Contents

1. The Psychoid, Psyche and Soul: Piercing Space-Time Barriers

Psyche and Soul

Inaugural Images

Two Sources of Healing

2. Psychoid Quality of the Unconscious, A Third Source of Healing

The Psychoid Quality of the Unconscious

The Psychoid Field

Other Theorists, Mystics

Healing Potential of the Psychoid Field

Blooming

Scraps

Meaning and Its Paradox

The Ubiquity and the Aura of the Psychoid

3. Examples of Psychoid Quality of Unconscious

Example 1: Murder

Example 2: Violence

Example 3: Psychoid Experience in Social Life

Example 4: Psychoid Experience in Everyday Life

Example 5: A Man’s Experience

4. Mending Trauma

Mending

Flashbacks

The First Witness

The Second Witness

Meaning Matters

Healing

5. Dread of Transition, and an Additional Matrix

Another Transition

Matrix as Container

An Additional Matrix

Benefits and Limits of the Container Image, and of the Interpenetrating Matrix

The Unconscious Psyche, and the Soul, as Additional Matrices

Back to Murder

The Psychoid and the Matrix

The Uncontainable

A Leap Perhaps?

Something More

Images of Something More, East and West

Meaning Once Again

Example

6. Spiritual Elements in Clinical Work

Something More (Again)

Tracking the Tiger

Dead Parts

Individual/Collective

The Really Bad

Scraps Again

Modes of Consciousness

Inaugural Images (Again), Psychoanalytic Theories and God-Images

The Psychoid

7. Excursus: Coincidence of Opposites – Nicholas of Cusa and C. G. Jung

Jung’s Style

God-Image

Coincidence of Opposites

Five Parallels Between Jung and Nicholas of Cusa

Suggested Implications of Aspects of Nicholas’ Notion of Godself in Us for Jung’s Notion of Self

Suggested Implications of Nicholas’ God-Image for Jung’s Complex

References

About the Author

 

1. The Psychoid, Psyche and Soul:
Piercing Space-Time Barriers

 

A sentence in Jung’s paper “Soul and Death” struck into me because it connected with a clinical experience that was profound. Jung was addressing the difference between consciousness whose “limitation ... in space and time is such an overwhelming reality” that when it is “annulled,” as it was in that clinical experience, it is of “the highest theoretical significance” and the “annulling factor would be the psyche, since space-time would attach to it at most as a relative and conditioned quality.” But, Jung goes further, “Under certain conditions it [psyche] could even break through the barriers of space and time precisely because of a quality essential to it ... its relatively trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature.” Jung urges, “The possible transcendence of space-time ... is of such incalculable import that it should spur the spirit of research to the greatest effort” (Jung 1934/1960, para 813; also cited in Bright 20014, 87).

This book is an effort to contribute to such research. Jung was discussing the space-time barriers in relation to telepathy. I am discussing them in relation to clinical experience of the psychoid quality of unconscious processes. Further, penetrating space-time barriers links to Jung’s looking for his lost soul, as recounted in The Red Book (Jung 2009, 232). Without soul, he lost not only his capacity to annul the space-time barrier, but also lost the aliveness of his everyday life.

Both Jung and Freud thought our projections of psyche and soul into religious categories, let alone political, philosophical or cultural institutions, that is, into containers ‘outside’ the psyche, had fallen away. Where had all that projected energy gone? It fell into our human psyche and the new discipline of psychoanalysis was the result. For Freud this meant getting rid of religion, for Jung, this meant investigating what he eventually called the ultra-violet spiritual pole of the archetype and the God-image and God beyond it.

In his Liber Novus, a pivotal transition happens to Jung, changing his initial project of reanimating religious traditions by discerning the correspondence of the truth of their symbols to images arising in our psyche. He now sees the human psyche is itself the site of transformation: “the spirit of the depths burst forth and led me to the site of the innermost” (Jung 2009, 239; see also 252 n.211, 253, and n227, 228; see also Jung 1953, para 7). Psyche/soul is now a space where transforming of us happens (or fails to) and that relates to what animates the whole world, for “the psychology of the individual, corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation” (Jung 2009, 253 n221 and in Jung 1953/1966, para 7, his italics; see also Jaffé 1963, 132).

