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not
only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak,
a personality which we also are. (1965, p. 398)
That metapsychological notion implied a model of psychotherapy that required not
so much the bringing into conscious awareness previously repressed material, as in
Freud’ psychoanalysis, but imaginal work aimed towards informing the ego of its
complicated, previously unconscious relationship to the larger, transcendent
reality that Jung called the “Self.” That more conscious relation to the Self
could be accomplished, as Jung saw it, by means of intentional realization of the
images which arose, continually, and spontaneously, within the soul. According to
Jung, there were two possible modes of dealing with such soul imagery. In the
first, which he called the reductive mode, the images were traced back to
primitive instincts as in Freudian psychoanalysis. In the second, the synthetic
mode, the images were developed into a procedure for “differentiating the
personality.” According to Jung,
The synthetic method elaborates the symbolic fantasies resulting from the
introversion of libido . . . . This produces a new attitude to the world . . . . I
have termed this transition to a new attitude the transcendent function. (Jung,
1921/1971, p. 252).
This differentiation of the personality by means of the transcendent function,
Jung called “individuation.” Individuation aimed at transformation of human
identity from that of a personality bound by conformity with convention to that of
a true individual, unconstrained by customary attitudes towards thought and
behavior. In Jung’s approach to psychotherapy, individuation was facilitated by
attention not to the symbolic meaning of images, as in Freudian practice which
reduced dreams and fantasies to expressions of instinctual drives, but through
intentional immersion into the images as forms of the gods within. As in Jung’s
personal experience, any such immersion might involve psychologically dangerous
confrontations with the gods, but those who survived would attain, as Jung claimed
for himself, a superior state of being. At the conjectural endpoint of this work,
expressed most vividly in Answer To Job (Jung, 1952/1969), the entire drama of the
relations between Self and ego might eventually fade out and disappear, not
through resolution of the conflicts seemingly inherent in the drama, but because
the drama was seen through, and so, transcended. Thus, the term “transcendent
function.”
Jung’s metapsychology, couched in terms such as “transcendent,” and positing a
telos of union between the individual self and the larger “Self,” clearly
suggested possibilities of a radical transformation of personality. Jung
(1921/1971, 1952/1969) even implied that individuation is the story of God's own
libidinal drive toward becoming conscious of himself. How different this is from
Freud’s psychotherapy, which, taking place purely on the human level, conceived
the aim of analytic work as changing neurotic unhappiness into ordinary
unhappiness. Freud, although he could be empathic, was seen by many of his early
followers as “a rigid, authoritarian, father figure who disliked rebellion”
(Corbett and Cohen, in press). And Corbett and Cohen opined that Freud’s
“dogmatism and his one-side approach to sexuality are actually markers of rigid,
monomodal thinking.” Perhaps that rigid persona was an inevitable concomitant of
Freud’s constant struggle—suggested by his episodes of fainting, or dizziness when
confronted by manifestations he could not explain—to suppress his shadow side,
which seems to have been fascinated with the irrational, the supernatural, and
intimations of the godhead. Accordingly, just as Jung’s transcendental
metapsychology reflected his lifelong inclination towards the mystic, Freud’s
metapsychology, with its limited aims for analysis, its rigorous denial of any
transcendental import in the images of dreams and fantasies, and its focus on
psychology as “science,” seems to have reflected Freud’s inner drama of keeping
the mystic at bay.
Jung’s theory of psychological types, published originally in 1921, is said to
derive from his wanting to “understand his own and Adler’s break with Freud”
(Corbett and Cohen, in press), or from his observations of the “conflict between
Freud and Adler [and] the apparent capacity of both theorists to account equally
well for the phenomenon of human neurosis” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993, p. 63).
Jung stated that the Freud-Adler conflict
must come from the fact that, owing to his psychological peculiarity, each
investigator most readily sees that factor in the neurosis which corresponds to
his peculiarity. . . . Adler sees how a subject who feels suppressed and inferior
tries to secure an illusory superiority. . . . This view lays undue emphasis upon
the subject before which the idiosyncrasy and significance of objects entirely
vanishes. . . . Freud sees his patient in perpetual dependence on, and in relation
to, significant objects . . . . The piece de resistance of his theory is the
concept of the transference, i.e., the patient’s relation to the doctor. . . .
With Freud objects are of the greatest significance and possess almost exclusively
the determining power. With Adler, the emphasis is placed on a subject who, no
matter what the object, seeks his own security and supremacy. . . . This
difference can hardly be anything else but a difference of temperament, a contrast
between two types of human mentality, one of which finds the determining agency
preeminently in the subject, the other in the object. (Jung 1943, cited by Atwood
and Stolorow, 1993, p. 64, emphasis mine).
To clarify this statement for the general reader, in an infelicitous coinage,
“object” in psychological jagon means “person.” Thus, the different
interpretations of the etiology of neurosis are seen as manifestations of each
man’s own tendencies towards extraversion or introversion. That is, theory is seen
as an expression of psychological type. Even more interesting, however, for the
present purposes, is Jung’s largely neglected idea from his 1921 book,
Psychological Types, that “if psychology remains for us only a science, we do not
penetrate into life. . . . since from the standpoint of the intellect everything
else is nothing but fantasy” (1921/1971, p. 59). In that view, because from the
scientific perspective, only two categories exist, science and fantasy—fantasy
comprising everything that is not scientifically valid—science can be dedicated
only to its own further development, and that tendency of the scientific intellect
towards immersion in its own premises creates a mental reductionism which,
according to Jung, “becomes an evil when it is a question of life itself demanding
development” (p. 59).
Seen from that point of view, both Freud and Adler were on the same side of the
metapsychological divide—the science side—and their respective differences in
attitude towards the etiology of neurosis were more apparent than real. In other
words, from Jung’s perspective, Freud and Adler shared an attitude: a
reductionistic depreciation of fantasy images as the stuff of psychological
experience. Their typological differences simply influenced the way each man
enunciated that depreciation. Freud’s psychotherapy was based upon a psychology of
instinct, and so was directed towards removing barriers of repression that made
the object inaccessible. Adler’s was a psychology of the ego, and so therapy was
directed towards seeing through habitual ego defenses that seemed to promote the
security of the ego, but at the cost of personal isolation. However, both modes of
psychotherapy must ultimately fail because the inherent healing power of fantasy
images would be diminished by reduction of the images to material accessible to
logical interpretation. In Jung’s view, since fantasy images had the power to
compensate for conscious attitudes, with proper appreciation and elaboration of
fantasy, the natural skewing of attitude due to temperamental type would tend
toward better balance. But the scientific reductionism of both Freud and Adler
would interfere with that spontaneous tendency towards wholeness. As Jung
articulated this,
Psychoanalysis fails . . . just in so far as the method it employs is oriented
according to the theory of the patient’s own type. Thus the extravert, in
accordance with his theory, will reduce the fantasies rising out of his
unconscious to their instinctual content, while the introvert will reduce them to
his power aims. The gains resulting from such an analysis merely increase the
already existing imbalance. . . . An inner dissociation arises, because portions
of other functions coming to the surface in unconscious fantasies, dreams, etc.,
are each time devalued and again repressed. . . . Both theories reject the
principle of imagination since they reduce fantasies to something else and treat
them merely as a semiotic [as opposed to symbolic] expression. (Jung 1921/1971,
pp. 62-63)
Jung’s personal experience that the images of fantasy were as psychologically real
as the observations of science, and perhaps even more psychically influential, led
him to the view that “every psychology . . . has the character of a subjective
confession” (1929/1979, p. 336). Further, since psychology is not scientific, but
confessional,
nobody is absolutely right in psychological matters. Never forget that in
psychology the means by which you judge and observe the psyche is the psyche
itself. . . . The psyche is not only the object but also the subject of our
science. So you see, it is a vicious circle and we have to be very modest.
(1935/1980. pp. 125-126)
The necessary modesty, Jung claimed, could be maintained by application of
philosophical criticism to metapsychological conjecture. Such self-scrutiny would
reveal that,
man does not make his ideas . . . man’s ideas make him. Ideas are, inevitably, a
fatal confession, for they bring to light not only the best in us, but our worst
insufficiencies and personal shortcomings as well. This is especially the case
with ideas about psychology. . . . Our way of looking at things is conditioned by
what we are. (1929/1979, p. 333)
According to Jung, Freud possessed neither the requisite modesty, nor the
inclination towards philosophically informed, critical examination of his own
metapsychology. From that standpoint, Freudian metapsychology, which Freud deemed
an accurate and universal view of the bedrock of human personality, really
amounted to an unwarranted extrapolation towards an all-embracing, global
hypothesis based on Freud’s subjective, limited observations of his own inner
drama. However, Jung could not quite argue that Freudian theory should be held to
apply only to its creator, because Jung had observed that it seemed to bear upon
some of Jung’s own patients too. He explained those observations thusly: since
Freud’s subjective confession was an honest one, it had some intrinsic merit,
albeit it was not universally applicable. The patients to whom, in some measure,
it did apply were those who were similar to Freud in psychological “type.”
These days, Jung’s line of reasoning regarding typology would be broadened by the
social constructionists (see, for example, Cushman, 1995, or Gergen, 1985) to say
that a metapsychology might apply to some others of the same psychological type—
that is, feeling, thinking, intuitive, sensate, introverted, extraverted—as its
creator, but only if they also shared a historico-cultural background with the
author of the metapsychology. In that view, selfhood is not some ubiquitous human
experience of being in the world, but rather the much more specific experience of
living within a particular historico-cultural environment. In other words, one’s
experience of selfhood is delineated in large part by the economic arrangements,
language, customs, and expectations of one’s specific milieu. In that conception,
a metapsychology is a cultural artifact, and so is limited in application only to
members of the specific culture from which it sprung. So, for example, Freud’s
theory of repressed drives coming into conflict with the “reality principle” was
not foremost a comprehensive metapsychology, but more an approach to a therapy for
the social ills—introjected as personal pathology—of one very specific culture.
Having observed that many human urges and desires were stifled by Victorian
cultural arrangements, Freud put forth a treatment modality that addressed the
personal consequences of that repression without greatly disturbing, nor even
questioning, the generalized economic status quo. Thus, from the social
constructionist perspective, Freudian metapsychology would be seen as applying to
the “types” found in fin de siècle European cities.
For Jung, a metapsychology also was limited in value to a specific group, but not
so much as a matter of culture. For Jung, psychology was as a matter of blood.
Simply put, Jung believed that human beings drew their psychological attributes
from the soil upon which they were born and from the racial characteristics of
their ancestors. Further, Jung believed that leaving one’s homeland would begin to
change that blood, and, subsequently, the blood of one’s descendants:
The mystery of earth is no joke and no paradox. One only needs to see how, in
America, the skull and pelvis measurements of all the European races begin to
indianize themselves in the second generation of immigrants. (Jung, 1918/1970, p.
13)
Because the Jews had no homeland of their own, Jung said, their connection to the
earth—thus to the primitive, and to the chthonic—was weak. Consequently, Jewish
culture and psychology was overly complex. According to Jung,
this may explain the specific need of the Jew to reduce everything to its material
beginnings . . . . A little bit of primitivity does not hurt him; on the contrary,
I can understand very well that Freud's and Adler’s reduction of everything
psychic to primitive sexual wishes and power-drives has something about it that is
beneficial and satisfying to the Jew, because it is a form of simplification. For
this reason, Freud is perhaps right to close his eyes to my objections. But these
specifically Jewish doctrines are thoroughly unsatisfying to the Germanic
mentality. (p. 14)
Thus, Jung’s most basic objection to Freudian metapsychology was not at all
theoretical, but racial, in fact, a reflection of Jung’s own racism. Contemporary
Jungians try to whitewash Jung’s arrant racism either by flatly—and wrongly—
denying it, or by explaining that his attitudes, widely shared in his day, cannot
fairly be judged retrospectively. Indeed, since the 1930s, when Jung’s anti-
Semitic, and even pro-Nazi sentiments became especially evident, his followers
have worked overtime to clean up his image. His family has kept hidden all of his
private diaries, most of his correspondence, and the famous “Red Book” of his
“discussions” with the dead. Aniela Jaffé, the editor of Jung’s so-called
“autobiography,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1965), camouflaged the fact that
Jung had written only a small part of that volume. Most of it consists of
adaptations of Jung’s lectures, or notes of Jaffé’s discussions with him, which
she—a fervent Jung apologist—rewrote to appear to be his first-person chronicles.
According to Noll (1997),
Unflattering material was, of course, left out, and even the usual sort of factual
material that one expects in a biography or an autobiography is missing, leaving
the strange story of an extraordinary individual who somehow lived outside of time
and escaped history. (p. xiii)
Even earlier, Jung himself labored to clean up his public image, purging it of its
anti-Semitic odor, by wangling an invitation to deliver the Terry Lectures at
Harvard in 1936, and by learning that it was important always to call himself a
Swiss.
This is undisputable, but it is only the beginning. I am in no position to ratify
the accuracy of Richard Noll’s (1997) recent examination of Jung’s “secret life,”
but his sources are many and varied, and his argument seems at least well-
reasoned. If even a fraction of Noll’s conclusions are valid, then the Jung of the
1920s and 1930s was less a psychologist than a neopagan zealot who intentionally
maintained and wielded the identity “psychologist” as a beard for his radical
political and religious agenda. Jung claimed that Freud’s metapsychology, and
hence the treatment it implied—psychoanalysis—was limited by Freud’s own
psychological unfitness:
I cannot see how Freud can ever get beyond his own psychology and relieve the
patient of a suffering from which the doctor himself still suffers. It is the
psychology of neurotic states of mind, definitely one-sided, and its validity is
really confined to those states. Within these limits it is true and valid even
when it is in error. For error also belongs to the picture and carries the truth
of a confession. But it is not a psychology of the healthy mind, and—this is a
symptom of its morbidity—it is based on an uncriticized, even an unconscious, view
of the world which is apt to narrow the horizon of experience and limit one’s
vision. (1929/1979, p. 333)
Jung’s polemic might be taken as a reasonable, if somewhat harsh, appraisal until
one understands that in making it Jung was arrogating the high ground of mental
health for himself, a territory to which he might have had no credible claim.
According to Noll’s (1997) account, Jung’s own view of the world was also
uncriticized and unconscious, to say the least, and Jung’s metapsychology was not
so much a psychology as an apologia and rationale, written in a secret code
accessible only to the cognoscenti, for a revivification of Aryan paganism and
German Volkish nationalism. According to Noll, Jung aimed at the replacement of
Christianity by a new religion, with Wotan as its chief deity, and Jung as its new
savior, the “Aryan Christ.” If true, this is more than just inflation. It is
florid megalomania, and Jung’s attacks on Freud for his “morbidity” may be
understood not as the outcome of theoretical disagreements, but as Jung’s
projection of his own “neurotic state of mind.”
Clearly, this is a picture of Jung very different from that of most Jungians who
see him as a old wise man dedicated to helping others to “individuate,” and thus
to find salvation. But my purpose here is not to pillory Jung. Or Freud. Simply,
if one wants to arrive at seeing depth psychology as personal confession, then the
excursion must begin with Freud and with Jung. They were the originators. Now,
nearly one hundred years after their interpersonal drama began and quickly ended,
the Freud-Jung break still perdures; a depth psychologist is apt to feel more at
home on one side of the fence than the other. After all this time, one is likely
either a classical Freudian or classical Jungian, a post-Freudian or post-Jungian,
or perhaps a reformed Freudian or reformed Jungian. Freud and Jung, along with
Adler, are the old-growth trees in the woods of depth psychology. So, for
instance, the view that dreams, daydreams, and other fantasies are not merely
release valves for the pressures of repressed ideation, but the fundamental
material of the psyche puts archetypal psychologists in the Jung tree, whereas
those who believe that innate aggression, along with the vicissitudes of an
infant’s struggle to come to terms with it, is the central factor in human
emotional development—the Kleinians—are firmly in the Freud tree along with
disciples of other, later object-relations theorists.
And what of Adler? Adler’s ideas continue to be influential, but not primarily as
metapsychology, for Adler, unlike Freud and Jung, did not offer any map of
intrapsychic space that could serve as the basis for a comprehensive
metapsychology. Adler’s work did not focus on making the unconscious conscious in
the sense of bringing to light repressed oedipal longings à la Freud, or revealing
the hidden faces of the anima, the shadow, and the other stock players in Jung’s
presumed internal drama. Adler’s psychotherapy aimed at bringing to light
unacknowledged, deeply held cognitive attitudes that interfered with living. In
this, it anticipated the existential-humanist position which usually is not
considered a branch of depth psychology. Adler conceived of psychological
development not so much as a quest of the isolated individual to fulfill personal
needs by means of exploration of unconscious material, but as the fulfillment of
the inherent drive and obligation of all persons to find their proper place within
society at large. Satisfying that drive, and meeting that obligation would require
coming to awareness of one’s feelings of inferiority, and compensatory strivings
for superiority, which hindered seeking socially useful goals. (Adler, 1931/1958)
In Adler’s conception, the most important human value was not, as for Freud, the
ability to recognize and satisfy relatively mature individual desires nor, as for
Jung, the realization of an inner telos already known to the greater self, but
development of the ability to live in harmony with the principle of
Gemeinschaftsgefühl, or social interest. In that scenario, the need to be
“socially embedded” is a primary, innate human characteristic, and the individual
is always part of larger social systems, ranging from the family to all humanity,
and particularly including the biological, male-female system. The various
relations within those systems inevitably entail predicaments of friendship, work,
and sexual love, but, for Adler, the solution to such problems involved not
individual struggles, but the unfoldment of the human capacity for
Gemeinschaftsgefühl, which could coordinate one’s striving with that of one’s
fellow humans. From that perspective,
All failures—neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children,
suicides, perverts and prostitutes—are failures because they are lacking in
fellow-feeling and social interest. They approach the problems of occupation,
friendship and sex without the confidence that they can be solved by cooperation.
The meaning they give to life is a private meaning: no one else is benefitted by
the achievement of their aims and their interest stops short at their own persons.
Their goal of success is a goal of mere fictitious personal superiority and their
triumphs have meaning only to themselves. (Adler, 1931/1958, p. 8)
Therapeutically, Adler sought to show his patients where their life-styles had
been selected, as in a kind of auto-hypnosis, to provide imaginary feelings of
superiority instead of leading to actions that really would generate feelings of
self-worth. Thus, successful psychotherapy was not a question of revealing the
unconscious, but of coming to understand the
goal of superiority [that] with each individual, is personal and unique. It
depends upon the meaning he gives to life; and this meaning is not a matter of
words. It is built up in his style of life and runs through it like a strange
melody of his own creation. In his style of life he does not express his goal so
that we can formulate it once for all. He expresses it vaguely, so that we must
guess at it from the indications he gives. Understanding a style of life is
similar to understanding the work of a poet. A poet must use words, but his
meaning is more than the mere words he uses. The greatest part of his meaning must
be guessed at; we must read between the lines. So, too, with that profoundest and
most intricate creation, an individual style of life. The psychologist must learn
to read between the lines; he must learn the art of appreciating life-meanings.
(1931/1958, pp. 57-58).
Hillman (1983), who also envisioned effective therapy as a form of poesis,
explained that Adler’s work serves well as the basis for a postmodernist critique
of Jungian metapsychology—and, by extension, of psychotherapeutic practice in
general—just because, unlike Freud and Jung, Adler refused to conceive of
intrapsychic models. In that view, “Adler was a phenomenologist who wanted to
understand consciousness from within itself and without appeal to structures
external to it which are always fictions of it anyway” (p. 110). Hillman cited
Adler’s view that humans “live in the realm of meanings,” and that,
historically ideas tend to grow from fictions (unreal but practically useful
constructs) to hypotheses and later to dogmas. This change of intensity
differentiates in a general way the thinking of the normal individual (fiction as
expedient), of the neurotic (attempt to realize the fiction), and of the psychotic
(. . . reification of the fiction: dogmatization). (Adler, 1917, cited by Hillman
(1983) p. 111)
From that perspective, as long as psychological suppositions about human conduct
or emotions are still seen as fictions, that is, seen in the poetic-metaphoric
form “as if,” they may serve as a useful tools. Once the fictions begin to harden
into generalized hypotheses, one already has entered the neurotic realm of Freud’s
fainting spells—so eerily evocative of the throes of his own “hysterical” patients
—when his world view seemingly came under attack, or the neurotic realm of Jung’s
“religious crush” on Freud the theoretician. The psychotic level of hardening
unfortunately takes place often in psychotherapeutic practice when images or
interpretations, not even original to the therapist, but learned by rote, are
imposed upon a patient as if they were objective “facts” which the therapist being
“fully analyzed” can see, but the patient, being ill, cannot. At that level of
misunderstanding, the therapist, having reified metaphor into certainty, is acting
“psychotic,” in Adler’s use of that term, but the patient who disagrees with the
therapist’s dogmatic interpretations is made to feel “psychotic,” that is. the
patient is made to carry the projections of the therapist’s psychosis. In my own
practice, a number of patients have come to me already deeply injured by Jungians
and Freudians in that very way, so that the therapy had to begin with trying to
undo some of that damage.
Nevertheless, Freud and Jung are the old-growth trees, and I have sought to poke
around among their roots—the deepest roots of depth psychology— because seeing
that work as personal confession is the embarkation point for seeing one’s own
work in psychotherapy as personal confession. But understanding Freud and Jung is
not easy. The connections between personal history and later affect and action,
which in the consulting room are the business of psychoanalysis, become, in an
essay like this one, the work of psychobiography, a form with many inherent
problems. Among the thorniest of these is the real difficulty of understanding the
Victorian culture in which Freud and Jung lived, for to the difficulty of
understanding the personal confession of any individual, must be added the
difficulty of situating that confession in the wider ambience of its time and
place.
At first blush, the world of Freud and Jung seems not very unlike our own, but for
a psychologist that attitude would be fatal error, for the very subject of
psychological inquiry—the human “mind”—was regarded very differently one hundred
years ago, and that difference is hard to reckon. As one says to a friend when an
attempt to share the humor of an earlier situation falls flat, “You had to be
there.” Well, we weren’t there, but we do somehow glean that the primacy of
conscious thought in that time so much closer to Descartes was considerably less
disputed then than now. For example, on April 14, 1912 when the Titanic hit an
iceberg, confusing wireless messages led some to believe that she was safe. The
New York Times was the lone voice predicting her troubles. All the other papers
had headlines such as: TITANIC RAMS ICEBERG. ALL PASSENGERS SAFE. Even two days
later, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece that said:
The gravity of the damage to the Titanic is apparent, but the important point is
that she did not sink. Man is the weakest and most formidable creature on Earth.
His brain has within it the spirit of the Divine. He overcomes natural obstacles
by thought which is incomparably the greatest force in the universe. (April 16,
1912, emphasis mine.)
Today, few would believe such thing. But in 1912, about a year before the
cessation of relations between Freud and Jung, thought was the greatest force in
the universe. Neurasthenia, the most prevalent psychological symptom of the day—it
was the ailment for which Coca-Cola was the medicine—was defined as a paralysis of
the will marked by indecision and doubt. A “healthy” person was masterful and
self-assured, not tentative or doubtful. Physicists were declaring that a
comprehensive understanding of the universe required only the solution of a few
more small puzzles which soon would give way to the power of thought. No wonder
Freud wanted to be “scientific,” and to fashion a metapsychology that could
explain everything psychological. To do less would feel like failure. Writing
about what he called “the problem of taboo,” in the introduction to Totem and
Taboo, Freud avowed that “the effort to solve it is approached with perfect
confidence” (1913/1946, p. x, emphasis mine.)
Sixty years later things had changed considerably. Neurasthenia had become
“anxiety,” an almost ubiquitous state of mind. Few believed that the universe
would soon—or ever—be understood. Standards of morality, which had seemed so self-
evident in Freud’s time, lay in tatters after the “situational ethics” of the
1950s, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Disaffected minorities were voicing
concerns that might have interested Adler, but certainly not Freud or Jung. It was
a time that many of us living today remember well, and our present day world is
not so far from it. It was in that milieu that Heinz Kohut, a noted Freudian,
abandoned his pampered position in the bosom of psychoanalytic orthodoxy to bring
forth a theory of intrapsychic dynamics that called into question many of the most
important “truths” in the Freudian canon. Because we know his world so well, it
will be easier than with Freud and Jung to separate out what was personal to Kohut
from the generalized presumptions of his cultural surround. Thus, the case of
Kohut and his self psychology, detailed in the following chapter, will offer a
good study in metapsychology as personal confession.