Psyche and Soul

Psyche is all the processes conscious and unconscious which enable or disable us to be a person connected to self, to others and to what transcends psyche. Psyche mediates reality, adding a psychical line of interpretation to traditional hermeneutics (Ulanov and Ulanov, 1975, 81-82). Soul is that willingness to be such a person related to self and others and to the beyond, the something more in us that longs for, desires both something beyond and dwelling in the quotidian. Jung writes, “it [the soul] has the dignity of an entity endowed with, and conscious of, a relationship to deity” (Jung 1953, para 11). I understand soul as that unlockable door residing within our body-self, our psychosomatic being, through which God (or whatever we put in place of God) can put a paw on us at any time.

Jung uses the term soul to denote a psychological faculty central to religious experience, and central to feeling oneself creatively alive and real. In conversation with Meister Eckhart, for example, Jung sees the soul as a definite complex, personifying contents of the unconscious (Jung 1921, paras 420-421): soul “is a function of relation between the subject and the inaccessible depths of the unconscious. The determining force (God) operating from these depths 1 is reflected by the soul, that is, it creates symbols and images” (Jung 1921, para 425). Soul shows in a willingness to respond, to be real and creatively alive in relation to others, to God, to self, even if in terror and dread (Ulanov A. and B. 1975, 91-92). Jung’s view of the soul as “in an intermediate position” between conscious and unconscious makes me think of it as a two-way mirror, reflecting upwards to (ego) consciousness images of archetypal depths, and reflecting downwards to the unconscious what is going on in consciousness, especially the effects on our ego of the images reflected upwards from the unconscious. As Jung puts it, soul is “both receiver and transmitter” (ibid).

In the work of many mystics, soul dwells in depths of us inaccessible by rational intellect or ordinary words or dualisms of consciousness (Hollywood 1995, chapter 1). God as center of reality is also soul’s ‘breath of life’ embodied in us, displaying the radical fact that ground of being is ground of us (though the relations of the two are very complicated and explained in diverse and conflicting ways). God is in the soul and the soul informs psyche about this groundedness (Jung 1950/1966, paras 139-140; Caputo 2011, 89-90; Ulanov 1984/2005, 280-283; Ulanov 1998/2004, 206; Ulanov 2008/2014, 181).

To see that psyche has trans-spatial and trans-temporal capacities and relation with soul, has effects in our clinical work. For example, a major consequence of trauma is loss of soul. Its mirroring function gets frozen or fragmented so that in addition to losing body flexibility and pleasure, we lose capacity to transcend “space-time barriers” in relation to the beyond (however we characterize it) and lose our capacity to live stably in space and time. Meaning goes missing; we cannot find it and fear it is destroyed forever. The ground beneath us cracks open. We cannot represent in word or even image what has happened to us. We have fallen out of being and suffer what Bion calls “nameless dread” as if surrounded by buzzing bees stinging us to death in a bombardment of unprocessed experiences ”(Bion 1962, 96; Bion 1992, 1992, 45-46). We need the clinical relationship (or its equivalent) to perceive that this buzzing is reaching to communicate the unlived meaning of events, memories and panics that besiege us (Godsil 2014, p. 63).

Jung begins his odyssey in The Red Book to find the soul he discovers he had lost. Instead of turning his soul into a “scientific object” which he could study and have “many learned words for her ... the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul” (Jung 2009, 232 and n 39). 2

Inaugural Images

We can see the soul’s spark in what Jung calls our raw materials – the data, the stuff of our ongoing life despite trauma (Jung 1946/1954, para 400; see also Jung 1950/1966, para 140). Nestled there soul sparks (what he calls scintillae) exist, initiating what I see as inaugurating images that, even in dreadful suffering, persist (Jung 1963, paras 42, 45, 49, 50). Hence, despite the black hole of the dead mother of André Green’s theory or the dead third of Samuel Gerson’s theory, we are not dead yet, but, as Green puts it, “the love or life instincts – are responsible for this growth, this ‘bud’ of being” (Green 2000, 81; see also, Green 1993, 148-155; Gerson 2009, 1342, 1343). Jung says an individual’s “traumatic complex brings about dissociation of the psyche”. It shows its tremendous power and autonomy: “it pounces upon him like an enemy or a wild animal” (Jung 1928/1954, paras 266, 267). Yet it too is part of us and of any unity we may assemble; it is part of “a string of hard facts, which together make up the cross we all have to carry or the fate we ourselves are” (Jung 1946/1954, para 400).