CHAPTER II
HEINZ KOHUT, AND THE INVENTION OF
PSYCHOANALYTIC SELF PSYCHOLOGY

About twenty-five years ago, the self psychology of Heinz Kohut emerged as a
modification of the Freudian paradigm. Since then, Kohut’s metapsychology has
become widely popular, not only among Freudians, but among depth psychologists of
all stripes. For instance, according to Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett, ”the
Jungian analytic community has been profoundly influenced by theorists of other
schools, of whom Heinz Kohut is currently of particular importance because of
various intriguing points of contact between his writing and that of Jung” (1989,
p. 23). Further, according to Corbett, Kohutian theory is of great practical use
to a Jungian analyst because it provides methods of working even with patients who
do not produce the kind of material that is amenable to Jungian interpretation, or
who are not prepared to hear such interpretations (personal communication,
December, 1995). Object relations theorists also have been influenced by Kohut’s
work, and Kohut’s locution “selfobject” is now a term of art even for those who do
not necessarily practice in the Kohutian manner.
As I will seek to demonstrate in what follows, notwithstanding the wide acceptance
of Kohut’s ideas and the obvious popularity of his therapeutic procedures as a
clinical modality, his metapsychology was not deduced from a global panorama of
human psychology, but clearly was Kohut’s confession of his own pathology, his own
personal organizing principles, and his own endeavors to heal himself. In order
that this be properly understood, it will first be necessary to look at the
Freudian background from which Kohut’s theories arose, and especially to review in
some detail the central
ideas of Kohut’s metapsychology, particularly with reference to Kohut’s most
famous case study, the case of Mr. Z.

Kohut The Freudian

In 1938, Freud, a Jew, was forced to flee Vienna for London. As Freud’s train left
the station, a young medical student standing on the platform waved, and was
favored by a tip of the hat from the great man whom he idolized but never had met.
That was the first and last time that Heinz Kohut ever saw Freud, but later, as
the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he delighted in
recounting the story, which, according to Kohut’s colleague, Ernest Wolf (1996),
Kohut interpreted as a symbolic passing of the torch. Like Freud, Kohut was also
Jewish, although he concealed that identity as best he could all his life. Two
years after Freud’s forced departure, when even for a completely assimilated Jew
like Kohut, staying in Vienna had become impossibly dangerous, Kohut fled too. At
the age of twenty-five, after a sojourn in London, he emigrated to the United
States, where he began a residency in clinical neurology at the University of
Chicago. He was praised by his teachers as “a brilliant clinician, destined to
become a star” (Siegel, 1996, p. 2), but Kohut, like Freud before him, turned his
attention away from neurology in order to study the workings of the psyche.
Leaving the University of Chicago, he entered the Chicago Institute for
Psychoanalysis, where he trained in classical Freudian theory, the predominant
psychoanalytic theory in the United States, and began a practice based upon the
Freudian principles of transference: a displacement upon the analyst by the
analysand of unconscious incestuous longings that play out the unresolved oedipal
drama of childhood, and resistance: the unconscious process impeding the
recognition of those desires. As a classical Freudian, Kohut subscribed to the
theory that emotional difficulties stemmed from the two drives—the sexual drive
that served to preserve the species, and the aggressive drive that served to
preserve the individual—coming into conflict with the prohibitions of the cultural
surround, which prohibited free expression of the drives. Thus, the paradigm that
Kohut was using in his clinical work was called the “drive-conflict” model, or
simply “drive theory.”
In Freudian theory, the primary object for the expression of the sexual instinct
is the parent of the opposite sex with whom the child desires an incestuous
relationship, and the primary object for the expression of the aggressive instinct
is the parent of the same sex, who is seen as a rival to be murdered. Awareness of
those oedipal desires creates profound anxiety due to concomitant fantasies of
reprisals by the rivaled parent. In the male child, his own incestuous and
murderous wishes produce a fantasy of castration by the father; the girl (already
believing herself to be castrated, according to Freud) fears reprisal through
abandonment by her mother. But since the same instincts that can produce such
terrifying anxieties also are the wellsprings of action in the real world—the
aggressive drive leading to action through assertiveness, and the reproductive
drive leading to action through sexual striving—having to defend against
expression of the drives produces inhibitions that interfere with living. As Kohut
conducted his practice in the 1950s, his task, seen broadly, was to analyze the
sources of his patient’s anxieties so that those analysands could be liberated in
some measure from their neurotic inhibitions.
Further, psychoanalytic work aimed at helping the patient to discriminate between
oedipal wishes, impossible to fulfill, and more mature desires that carried with
them the prospect of genuine satisfaction through effort in the real world. Freud
had called such discernment “the reality principle,” and had asserted that
experiences of “optimal frustration” are responsible for the differentiation
between a wish and reality. An optimal frustration is the period of delay a child
experiences before a particular wish can be satisfied. Through the delay the child
comes to realize that active steps must be taken in order to satisfy the wish.
According to Kohut [who taught Freudian theory from 1958 until the late 1960s at
the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis], Freud suggested that it is only through
an optimal frustration, a frustration that is neither so intense as to be
traumatic nor so minimal as to be insignificant, that wishes can be differentiated
from reality. (Siegel, 1996, p. 27)
This point will be important later in looking at Kohut’s self psychology, because
the idea that children (or analytic patients) learn through “optimal frustration”
was central to his new conception.

The Move Away From Freudian Theory

Kohut was always sensitive to the psychoanalytic question of narcissism, probably
because he struggled with his own pronounced narcissistic tendencies. Wolf (1996),
writing very much in the mode of Kohutian self psychology, interpreted Kohut’s
creativity and its final focus on narcissism as
a compensatory response to some early deprivations that had threatened the
cohesiveness of his budding self. One major deprivation was the absence of his
father during World War I. . . . The war had been a catastrophic interruption of
his career as a concert pianist and he was unable to pursue his musical aims after
he returned. One can easily imagine the father's depression and the son's
disillusionment in the now returned father, who must have been a distantly admired
hero during his military service.
Little Heinz was close to his mother and he remained so for many years. Yet
certain remarks that he made at times left me with the impression that his mother
was a somewhat distant woman who was overly involved with her social life, leaving
Heinz in the care of servants and tutors. (p. 14)
In an early paper, written with the collaboration of a colleague, Kohut displayed
his interest in the problem of narcissism, connecting its pathological
manifestation to Freud’s concept of optimal frustration:
If the child is over-spoiled (not optimally frustrated), it retains an unusual
amount of narcissism or omnipotence; and at the same time, because it lacks actual
skills, feels inferior. Similarly, overly frustrating experiences . . . lead to
retention of narcissistic omnipotence fantasies. (Kohut & Seitz 1960, cited in
Siegel, 1996, p. 28)
A few years later, Kohut would redefine narcissism, and that reformulation would
become the central premise of self psychology, but the narcissism to which Kohut
and Seitz referred was still, as in classical Freudian theory, a stage of human
emotional development during which
libido is invested completely or mainly in the self, or the ego, or, more simply
in the body. . . . [It] is considered normal in the very young; should it persist
into adulthood it is usually classified as a neurosis and is generally
characterized by a love of self that precedes, if not precludes, love of others.
(Reber, 1985, p. 462)
For Freud, the normal developmental line—that which would not be neurotic—required
that primary narcissism find later expression in “object libido,” first directed
toward a homosexual object, then towards a heterosexual object, and finally, in
its best development, culminating in abandonment of narcissism in favor of real
object love. That sequence of development implies that narcissism per se is
pathological if it continues beyond infancy, that is, narcissism is something to
be outgrown. Kohut had been teaching that point of view, and his 1960 paper on
optimal frustration still presumed it, but in 1966 he abandoned the Freudian
position, postulating that narcissism had a developmental line of its own—in fact
two developmental lines—and that narcissistic development was normal, not
pathological. Further, pointing to the contempt with which many psychoanalysts
regarded “narcissists,” Kohut asserted that positing object love as a higher
development than self love was judgmental and demeaning, putting the needs of
society at large above those of the individual patient.
Kohut (1966/1978a) hypothesized that the infant’s world was naturally blissful
until inevitable failures of maternal care began to threaten that bliss. To defend
against the destruction of its peaceful world, the infant created two new systems
of “narcissistic perfection.” One, the “idealized parental imago,” attempted to
protect the infant’s well-being by endowing an outside object with infinite power
and goodness. The second, the “narcissistic self,” fantasized that everything good
was contained within the infant, and everything bad was outside. Later, Kohut
(1968/1978b) modified his terminology so that the “narcissistic self” became “the
grandiose self.”
Each of the two forms of narcissism, grandiosity and idealization, followed its
own course of development. Regarding idealization, the stability of the idealized
parental imago—the image of a perfect other with whom one could totally merge, and
who would be a source of endless strength, perfect kindness, and unlimited power—
inevitably would be challenged by disappointing comparisons to the child’s actual
parent. If these disappointments were not too sudden or traumatic, the imago would
be converted slowly into ideals. Regarding grandiosity, the child’s grandiose self
desired to receive from important caregivers witness to its perfection and
admiration of its magnificent powers. According to Kohut (1966/1978a), without
such appreciative witnessing, without “the gleam in the mother’s eye,” the child’s
narcissistic self could not properly mature, but with adequate admiration, archaic
grandiosity matured into realistic ambitions.
By 1971, with the publication of Analysis of the Self, Kohut was prepared to
discuss in detail what would happen if the idealized parental imagoes and the
grandiose self did not properly mature. As we have seen, if the child’s fantasy of
an ideal parent were gradually controverted by a series of disappointing, but
tolerable experiences with the real parent, the idealization would be internalized
by the child in the form of ideals. For example, the idealized imago of “daddy” as
a flawlessly noble, entirely moral, perfectly fair guardian of truth, could
mature, as daddy proved to be not flawless, but human, into a love of justice in
the abstract. However, if this line of development were disturbed, perhaps by a
disappointment in the actual father that was too sudden and severe to be
tolerated, the idealizing narcissism would not mature into ideals, but would
remain compellingly active in the adult, who then might be forced to seek persons—
rather than abstract ideals—to idealize for all of her or his life. One sees
extreme examples of this pathology, for instance, in cult members. As for the
grandiose self, it it were tolerably (optimally) disappointed—for example, mother
sometimes praised the child, but sometimes was too busy to notice the child’s
“greatness”—then the child’s needs for admiration could mature into the ambition
to gain recognition for achievable accomplishments in the real world. However, if
the disappointment were traumatic—perhaps, for instance, mother fell into a
depression and never noticed the child—then, according to Kohut, there would be no
line of development by which the child could imagine garnering sufficient
appreciation through ordinary achievements, and he or she would retain an archaic
grandiosity, going through life lacking self-esteem, perhaps feeling acutely
sensitive to imagined slights, or perhaps demanding constantly to be a center of
attention. In its extreme form, this is the so-called “borderline personality.”
Kohut (1971) conceived the successful maturation of the idealized parental imago
as a process of “transmuting internalization.” This meant that the idealizations
invested in the caregivers when gradually withdrawn would be absorbed into the
psyche of the child where they would form new structures that could perform the
psychological functions previously performed by the idealized parent. Observe that
Kohut, like Freud, needed to express his psychological understanding in terms of
reified structures. Later, sensitive to criticism of this apparent
hypostatization, he took pains to distance himself from Freud’s mental apparatus
model, and to explain that he saw the structures only metaphorically:
When the self psychologist speaks of “psychic structure,” he is referring neither
to the structures of a mental apparatus nor to the structures of any of the
constituents of a mental apparatus but to the structure of the self. The structure
of the self, in other words, is the theoretical correlate of those attributes of
the self which, in their sum total, define this central concept of self
psychology. While the notion of psychic structure is, like all theoretical
constructions, no more than a tautology, it is still an invaluable aid to our
thought and an indispensable tool when we communicate with one another. (1984, p.
99)
Akin to his understanding of the successful maturation of the idealized parental
imago as a process of “transmuting internalization,” Kohut (1971) believed that
the grandiose self also could be transmuted—recast from an expression of absurdly
exaggerated demands for attention, and unobtainable fantasies of power,
domination, and admiration, into a “self” capable of authentic enjoyment of
ordinary life and its possibilities. But there was a difference. Transmutation of
parental idealizations required some parental support—for example, some
willingness on the part of the parent to accept the idealizations—but, if there
were no traumatic, sudden disappointments in the idealized figure, the
unavoidable, day-by-day comparison of the idealized imagoes with the actual
parents would cause a more or less automatic, step-by-step withdrawal of the
idealizations by means of their gradual metamorphosis into abstract ideals. On the
other hand, transformation of archaic grandiosity into realistic self-esteem
required active participation of the parents in acknowledging and supporting the
child’s needs for admiration, and thus would demand parents who were relatively
comfortable with their own grandiosity.
According to Kohut, a parent who easily performed the function of a mirror, or
gracefully performed the other important function, that of being idealizable,
would not be seen by the child as a person in his or her own right. Rather, that
parent would be experienced as a part of the child’s own self, as an extension of
the self, and Kohut (1971) named this capacity of serving as a psychological
extension the “self-object function.” The person who fulfilled the function, he
called a “self-object.” Later, he removed the hyphen, and created the term
“selfobject” to indicate that the function-providing object is not experienced as
separate from the self. This view of early caregivers as selfobjects whose
functions would be internalized, thereby creating structures within the self,
could not be reconciled with the Freudian conception in which parents were seen
mainly as the objects of the drives and the source of drive gratification, and in
which narcissism was seen as normal only in the very early stages of life, and
pathological later. Kohut had tried to remain true to his Freudian roots—after
all, he was President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and his
colleagues thought of him as “Mr. Psychoanalysis” (Wolf, 1996)—but his clinical
experience, he claimed, particularly his growing understanding of narcissism, was
leading him farther and farther away from the idea that the “self” was produced by
the intersection of innate drives with the outside world embodied in the parents.
By 1977, he wrote,
It is possible to discern a self which, while it includes drives (and/or defenses)
in its organization, has become a superordinated configuration whose significance
transcends that of the sum of its parts. (1977, p. 97)
This belief in a self “beyond knowing empirically, a supraordinate concept,
transcending the sum of its parts, which has cohesiveness in space and continuity
in time” (1977, p. 177) was a radical departure from psychoanalytic theories that
saw the “self” as a content of the “mind,” that is as a collection of self-
representations, leading Kohut to declare that Freud’s theory of the oedipus
complex had only limited explanatory power:
The classical theory of drives and objects explains a good deal about the child's
oedipal experiences; par excellence it explains the child’s conflicts and in
particular, the child’s guilt. But it falls short in providing an adequate
framework for some of the most important experiences of man, those that relate to
the development and vicissitudes of his self. To be explicit . . . these theories
fail to do justice to the experiences that relate to the crucially important task
of building and maintaining a cohesive nuclear self. (1977, pp. 223-224)
For Kohut, aggression was not an innate drive, but a response to faulty parenting.
Thus, Kohut’s schema was a parent blaming theory, in contrast to the baby blaming
theories of Freud and particularly of Melanie Klein, who saw the parent as the
target of the child’s frustration, envy, and hatred, and imputed later pathology
to an excess of aggression in the newborn. This is the crux of Kohut’s departure
from his earlier work as a Freudian analyst: drives do not make the self, that is,
“man is not born to conflict . . . he is not of necessity in an adversary
relationship with his parents or with his culture, and . . . his development is
not determined or predetermined by drives or instincts as psychoanalysis has
understood them” (Basch, 1984 p. 29).

The Making of an Apostate

Today, thousands of psychoanalysts use the ideas of self psychology routinely in
clinical practice, and the Jungian analytic community in particular has embraced
Kohut’s work. But in the 1960s, the move away from classical psychoanalysis was
not easy. Kohut was among the aristocracy in orthodox Freudian society. He was
President of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He was Vice-President of the
International Psychoanalytic Association, and was expected to be its next
President. Kohut also was famous at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute for
teaching the best Freudian theory courses, and for writing the most engaging
papers (Wolf, 1996). But he was about to abandon the theoretical basis of a
brilliant career, and to slide into apostasy by creating a theory that cut the
heart—the oedipal, drive-conflict concept— out of Freud’s system. His creation of
self psychology would cause friends to abandon him, and important colleagues to
keep their distance (Ernest Wolf, personal communication, September 1, 1997). A
Kohut lecture would be condemned as not sufficiently eulogistic of Freud, and
shortly after, he would be ousted from the Psychoanalytic Education Council of the
Chicago Institute by a vote of its other members who would conspire by telephone
to remove him, wounding him deeply (Paul Tolpin, personal communication, September
9, 1997). What could induce such a difficult and costly iconoclasm?
In the first place, many of Kohut’s patients had told him that his oedipal
interpretations missed the mark, and he found himself having increasing difficulty
in ascribing their objections to “resistance.” As he put this in his final book,
How Does Analysis Cure, published posthumously,
If there is one lesson that 1 have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the
lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true—that many times when I
believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often
only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their
rightness was profound. (1984, pp. 93-94)
Secondly, his experience as President of the American Psychoanalytic Association
(1964-1965) had been deeply discouraging. Ernest Wolf, a colleague, collaborator,
and close friend of his, remembered Kohut remarking bitterly, and often, on the
flagrant narcissism, and the self-serving political maneuvering of previously
respected colleagues. According to Wolf, Kohut already had the basis for his ideas
about narcissism—”by 1966 he had the makings of the new paradigm”— but his
experience of the narcissistic behavior of his colleagues may be what finally
moved him to make them public (personal communication, September 1, 1997). Paul
Ornstein, another close colleague and collaborator, agreed. As Ornstein remembered
events, Kohut’s first paper emphasizing the importance of narcissism and its
treatment was presented as Kohut’s Presidential Address to the Association,
delivered just as his term was ending (personal communication, September 1, 1997).
Further, Kohut struggled constantly with his own narcissistic proclivities. Ernest
Wolf remembered that Kohut was cautious about choosing those with whom he would
speak about his theories,
not because he was haughty as some people believed, but because he was vulnerable,
and needed constant mirroring. He was not arrogant, but vulnerable. In those days
I would get to my office early, usually before seven when expecting an eight
o’clock patient. Often around seven the phone would ring, and it would be Heinz,
feeling lonely and needing to chat. It was that kind of narcissism. Not the
arrogant kind of self-overestimation. (personal communication, September 1, 1997).
Paul Ornstein’s account agreed with Wolf’s. According to Ornstein,
He couldn’t tolerate stupidity easily, and was selective about who he would invite
to his home for evenings of conversation. Then he was less interested in our
thoughts than in having us listen to his. Yes, in that sense he was narcissistic.
Except that he had the most interesting thoughts. My perception is that some of
them were awed by what he had to say, and then resented it.
Some described him as distant, uncaring about others, highly narcissistic. And of
course, in that sense, narcissistic he was. Self absorbed he was. But that never
interfered with his relationship with me and with Anna [Anna Ornstein, Paul’s
wife]. He was extremely sensitive and vulnerable, so he protected himself.
(personal communication, August 29, 1997)

The Two Analyses of Mr. Z

In 1979, Kohut published a paper, The Two Analyses of Mr. Z., describing a pair of
analyses that he had conducted with the same patient. The first analysis, of four
and a half years duration, with meetings five times per week, took place while
Kohut still practiced in the classical Freudian tradition. Mr. Z was a graduate
student in his mid-twenties who presented to Kohut complaining of an inability to
form relationships with women, and with a list of somatic complaints such as
sweaty palms, irregular heartbeats, and a feeling of uncomfortable fullness in his
stomach. The second analysis, begun after a hiatus of five years, that is, almost
ten years after the beginning of the first, was carried out using Kohut’s new
ideas about developmental deficits in the structure of the self, narcissistic
transferences, and the possibility of cure by means of selfobject experiences
within the analysis. This second analysis also lasted for four and a half years
with meetings five times a week. Taken together, the two analyses provided a way
of comparing the clinical effects of the two differing theoretical perspectives.
The case history is complex—could any analysis of nine years duration, five days a
week not be complex?—but briefly: while Mr. Z was a young child, his father became
seriously ill, and while hospitalized fell in love with his nurse, eventually
leaving home to live with her. While his father was away, Mr. Z, then about four
years old, slept in his bed. When his father came back home again, a year and a
half later, Mr. Z moved out of his father’s bed, and began sleeping at the foot of
his mother’s bed, where he repeatedly witnessed their sexual intercourse. At that
time, Mr. Z began masturbation, involving fantasies of being sold as a slave to a
woman who used him to clean up her feces and urine, urinated into his mouth, and
humiliated him in various other bizarre ways. Later, around age eleven, Mr. Z, had
a homosexual experience with a camp counselor whom he idealized, and in whose
presence he had always felt calmer and stronger.
As an adult, Mr. Z continued compulsive masturbation—his only sexual outlet—still
accompanied by masochistic fantasies of servitude and humiliation. He had little
social life, except for evenings out with his mother. But these embarrassing facts
only emerged later in the analysis. At first, Mr. Z presented himself to Kohut as
grandiose, arrogant, and superior. In the classical Freudian mode, Kohut
interpreted that supercilious attitude as an expression of Mr. Z’s imagined
oedipal victory, when, at age three his father went to the hospital, leaving Mr.
Z’s mother alone with him. In that Freudian scenario, hidden behind the repression
barrier lay castration anxiety and depression due to what really had been an
oedipal defeat: the father’s coming back. After four and a half years of making
such interpretations, Kohut ended the work, pointing to a decrease in Mr. Z’s
masturbation and accompanying masochistic fantasies, and to Mr. Z’s moving out of
his mother’s home and initiating some sexual experiences with women as indications
of success in the work. Also, Kohut noted that Mr. Z’s narcissistic demands had
moderated, and that finally he was able to accept Kohut’s interpretations of those
demands as defenses against his repressed fear of castration. Near the end of the
analysis, Mr. Z. had the following dream:
[Mr. Z] was in a house, at the inner side of a door which was a crack open.
Outside was the father, loaded with gift-wrapped packages, wanting to enter. The
patient was intensely frightened and attempted to close the door in order to keep
the father out. (Kohut 1979, pp, 407-8)
From the same classical outlook that had determined his interpretations of his
patient’s narcissism, Kohut interpreted this dream as expressing Mr. Z’s
ambivalence towards his father, marked by fear of castration due to Mr. Z’s having
been living alone with his mother. Soon after, the analysis ended, time well spent
in Kohut’s estimation.
Five years later, Mr. Z. was back. He still suffered, it seemed, from lack of
success with women, and what sexual liaisons he was able to arrange still needed
to be accompanied by humiliating masochistic fantasies. He felt unhappy at work,
and found life in general unsatisfactory. There was a delay before Kohut could
begin analysis with Mr. Z again, but after a couple of initial appointments, used
just to plan for the subsequent work, the patient began to feel better. Kohut, by
this time equipped with his new theoretical lens, pictured Mr. Z’s sudden
improvement in mood as the result of his having established an idealization of
Kohut, similar to the idealization of the camp counselor during adolescence. An
initial dream in this second analysis, the image of a powerful figure of a man who
evoked in Mr. Z associations to his father, to the camp counselor, and to Kohut
himself, supported Kohut’s idea of an idealizing transference.
This second analysis focused on Mr. Z’s mother, who recently had become psychotic
with paranoid delusions. Mr. Z remembered that in childhood his mother had seen
him not as a person in his own right, but as an appendage. Like Portnoy’s mother
in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel, interestingly enough, about a
compulsive masturbator, Mr. Z’s mother would examine his feces, and search his
skin for blackheads. He was allowed no privacy; she would enter his room,
unannounced, whenever she liked. In Kohut’s terms, Mr. Z had been forced into a
merger with his mother. In this second analysis, Mr. Z came to comprehend that his
previous view of his mother as a devoted, loving parent had been one-sided, and
that his mother’s love was far from unconditional. Her “love” required that Mr. Z
submit entirely to her demands, giving up any hope of autonomy. She gave her love
only on condition that he remain for her a permanent selfobject whose presence was
necessary for her to sustain her own fragmenting self, necessary, that is, for her
to avoid breaking through into the psychotic core of her borderline personality.
That latent psychosis, against which she always had used her merger with Mr. Z to
defend, finally had emerged in her paranoid delusions when, during the course of
the first analysis, Mr. Z finally had left her house for a place of his own. Kohut
was surprised that almost nothing of that outré parent-child relationship had
emerged in the first analysis. He searched for the reason for that flaw in the
first analysis, finally imputing it to his having forced upon his patient the,
convictions of a classical analyst who saw the material that the patient presented
in terms of infantile drives and of conflicts about them, and of agencies of a
mental apparatus either clashing or cooperating with each other. (Kohut 1979, p.
423).
And Kohut blamed himself for having become for his patient,
a replica of the mother's hidden psychosis, of a distorted outlook on the world to
which he had adjusted in childhood, which he had readily accepted as reality—an
attitude of compliance and acceptance that he now reinstated with regard to me and
to the seemingly unshakable convictions that I held. (p. 423)
Thus, in Kohut’s view, the second analysis of Mr. Z stood as a major watershed.
Having understood that classical analysis forced something upon the patient, there
was no going back; Kohut would have to come out of the closet with his self
psychology. As he expressed this in his final writing:
This patient, as I saw clearly in the second analysis, must have confronted me, as
many other analysands throughout my professional life undoubtedly had, with the
recognition that his needs were primary and real and not defensive. But whereas
formerly . . . I had silently made my compromises with established theory and
technique, I was this time in greater need of keeping those forces in check which
demanded that I acknowledge what I saw and how I saw it. These forces whispered to
me that I should not only stand up for my new insights in the clinical situation
but also . . . raise the findings of individual psychology to more general levels,
by expressing them in a carefully chosen, well-defined terminology, and by
communicating them to the broad scientific community. (1984, p. 88)
Alhough it would cost Kohut several important friends, and provoke colleagues to
keep him at a distance (Ernest Wolf, personal communication, September 1, 1997),
and though he struggled for a time at least to maintain Freud’s language, if not
his metapsychology, the cat would have to be let out of the bag.
As the second analysis of Mr. Z proceeded, Kohut concluded that the homosexual
relationship with the camp counselor had not been about sex qua sex, but had been
an expression of Mr. Z’s need for a meaningful relationship with a strong male
figure. Affiliation with his own father could not have provided that relationship,
because, in early childhood, his father had almost always been away, and even
after his return, Mr. Z saw him as a weak man, kowtowing to a domineering,
demanding wife. As that latter awareness developed, Mr. Z suddenly appreciated why
his father might want to leave home for another woman, whereupon he recovered a
forgotten memory of a ski trip with his father at age nine. On the ski trip, Mr. Z
had seen his father in a different light. His father, an excellent skier, had
seemed at ease in the world. Also, there was a woman present who had what seemed
to be a sexual relationship with his father. Perhaps she was the nurse for whom he
earlier had left his wife. Mr. Z remembered having kept those details secret from
his mother, as if he and his father had shared a special masculine understanding.
In Kohut’s view, the recovery of this memory indicated a revival, within the
analysis, of Mr. Z’s childhood need for a man he could idealize.
In this second analysis, Kohut no longer construed Mr. Z’s having begun
masturbation after witnessing his parents intercourse as an expression of
incestuous fantasies. This time, Kohut explained the masturbation as Mr. Z’s
attempts to regulate the overstimulation of his undeveloped self occasioned by his
mother’s demanding that Mr. Z merge into her adult experience. That merger, in
Kohut’s conception, precluded Mr. Z’s own normal experience which would have
furnished the phase appropriate, gentler stimulation of a child’s increasing
autonomy. And Kohut now perceived Mr. Z’s masochistic fantasies not as
manifestations of unconscious guilt for his oedipal fantasies, but as symbols of
domination by his unstable, demanding mother.
As the second analysis drew to a close, Mr. Z reintroduced the earlier dream of
being frightened when his father appeared at the door with gifts. This time, Kohut
proffered a different interpretation, no longer construing the dream as a
reference to fear of castration. From the viewpoint of his new self psychology,
and in the light of the recovered memories of the ski trip, Kohut understood the
dream as expressing a yearning for the father and the gifts he carried—masculinity
and psychological strength—gifts which the child’s enfeebled self, due its
enmeshment as a permanent selfobject for his mother, had not been able to receive.
From that perspective, closing the door was not an attempt to protect himself from
a castrating father figure, but rather an effort to modulate the excitement he had
felt at the return of his long-absent father.
In the classical view, according to Kohut (1979), the psyche of Mr. Z could be
pictured schematically as having a horizontal split: Freud’s repression barrier.
Above the horizontal split was Mr. Z’s overt grandiosity and arrogance due to his
imaginary oedipal victory over his father upon his father’s departure. Below the
horizontal split, that is, below conscious awareness, lay Mr. Z’s castration
anxiety and depression due to his actual oedipal defeat occasioned by his father’s
return.
In Kohut’s new paradigm, the psyche of Mr. Z was split vertically. To one side of
the split lay Mr. Z’s overt arrogance and superiority “on the basis of a
persisting merger with the . . . idealized mother [who] confirms the patient’s
superiority over father provided patient remains an appendage of her” (p. 446). To
the other side of the vertical split, lay another part of Mr. Z’s psyche, this
part alone divided by a repression barrier à la Freud. Above the repression
barrier, that is consciously, Mr. Z experienced impaired self-esteem, depression,
and masochism. And this is what was split off (vertically) from his arrogance; in
other words, when he was feeling arrogant, he was protected against his depression
and low self-regard. Below the repression barrier was not castration anxiety as in
the Freudian understanding, but rage against his domineering mother, as well as
self-assertive male sexuality with which he could not get in touch.
The difference between these two schemata is striking. For the Freudian Kohut, Mr.
Z’s grandiosity was the outcome of an imagined oedipal victory, but that inflated
self-image rested on a shaky footing, for below the repression barrier, just
outside of conscious perception, lay the anxiety of paternal reprisals through
castration. For Kohut the self psychologist, Mr. Z’s grandiosity had nothing to do
with the vicissitudes of the oedipal situation. Rather it was a defense against
the depression and low self-esteem originating in the patient’s lack of proper
mirroring by his mother. In other words, Mr. Z’s arrogance signified a failure of
normal development in the “grandiose sector” of the self due to his mother’s never
having appreciated Mr. Z for himself, but only as a selfobject serving her needs,
a reversal of the appropriate parent-child relationship. As long as his defensive
grandiosity was dominant, Mr. Z could not properly make the idealizing connection
to a male figure that he needed to be healed. But once Kohut properly understood
and explained Mr. Z’s arrogance, Mr. Z was free to idealize Kohut, and, through
that idealization, slowly to incorporate the selfobject analyst, that is, to make
the functions that Kohut was carrying out for him become part of him. According to
Kohut, he learned later that the second analysis really had been helpful: Mr. Z
was happily married, and was regarded as outstandingly successful in his chosen
career.
Was Kohut Mr. Z?
Recall that Ernest Wolf said Kohut “was vulnerable, and needed constant mirroring”
(personal communication, September 1, 1997), and that Paul Ornstein remembered
Kohut as, “distant, uncaring about others, highly narcissistic. And of course, in
that sense, narcissistic he was. . . . he was extremely sensitive and vulnerable,
so he protected himself” (personal communication, August 29, 1997). Clearly,
Kohut’s interest in narcissism was not just theoretical, but personal. With that
in mind, and knowing that some of Freud’s “cases” were really self-analyses
ascribed to fictitious patients, I wondered about the faint rumors among self
psychologists that Mr. Z may have been Kohut himself. A number of Kohut disciples,
seemingly concerned about wounding Kohut’s narcissism posthumously, proved
reluctant to discuss that question, but eventually, some in Kohut’s inner circle
found my inquiries worthy of reply.
According to Paul Stepansky, who collaborated in the postmortem publication of
Kohut’s final book, “Betty [his wife], and Tom [his son] confirmed to me that
Kohut was Mr. Z” (personal communication, December 9, 1996). On hearing
Stepansky’s testimony, Ernest Wolf, Kohut’s close friend and collaborator, agreed
that Kohut must have been Mr. Z:
For one thing, there are many parallels between Mr. Z’s case and Kohut’s own
biography. Like Mr. Z, Kohut’s father was absent [he was away at war], and after
returning was chronically depressed. Also, Kohut was not allowed to go to school
with other children, but was educated at home by a tutor who may have been the
camp counselor in the Mr. Z case history. Anyway, I long ago accepted that Mr. Z
was Kohut’s self-analysis, even before the controversy. Freud did it all the time.
I never even needed to ask him. (personal communication, September 1, 1997)
Paul Tolpin, who was one of Kohut’s analysands, and who, along with Michael Basch,
John Gedo, Arnold Goldberg, David Marcus, and Paul Ornstein, attended chapter-by-
chapter readings of Kohut’s first book in progress, had this to say:
I think it’s highly likely that he was [Mr. Z]. In fact years ago, before anybody
was talking about it, I realized from things he had said about himself that it did
sound like him. He had let things drop that sounded so much like Mr. Z. He had an
analysis with Ruth Eissler in Chicago and hated it, and the only other analysis he
had after that was with himself. He spoke about being a lonely child, and how
important his tutor was to him. That tutor was like the camp counselor in Mr. Z.
My wife [Marian Tolpin], and Ernie [Wolf], and I got together one night and
somehow it all came out that each of the three of us already had been thinking
that it was a possibility. There were so many points of convergence between his
story and Mr. Z’s. He may have put together parts of himself with parts of
somebody else. It is hard to think of Kohut tasting his own feces which is part of
that case too. . . . I guess we don’t like to think of that in our leaders. They
should be healthy people who understand the ill.
Some people feel that it was improper to use himself and to say that he had
discovered that in other people, but Freud also created things right out of his
own development. Like when he peed in the pot in his father’s bedroom, and the
father said “You’ll never grow up to be a decent man,” and that became castration
anxiety. I don’t know that men do have that kind of castration anxiety. It’s
possible, but it doesn’t come up in patients of mine who focus on that
specifically.
Whether all the details are correct or whether he intensified the case to get
across the desperateness of this poor man in order to demonstrate his theory, I
think he was Mr. Z. (personal communication, September 10, 1997).
Paul Ornstein, a member, along with Tolpin, of the early Kohut group, edited and
wrote the introductions for volumes of Kohut’s papers. He and Kohut worked
together closely. This is what he thought of the Kohut-Mr. Z connection:
Many analysts before, including Freud and Anna Freud, have presented self-analyses
as if they came from patients. When someone finds certain constellations, genetic
or dynamic, as a result of self-analysis, he is bound to see them also in other
people. Also, Kohut had a case from a German analyst that he wanted to use in
Restoration of the Self. At the last minute, the German analyst changed his mind,
and refused to let Kohut publish the case, so Kohut used Mr. Z. But Kohut burned
his letters before his death, so now we will never know.
In any case, for me it is irrelevant. The speculation is that the first analysis
was Kohut’s analysis with Ruth Eissler in Chicago, and the second, his own, but
what is important to me is not whether Kohut was Mr. Z—although he may have been—
but extracting the essence of the meaning of the comparison of the two analyses. I
think that the meaning of the nature of the interpretation of the dream in the
first and the second is the clinching aspect of what sort of changes he arrived at
in his theory. That is, rather than seeing the dream as a defense against oedipal
feelings, he felt at that moment that it was a self protection against
overstimulation.
And yet, the need for the gift from the father—because that is a theory of his
also, how to have masculine substance in yourself—and the recapturing of the
relationship with the father that time at the ski resort, seemed to describe how
he saw psychoanalysis and what it can do, and what the transference is all about.
So, very sketchily, the dream is what he saw as describing the essential
difference in the two analyses. Also, the other major point related to it was that
rather than seeing what Mr. Z presented as defensive, seeing it as expressing what
he experienced. And that is a major difference. (personal communication, August
29, 1997)
Later, Ornstein went on to say that,
If a theory is going to be good, it has to come from within, from the authenticity
and validity at the personal level. The analysts who live on are the ones whose
contribution definitely occurred through self-analysis. (personal communication,
August 31, 1997)
On that point, Ernest Wolf told me that,
The ideas of a certain theorist—I won’t say who it is, but you can probably guess
[I could not guess]—were received this way by the other analysts: “Ah, yes. That
sounds just like many of my patients.” But Kohut’s ideas were received like this:
“Ah, yes. That reminds me of myself. Do you see the difference in that? Kohut’s
ideas were alive because they came from within, from deep self-analysis. (personal
communication, September 1, 1997)
Given these opinions from some of the people closest to him, I conclude that Kohut
was Mr. Z, and that the watershed “case” in self psychology was not work with a
patient, but Kohut’s personal confession of his struggles to comprehend, and treat
his own “narcissistic personality,” which manifested in such “symptoms” as
unrelenting needs to excel professionally, a biting loneliness even when
surrounded by friends, an unremitting desire to be always the center of attention,
surrounded by admirers, and, as we shall see, a urgent need to define
psychoanalysis not as an art, but as a science.

Why Did Kohut Need Mr. Z?

If the important and vital ideas in psychology always come from self-analysis, as
Ornstein and Wolf said, then why would Kohut dissimulate the source of his
theories? Since it was widely known that a chief source of Freud’s theories was
his own self-analysis, and since, as Jung observed, “in psychology the means by
which you . . . observe the psyche is the psyche itself . . . the observer is the
observed . . . psyche is not only the object but also the subject of our science”
(1935/1980, pp. 125-126), then why not, in the manner of a mystic making a
religious confession, simply proclaim, “I was moved by my own pain to seek, and
this is what I found”?
In the first place, Kohut would have been uncomfortable showing the wounded side
of himself. He had always hidden his Jewishness, certainly, for a boy from Vienna,
a kind of psychic wound. Even after arriving in Chicago, he went to great lengths
of deceit and concealment to keep colleagues from learning that he was a Jew; most
of them never found out (Strozier, 1985). Further, his persona was the antithesis
of a wounded man. The public Kohut was a man about town, cosmopolitan, energetic,
suave, and charismatic—a literate, artistic, bon vivant—and all this while
amassing an impressive reputation as a scholar, psychoanalyst, and psychodynamic
theoretician. How could he have endured undermining that facade with admissions of
masturbating to fantasies of drinking urine as a sex slave? Thus, ironically,
Kohut’s own narcissistic personality, the very ailment which he claimed to have
treated successfully in the case of Mr. Z, impeded a confession of the real source
of his metapsychology: self-analysis.
But, one might ask, could not Kohut have left out the most embarrassing details of
the case and then offered it as self-analysis? For him that would have been
difficult, for omitting data would not have been “scientific,” and the compulsion
to see psychoanalysis as a science runs through Kohut’s writing like a red thread.
There were no omissions. Kohut reported every last detail as if Mr. Z’s case
history really were a scientific document, but then took the greatest measures to
dissemble, including offering subsequent reflections on the case of Mr. Z, written
years later, in which he further underscored that he and Mr. Z were two different
people:
I believe no perceptive analyst will have any difficulty understanding why I was
so consistent, in my demand that Mr. Z. face his Oedipus complex; why with
increasing firmness I rejected the reactivation of his narcissistic attitudes,
expectations, and demands. (1984, p. 88)
As I see it, excursions into psychobiography—like this look at Kohut—and the
sister of psychobiography, case analysis, are not science, but occasions for a
kind of subjective speculation that may be more or less informed. From that
viewpoint, case analysis is a kind of imaginal activity. In good clinical work, a
hermeneutic feedback loop may help keep the therapist’s fantasies on a track that
really does somehow relate to the patient, but working with such conjectures
always will entail traversing slippery slopes of interpretation that are more
appropriate to literary exegesis than to anything that can be called scientific.
Of course in the postmodern view, even science no longer is considered
“objective,” since no methodology can eliminate completely the personal components
that influence what is studied and how (Polanyi, 1958), but still, the humanities
and the sciences normally are considered as occupying different portions of the
subjectivity-objectivity spectrum. Kohut knew that; nevertheless, for him, it was
extraordinarily urgent that self psychology be situated firmly within the
precincts of science. Kohut desired that psychoanalytic practice be based upon a
fixed methodology which could be practiced by any competent analyst more or less
equally well, and he demanded a strict definition of what constituted a
psychoanalytic “cure,” that is, he wanted psychoanalysis to be science, not
poetics.
In the age of Freud, as I have suggested, the authority of thought had a dominance
which today few would assign it, and so one readily understands that, from Freud’s
perspective, psychoanalysis, if it were to be widely accepted, had to seem
scientific. Further, we have seen that Freud, doubting that he had sufficient
credentials or practical knowledge to make a success as a physician, wanted his
new creation, in which he did hope to make a career, to appear to be a form of
medicine. Years later, his guilty ambivalence about crediting psychoanalysis with
a medical status it really did not deserve moved him, I believe, to write his 1926
essay, The Question of Lay Analysis, a vigorous defense of a non-medical member of
the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society who was being prosecuted for quackery. In
that treatise, Freud wrote,
After forty one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge tells me that I have
never really been a doctor in the proper sense . . . I have no knowledge of having
had any craving in my early childhood to help suffering humanity . . . . I passed
my medical examinations, but I took no interest in anything to do with medicine
till the teacher whom I so deeply respected [Ernst von Brücke] warned me that in
view of my impoverished material circumstances I could not possibly take up a
theoretical career. (1926/1969, pp. 104-105)
Hence, we understand that the scientific status Freud sought for psychoanalysis
was partly a product of his historico-cultural milieu, and partly of his need to
legitimize a faltering career. In short, Freud had invented a new product,
psychoanalysis; then he needed to sell it. Advertising the product as
“scientific,” and himself as a scientist, was the best sales pitch, both for the
product and for himself.
But why did Kohut want psychoanalysis to be strictly a science? His career was not
faltering; on the contrary, he was a star. Further, the 1970s marked an apogee of
existential-humanism which would have been glad to accept the selfobject concepts
of self psychology not as science, but as an important insight into the human
dilemma of desiring autonomy while being deeply dependent upon others. It might be
argued that Kohut’s background was in the science of neurology, and that his later
training had been at the Chicago Institute where the connection between medicine
and psychoanalysis was taken for granted, so that Kohut was just doing what he had
been trained to do: science. But that won’t wash. After all, his challenge to
Freud was a radical departure from both his training and, in some ways, his self-
interest; if he could do that, he certainly could have left behind the rest of his
professional indoctrination.
One perspective on this question involves a bit of history from the Freud-Jung-
Adler era. When Adler defected from the circle of loyalists around Freud by
proposing that feelings of inferiority were as basic, or perhaps more basic, to
human motivation than Freud’s drives, Freud’s grandiosity drove him to respond
with a thinly disguised ad hominem attack. Seizing upon a statement of Adler’s
that he (Adler) could not live forever in Freud’s shadow, Freud put all the
motivation for Adler’s defection in oedipal conflict terms, and left no room for
the possibility that Adler’s ideas might contain valuable insights. Thus, for
Freud, as soon as Adler’s ideas could be psychoanalyzed, they no longer had value
as “science.” Kohut was aware of this story; he referred to it in his last book
(1984). We have seen that Kohut went to lengths to obscure his Jewish background,
and to falsify the personal origins of his self psychology. I believe that Kohut
wanted to keep the intimate origins of his theory secret because he feared being
exposed as a Jew (wounded man), and as a neurotic (wounded man) who had
masturbated compulsively, eaten his own feces, and fantasized being humiliated at
the hands of women. His urbane, masterful persona was, in Jungian terminology,
compensatory to those other sides of his personality, serving both to conceal and
to attempt to bridge an unusually severe split between ego and psyche. If Kohut
could establish that psychoanalytic self psychology was science, that is, proclaim
that his metapsychology existed objectively, regardless of its origins in his own
(from his point of view, neurotic) personality, then his own subjectivity would
never have to be disparaged—as Adler’s had been by Freud—nor even come under
investigation and scrutiny. Thus, for Kohut, scientific objectivity could function
as a cloak for his own personality about which he was so unusually ashamed.
Kohut knew that psychoanalysis could not really be science. In fact, tacitly
acknowledging that, he attempted to invent a new classification, the “scientific
humanities” (1980, p. 504), which would more plausibly contain his work while
still providing some of the camouflage of scientific objectivity. He knew that
works in the humanities were studied, and often to some extent evaluated, with
reference to the personalities of their creators (1978c, pp. 908 ff.). If self
psychology were seen not to be science, but personal confession, Kohut, possibly
largely unconsciously, feared that 1) his work would be debased by its association
to the covert aspects of his wounded selfhood; and 2) that the more questionable
aspects of his conduct and personality would come to light. For a proud man like
Kohut, whose self-esteem depended upon his image of mastery, superiority, and
power, that would have been a narcissistic injury beyond toleration.
I believe that this analysis finds support in the unusual vehemence with which
Kohut, in his last, posthumously published work, stated his demand that workers in
science not be subjected to psychoanalytic investigation, nor their work evaluated
with regard to their personal motivations. After admitting, albeit reluctantly,
that one’s experience of a work of art or literature might be enriched by learning
about its creator, he went on to assert that,
The motivations and purposes of the scientist are, as far as our judgment of the
value of his contribution is concerned, not only irrelevant but to be actively
excluded from consideration. However challenging it may be to study the
personality of a scientist, whether as the investigation of the personality of a
specific individual or a contribution to our understanding of human creativity,
his work must ultimately be judged on its intrinsic merits alone. Whatever the
personal reasons for undertaking a scientific task might have been, as far as
science is concerned, it is only the accuracy, truth, and relevance of the result
that ultimately count. . . . Scientific work, including work in psychology in
general and psychoanalysis in particular, must be judged on its intrinsic merits,
that is, with regard to its explanatory power. The personality, the mental state,
the specific motivations of the contributor should not influence our judgment
about the value of the theories and findings presented to us. (1984, pp. 34-35,
emphasis mine)
One subtlety here is this: after laboriously staking out a new category for
psychoanalysis four years earlier as a part of the “scientific humanities,” here,
without even an attempt at justification, he finessed that classification, simply
putting “work in psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular” back into
the realm of “scientific work.” For a man who was so careful with words, and
usually so logically consistent, this is quite an oversight. More evidence, it
seems to me, for the proposition that Kohut needed self psychology to be science.
Why is this important? Does it matter whether Kohut’s theories belong to science
or the humanities, or whether they originated in observations of others or in
self-analysis? Is it not enough that Kohut’s metapsychology, like that of Freud
and Jung before him, has been accepted as valid by many intelligent and
trustworthy psychotherapists who appreciate self psychology for its theoretical
elegance, and what they consider its apparent effectiveness as a therapeutic
modality? In the chapter to follow, I will go into those questions further by
examining the relationship between psychological theory and the practice of
psychotherapy, with particular reference to the possible costs and possible
benefits of cognitive commitments to metapsychological theory as the basis for
work in psychotherapy.

CHAPTER III
ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PSYCHOTHERAPY
AND METAPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Regarding Analytic Objectivity

In the postmodern understanding, objectivity is a fantasy, and truth is a fiction.
The observer is not separate from the observed. Moreover, a particular scientific
instrument, or a particular theory influences, even dictates, what observations
are made, so that observed “facts” really are artifacts. The story is told of a
man who loses his house key. He is discovered looking for it under a streetlamp by
another man who begins helping in the search. A long time passes without success.
“Are you sure this is where you dropped it?” the helper finally asks.
“No,” replies the first man. “I dropped it over there, but light is better here.”
In psychology, we see what we see in the light of one theory or another, and we
may fail to see what we fail to see because the theory we are using does not shed
light there. Pretending to a kind of agnostic objectivity by claiming to believe
in no theory at all does not avail, for that also is a point of view. When
imaginal psychologists, for example, reject classical Jungian dream interpretation
—which, justifiably in my view, they reproach as mired in hackneyed
interpretations and reductionistic conventions—in favor of letting the multitude
of images speak for themselves, that also is a point of view: one that presupposes
that images can speak for themselves. James Hillman himself, the originator of the
archetypal approach, admitted that archetypal psychologists base their
observations on a set of tenets:
The stubborn refusal to budge from apodictic assertions like stick to the image
and all is fantasy shows a stiff-necked pride within archetypal psychology. It
takes its own tenets as commandments given from the mountain. (1992, p. 125)
But then, in his next paragraph, he strove to put the tenets of archetypal
psychology in a separate category from all other tenets:
The tenets to which archetypal psychology clings make it not only incapable of
believing in the theories and findings of other psychologies, they also make
belief itself impossible. To believe in a fantasy is delusion; to believe in an
image, idolatry. So belief itself must go, not merely its contents. (p. 125)
Now the proposition that somehow this one particular mode of thought can insist
apodictically upon its own ideas while, at the same time standing outside of
itself, seeing itself as fantasy, seems to me to be a fantasy worth noticing. In a
sense, this proposition feels like a latter-day extension of the argument of
Husserl (1913/1990), who attempted to provide a logical basis for a “pure
psychology,” that would limit its purview to unadulterated phenomenological
observations of the data of subjective experiences without necessarily ascribing
meaning to those experiences. The observations would be carried out by
psychologists who adopted the attitude of “detached and disinterested” beholders
of the mental life of their subjects. Still, it seems to me, that Husserl’s
suggested outlook, a kind of knowledgeable naivete, also is a theory—the theory
that a human being through adopting an intentional attitude, or following a
purposeful procedure may obtain freedom from all assumptions about causes and
consequences—an so, by its own theoretical weight, that outlook forecloses any
possibility of an authentic naivete, that is, one that would be only
phenomenological. Besides, in the light of Barratt’s, observation, in my view
undisputable, that the “‘I’ of enunciation never thinks just what it thinks it
thinks, and never simply is what it thinks it is” (supra), who exactly would be
Husserl’s pure psychologists? Who would be making those allegedly dispassionate
observations, immune even from prejudices hidden unwittingly behind the repression
barrier, prejudices even more likely to weigh upon the supposedly impartial scales
of investigation than consciously held opinions, for which at least some knowing
compensation could be made? In this regard, I find myself in agreement with
Hillman (1975) who wrote that “phenomenology stops short in its examination of
consciousness, failing to realize that the essence of consciousness is fantasy
images” (p. 138). To that I would add that the inevitable presence of those
fantasy images of which the supposed “pure psychologist” is not even consciously
aware is what most limits the usefulness of approaching psyche by imagining that
one may “bracket” one’s personal, embodied point of view. It seems to me that a
psychologist does better when admitting that, contrary to Husserl’s concept, there
are no dispassionate observers, and no dispassionate observations; it is precisely
the personally felt inward suffering of such subjective experiences as desire,
fear, existential anxiety, and perplexity, and not their “pure” phenomenology,
that need the attention of psychotherapists.
Since, in Husserl’s (1913/1990) schema, knowing one’s own consciousness was the
only “fact” about which one could be certain, he based his method of psychological
investigation upon the procedure of beginning with the first person. By eschewing
all presuppositions, he claimed, one could strip away the influence of the objects
of experience, arriving at the intrinsic, base-line reality of the mental
processes—the so-called “objective functions”—that underlay consciousness. Once
having come into contact with the objective functions of one’s own first person
mentation, thereby gaining awareness of the “logical structures” that produce
meanings from what he considered to be the raw material of perceptions, one could,
by means of “transcendental intersubjectivity,” extrapolate that awareness to gain
conjectural knowledge of the essential consciousness of other people. Husserl’s
first step, the eschewing of all presuppositions, was what he called “epoche,” or
“bracketing,” that is, setting one’s own point of view aside.
Now Hillman’s (1975) statement that phenomenology fails understand that the
substance of consciousness is fantasy images, implies, as I understand it, that
Husserl was lost in his own fantasy images—images of Promethean intellectual
comprehension, for example—and, that being lost in them, he was unaware that they
even existed. Thus, Husserl’s “pure psychology,” which he cleverly, if somewhat
obscurely, justified with logical arguments, cannot be said to be in any way
“objective,” or even, in my view, to be particularly conscious. His pure
psychology is not conscious because it is based on the ignis fatuus that a method
or systematic procedure can lead to objective understanding of one’s own mental
structures, and, by means of extrapolation, the mental structures of others. As
Hillman said,
We must know the archetypal substructures which govern our reactions; we must
recognize the Gods and the myths in which we are embroiled. Without this
awareness, our behaviour becomes wholly mythic and consciousness a delusion.
(1979, p. x)
Thus, the only possibility of human objectivity, in Hillman’s terms, would be to
know completely the “archetypal substructures” underlying our lives. But is this
possible? And even if it were possible, the Gods themselves were never
“objective”—indeed their myths are filled with desire, sexual passion, conflict,
favoritism, jealousy, and revenge—therefore, in fully seeing those archetypal
substructures, we would find ourselves to be archetypally subjective, not
objective “pure psychologists” à la Husserl.
Jung said that he considered his contribution to psychology to be his “subjective
confession,” but then, unfortunately in my view, went on to imply that “an
objective psychology” could be attained:
It is my personal psychology, my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do.
I admit that I see things in such and such a way. . . . So far as we admit our
personal prejudice, we are really contributing towards an objective psychology.
(1935/1980. p. 125)
But to admit one’s personal prejudices, one must first be aware of them, so Jung’s
“subjective confession” implies that he knew his personal prejudices. However,
according to Noll’s biographies (1994, 1997) of Jung, his claim to a personally
individuated consciousness, that is, to self awareness, was, in Hillman’s sense,
also a delusion, since, paradoxically, Jung was seemingly unaware of the Dionysian
reenactment, complete with ritualized polygamy, that he created around himself,
and in which he himself was embroiled.
Like Dionysus at the center of his orgiastic mystical cult, Jung’s influence
shattered the bonds of ordinary social life. The daughters, and occasionally the
sons, of many prominent families left their homes, their parents, and their
spouses to live close to Jung and to “be in analysis.” Many never returned,
becoming like the maenads surrounding Dionysus. As if fashioned by a twentieth
century version of the Greek god of fertility, ritual dance, and mysticism, Jung’s
therapy aimed at producing the ecstatic experience of standing outside of oneself
(the transcendent function), and at engendering enthusiasm (feeling the Self
within). And, as if Jung’s clinical work were a reenactment of the Dionysian
mystery, often the devotee (analysand) and the god (Jung) became identical, merged
in the alchemical bath of hermaphroditic union, and often, according to Noll
(1997) in the non-alchemical bedsheets of copulatory union too.
So it was not just the intellectualism of Husserl that fell short of noticing
fantasy images. Apparently, even such a famous imaginal psychologist as Jung could
not keep track of his own data. Similarly, the fantasy of “objectivity,” which
seems an irresistible siren song to psychologists, whom one imagines should know
better, runs through most, if not all, clinical metapsychologies, albeit often in
disguise. Simply to conduct a relationship with another human being, using all of
oneself subjectively, and allowing the depth of that relationship to serve as the
model for, as well as the experience of, healing seems too obvious, too
unsophisticated, too simpleminded, too “unprofessional,” and perhaps, too
dangerous. The clinician demands theories, categories, expertise. In other words,
the clinician dearly wants a vantage somehow above the fray. If epoche—”pure”
psychological objectivity—is not possible, then at least the therapist wants
insulation, distance, perspective: “clinical objectivity,” which, the fantasy
goes, will be obtained through studying theory and technique, and perhaps by being
analyzed oneself.
But let us assume that: 1) epoche is possible, and that 2) epoche itself is not
really a psychological theory—although of course it is one—but more, as Husserl
imagined, a means. Assume, that is, that one may step outside of ordinary
engagement in the desiderata of human existence in favor of a non-judgmental,
“pure” phenomenological remove. Assume that it is possible, that is, to see a
patient as if knowing absolutely nothing about that person. Why then must a
psychotherapist bring any psychological theory at all into the consulting room?
Why carry such a burden? Why, for example, should I call the feelings that my
patient has for me a transference, with all that implies, and the feelings I have
for him or her a countertransference? Why not just call such feelings love? After
all, love is love, isn’t it? And if those feelings in the consulting room aren’t
love, then why are the feelings between husband and wife love?
This question is important, because adherence to theories, even seemingly useful
ones, has a powerful downside. Like the man searching for his house key, one tends
to explore where the streetlamp of theory casts its illumination, and to avoid
looking in the shadows where things are more obscure. As this sometimes is said, a
person with a hammer is always looking for nails to pound. If one’s theories
become pet theories, then not only does too much of the looking take place under
the streetlamp, and too little in the shadows, but even worse, one no longer even
notices that there are shadows. In animal studies, this is called “premature
cognitive commitment.” For instance, if houseflies are born in a jar with a glass
cover they will at first try to fly out, but soon they will stop trying. Later, if
the glass cover is removed, almost all of the flies will remain within the jar,
trapped as if by their own assumptions. If kittens, raised in a room with only
vertical lines, later are put in a room with horizontal obstacles, the kittens
will not see them, and will suffer constant collisions. Kittens raised in a room
with only horizontal lines suffer the same fate if put in a room with vertical
obstacles (Chopra, 1993).
Because the psychoanalytical situation is never one in which an objective observer
(the analyst) studies the subject (the patient), but rather an ongoing experience
of mutual communication within an intersubjective space (see Stolorow, 1994a), and
because this communication takes place on many levels simultaneously, some of
which are remote from conscious awareness, the analyst’s premature cognitive
commitments are certain to be communicated, at least on some levels, to the
patient. For instance, the therapist may unknowingly lean forward with interest
when the patient mentions a dream, wordlessly communicating that dreams are
important, and might unmindfully yawn when a problem at work is mentioned,
indicating that quotidian troubles are unimportant. Once communicated, the
prejudicial effects of the analyst’s cognitive biases can be severely compounded
by the patient’s inadvertent complicity, intentional connivance, or both. For
example, it is well known that the patients of Freudian analysts have “Freudian
dreams,” the patients of Jungians have “Jungian dreams,” and so forth. At that
point, the entire analytic process has become compromised. No longer is the
“analysis” an examination and deliberation of the patient’s material; it has
become a process by which the analyst, probably unwittingly, seeks to confirm
personal prowess as a healer, and to corroborate the efficacy of the pet theory.
The danger of falling into premature cognitive commitment is exacerbated by the
phenomenon of therapists being attracted to theories that suit their own
personalities. Perhaps a particular theory has been helpful in dealing with one’s
own problems, or somehow the theory somehow just “makes sense,” that is, it seems
intuitively correct, and seems to evoke immediate, and noncritical, substantiation
within one’s own circumstances. In either case, evidence for the theory may
accumulate easily, while evidence against it may go all but unnoticed. Once that
starts to happen, the theory, if not yet a “pet,” certainly has its nose in the
door, and may soon be invited to come inside and jump up onto the sofa.
Schools of analysis have evolved through clinical experience being interpreted in
various ways, and “as with schismatic groups in religion, through a recognition
that there has been some serious omission, or overemphasis, in the thinking of
other schools” (Casement, 1985, p. 348). At first, the correction is helpful, but
then, “the part-truth, newly highlighted by the fresh thinking, all too often
comes to be elevated as being the truth” (p. 348). For example, Kohut’s idea of a
bipolar self, which he saw as supraordinate to the mental apparatus—ego, id, and
superego—of classical drive theory, even if not “correct,” certainly served as a
welcome and useful antidote to the hegemony of Freudian doctrine which had by then
become gospel, used by some analysts to explain everything. Unfortunately, Kohut’s
work, which at first had been aimed at treating a particular kind of problem—
narcissistic disorders—that he believed was not effectively addressed by drive
theory, also has evolved into a comprehensive metapsychology that now is used by
some self psychologists to explain, and to treat, everything from severe psychosis
to drug addiction. If Freud’s theory of intrapsychic conflict could not explain
everything, why should Kohut’s theory of developmental deficits be able to explain
everything?
Even in the unlikely event that a theory could explain everything, such a theory
would still have a downside if it became a pet theory. Recall Kohut’s saying:
“many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned
out . . . that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound”
(pp. 48-49, supra). I understand this as meaning that his rightness was
theoretical, hence shallow, whereas the patients’ rightness was a deep inner
knowledge of what their lives were about, and what was needed for healing. Those
in clinical work who are accustomed to applying theory and technique to a patient
as if applying wrenches to an automobile engine—the right wrench properly wielded
will turn the bolt—might witness more of that inner wisdom if they remained open
to noticing it. Attachment to theory and technique gets in the way of that
openness.
If the analytic situation is regarded as an intersubjective field, a system of
reciprocal mutual influence (see Stolorow, 1994b), then healing depends upon
relatedness and upon bilateral communication within that field, not the analyst’s
proffering of “right” interpretations. In fact, interpretations, even if they are
“right,” even if they could explain everything, often have more power to wound
than to heal. Theoretical interpretations, unless they also happen to communicate
something necessary to the relationship between analyst and analysand, can even be
felt as psychic rape. Winnicott (1965) believed that often a beginning analyst
will do better work than years later after learning more and becoming settled in
theory. The neophyte does not mind going slowly; after all, he or she is learning,
and still has what Zen Buddhism calls the beginner’s mind, an ability always to
see things as fresh and new. Later, having more patients and more erudition,
he begins to make interpretations based not on material supplied on that
particular day by the patient but on his own accumulated knowledge or his
adherence for the time being to a particular group of ideas. This is of no use to
the patient. The analyst may appear to be very clever, and the patient may express
admiration, but in the end the correct interpretation is a trauma, which the
patient has to reject because it is not his. (p. 51)
The correct interpretation is a trauma!
Reliance on theory carries with it another pitfall. Since theory is a
generalization, often stated in impersonal, usually academic, jargon, the
adherents of that theory may come to behave as if mere habitual employment of the
detached, apparently disinterested terminology furnished a kind of objectivity or
analytic neutrality. Without even going into the question of how much objectivity
is implied by a term like “borderline personality disorder,” the objective
analyst, in my opinion, is a mirage; there is no analytic neutrality. Husserl’s
“pure psychology” notwithstanding, the analyst always brings a self of his or her
own into the room, and that self has no way of being neutral.
Stolorow (1994c) offered some useful illustrations of supposed analytical
neutrality which, in his view, turn out to be far from neutral. For example, Freud
(1915, cited by Stolorow, 1994c, p. 146) stated that “treatment must be carried
out in abstinence,” by which he meant that gratifying the patient’s desires would
interfere with the analytic goal of bringing repressed instinctual drives into
awareness. Freud’s stance of abstinence often is equated, particularly by Freudian
analysts, with neutrality. But is it neutral? According to Stolorow, no, because
for the analyst who practices it, “abstinence is an expression of the deeply held
belief system to which he adheres in conducting his analytic work [including]
basic assumptions about human nature and psychological illness and health” (p.
146). Further, from the point of view of the patient, abstinence would never feel
neutral. Who would experience intentional frustration of one’s needs and desires
as neutral? According to Stolorow, such inflexible abstinence produces hostility
and conflicts that are “more an artifact of the therapist’s stance than a genuine
manifestation of the patient’s primary pathology” (p. 146). Similarly, Freud’s
idea that the analyst should appear opaque and anonymous to his patients
contradicts the “interactive nature of the analytic process. Everything the
analyst does or says—including most especially the interpretations he offers—are
products of his psychological organization, disclosing central aspects of his
personality to the patient” (p. 146). Thus, the “opacity” of the analyst is no
more than an unrealizable chimera perpetuated in an authoritative sounding theory
that has little relation to what really happens in the consulting room. It is a
fancy of the analyst, aimed at insulating his or her ego against the potentially
fearful knowledge that psychoanalysis is a two-way street, and that the analyst
will be seen and known as well as the patient. Often the opaque persona, clearly a
defense mechanism, is rationalized by the claim that by remaining neutral the
analyst is better facilitating the formation of transferences, but that won’t
wash. Transferences form both way always; they do not need facilitation, but
comprehension.
To take this a little further, wanting to seem objective or scientific by adhering
to a strictly organized theory as a basis for psychotherapy leads many therapists
into the preposterous position of saying one thing when they speak or write
theoretically, and doing quite another when they practice. When Freud wrote that
the analyst should be opaque to his patients, showing them nothing of himself, but
only acting as a mirror for their behaviors, that was his theoretical stance, and
that recommendation has spawned several generations of obedient Freudians who
decline even to shake hands with their patients, much less meet them outside of
the consulting room. For instance, in Fairbairn’s analysis of Guntrip, a younger
colleague, Fairbairn never once shook hands with Guntrip until the conclusion of
their work together, and then only at Guntrip’s behest (Guntrip, 1975).
Parenthetically, Fairbairn seems to have been a schizoid type (see Grotstein &
Rinsley, 1994), for whom impersonality and emotional abstinence would have been as
natural as fleas on a dog anyway; thus, his adoption of the analytic opacity part
of Freudian theory clearly was ego syntonic. In practice, however, Freud himself
often met his analysands socially, even to the extent of going on holiday with
some of them, leaving us to wonder how many of his cures really were analytic, as
he used that concept in his stated theories, and how many were so-called
“transference cures”—much disparaged by orthodox psychoanalysts—produced, not by
making the unconscious conscious, but via the stimulating influence of the great
man’s personality upon the persons of his patients.
Why then, would Freud say one thing and do another? If Freud really was treating
patients by spending hours in their bedrooms conversing with charm and courtliness
(the young women), or drinking port and smoking cigars after dinner (the men), why
would he promulgate a theoretical approach that demanded analytic abstinence? I
think the answer to that question should be stated in three parts. First, the
Freudian part: because “the ‘I’ of enunciation never . . . simply is what it
thinks it is” (Barratt, supra). Second, the Kohutian part: because his patients
were selfobjects for him, but he shied away from admitting that to himself, that
is, to use the pop-psych jargon, Freud was “in denial” of his selfobject needs.
Third: sometimes he really did practice abstinence. Lest this be taken as yet
another blow in the barrage of Freud-bashing that now seems de rigueur, let me
hasten to state that I admire Freud’s writings. My point here is not that Freud in
his clinical work said one thing, and did another, but that we all do. And for the
same reasons as Freud. First, we don’t really know who we are, what we stand for,
or what we really are doing (and the more we think we do, the less we really do).
Second, our patients are selfobjects for us whether we can admit that to ourselves
or whether we need to be “in denial.” Third, most of us really do feel theoretical
commitments, and we act in accordance with them some of the time, the rest of the
time often needing to make believe that we are acting in accordance with them.
Kohut moved away from Freudian practice partly in disagreement with the idea that
abstinence was neutrality, but then he also claimed that analytic neutrality was
achievable, defining it as “the responsiveness to be expected, on an average, from
persons who have devoted their life to helping others with the aid of insights
obtained via the empathic immersion into their inner life” (1977, p. 252). Such
responsiveness, in my view, is not neutrality. Like the idea of abstinence, it
also is rooted in a theoretical belief system, albeit one that posits the
analyst’s empathic attunement to the inner life of the patient as the healing
factor in therapy, and the development of a healthy “self” as therapy’s goal.
Further, since, according to Kohut, being seen by means of empathic attunement
will satisfy one of the patient’s deepest desires—the desire to be “mirrored”—how
could an such an analysis be experienced by the patient as a neutral situation?
And how can a therapist constantly stand as if in the shoes of the patient—which
is the working definition of empathic attunement—and still be neutral? It seems to
me that such “neutrality,” like many of the ideas in comprehensive, authoritative
metapsychologies like Kohut’s, is an artifact of language, that is, that it may be
named without really existing at all.
In regard to so-called analytic neutrality, which seems to be a form of Husserlian
“pure psychology” in disguise, I find myself in close accord with Stolorow who
said the following:
To expect that an analyst can be neutral or objective with respect to his
patient's subjectivity, and thereby gaze upon the patient's experience with pure
and presuppositionless eyes, is tantamount to requiring the analyst to eliminate
his own psychological organization from the analytic system. This, in my view, is
an impossible feat, especially when the most powerful expressions of the patient's
subjectivity are directed toward the analyst himself—hardly a disinterested party.
What the analyst can and should strive for in his self-reflective efforts is
awareness of his own personal organizing principles—including those enshrined in
his theories—and of how these principles are unconsciously shaping his analytic
understandings and interpretations. (1994c, p. 147)
That one’s own personal organizing principles are enshrined in one’s theories
means that theory becomes a preservative container for, and a justification for,
the ego defenses that are a part of one’s organizing principles. Ergo a vicious
cycle: the better that a theory serves to justify ego defenses, the less the
person holding it will perceive the theory as personal confession; the less it is
perceived as personal confession—that is, the more the theory is universalized—the
better it serves to justify those ego defenses, and so on.
Since complete awareness of one’s own ego defenses is not possible, in other
words, since no one is “fully analyzed,” a psychological theory is very different
from a scientific theory. A scientific theory may also serve some ego-defensive
purposes, but primarily a good scientific theory is a systemic binding together of
confirmable observations with a view towards verifiable explanations and testable
predictions. A metapsychological theory is, willy-nilly, an enshrinement, an
unconfirmable, almost religious cherishing of one’s own psychology. Psychological
theory, in other words, makes a pet of one’s own inner nature. No wonder
psychologists love their theories!

The Example Of Astrology

Popper (1968) drew sharp distinctions between scientific theories and
psychological ones.
During the Summer of 1919 . . . I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with
these theories [Marx, Freud, Adler] . . . and I began to feel dubious about their
claim to scientific status. . . . Why are they so different from Newton’s theory
and especially from the theory of relativity? . . . It was not my doubting the
truth of these theories which bothered me . . . what worried me was [that]
theories, though posing as sciences, had in fact more in common with primitive
myths than with science: that they resembled astrology more than astronomy. (p.
34)
Popper, of course, meant to derogate what he called “primitive myths,” and
“astrology,” but one need not disparage them to see that myths and astrology are
different in kind from science.
Myths and astrology are much studied by certain clinicians, particularly Jungian
analysts and post-Jungian archetypal psychologists. Knowledge of mythology is said
by such workers to help in doing psychotherapy because, as Jung taught, the
fundamental themes of mythology also are the fundamental themes of human
psychology, that is, the gods and goddess are images of the archetypes—the deepest
patterns of psychic functioning—that manifest in various ways within each of us,
or, as the archetypalists might say, the gods and goddesses are both immanent
within us, and they transcend us. But it may also be that myths and astrology help
in psychotherapy just because they are not science, just because they are not
easily organized or comprehended rationally. In this sense, they are “anti-
theories.” Their very ambiguity fosters what Keats called “Negative Capability,
that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (letter to George and Thomas
Keats, December 21, 1817, cited by Casement, 1995, p. 358). Such a negative
capability, I imagine, is what Bion (1974) meant when he wrote,
Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear
on obscure problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of the light—a
penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight. (p. 37)
Unfortunately, many of those who use astrology and mythology in psychotherapy lose
sight of those repositories of archetypal imagery as reciprocals of the
searchlight, that is, as poetic ways to deliteralize the overwhelmingly literal
weight of metapsychological theory with which all of us psychologists have been
laden. Instead, it is wrongly imagined that astrology and mythology can function
as powerful searchlights in and of themselves. And so, in lieu of a DSM-IV
diagnosis, the therapist will regard the patient as, for example, having a Mars
problem, or needing to survive the Saturn return, and that kind of diagnosis will
be imagined to have some basis in fact. This is reminiscent of nothing so much as
the phrenology of the mid-nineteenth century in which practitioners, after feeling
the bumps on their patients’ heads, referred to plaster busts, aggressively
marketed by the Fowler brothers, Orson and Lorenzo, mapped out with the zones of
the skull that corresponded to self-esteem, intuitive reasoning, will power,
domestic propensities, criminal tendencies, etc. (DiGiustino, 1975).
Besides its obvious appeal to the kind of person whose personal organizing
principles include a need to believe in kismet, and the desire to be able to
predict its vagaries, the dedicated astrologer/psychotherapist finds the “science”
of astrology compelling for three main reasons, I think. First, because no two
people can have exactly the same birth chart, astrology seems to account well for
the observation that everyone is different. Second, astrology has unlimited
explanatory power. Instead of having to say “I don’t know,” the astrologer always
can go to a “deeper” level of analysis, including, recently, analysis of the
effects of distant galaxies, novae, and black holes. Third, casting the birth
chart seems to take therapy out of the realm of intersubjectivity. Instead of
having to measure up to the completely fresh, living situation of two people, both
of whom know nothing, sitting in a room together essentially naked, noticing
thoughts, feelings, and images in the moment, the astrologer has a powerfully
authoritative prop.
Here I am speaking of “serious” astrology, not the kind one reads on the same page
as “Dear Abby” and the comics. The serious astrologer has a computer program to
cast charts and to produce various levels of analysis. Corrections are made for
changes in the calendar. All the trappings of science. Unlike the intuitive
fortune teller who knows full well that the crystal ball is only a colorful
pretext for her visceral insights, the serious astrologer believes that thousands
of years of observations have yielded countless hard data supporting the theory
that positions of the planets and stars influence human character and behavior.
Further, the serious astrologer believes that by learning the techniques of
interpretation implicit in astrological theory—a process requiring years of study,
by the way—one can better understand the needs, desires, struggles and problems of
an individual human being. In short, the serious astrologer/psychotherapist
believes that astrology will help in understanding the emotional problems of
patients, and in providing effective therapy.
Now I will concede that astrology, like mythology, may provide a kind of poetic
language that could be useful in communicating insights otherwise gained. And
certainly I will concede that I am not in a position to decide once and for all if
the theory that one may know anything about another person by looking at a diagram
of planets holds any water or not, although personally I see little difference
between phrenology and astrology. After all, phrenology also had its serious
adherents who went into great “depth” about the zones of the head, and had waiting
rooms filled with patients who presented themselves in all solemnity for
consultations. But my intention here is not to debunk astrology. Rather, I seek to
illustrate that personal needs to believe in one thing or another are the
foundations of psychotherapeutic practice, and that even highly trained, serious,
well-meaning people will claim effectiveness and veracity for their methods
regardless of evidence to the contrary. In other words, I point to the
astrologer/psychotherapist to demonstrate that a clinical metapsychology is much
more a confession of personal organizing principles than an accurate, systematic,
scientific comprehension of anything universally human.
Research into the veridicality of extra-sensory perception such as clairvoyance,
clairaudience, or telepathy, and into such psychokineses such as telekinesis or
the strange rappings, breaking of objects and explosive sounds that Jung (1965)
reported to have occurred around him has always been problematical. Honest studies
have not succeeded in reproducing such phenomena, and most scientists doubt that
they exist. On the other hand, parapsychologists, who often have more of a
cognitive commitment to belief in such phenomena—perhaps, for example, they have
seen ghosts, or, like Jung, have personally experienced other seemingly
supersensory events—will argue that the very materialistic attitude of the
scientists creates the difficulty in reproducing the phenomena. In other words, it
is argued that an attitude of belief is conducive to the occurrence of
supersensory events, and that an attitude of skepticism is discouraging to their
manifestation. This is Catch-22 logic, of course, and makes problematical any
scientific inquiry into the paranormal. However, such difficulties ought not to
apply to an honest investigation of astrology.
If a computer program can cast a birth chart, and if certain interpretations and
predictions traditionally are held to correspond to certain planetary
configurations regardless of the state of mind of the astrologer, then astrology
ought to be accessible to scientific testing. Indeed, many tests have been made,
and most, if not all, indicate that astrology has no predictive validity
whatsoever. For example, Dean (1987) conducted a study in which subjects who
believed that they were receiving a straightforward astrological reading were each
given a birth chart and a detailed written interpretation based upon widely
accepted astrological construals of the particular planetary aspects on the chart.
However, unbeknownst to the group of subjects, only half of the birth charts were
real ones. The other half were prepared with the planets reversed as to meaning,
so that the sun sign was correct, but the planets were in totally incorrect
positions and aspects. For instance, if the real chart contained sun square Mars
(which traditionally is considered to indicate impetuosity), then the reversed
chart was prepared with sun trine Saturn (which is said to indicate cautiousness).
Similarly, extroverted indications were substituted for introverted, forcefulness
for self-effacement, ability for inability, etc. Then, the “astrologer,” telling
each subject that it was necessary to test the chart carefully before the
interpretations could be accepted, asked the subject to rate on a three point
scale (correct, uncertain, incorrect) each of several hundred items in the written
interpretation. The subject was instructed to mark as correct only an
interpretation that was correct both as to meaning and intensity. When finished,
each subject was given the opportunity to change items on the rating scale in
order to resolve any uncertainties or conflicts between one part of the
interpretation or another. Most changed nothing. Finally, each item in the
interpretation was scored as a “hit” only if the subject had marked it as correct,
or a “miss” if the subject had marked it either as uncertain or incorrect. The
results of this trial showed that subjects with reversed charts, ones whose
astrological indications could not have been more wrong, rated them just as highly
as did the subjects with authentic charts: approximately 96% correct.
It should be emphasized that the interpretations given in Dean’s experiment were
not the sort of widely applicable generalities often proffered by newspaper
astrologers, or by sharpie psychics—“interpretations” on the order of “You worry
about money,” or “You are changeable”—but extremely detailed information that
really would indicate profound characterological or temperamental differences. Nor
can examiner influence be implicated as having skewed the study, since an earlier
study based on similar procedures but conducted by mail, produced almost identical
results (Dean and Mather, 1977, cited by Dean, 1987). Further, Dean’s work is
corroborated by numerous other studies. For example, German
psychologist/astrologer Peter Niehenke (1984), gave 3,150 subjects a 500-item
questionnaire designed to test astrological interpretations of planetary aspects.
The results were completely negative; for example, subjects with as many as four
Saturn aspects, which are said to indicate a weighty sense of responsibility and
depressive tendencies, reportedly felt no more depressed or responsible than those
with no Saturn aspects.
Niehenke, who had been using astrology in clinical work, was one of those rare
practitioners who have the courage to test their own theoretical presuppositions
not for comfort, but for validity. Of course, just living in the material world
requires a lot of physical and social “reality testing” of all of us; therefore,
we may assume that we apply strict standards of substantiation to our theoretical
commitments too. However, a study by Glick and Snyder (1986, cited by Dean, 1987)
suggests that most of us do not. It is well known that the choice of questions in
a study strongly influences the outcome. If, for example, an astrological chart
indicates that a person is extroverted, and one wishes to test that finding, one
will ask questions about behavior. The problem is that introverted people
occasionally do extroverted things, and vice versa, so that asking questions about
extroverted activities (“Do you go to parties?”) will tend to confirm
extroversion, and asking questions about introverted activities (“Do you read
books”) will tend to confirm introversion. With that in mind, the researchers
prepared a list of 26 questions which secretly they had divided as slanted towards
confirmation of extroversion, neutral in regard to extroversion, or slanted
towards disconfirmation of extroversion. Next a group composed of astrology
skeptics and astrology believers were asked to test the validity of a birth chart
interpretation which indicated that the subject was highly extroverted. From the
list of 26 questions, each participant was asked to choose 12 with which to test
the subject, who, as a confederate of the researchers, had been coached to answer
the questions in accordance with their bias. According to Dean, both believers and
skeptics chose questions that would confirm their own already preexisting
persuasions, that is, the skeptics chose disconfirmatory questions, and the
believers confirmatory ones. But that was not all. In the case of the skeptics,
the more confirmatory questions they asked—which, since the confederate played
along, increased the amount of confirmation they received—the more highly they
rated the accuracy of the astrological prediction of extroversion. But in the case
of the believers, there was no such correlation. All of them rated the
astrological interpretation either as “accurate,” or “mostly accurate” regardless
of the number of confirmatory questions they posed. In other words, for the
believers, the information they received made no difference in their evaluation of
the validity of astrology. Certainly this is a perfect illustration of premature
cognitive commitment, hardly different from the houseflies who could not escape
from the jar even after the glass cover was removed.
According to Dean (1987), belief in astrology or similar systems of prediction
such as tarot, numerology, and palmistry, all of which have been tested and found
to produce interpretations no better than at the chance level, is not gullibility,
but a misuse of human inference. In other words, since predictions, whatever their
basis, sometimes are correct, one easily infers that the system producing them
must have some predictive power. Such faulty inferences are the beginnings of
faulty premature cognitive commitments. Unfortunately, premature cognitive
commitment often feels good. It relieves the tensions inherent in having to live
with doubts and uncertainties, and, as in the case of an astrologer who earns a
living giving readings, it may help economically. Why should the astrologer,
against all incentives, keep questioning the system? After all, it works . . . all
the way to the bank. As Dean expressed this tendency,
Astrologers take every advantage of their inferential deficiencies. To them
everything is a correspondence and nothing is a coincidence . . . . Thus a
Sagittarian cavalry officer will be seen as confirming astrology (the centaur
symbol of Sagittarius, is half-man, half-horse) even though the occurrence is at
chance level and everything else in his chart says he should be a banker. (pp.
264-265)
The disconfirmatory evidence that he should be a banker simply will be discarded.
Clearly it is not only astrologers, or palm readers who take advantage of
inferential deficiencies. Consider, for example the classical Freudian analyst.
Years of training and a lucrative practice have given this person every reason to
maintain a cognitive commitment to the drive-conflict line. Every now and then the
analyst really does see a patient whose central issues seem to implicate the
oedipal complex. This confirms the Freudian inferences. As for the others: they
are “resisting the transference,” are “unwilling to be helped,” or prove not to be
“good candidates for analysis.”

Does A Psychotherapist Need Theory?

Having seen some of the adverse side of metapsychological theory, it seems all the
more germane to ask: “Why then must a psychotherapist bring any psychological
theory at all into the consulting room? Why carry such a burden?” Of course, being
entirely without a metapsychology may be impossible. Even having a consulting room
at all, and arranging to sit there with a patient, at least implicates the theory
that such an approach will be helpful or useful in some way, and probably entails
a methodology of procedures, limits, and boundaries as well. But this is stating
the negative: we have theories because we cannot not have them. What I wish to
address here is the possible utility of theory. Why, for example, beyond his need
to make a personal confession, would Kohut spend years developing a theory of the
self? Of what use is such a theory?
Perhaps it is of no use at all. That seems to be the argument of Hillman (1975),
who said that psyche, being, as both the object of psychology and its subject, a
sui generis, needs not theories, but ideas, and lots of them. Hence the fierce
attack by Hillman and other archetypalists on the various modes of psychotherapy
based on developmental metapsychologies like Kohut’s, or
the cult of the inner child (Bradshaw) . . . the goodness and creativity of
innocence (Alice Miller) . . . “empirically” based theories of the infantile
psyche (Melanie Klein, Fordham) . . . the birth experience (Grof) . . . the dogma
that regression to childhood is necessary for therapeutic progress. . . .
(Hillman, 1992, p. 128)
Like Freudian theory, such metapsychologies implicate the developmental
presumption that the etiology of adult emotional difficulty lies in early
disturbances to the proper formation of personality. Although they differ in how
treatment should be conducted, each presents itself as a theoretical basis for
insight into emotional disabilities that preclude achieving a happy and fulfilling
modus vivendi. Such disabilities are seen as the sequelae of early disturbances to
personality development, and each metapsychology implies or explicitly suggests
therapeutic methodologies for healing the early wounds that lead to such
disabilities. In contrast, archetypal psychology prefers not to assume a happy and
fulfilling life as the necessary telos of the human career. Hillman (1975)
resisted seeing symptoms as indications of failures in development. Instead, he
recast symptoms as part of the primary data for “soul-making,” a term he borrowed
from Keats. From that perspective, the term “depth psychology” loses its meaning
as a specific branch of psychology, demarcated by theories of personality
development and therapies for treating the eventualities of flawed development, or
even, as for the Jungians, as an approach towards a transcendental connection to a
larger Self. Instead, for the archetypal psychologist, depth psychology denotes
the process of soul-making through soul-searching, that is, through attempts to
perceive the intricacies of life, so that everyday occurrences deepen into soulful
experiences. In that view, therapy is not confined to the consulting room; it is a
process which goes on continually throughout a life so long as sufficient
attention is paid to the profundities and particularities of ordinary events. Thus
arises Hillman’s abhorrence of developmental psychology which sees therapy as
directed towards healing earlier wounds, and his desire to emphasize instead,
such adult complexities as citizenship, language, beauty, sexual imagination
friendship, humor, philosophical reflection, conflict and war, [the] polytheistic
ambiguities [that] constitute the essence of human life and thus of therapy.
(1992, p. 129)
In that conception, it is held not to be important, nor even possible, that a
patient’s experience be understood by means of theories, but that the ideas and
fantasies of both the patient and the therapist be seen, and then perceived as
archetypal, mythic patterns—that is, as larger than either the patient or the
therapist—for, in that process of seeing and perceiving, soul is made. According
to Hillman, the questions “how?” and “why?”—questions at the heart of scientific
theorizing—are inappropriate to psychotherapeutic discourse. In his view, the
important therapeutic questions are “who?” and especially “what?”:
“What?” proceeds straight into an event. The search for “whatness” or quiddity,
the interior identity of an event, its essence, takes one into depth. It is a
question from the soul of the questioner that quests for the soul of the
happening. “What” stays right with the matter, asking it to state itself again, to
repeat itself in other terms, to re-present itself by means of other images. . . .
Why takes one toward explanations or purposes, how takes one toward a set of
conditions, or causes, or solutions, or applications. . . . away from what is at
hand, away from what is present and actually taking place. (1975, p. 138)
Now Hillman’s “what?” is not far from the Greek word qewria, the original source
of our word “theory,” which meant “looking around oneself in the world” or
“contemplation.” Consequently, Hillman’s reproach of metapsychological theorizing
appears to center upon its pretensions towards scientific theorizing, which,
aiming at explanation and prediction—so that, for example, one speaks of powerful
theories—really does have a right to ask “why?” From that prospect, perhaps
psychological theorizing, which is, it seems to me, an inevitable concomitant of
self-reflexive human awareness, needs to be more like “theory” in its qewria
connotation, which would signify more a phenomenological activity than an
explanatory or predictive one.
Of course Hillman, who said: “My books are like war games; I’m attacking and
destroying as many enemies as I can in each book” (1996, December), took a few
potshots at Husserlian phenomenology too. Recall his statement that,
“phenomenology stops short in its examination of consciousness, failing to realize
that the essence of consciousness is fantasy images” (supra). In Hillman’s
archetypal psychology, qewria is applied to the irrational, imaginal, and
especially to the psychopathological side of life. From that outlook,
psychopathology is neither diagnosed nor categorized according to some system of
nosology, in which a set of symptoms indicates a known disease, “depression,” for
instance, which then demands treatment with known modalities, Prozac, for example,
or cognitive therapy. Nor is psychopathology explained by reference to its
etiology. Instead, each “psychopathology” is contemplated (qewria) as a phenomenon
with its own irrational meanings, and its own imaginal actualities asking to be
discovered. “This,” said Hillman, “is what depth psychology has always insisted
upon: . . . Look at the daylight world from the night side, from fantasy and its
archai” (1975, p. 139). As I understand Hillman’s position, he objects to the
questions “how?” and “why?” precisely because they do not take us to the night
side; they are too much about diagnosis and etiology, and not enough about
imagination.
But metapsychological theory, in my experience, does more than just ask “how” and
“why,” albeit those question do sometimes usefully arise. Theorizing provides a
field within which imaginal exploration—including criticism like Hillman’s—may
take place. Without the limits of such a field, investigative inquiry might have
no orientation at all. As architecture critic Robert Campbell (1988) expressed
this,
Creativity without constraints is like moving chess pieces around on your living
room floor. You might come up with a lot of moves, but in the absence of the
chessboard, they wouldn’t be anything you could possibly call creative. (cited in
Schneider, 1990, p. 191)
In that sense, psychological theory provides the chessboard—the framework—on which
movements within the “hermeneutic circle” (Dilthey, 1926/1961) may take place. In
Dilthey’s hermeneutics, the theories of an interpretative activity—history, art,
religion, psychology—are different in kind from the theories of natural science.
In a natural science like mathematics or physics, all the axioms and all their
lawful deductions already exist, archetypally complete. The value of π is still
3.1416 whether anyone notices it or not. But Dilthey’s “cultural sciences” depend
upon lived experience, which is not archetypally complete. The meaning of lived
experience transubstantiates continuously as more experience, moment by moment,
becomes part of the background upon which the present is based. Consequently,
lived experience, although it may recapitulate certain archetypes—fatherhood, for
example, or the wounded healer—is not only archetypal, but also idiopathic. We may
know things about human life in general, but nothing is known about an individual
life until it is lived. The knowing is in the process, that is, the knowing is
hermeneutic knowing. Clearly, the psychoanalyst must draw upon his or her own
cultural background, and conscious awareness in order to understand the patient,
but the theory to which the analyst has been exposed, willy-nilly, is part of that
background. As such, the theory is subject to constant modification and
interpretation, much of it taking place outside of conscious awareness, within
successive hermeneutic cycles.
As in the writing of a novel whose characters have taken on a life of their own,
and so begin to resist domination by the conscious will of their author, the space
demarcated by theory constantly threatens to exceed its author’s purview and
control. Always one feels that there is some understanding that lies just beyond
the horizon of intelligibility so that the theory is alive with potential. It is a
potential space. The need to have such potential spaces as frameworks for
hermeneutics may be seen in the play of quite young children who create elaborate
structures of rules for their games, and then make modifying the rules not just
part of the game, but the best part of it.
The mother-infant observations of Winnicott (1971) suggest that the adult need for
theory as hermeneutic framework is an extension of a tendency that is present at
birth (hence, archetypal):
From the beginning the baby has maximally intense experiences in the potential
space between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived, between
me-extensions and the not-me. This potential space is at the interplay between
there being nothing but me and there being objects and phenomena outside
omnipotent control. . . . The potential space happens only in relation to a
feeling of confidence on the part of the baby, that is, confidence related to the
dependability of the mother-figure . . . confidence being the evidence of
dependability that is becoming introjected. (p. 100)
Winnicott’s notion of the child’s introjection of the dependability of the mother
figure sounds a lot like Kohut’s transmuting internalization of selfobject
functions; however, here the point of greatest interest is not Kohut’s relation to
Winnicott, but the possible utility of theory. Theory is that which contains the
potential space for organized inquiry. With confidence in a theory, one can play
in the potential space; if one loses confidence in the theory, the potential space
collapses, and no further play is possible until a new potential space can be
created. When I say “confidence,” I do not mean confidence that the theory is
“correct,” but confidence that the theory will support further playful exploration
within a matrix that concerns oneself, but which is not altogether about oneself.
To discard theory per se entirely, even if that could be done, would be to
foreclose even the possibility of that kind of play—Winnicott’s “interplay”— and
thus to foreclose the succession of hermeneutic circumambulations that may lead to
enhanced awareness. As experience deepens, theory also deepens—after all, one’s
theories are not fixed quantities standing outside of oneself like books on a
shelf. One’s theories include one’s personal discernment of what they address,
what they mean, what is at stake in adopting such theories, along with one’s
discernment of everything else in one’s world, all those various discernments
intertwined, interdependent, and evolving together.
Further, if the gods are to appear and be served in therapeutic work, as the
archetypal psychologists say they must if therapy is to be more than simply a
humanistic enterprise, the work requires, in my view, a reliable therapeutic
container. Visitations by the gods without the security of such a strong alembic
are often simply too much to bear, which may be one reason—perhaps the chief
reason—for the patient’s seeking therapy in the first place. The firmness of
therapeutic vessel depends largely upon the interpersonal relationship between
therapist and patient, and particularly upon the patient’s confidence that the
therapist can hold whatever the patient brings. This is partly a function of the
temperament and personal development of the therapist, but in some measure the
therapist’s ability to hold the patient’s material relies upon a working technique
derived from some kind of theoretical approach. Thus theory supports the therapist
in standing up to the archetypal material that is constellated in the process of
therapy. In my experience, the better the container, the more is constellated, or,
at least, the better the container, the more of what is constellated will be seen
and digested by both patient and therapist. As Corbett (1996) put this, “Anyone
who works with a human being is of necessity working clinically within a
particular model of the therapeutic relationship; only the artist or philosopher
works purely symbolically” (p. 14).
Further, even if one could work purely symbolically, or at least largely
symbolically, there are many patients who are not good candidates for such an
approach. Speaking personally, I am thinking now of my work with survivors of
incest and other severe emotional or physical abuse in childhood. To begin therapy
by considering the rape of a six year old by her father, for instance, as fiction
or image is, in my view, counterproductive at best. The therapeutic groundwork in
a case like that usually is quite the opposite. Patient and therapist must admit
that the unthinkable really happened, and that the abuse has interfered with the
fullest emotional development of the patient, usually eventuating in an impaired
sense of self, and in a generally predictable series of relationship problems such
as difficulties in establishing appropriate personal boundaries with spouses or
lovers. And that work of admitting the unthinkable is not a one-time event; it
continues in various forms throughout the therapy. With severe sexual abuse in the
patient’s background, the therapeutic alliance itself often is subject to cyclical
reenactments of the dramas of rescue, inequality, violation, and betrayal.
Further, the patient may feel compelled to reenact the abuse, leading to anxiety
about trusting the therapist: perhaps the desire for reenactment has been
projected onto the therapist, or perhaps there is a transference in which the
therapist is seen as the abuser. Accustomed to suffering habitual difficulties in
maintaining proper boundaries, the patient may fail to comprehend that this is not
difficult for the therapist. Sadly, the patient may already have been treated
badly by a previous therapist since some proportion of the psychotherapeutic
community is prone to abusing patients, and survivors of incest or other severe
abuse are particularly vulnerable to revictimization. In particularly difficult
cases, the patient may be struggling with feelings of depersonalization, and
alienation from self which often are not tolerable passages in the process of
individuation or soul making, but intolerable terrors that need to be managed
precisely by literalizing the relationship between therapist and patient, that is
by emphasizing the importance, and solidity of the personal encounter, certainly
not by deliteralizing it, or pointing out that all is fantasy anyway. Later, if a
nourishing relationship can be established, the patient may be able to tolerate,
and benefit from imaginal work, but, in my view, much worthwhile and effective
therapy may be accomplished without ever pushing the metaphysical envelope or
depersonalizing the therapeutic encounter. In this kind of work, which is
personally challenging for the therapist, and even at times fearsome, knowledge of
theories which emphasize the value of a personalistic therapeutic matrix, and
which explore the expected vicissitudes of work within that matrix—self
psychology, Winnicott, object relations, et. al.—is good to have.
From that perspective, theory per se is not the problem, but theory taken
literally, that is, theory not as a framework for hermeneutic discernment, or as
part of the matrix for a therapeutic interpersonal relationship, but theory
hardened into a fixed system of tenets. As Hillman phrased this:
Perhaps there can be no discipline of therapeutic psychology, only an activity of
psychotherapy. Perhaps therapeutic psychology is self-defeating; once insights
become “psychology,” serving as an interpretative tool, a reliably steady mirror
throwing light on all events from the same angle—then the particularity,
multiplicity, and spontaneity of the soul's reflections become codified. An
articulated, all-worked-out psychology is better spoken of as a theology or a
philosophy or a movement, and the activity performed in its name and called
“therapy” (Freudian, Jungian, Rogerian, Reichean) is more truly indoctrination or
conversion. (Hillman, 1975, p. 145)
Clearly, this refers to the kind of religious zeal which Jung and Freud inspired
in their followers, perhaps even intentionally. And obviously, the therapy
provided by an indoctrinated therapist will be a procrustean bed for the patient,
deforming the patient’s experience to make it fit the dogma. However, I am not so
ready as Hillman to jettison altogether working within a discipline of therapeutic
psychology, including, for example, such specifics as the various kinds of
transferences that may emerge, what their emergence may signify, and how the
therapist might go about understanding, and interpreting them in useful ways. In
fact, to what Hillman calls an “articulated psychology” I see no alternative that
would permit the transmission of complex metapsychological ideas from one person
to another, enabling the ideas of that first person to become part of the
potential space within which the ideas of the next person can take shape, develop,
and grow. Without such transmission, it seems to me that psychologists would be
forced to keep reinventing the wheel.
It may be that continually reinventing the wheel is really what Hillman has in
mind, for then fantasies of progress and development, such as Jung’s
individuation, or Kohut’s transmuting internalization of compensatory structures,
would have to be seen as unrealistically heroic, and might give way to simpler
aims. Thus “therapy” would not accomplish anything; it would be a style of life
that honored woundedness, or at least simply allowed it, instead of trying to cure
it. In fact, this seems close to the central argument of archetypal psychology as
I understand it: pathology is not to be cured or even necessarily treated, but
used in the service of soul making simply by noticing it in detail, and seeing
where it leads. Thus, the symbols of transformation, which for Jung were the
baseline data of the psyche, have given way to psychopathologies as manifestations
of the gods, which are the baseline data of the archetypal psychotherapist.
Given Hillman’s own intimate knowledge of Jungian orthodoxy—he was Director of
Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich—no wonder his uneasiness about insights
calcifying into a “reliably steady mirror.” Classical Jungian psychology has
become hackneyed. Libraries at Jungian institutes contain dictionaries of symbols,
cataloging the “meanings” to be ascribed to various characters and figures, as if
some superhuman linguist had already deciphered, for once and for all, the mother
tongue of dreams and fantasies. But the crux of the problem, it seems to me, lies
not in the organization and transmission in articulated form of ideas—theory—but
in the uncritical reception of those ideas. A thinker as powerful as Freud, or
Jung (or Hillman) perforce must make weaker-minded converts, whether or no. It was
inevitable that schools of Freudian, Jungian, (and Hillmanian) psychology would
arise, and that certain lesser thinkers would find within them a not a stimulus to
further hermeneutics, but instead a refuge from the demands of an evolving
personal selfhood with all of its inescapable attendant doubts, fears, and
uncertainties. The processes of indoctrination and religious conversion always
have existed, and always will. They are, in that sense, archetypal. But in
Hillman’s “war games”—the image arises of an adolescent boy in a video arcade
laughing fiendishly as he vaporizes enemy spacecraft—I see, along with the beauty
of fresh insights and fierce rhetorical challenges to the status quo, some
proclivities towards throwing the baby out with the bath water. And looking at
those tendencies from the “night side” of depth psychology, as Hillman himself
recommended, I wonder if they have to do with an earlier Jungian indoctrination
and conversion of his own.
Further, those who follow Hillman in his critique of psychological theories such
as Kohut’s or Fordham’s, pointing, with some justification in my opinion, to the
formulaic, and self-confirming nature of such developmental psychologies, fail to
notice that, inevitably, Hillman, like all of us, has developmental biases of his
own. His unceasing disparagement of psychotherapies that attempt to heal personal
“inner” injuries (see Hillman, and Ventura, 1992), combined with his persistent
promotion of regarding the “self” not foremost as an individual, but as a citizen,
constitute an unmistakably strong advocacy of a preferred way of being. Any such
advocacy, obviously, is filled with its own developmental notions, equally self-
confirming as Kohut’s or Fordham’s. My intention here is not to take issue with
Hillman’s preferences, for they are a matter of opinion, and de gustibus non est
disputandum. I simply point out that his notions of what human life should be
about (citizenship, soul-making) also constitute a kind of theory—as much as
Fordham’s or Kohut’s—and need to be recognized as such.
To Paul Tolpin, analysand and early colleague of Kohut, I put this question: “Must
an analyst have a theory?” Here is part of his reply:
We have theories whether we acknowledge them or not. Freud’s theories have changed
permanently the way we understand people from the time he began to write about
them. One must have a theory. It can be a rather general theory. It need not be
clearly stated and written out. But we all have theories about what the human mind
is like, and how as human beings we develop psychologically, and how we function
psychologically, and we use those theories. These can vary from the loosest
theories to the strictest, most detailed ones, but we must have something to work
from. You cannot work with a patient without having some kind of theory. . . . My
theory is that there must be available responsiveness from the caretaking adults
for psychological health to develop. (personal communication, September 9, 1997)

Deliteralizing Imaginal Psychology

Tolpin said it well. We all have theories about how we function psychologically.
The archetypal psychologists and other foes of developmental perspectives may
disagree with Tolpin’s theory that psychological health depends upon receiving
certain developmental “nutrients” from caretakers. After all, theory evolves from
the processes of observation and interpretation, and, as we have seen, those
activities constitute a circle in which interpretations influence observations
which then influence the next interpretations, ad infinitum. But Tolpin, as I
understood his statement, was not claiming facticity for his particular theory. He
was merely opining that psychotherapy cannot be conducted without some kind of
theory to support the personal work required of the therapist. This requirement
for some sort of suppositional framework for the actual practice of psychotherapy
helps to explain why Hillman, although has labored rhetorically to keep his ideas
from ossifying into a “psychology,” has not, in my view, been entirely successful.
Twenty-something years after the publication of Revisioning Psychology (1975),
archetypal psychology has hardened into what Hillman himself called “a stiff-
necked pride” that clings to the tenets that one must “stick to the image” and
that “all is fantasy” (supra). While one is clinging to tenets, regardless of what
they may be, the idea that all is fantasy really will not be seen as fantasy. One
may say that it is fantasy, but at the same time, it becomes a pet fantasy, a
fantasy without which one cannot do.
A pet fantasy is not very different from a pet theory. Ultimately, it blinds. What
had been insight becomes habit. Once one postulates that the “use of the world” is
soul-making, one already has begun to theorize that the world has a use, which, if
taken literally, is not metaphor, but metaphysics. And, it is a metaphysics that
implies a project: making “soul” from experience. This may sound good, but, in my
experience, infatuation with that project often detracts from an open appreciation
of life itself, since even life (undeniable) is imagined to exist in the service
of soul (speculative). When I say that “soul” is speculative, I do not mean “soul”
in its connotation of one’s “psychological constitution,” as Hillman (1975, p.
xii) employed that word. Nor do I mean to call into question the existence of soul
in Hillman’s sense of soul as “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint
towards things rather than the things themselves” (p. x). Manifestly, each of us
has soul in those senses. When I say that life is undeniable, but “soul” is
speculative, I refer to those conjectural extensions of the word “soul” beyond its
meaning of psychological constitution, or perspective, as in phrases like “the
soul of the world.” Does the world have a psychological constitution in the same
sense that a human being has one? Does the world have a perspective? I would say
not. My dog seems to have a psychological constitution, and perhaps also a
perspective, so I would say she has a soul, but perhaps the Pope would disagree,
declaring that scripture allows souls only to humans, not animals. As an item of
personal confession, I see humans as a variety of animal, and so do not make such
an unambiguous distinction between myself and my dog, but perhaps that attitude
says more about me than about the question of soul. One may feel powerful
intimations of containment within a “soul” external to the personal psyche, and
one may feel, as I often do while pushing the wheelbarrow through my garden, that
one’s efforts and struggles somehow serve that soul. One has a right to believe in
the existence of that kind of soul (essentially a religious idea), and to believe
that “making soul,” or “serving soul” is the point of living at all, but such a
beliefs are, as I said, no longer metaphors but metaphysics.
Moreover, the stiff-necked tenet of archetypal psychology that “all is fantasy” is
nothing new. It has been said for centuries, but simply never, or at least rarely,
lived. “All is fantasy” is found in Advaita Vedanta, first mentioned in
Gaudapada’s Karikas on the Mandukya Upanishad (early 7th century), and expanded
upon by Shankara (early 8th century). In Vedantic metaphysics there is only one
reality, called Brahman or Atman, which is uncaused, eternal, and unchanging. The
individual ego is illusion, and its perceptions, both apparently external
(sensory), and apparently internal (thoughts, images), are all fantasies. In that
view, it is only through ignorance, or maya that one fantasizes a world filled
with a multiplicity of objects, and a “mind” filled with a diversity of images and
ideas. Thus, the “world” is literally dreamt up endlessly, and only the
continuation of maya allows the dream to go on. Analogously, in 20th century
biophysics, it is believed that body, space and time—thus, “self”—are merely
interpretative constructions of sensory experience. Since, sensory experience
itself is only an epiphenomenon of the impingement of certain narrow potions of
various bands of energy upon the sensory apparatus, and since a different creature
with a different sensory apparatus—a butterfly, for example, which sees ultra-
violet vibrations and higher—would sense things differently, human perception of
“reality” is, at most, only a version. This is close to Vedanta, albeit expressed
in more positivistic terms. The work of neurologist Oliver Sacks (1995), who
described the bizarre perceptual worlds of persons with various brain lesions and
tumors, illustrates well that any perception is only a version, that is, a
rendering. However, as much as the fantastic nature of “reality” is known—in the
Upanishads, by biophysicists, or by archetypal psychologists—it is not lived.
Perhaps, as Hillman said, “to believe in a fantasy is delusion; to believe in an
image, idolatry” (supra), but that is exactly what all of us do. Within the
collective fantasy of individual embodied existence in a material world, people go
on pursuing their pleasures, seeking to avoid their pains, making endless
distinctions between one thing and another, bearing children and raising them,
working on projects, and “attacking and destroying” enemies. Thus, the waking
dream continues.
Hillman’s exhortations that psychology move its center of focus from the “self” to
the “soul” provide a worthwhile corrective to the egocentricity of the post-
Freudians and the post-Jungians. His suggestion that case history be heard not as
biography but as fiction is, in my view, an important and liberating approach to
work with some, albeit certainly not all, patients. However, notwithstanding the
vigor of his efforts to move psychology from the literal to the metaphorical, his
own ideas are being taken literally. Already there has arisen a cadre of scholars
and therapists who seem to believe that “soul” literally is “made” by taking one
approach to life instead of another. For many of these, the notions that
personality develops through experience, and that early experiences especially are
crucial to that development—ideas that, from my perspective, seem powerfully self-
evident—are anathema. In my opinion, discarding wholesale the valuable ideas of
developmental psychology makes almost certain that some patients’ important needs
will be missed. After all, who is to say that developmental needs, expressed in
the transference à la Kohut, are not also expressions of soul, not also
manifestations of the gods, not also archetypal? In my experience, based upon the
peculiar strength and feeling tone with which such transferences often make
themselves known, the human needs to idealize and to be mirrored are archetypal.
Why are they not honored as such along with all the other archetypes? The literal
adherents of archetypal psychology do not want to hear hypotheses about the
development of personality, or the (archetypal) lacunae in self-structure, only
about which god is in charge from moment to moment, as if there really were gods
in fact. How can that literalization be dissolved?
Others who advocate moving the focus of psychology from the self to the soul
imagine the soul of the world as Gaia. In that view, the earth “herself” is
intelligent, and benign. Most, if not all, of the world’s problems are imputed to
centuries of a masculine abuse of the life principle. But that view of a holistic
Mother Earth leaves out the intimidating aspects of living in a soft, fleshy body
on a wild planet, and it glosses over the horrifying aspects of “mother,” as Freud
also tried to do in his way. The life principle also is a death principle. Nature
is not all benign, but “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said (“In Memoriam
A.H.H.”, Canto LVI). The unspoiled wilderness, to which the Gaia-romantics want to
return, inspired in our forebears less an appreciation for the beauty of nature
than an awestruck terror of her savagery which sometimes made the flesh creep,
made the teeth chatter, or curdled the blood. Formerly that mortal fear found
partial expression in projects dedicated to creating relatively safe spaces:
clearing, cultivating, constructing. Now the same archetypal dread is being pushed
into the shadows, unwittingly forced into unconsciousness by a self-justifying
political correctness that refuses to honor, or even to notice, it. The universal
human desires for some small insulation from the primitive dread of darkness, and
some scant protection from the ultimate archetypal fear—the fear of ceasing to be
at all—are recast by eco-psychologists as “rape of the planet.” How can that one-
sided literalization be dissolved?
Jung had a dream in which he encountered a yogi who sat facing him in deep
meditation. After looking more closely, Jung realized that the yogi had his face,
and, upon that realization, he awoke, profoundly frightened, thinking: “‘Aha, so
he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’ I knew when he
awakened, I would no longer be” (1965, p. 323). Jung’s exegesis proposed that the
dream intended to reverse the “relationship between ego-consciousness and the
unconscious, and to represent the unconscious as the generator of the empirical
personality” (p. 324). Thus, according to Jung, the dream intended to put the
locus of “reality” in the unconscious.
Hillman’s (1972) work, it seems to me, sought to take Jung’s dream one step
further. In Hillman’s view, if I correctly understand it, the unconscious does not
properly exist; the phrase ”the unconscious” is but a hypostatization of the
ongoing process of unawareness of the fantastical nature of all experience. In
other words, in Hillman’s view, Freud and Jung, created a noun form (the
unconscious) from what really should be understood as a verb form (being
unconscious). From that vantage, the dreams one has at night, are not different in
kind from waking dreams, except that it is easier to notice nighttime dreams as
dreams, since while one sleeps, the literalizing force of habitual ego-
consciousness sleeps also.
For Hillman, “Our archetypal fictions keep their mythopoeic, their truly
fictional, character beyond what we do or say about them. We can never be certain
whether we imagine them, or they imagine us” (1972, p. 151). That last sentence is
reminiscent of the fantasies Jung had as a child when he would play
an imaginary game that went something like this: “I am sitting on top of this
stone and it is underneath.” But the stone also could say “I” and think: “I am
lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.” The question then arose
“Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is
sitting? (1965, p. 20)
But there appears to be a subtle difference in the two points of view. For Jung,
the answer to that question seemed vitally important, but “remained totally
unclear” (p. 20), whereas for Hillman, there is no answer (or there are countless
answers). In Hillman’s conception, to offer a definitive answer would be to
literalize the fiction that someone is sitting on someone else, and thus to
destroy the vitality of the paradoxical uncertainty inherent in “whether we
imagine them, or they imagine us.” In considering the gods, it is not just that
one is uncertain as to whether they imagine us or we imagine them, but one must
remain uncertain also as to the possible ontological value of the entire line of
speculation about who imagines whom. To assign such conjectures any particular
value whatsoever beyond their possible satisfaction of the human desire to play
(homo ludens), that is, to fantasize, and thus to express one’s soul, is
immediately to wax scientific, that is to literalize this way of seeing as having
heuristic value above and beyond, or better than, some other fantasy, the fantasy
of Buddhist compassion towards the stone for example, or the fantasy of
existential psychotherapy in which one might be asked not to wonder who is
dreaming whom, but simply to appreciate the stone’s stoniness. Thus, if Hillman’s
archetypal psychology were properly regarded as a fiction itself, and, more
specifically, as a fiction that serves to express the soul needs—the
“psychological constitution,” as Hillman himself put it (supra)—of its creator as
his personal confession, the tendency to literalize it into a “better mousetrap,”
that literally can “make soul,” or “save the planet,” would be recognized too, and
cut off at the root.

CHAPTER IV
PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PERSONAL CONFESSION

Faith, Religion, and Numinosity

As we saw in Chapter I, Jung noticed that for Freud “sexuality was a sort of
numinosum” (supra). Jung had adopted the word “numinous” from Rudolf Otto's (1958)
book The Idea of the Holy, which, according to Corbett (1996),
had a major influence on Jung's thought. According to Otto, the essence of
holiness, or religious experience, is a specific quality which remains
inexpressible and “eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” To convey its
uniqueness he coined the term “numinous” from the Latin numen, meaning a god,
cognate with the verb nuere, to nod or beckon, indicating divine approval. . . .
For [Otto], the presence of the numinous is . . . felt to be objective and outside
the self.
The numinous grips or stirs the soul with a particular affective state, which Otto
describes as a feeling of the “mysterium tremendum”. . . .
It has an uncanny quality which, Otto suggests, gives rise to its objectification
within myth and folklore as the presence of demons or gods. (pp. 11-12)
Jung concluded that Freud experienced sexuality numinously after observing, during
their first meeting, that when Freud spoke of sexuality, “a strange, deeply moved
expression came over his face” (Jung, 1965, p. 150). According to Jung, when they
next spoke three years later,
Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. .
. . we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” He said that
to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, “And promise me this one
thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday.” . . . it was the
words “bulwark” and “dogma” that alarmed me; for a dogma, that is to say, an
undisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress
doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific
judgment; only with a personal power drive.
This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. I knew that I would
never be able to accept such an attitude. (p. 150, emphasis mine)
Now here is a contradiction. If the numinous is “felt to be objective and outside
the self,” then how is it that a confession of faith in a numinously felt
experience—the sexual drive in Freud’s case—was construed as a drive to personal
power by Jung? Why was not such a manifestation of awestruck reverence as a
strange, deeply moved expression coming over Freud’s face, as well as
Freud’s undisputable confession of faith, seen by Jung not as evidence of a desire
for personal power, but as what it likely was, a surrendering of personal power in
the face of Freud’s overwhelming idiopathic experience of the sexual mysterium
tremendum?
Jung had great ambitions for power and fame himself, which he routinely denied, so
one might conjecture that accusing Freud of abandoning scientific judgment in a
thrust for personal power was a projection by Jung of his own shadow. That would
be a conventional Jungian interpretation, but it misses the mark I think. Suppose
Freud had been speaking not of sex, but of God, or of the gods, or of mana, or
daimon when the “deeply moved expression” had come over his face. And suppose
further that he had then said to Jung, “Promise me never to abandon faith in God
(or the gods, or mana, or daimon) as the healing principle in psychotherapy. We
must make a dogma of it.” Would Jung have called that a drive towards personal
power? I think not. Under those circumstances, I imagine Jung determining that
Freud was expressing, albeit zealously, the convictions born of an authentic
religious experience, which would constitute not a drive towards power, but
towards healing. After all Jung himself confessed his own conviction that, “the
approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to
numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology” (1973, p. 377).
Why then was Jung so put off by Freud’s attitude of religious awe towards
sexuality? Despite his bourgeois background, Jung was certainly no prude. He
carried on a variety of sexual affairs throughout his life, at times several
affairs simultaneously, and even promoted polygamy to his followers as necessary
for individuation (Noll, 1997). So if it was not priggishness that stimulated Jung
to judge Freud so harshly, nor simply the projection of his own shadowy ambitions,
what was it? I submit that Jung misunderstood Otto’s idea of numinosity; he
construed it far too narrowly. Otto’s notion implies that numinosity can inhere in
any experience that “grips or stirs the soul with a particular affective state.”
Thus, for one person entering a cathedral may be numinous, while for another,
entering a vagina. For Jung, who wanted the “Self” to be a transcendental concept,
that is, not simply an archetype, but the central archetype (1921/1971), sexuality
would have seemed far too mundane to provoke any intuition of the mysterium
tremendum. Not only was sex, by Jung’s lights, outside the regions of possible
numinosity, but Jung went so far as to claim that Freud’s entire theory dealt with
nothing important to Jung at all. “My own world,” Jung wrote, “had scarcely
anything to do with Freud’s. My whole being was seeking for something still
unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life” (1965, p. 165). That
something still unknown—in other words, intimations of the numinous—Jung certainly
could not find in sexuality which he perceived as both dirty and pedestrian:
To me it was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the probing mind
had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in the depths of the psyche than
the all too familiar and “all-too-human” limitations. I had grown up in the
country, among peasants, and what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out
from the Rabelaisian wit and the untrammeled fantasies of our peasant folklore.
Incest and perversions were no remarkable novelties to me, and did not call for
any special explanation. . . . they formed part of the black lees that spoiled the
taste of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and meaninglessness of
human existence. That cabbages thrive in dung was something I had always taken for
granted. In all honesty I could discover no helpful insight in such knowledge.
“It's just that all of those people are city folks who know nothing about nature
and the human stable,” I thought, sick and tired of these ugly matters. (p. 166,
emphasis mine)
Now this is a remarkable statement in several ways. In the first place, when one
declares being “sick and tired” of “ugly matters,” a Jungian ear, hearing that
vehemence, would infer that such an attitude compensates for another, unconscious
attitude which finds those same matters fascinating and stimulating. That Jungian
apothegm, which holds that conscious and unconscious attitudes countervail,
perhaps sheds some light on the contradiction apparent in Jung’s first saying that
incest did not call for any special explanation, and then later devoting hundreds
of pages to writing about incest, even making the theme of incestuous relations a
centerpiece of his theory of the inner workings of clinical practice, in which the
relationship between analyst and patient is said to recapitulate symbolically the
brother-sister, and king-queen incest relations depicted in the Rosarium
Philosophorum of medieval alchemy (Jung, 1946/1966). But more significant for my
present purposes is Jung’s statement that not just sex, but human existence itself
is ugly and meaningless, which suggests that numinosity will not inhere there
either. In other words, it is not just sex that lacks numinosity, but anything
having to do with ordinary human life at all.
Numinosity is a personal experience. That will be clear to anyone who ever has
felt it, for it is not just overarching sensations of awe, dread, and humility
that feel especially numinous, but also profound feelings of captivation, and
allure, and what captivates one person may mean nothing at all to another. In the
early 70s, I played the bass guitar in a soul band. Although I cannot now
reexperience them, I can still remember faintly the special feelings that
occasionally overcame me when I opened the case of my instrument and saw my bass
guitar nestled in its red velvet padding. Everything else would disappear: the
room, the stage, the lights, the voices of the patrons, even the awareness of my
own physical body. And sometimes when I drew my bass out of its case, I was
bewitched, and then inspired, filled with energy, by gazing at the ghostly shape
the instrument had left behind in its velvet bed. For me, that bass guitar was a
reservoir of numinosity; simply holding it seemed to fill me with mana. Often,
when playing the instrument, an odd sensation would come over me. My body seemed
weightless and transparent. My nerves on edge. My teeth felt like the most solid
part of me. Then some essential focus would shift, and suddenly I was not playing
the bass, but I was being played by the bass. The instrument was making the music,
while my hands seemed to be moving in accord with forces beyond my volition, and
out of my control. As athletes sometimes put this, I was “in the zone.”
In regard to Freud’s experience of sexuality, it seems that Jung would not
recognize that variety of numinosity. The kind of numinosity credible to Jung had
to do with God, not guitars or sexual excitement. Later in the same chapter in
which he said he was “sick and tired of these ugly [sexual] matters,” Jung —“in
retrospect,” as he put it—softened his position on Freud, and on sexuality.
“Sexuality,” he wrote, “is of the greatest importance as the expression of the
chthonic spirit. That spirit is the ‘other face of God,’ the dark side of the God-
image” (1965, p. 168). Now that statement seems especially significant to the
present consideration of psychotherapy as personal confession. Jung explicitly put
sexuality in the shadows: sex is the dark side of the God-image. Why is it not the
light side? Why is sexuality chthonic, that is Plutonian, or sulphurous? Why, for
instance, aren’t warfare, and murder, the destruction of life, the dark side of
the God-image, and sexuality, the instinct towards the creation of new life, the
light side? Why chthonic, and not Elysian, or golden? Also, why does God have two
faces? Why not one face? Or, as Hillman likes, countless faces?
Before going on to consider those questions, a brief detour: recall that the
authenticity of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s “autobiography” from which I
have drawn his words on Freud and sexuality, was severely impugned by Noll (1997).
Jung may have authored those words about sex, and perhaps he did not. However,
even assuming that he did write them, the analysis I am about to make will, I
submit, say more about me as an interpreter of Jung’s story than about Jung, whose
story can be read in 10,000 ways. Accordingly, what is being discussed here is
“Jung” in the sense of Hillman’s notion of case history as fiction, and not the
historical Jung, a “factual” entity. The distinction is important. If we are
speaking of fiction, then exegesis is appropriate, and answers to such questions
as how many faces Jung’s God may have, and why, for Jung, sex is chthonic become
expatiation, not exposé.
That said, Jung’s God cannot have only one face; a view of God with only one face
would not be “psychological,” but religiously dogmatic. One face would be the New
Testament Christian God, scorned by Jung, a disembodied fountainhead of pure
goodness, with all evil unambiguously split off to be shouldered first by Satan
and then by human beings, particularly in regard to their bodily functions. If God
has only one face, everything noble is God, and everything ignoble is not God.
With a one-faced God, the problem of evil becomes simply a problem of human
comportment, and the story of Job, which fascinated Jung, loses significance. Put
another way, if God has only one face, Jung would have no way to penetrate the
conspicuous phenomenon of human ambivalence, which, by giving God two faces, he
freed himself to psychologize with ideas such as enantiodromia (Jung’s coinage for
the Taoist idea that things tend to become their opposites), as the hammer and
tongs battle between ego and Self which he called individuation, or as the duality
of conscious attitudes counterbalancing unconscious ones, and vice versa.
Jungians like to say that the goal is not perfection, but completeness; however,
Jung’s notion of the “other face of God” (that is, specifically not the many faces
of God), along with his repudiation of the possible numinosity of sexuality,
indicates a tendency less towards completeness than towards hierarchy. In other
words, Jung, at heart, was classically monotheistic. “The anima/animus stage is
correlated with polytheism,” he wrote, “the self with monotheism,” (1951/1968b, p.
268, emphasis mine) That is why Jung’s God cannot have countless faces. True,
there are manifold archetypes, but they are just bit players in the drama. The
star of the show is the central archetype, the Self, which, as Jung put it,
proves to be an archetypal idea which differs from other ideas of the kind in that
it occupies a central position befitting the significance of its content and its
numinosity. (1921/1971, p. 461, emphasis mine)
But if God must have two faces, not one, or many, why must sexuality be the
chthonic side of Jung’s God? Why not the ethereal side? Sexuality was the chthonic
side of Jung’s God, because sexuality was the chthonic side of Jung. His famous
Turm (tower) at Bollingen, built with Jung’s own hands, which has become a hadj
for Jungians, was his “sexual space, a pagan sin altar where, removed from his
wife and family in Künacht and his disciples in Zurich, he could enjoy his
intimate companion, Toni Wolff, with orgiastic abandon (Noll, 1997, p. 3). And as
for the Turm, the erection of Jung’s own labor: one doesn’t even need to refer to
its shape to see the Freudian implications.
Now in Otto’s (1958) conception, the appearance of the numinous was the central
element of religious experience. He said that the numinous was “felt to be
objective and outside the self” (supra). The key word here is “felt.” One’s only
way of perceiving the world is through psyche. There may be a God, or gods
“outside” of the psyche, but an individual has no way objectively of knowing that.
Whatever may objectively exist comes to us mediated by the psyche. In other words,
the psyche itself constitutes our only directly knowable reality, and whether or
not psychic experiences, including experiences of numinosity, reflect or coincide
with a larger, trans-psychic, ultimate reality, cannot ever be known
psychologically. Thus, while the experience of the numinous feels undeniable when
it occurs, attributing it to an agency larger or more comprehensive than the
psyche, or at least to an agency not coincident with the psyche—the hand of God,
for instance—is a matter of faith, not of psychology. And even if one eschews the
kind of faith arising from mysticism, preferring an intellectual approach to the
question of the divine, psychology, by the very nature of its approach, limits
itself to studying psychic manifestations, not ultimate “truths,” which are more
properly the business of ontology or theology.
When Jung said that “the approach to the numinous is the real therapy” (supra) he
was referring expressly to certain visions perceived while he hovered between life
and death during a heart attack, but that short phrase encapsulates the central
principles of the Jung’s entire psychotherapeutic methodology: 1) something larger
than the individual personality exists, and makes itself known through visions,
dreams, synchronicities, intuitions, etc., and 2) that “something,” which Jung
called “the Self,” has the power to heal neurotic manifestations by correctly
orienting the individual life and awareness towards the natural telos of that life
which is individuation. Since there are many other less teleological explanations
for dreams and visions, those two principles already constitute a statement of
faith, but so far they do not necessarily presume or require an agency
transcendental to the psyche. In other words, “Self” as the healing or orienting
force could be understood as referring not necessarily to “God,” but only to the
totality of the psyche, while the ego, which feels the need for the healing or
orienting, may be a part of that same “Self.” In that schema, ego, in its non-
individuated state, is relatively unaware of the larger psyche of which it is a
fragment. Thus from the point of view of the ego, the “Self” may at first seem
transcendental to one’s own being, but later, at least as a conjectural endpoint,
may come to be known not as “God,” but as psyche, one’s own “inner personality”
(Jung, 1921/1971). Thus, Jung’s clinical metapsychology does not necessarily
require that psychic manifestations, such as dreams, visions, and numinous
experiences be seen as given by the hand of God. Arguably, therefore, one could
practice a kind of “Jungian analysis” without believing in God at all. Dreams,
visions, and numinosities could be regarded as communications from the totality of
the psyche—which may or may not implicate “God”—to the conscious fraction of the
psyche (ego), and the deeper religious question thereby finessed.
It is clear, however, that Jung was not content to leave the matter there. He did
say that “the unconscious is the immediate source of our religious experiences”
(1954/1980, p. 682, emphasis mine), but then went on to confess his own religious
experience which he conceived as antecedent to the unconscious, that is, as trans-
psychological:
The psychic nature of all experience does not mean that the transcendental
realities are also psychic; the physicist does not believe that the transcendental
reality represented by his psychic model is also psychic. He calls it matter, and
in the same way the psychologist in no wise attributes a psychic nature to his
images or archetypes. He calls them ”psychoids” and is convinced that they
represent transcendental realities, He even knows of “simple faith” as that
conviction which one cannot avoid. It is vain to seek for it; it comes when it
wills, for it is the gift of the Holy Spirit. There is only one divine spirit—an
immediate presence, often terrifying and in no degree subject to our choice. There
is no guarantee that it may not just as well be the devil, as happened to St.
Ignatius Loyola in his vision of the serpens oculatus, interpreted at first as
Christ or God and later as the devil. . . .
Surrender to God is a formidable adventure, and as “simple” as any situation over
which man has no control. He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself
directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes
“simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of
risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. An experience of
this kind is always numinous, for it unites all aspects of totality. (pp. 682-683)
Here we see confirmation of my earlier assertion that Jung was, at heart,
monotheistic (“there is only one divine spirit”), but more than monotheism is
involved. It is seen that for Jung the images or archetypes were definitively not
of the psyche, but rather the reflection by the psyche of transcendental realities
which the archetypes represent, or embody. In that view, the individual psyche,
that is, the soul—Seele in Jung’s original German text, not Anima—is regarded not
as the source of images, but more correctly as the receiver of images which
emanate from elsewhere (the Holy Spirit). A feasible analogy would see the soul as
a television set which does not make pictures, but only displays them, assuming it
is tuned to a channel that is broadcasting them. This implies that, although the
archetypes are perceived psychically, they cannot be understood psychologically.
They are trans-psychological. Whatever ultimate significance the archetypes may
have is a matter of “simple faith,” and certainly is beyond discovering by means
of therapeutic processes. Therefore, in Jung’s conception, the practice of depth
psychotherapy becomes, ultimately, totally a matter of faith.
Jung, confessing his metaphysical commitment to belief in the two faces of God,
wrote,
as good is real so also is evil. . . . we can but trust to our mental powers on
the one hand and on the other to the functioning of the unconscious, that spirit
which we cannot control. It can only be hoped that it is a “holy” spirit. The
cooperation of conscious reasoning with the data of the unconscious is called the
“transcendent function” . . . . This function unites the opposites. Psychotherapy
makes use of it to heal neurotic dissociations, but this function had already
served as the basis of Hermetic philosophy for seventeen centuries. Besides this,
it is a natural and spontaneous phenomenon, part of the process of individuation.
Psychology has no proof that this process does not unfold itself at the
instigation of God's will. (1954/1980, p. 690)
But if psychology has no proof that the process of individuation does not unfold
itself at the instigation of God’s will, it also has no proof that the process
does unfold itself at the instigation of God’s will. That is a matter beyond the
ken of psychology; it is a matter of faith alone. And even if the process of
individuation does proceed at God’s behest, that still is no guarantee that a
psychotherapy based upon the telos of individuation should be imagined as benign,
or even necessarily helpful on the human level. God, in Jung’s view, is a
paradoxical complexio oppositorum, “like YHWH [who has] two hands; the right is
Christ, the left Satan, and it is with these two hands that he rules the world”
(p. 682), leading Jung to declare:
True, we ought to abandon ourselves to the divine will as much as we can, but
admit that to do so is difficult and dangerous, so dangerous indeed that I would
not dare to advise one of my clients to “take” the Holy Spirit or to abandon
himself to him until I had first made him realize the risks of such an enterprise.
(1954/1980, pp. 684-685)
Ironically, this point of view is radically different from that of many present-
day Jungians who proceed therapeutically on the assumption that activating the
transcendent function by engaging a patient in dream analysis, active imagination,
or analysis of the transpersonal aspects of the transference will automatically be
healing and helpful. That perspective assumes either a totally benign God (one
face), or posits that God is irrelevant, as in psychological humanism which
imagines the Earth and its inhabitants as the center of the universe, and
envisions only positive outcomes for therapy: freedom, meaningful relationships,
self-expressiveness, openness, fairness, and “love.” Of course, the split, the
complexio oppositorum, that Jung located in the Holy Spirit has to inhere
somewhere; it can be maneuvered, but not banished. In humanistic psychotherapy
that split turns up this way: “human potential,” which humanistic therapy aims at
“maximizing,” itself is “God.” If the client gets “better”—that is, has fulfilling
relationships, learns to manage anger, feels creative, etc.—then the therapy has
succeeded (Christ). If the client does not get better, then the therapy has failed
(Satan). With that orientation, one may have a sand tray in the office, teach the
client to make mandala drawings, analyze dreams in terms of shadow and anima,
notice synchronicities everywhere, and hold forth on therapy in alchemical argot,
but nonetheless be miles away—further away than Freud was, or Adler—from Jung’s
personal confession that his practice of psychotherapy implicated an awestruck
fear of the duality of the Holy Spirit, and a fervent, but by no means certain,
hope that the spirit involved in the transcendent function would be a benign one.
In other words, practicing analysis as Jung practiced it is not primarily a matter
of technique, but of being in agreement with the religious premises that underlie
Jungian metapsychology, first of which is that therapy does not necessarily serve
the ego—the everyday sense of self as an agent that chooses behaviors in order to
accomplish some end— rather, therapy serves the “Self,” which is everything that
the ego is not.
This point, in my opinion, has been widely misunderstood. “Jungian” analysis has
too often become a kind of humanistic quest, and individuation a kind of
upbeat project along the lines of the United States Army slogan, “be all that you
can be.” That kind of “Jungian” analysis bases itself upon the metaphysical
presupposition that the Self is an all-knowing, wise, kind, benign presence, like
the God of Christian Science who only heals, never makes ill. Jung himself, Noll’s
observations notwithstanding, is often imagined that way: wise, kind, benign,
vulnerary. Jung, however, did not envisage that individuation involved becoming
“better,” or “all that you can be.” On the contrary, in a deep sense,
individuation meant losing oneself entirely:
Individuation is not that you become an ego; you would then be an individualist. .
. a person who did not succeed at individuating. . . . Individuating is becoming
that which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Nobody understands what the
self is, because the self is just what you are not . . . if you function through
your self, you are not yourself—that is what you feel . . . as if you were a
stranger. (1975, p. 31)
Thus, success in therapy, according to Jung, would leave the client feeling as if
always estranged from oneself, always alienated from egotistic aims, never
completely at home in life. This obviously has nothing to do with such New Age
enterprises as developing one’s potential, improving self-esteem, becoming self-
actuating, having peak experiences, etc. In fact, it is quite the opposite. In
Jungian analysis, the productions of the Self—dreams, fantasies, art works, the
projection onto the analyst of inner figures—are used by the therapist to help the
client precisely to decenter the idea that “I” (ego) am the Self, or ever will be.
It was just Jung’s particular genius, in my view, that his metapsychology was not
just a confession of his own personality structure, but also an explicit
confession of his metaphysics, and his religious beliefs, which many psychologists
try to hide, and only confess inadvertently. It might be argued that my separating
religious beliefs from personality structure is a false distinction, but that
position reduces intimations of the godhead to mere manifestations of intrapsychic
processes. For example, the psychological reductionist might assert that Jung’s
faith in God was a projection of parental imagoes, or indicated a failure
sufficiently to sublimate libidinal drives towards his father, or was erected as a
defense against unthinkable infantile anxieties such as falling forever, or going
to pieces.1 From that standpoint, it would be argued that Jung’s religious beliefs
were part of his personality structure, or that his metaphysical presumptions
reflected his personality, but that would be to nullify Jung’s own confession,
which expressed his intuition of the presence of a greater Self, and his devotion
to serving that. Jung’s therapy was directed not primarily towards the person, nor
the ego, nor even towards the quasi-personal “subjective psyche,” but towards
serving the ends of the “objective psyche” (1917/1966a). Jung separated person
from psyche, and in trying to argue that they should not be separated, the
reductionist cannot help but misunderstand Jung.
The outcome of separating person from psyche, and choosing to serve psyche, in
Jung’s own estimation, was this:
I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure
about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. . . . I exist on
the foundation of something I do not know. . . . When Lao-tzu says: “All are
clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.
(1965, p. 358)
It seems to me, that few persons would embark on a course of Jungian analysis,
either as the analyst or as analysand, if those words really were understood. Who,
after all, consciously wants to work toward becoming more clouded?

Psychotherapy As Personal Confession

Recall that it was regarding Freudian analysis that Barratt (see p. 20, supra)
said, “psychoanalytic process indicates the falsity of any belief in a mastery of
consciousness or communication.” But those words could apply equally to the
discoveries of Jung who confessed that, “the older I have become, the less I have
understood or had insight into or known about myself” (1965, p. 358). Thus, in my
opinion, a most central premise of depth psychology—Freudian, Jungian, or
otherwise—is that one may not know anything. When Marie-Louise von Franz, an
analysand and disciple of Jung, and later a theorist and analyst in her own right,
asked Freud, “When do we intervene?” Freud replied, “I don’t know” (James Hillman,
personal communication, December 6, 1996). That exchange has the feel of a Zen
Buddhist encounter like this one:
student: “Who am I?”
roshi: “Who wants to know?”
Those two roles, von Franz and Freud, or student and roshi, epitomize the
difference between an adherent and a personal confessor. The adherent cleaves to a
theoretical perspective which, already existing, prefabricated, and extrinsic to
the personal experience of the adherent, must be held, at least in part,
dogmatically as a knowing of something. The personal confessor, whose
psychological outlook becomes more and more “clouded,” as it becomes more and more
personal, moves always away from dogma and into the unknown. As a Jungian
adherent, or a Freudian adherent, or a Kohutian adherent, or a Hillmanian
adherent, one is already unfortunately in retreat from the uncertainty of one’s
own moment-to-moment psychological phenomenology. To adopt the Jungian confession,
for example, without putting it to proof within one’s own being, will provide the
comforting illusion of knowing something about “psychology,” hence, about oneself.
Suddenly one can speak confidently about one’s “anima problems,” or “father
complex.” On the other hand, focusing one’s efforts upon the more fluid project of
noticing the idiosyncratic, weathery, capricious psychic singularities of one’s
own experience, will, if honestly pursued, lead to not knowing, that is, to a
sense of oneself as “a stranger to oneself,” as Kristeva (1991) phrased it. Thus,
psychotherapy as personal confession operates in the mode of not knowing, and
psychotherapy becomes the work not of interpretation by means of theory, but the
work of profound noticing, abetted by active deconstruction of theory, of what is
arising in the potential space between therapist and patient.
Aided by the ready-made theoretical spectacles of a brilliant predecessor, one’s
psychotherapeutic vision feels too sharp, not sufficiently clouded. Psychological
seeing is debased, not enhanced, by excessive acuity. Some blurred vision,
squinting, and rubbing of the eyes allows images that will not appear to the
hawkeye of certainty. Recall Bion’s saying (see p. 79, supra): “Instead of . . . a
brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light . . . I suggest a diminution of the
light—a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight.”
It is just those eerie and numinous sensations of unfamiliarity and strangeness
with oneself that enable one to meet with another, not as an expert, ready with
explanations and interpretations, but as a collaborator in an exploration of the
unknown. One’s own sense of not knowing enables, as Buber put it, a meeting
between I and thou, in which “one exists over and against the other, as his other,
as one able in common presence to withstand and confirm him” (1973, p. 57). In my
experience, it is precisely in those moments when the patient beholds the
therapist as his other—that is, when the patient’s projections of power,
knowledgeability, and mastery collapse for lack of firm support in the cognitive
commitments of the therapist—that something can happen that really deserves to be
called therapeutic.
This is not to say that psychotherapy is entirely a personal confession, or that
the therapist should pretend to the condition of tabula rasa. Being entirely
without metapsychological presuppositions is not possible. In the first place, our
very learning of spoken language immediately entangles each of us in a web of
collective meanings apart from which personal meanings cannot be expressed (Lacan
1956/1988), and these collective meanings, arising from the very structure of
language, implicate the most basic psychological viewpoints. To chose but one
example, the Japanese word amaeru, which means “the expectation of being loved,”
expresses perfectly Balint’s (1968) idea of “primary object love,” in which an
infant, having its wishes and expectations, assumes that the primary love object—
mother, initially—would automatically have the same wishes and expectations. In
that view, aggression is not an inherent drive à la Freud, but arises in the
absence of a loving understanding between child and caretaker, and narcissism is
not an natural manifestation of the nuclear self with a normal developmental line
of its own à la Kohut, but a subordinate phenomenon that arises only due to
frustration of the infant’s fundamental needs for primary object love. In other
words, an infant is born expecting to be loved, and psychological problems
eventuate when that expectation—”to establish,” in Balint’s words, “an all
embracing harmony with one’s environment,” (p. 65)—is not met. A Japanese, even if
he or she never had read a word of psychology, would presume Balint’s viewpoint
simply because the word amaeru implies it. This would not be true for a European
whose language contains no such word. According to Doi (1973), amaeru, along with
its derivatives such as amai, which means “sweet,” is so commonly used that the
Japanese find it almost impossible to believe that there is no word for amaeru in
the European languages. Secondly, beyond the fundamental implications of language,
the psychologist’s “personal confesson” is admixed, willy nilly, with the
deadening pervasion of Cartesian, European, patriarchal, intellectualist cultural
values, experienced, often more or less unmindfully, as “myself, and my ideas.”
Finally, the training of a psychotherapist inevitably involves required
familiarity with specific theoretical models and assortments of jargon that
inevitably implicate cultural premises even if those models and terms of art
appear critical of the cultural gestalt. Clearly, there is no absolute freedom
from acculturation. But the cultural background, the theoretical models, and the
psychological jargon need ongoing deconstruction if they are not to become a
bedrock of conviction, foreclosing a genuine therapeutic meeting between I and
thou, perhaps even, as for Jung, a meeting mediated by what is neither I nor thou.
Naturally, many humans, psychotherapists included, are not at all interested in
seeing through the premises of their cultural background; the more popular project
is to try to succeed within those premises, so that, from the typical perspective,
desires for power, prestige, position, wealth, and fame seem normal, and their
attainment occasions for personal pride. Each time such accomplishments are
celebrated, those values are reinforced, unexamined, both within the person, and
within the wider culture at large. Now and then, one individual or another really
does work at noticing his or her own acculturation, but such work is not easy.
Intellectual efforts to gain a wider cultural awareness often tend to confirm and
energize the very Cartesian, intellectualist premises that need unmasking. Non-
intellectual approaches, such as, for example, the spiritual practices of foreign
cultures, sometimes do avail, but often they are subtly deformed in ego-syntonic
directions so that what appears be a attempt at cultural transcendence ends up
being another version of New Age humanism with increased self-esteem and peak-
experiences as the ultimate goal. Thus, the would-be spiritual seeker still
functions as a thoroughly self-centered consumer, a kind of spiritual materialist
(Trungpa, 1972). In my experience, this latter dilemma is often one of the first
difficulties to be faced in moving towards the depths of depth psychotherapy. To
choose just one example, the popularity of “meditation,” for instance, has
produced a strange hybrid of Eastern with Western cultural values so that
“meditation” has become a kind of drug, like Valium—a way of calming oneself,
stilling the mind, or feeling better—and the practice of “meditation” has become a
technique, like a golf swing, to be perfected with time and effort. But those
attitudes are the very antithesis of meditation—and, by extension, depth
psychotherapy—the very essence of which is the profound noticing of what is in the
very moment, with no attention to changing anything.
Earlier, I mentioned the sensations of numinosity which, for me in the 1970s,
surrounded playing the electric bass. During the next decade, the 80s, I produced
a series of photographs of the nude human form in nature. In an interview, I was
asked how I went about composing those images which were said to have an inner
magic, and a shamanic sensibility. Here is part of my reply:
I might say to the model “stretch your arm up,” or something like that. I’m not
doing this because I’m thinking, “This isn’t composed properly.” My decision is
based on something that is much deeper than composition. I’m looking for a
feeling, and it is unmistakable. When there’s really something there that works
for me, suddenly I feel a tremendous calmness. It’s as if time has stopped.
(Saltzman, 1990, p. 216)
Now that feeling of tremendous calmness as if time has stopped, is an apprehension
of numinosity. The sudden, unmediated recognition of a particular gesture as a
magical gesture—the perfect gesture, the only gesture—directly conveys the mythic
or mystic. As Jung articulated this, “archetypes are complexes of experience that
come upon us like fate” (1934/1968a, p. 30). To perceive a human gesture, and
simultaneously to apperceive its unmistakable significance, that is, its
perfection, brings a startling sensation of timelessness, of inevitability, of
kismet. In a similar regard, dancer and Jungian analyst Joan Blackmer cited one of
her teachers who advised her
to move as if every movement we made was only the most recent in a long chain of
movements—every movement we had ever made, and our ancestors before. All this was
attached to our backs and stretched out behind us. . . . As this potent image went
deeper into my being, I suddenly became aware of my place in time. The front of my
body, which like the ego expresses the present and faces to the future, carries on
its back my personal and collective history. (1989, p. 81, emphasis mine)
Blackmer’s sudden awareness was also a kind of numinous experience induced by the
“potent image” given to her by her teacher.
As I observed earlier, numinosity, regardless of whether or not it is
transpersonal in origin, is an experience personally felt. What feels numinous to
one person, may leave another completely untouched. Perhaps those who have
appreciated my photographs have felt something of the time-has-stopped numinosity
that descended upon me in the making of them, but others have looked at the same
images and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Yet a numinous experience feels
objectively motivated. Consequently, sensations of numinosity are paradoxical. One
is seized by feelings that seem to be transpersonal, or even universal, while at
the same time knowing that others may discern nothing momentous. I remember, for
example, hearing an organ concert at the old cathedral in Riga, Latvia that moved
me unimaginably. When the music stopped, and my awareness came back to my person,
I found my face wet with tears. How strange it was to see all the people around me
preparing to leave, asking one another for cigarettes, arranging where to go next.
Hadn’t they heard? Apparently, not. It was my turn to be moved, my turn to
experience the numinous.
Now my personal experience of psychotherapy, both as therapist and as patient, is
not so different from my experience in music or photography. The best moments
possess—or perhaps it is better to say are possessed by—that singular aura of
numinosity, a paradoxical sense of otherness which, although experienced inwardly
and personally, feels objectively provoked. Lately, I sense this as an apparently
objective field of compassionate understanding that surrounds and interpenetrates
both parties to the therapeutic dialogue. For me, there is something prodigiously
convincing about such moments, and I like to honor them, and to use them in my
work. For instance, a patient brought a lengthy and intricate dream of returning
home to find an intruder in her house. After some dilation of the dream along the
Hillmanian lines of staying strictly with the images, I had an flash of intuition,
and, although it seemed a considerable reach, I offered this interpretation:
“I wonder if this is a dream about alcoholism.”
“You’re right. It is,” she said without hesitation, and, as she spoke, a frisson
ran through my body, and my hair stood on end.
“Now I’m convinced that this has to do with alcoholism,” I said. “When you told me
I was right, my hair stood on end.”
“I’m sure too,” she replied, visibly moved. “I’m feeling chills all up and down my
spine.”
Perhaps there really is something objective or holy about such moments of
numinosity which Jung believed to be “the real therapy,” (supra) but I confess to
having no way of knowing that. My honoring and utilizing such feelings in
therapeutic work is a matter of art, and perhaps also a matter of faith, that is,
a personal confession of my own psychology and metaphysics, not Jung’s, and not
anyone else’s. But to claim that adumbrations of the numinous factually point to
something beyond the personal, would go far beyond art or faith. An attitude like
that, in the therapeutic milieu, smacks of dogmatism, dictativeness, advocacy, and
authoritarianism, qualities that, in my view, are poisonous to psychotherapeutic
work, for they undermine the non-judgmental openheartedness of the personal
encounter which, in my opinion, is the sine qua non of good therapy.
If ideas alone, without the establishment and eventual analysis of a deep personal
engagement between patient and therapist, always could heal, then depth
psychotherapy would not be needed. One could simply read a book on metaphysics or
metapsychology, or an essay on religious experience, and that would be
sufficiently therapeutic. If images alone, without an intentional human
relationship to help contain and interpret them, always could heal, then depth
psychotherapy would not be needed. One could simply dream and fantasize, or, if
requiring more exogenous imagery, go to the movies, or to church, or to an
exhibition of pictures, and that would be sufficiently therapeutic.
In my opinion, for some people, at some times, an intentional, professional,
ritualized, therapeutic relationship, often including analysis of the
transference, is just what is needed. That kind of work has been called
narcissistic and unnatural, but I cannot agree. Such judgments tar with the same
brush a wide spectrum of therapeutic work, some of which, in my view, is eminently
helpful, and uniquely valuable. Some archetypal psychologists inveigh against
personal psychotherapy because it removes the focus of attention from the world,
they say, and puts it on the self, thereby leaving the world uncared for. I agree
that the world deserves our compassionate care, but what comprises one’s “world”
is a matter of perspective, that is, of personal confession, and the care that
each individual can give is a matter of ability and inclination, that is, of
personal confession. Personally, I rarely think of “saving the planet.” It’s too
big, and, in my view, may not even need “saving.”
But even if one agrees that the planet, under attack from increasingly importunate
economic exploitation by a burgeoning human population, does need saving, and even
if one believes that therapeutic efforts which do not serve that agenda are
wasteful, unjustified, and counterproductive, that still would not mean that depth
psychotherapy is without value. In my experience, a successful analysis, which
empowers the patient to give up excessive reliance on archaic inner object
relationships, liberates that person precisely to become attentive to the needs of
others and to the needs of the world around him or her—that is, to join the world
as a member of the community—and this is in direct proportion to the degree of
liberation from the previous reliance on the archaic inner objects. Most likely,
urging such a person rhetorically to turn attention to the soul of the world, or
to citizenship, or to community, would accomplish nothing. Without the inner
liberation provided by the analysis, that person had no ability to turn attention
elsewhere; it was persistently fixated upon the primitive objects of unrecognized,
unsatisfied needs and desires.
In Jewish mysticism, it is said that within each person is a universe, so that
whoever saves a life saves an entire universe. That expresses well my approach
towards practicing psychotherapy. No doubt wider social action is also needed, as
well as work aimed at better connecting the individual to the world at large, but
not, in my view, to the exclusion of the project of personal alchemy by means of
one-pointed, non-judgmental, profound consideration of individual human
interiority. With no particular wider agenda.
Earlier, I discussed therapeutic work with survivors of incest and severe abuse.
Such work presents special difficulties for the therapist. Entering into an
meaningful, long-term relationship with someone who is deeply wounded, and perhaps
not functioning well socially, can be trying on many levels, not the least of
which is bearing up to the sadness, anger, or even rage, stirred up within the
psyche of the therapist upon hearing about the maltreatment of the patient. Such
difficult feelings signify more than just moral indignation. Nor are they only
reflections of the suffering of the world, nor solely projections of the patient’s
rage into the therapist, although that component of projective identification (see
Racker, 1968) probably is present. Such feelings probably also reverberate the
therapist’s own sadness, anger, and rage at early experiences of perceived
mistreatment, even if such mistreatment was not particularly abusive or severe.
Consequently, to do the work, the therapist must willingly subject himself or
herself to suffering a series of burdensome affects and onerous emotions which
are, at least in part, intensely personal. Further, continued exposure to accounts
of cruelty and violence, which really cannot—or at least, in my view, should not—
be heard as fiction, can impel the therapist towards more prolonged moods of
cynicism or depression which then must be swallowed and somehow digested, or, if
that proves impossible, simply borne compassionately.
In a lovely essay called “House and City,” Sardello (1992) discussed feelings
aroused in himself by his realization that “city design deadens the soul, and we
must realize that the city is dying” (p. 45). On seeing the dying city, one’s
first instinct, he said, is denial. Following that,
a response of rage follows [that] makes us want to flee the city. Rage—felt, held,
not shut off nor denied nor acted out—leads to compassion. Compassion must be
nurtured to the point that one suffers with things. Compassion opens the soul, an
opening which can lead to a different perception of the city, one which ceases
merely to look at the city and begins to engage the city’s invisible soul. (p. 45)
When reading those words, I was reminded of my work with survivors of child abuse.
The focus of Sardello’s essay was the city—that is, “outside” of self—and the
focus in my work is the person—that is, “inside” of self—but the working process
seems identical. One sees the damage. One becomes angry. One wants to flee
(meaning, in my case, not take on the patient). One allows the feelings of rage
which leads to a compassionate opening of soul.
When reading his next words, I was particularly struck by the parallel between
Sardello’s commitment to the work of ensouling the city, and my commitment to the
work of helping psychically wounded persons. This is what he said:
In order for anything to express itself, it needs to be held in positive regard.
But this regard is not a judgment of the thing as beautiful when it is not, or as
good when it is not. The positive regard is the capacity to experience the
particularity of the things of the world in an attitude of silence and waiting.
The heart says yes there is something here to behold beyond what I think or feel
about it. The heart does not strive after meaning, but rather allows the things to
disclose themselves. (1972, pp. 45-46).
Now, if every appearance of word “thing” in Sardello’s affirmation were simply
changed to the word “person,” that affirmation would express faithfully my
attitude towards the practice of depth psychotherapy. I seek to view my patients,
however wounded, awkward, or troublesome they may seem to be, with positive
regard. I get to know them. As their interiority is disclosed, compassion arises,
and, in my personal experience, that compassion provides an enveloping matrix in
which healing may occur. Whether that healing is called ensoulment, reconnection
to the world, restoration of the self, reintegration of the personality,
individuation, or the grace of God does not, in my personal confession, seem
ultimately to matter very much. Those phrases are only words that refer to the
indescribable, indefinable, ineffable anyway.

CLOSING INVOCATION

I am grateful to my friend, Lionel Corbett, M.D., Jungian analyst, self

psychologist, astrologer, mystic, for this beautiful formulation:

May all our teaching and learning be for the sake of the harmony and peace of all
beings.
May all the work that we do with those who come to us for help be for their
greatest good, whatever that may be.
May we offer whatever we are able to those who come to us for help with no
reservation.
May we never use those who come to us for help for our own purposes.
May we give whatever we give in a generous and selfless spirit.
May we be given the means to increase the peace of mind of all those who come to
us for help.
May we help in their awakening.
May we always be compassionate and kind.
May we never do any harm to another being.
May we help all beings to rest in their True Nature.
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