Winnicott says is not interpretations, but new living experience with another that heals (Winnicott 1971, 117). I would also add that healing arises from such animated connection with heretofore missing parts of ourselves, and beyond ourselves with ‘something more’ that the soul knows about, and yearns to inhabit. When we respond to those inaugurating images a hum of meaning gets into play. A singing, a thinking, a perceiving, a nonpurposive purpose grows in us which we find instead of manufacture. We can spot those inaugurating images in theories we esteem – Winnicott’s space of transition from which our symbols spring; Freud’s space between the free-associating and the observing ego that allows freedom from instinct at the same time we channel its energies into life projects. In this space Kohut locates the cohesive self, so elusive of definition but also central to living. Bion finds here the ultimate O, the emotional truth of the moment. Klein finds the mysterious triggering by our anxiety changing into guilt the instinctive response of our reparative efforts to make things better and to feel gratitude (see Ulanov 1992/2005, 32-33). Money-Kyrle finds the image of parental intercourse the supreme symbol of creating something good between self and other (See Meredith­-Owen 2009, 459). Jung’s image is the rhizome, growing in, of and through him of its own accord, including the damaged places, with its ownmost capacity to be and to flourish (Jaffé 1963, 4, 19, 20, 27), Jung’s words, “the perennial rhizome beneath the earth ... the root matter is the mother of all things” remind me of the title of Celan’s poem, “Radix Matrix” meaning “Root, Womb” (Jung 1956/1974, xxiv; Felstiner 2001, 175).

We each can give examples of inaugurating images in ourselves, and in our analysands, that if heeded, not only inspire faith in processes of psyche to communicate our distress (e.g. citing analysands, “I am disappearing down the bathtub drain”; “I am like an aborted mess”) but also to salute emerging meaning (e.g. “the ‘solid girl in me,” “the dream instructs: I am to build a bridge”). Recovery from trauma includes spying soul’s inaugurating images that plant a seed in us that we are to incarnate into a life. Jung calls such an image ‘primordial’ – not derived, not symptomatic of something else, but “a true symbol ... an expression for something real but unknown” and “intentionally kept secret ... hidden ... out of religious awe” (Jung 1950/1966, para 148). Such images open us to psychoid quality of unconscious processes and to something beyond psyche that looks at us, so to speak, from its point of view. Jung asks, “What if there were a living agency beyond our everyday human world ... a door that opens to the human world from a world beyond” to carry us “to a more than personal destiny?” (ibid.)

The psyche-soul question is, will we respond to these images, make something of them making something of us, for as Jung says: “Only what is really oneself has the power to heal” (Jung 1953/1966, para 258). I see these inaugural images as our nubs of being, as soul elements that generate original thinking and spontaneous emotion that fill us with hope for the precious smallness of our everyday lives in the large universe. These moments proffer a coniunctio of immediate child consciousness without preconceptions joining with adult reflection. Their conjunction imparts what Sedgwick, citing Proust, calls “a psychology of surprise and refreshment” (Sedgwick 2011, 4). Such a joining is lived but not known. As for the world – the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world – its transitions rely on each of us: “The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world” (Jung 1957/1964, para 511, see also 540).

If psyche/soul transcending space and time barriers truly matters, its effects show up in our clinical work. I cite three: experience of the psychoid quality of the unconscious in the transference/countertransference field as a place of healing even trauma in self and world; experience of two kinds of witnessing that help heal trauma; new experiences of transition, and of containers.

Two Sources of Healing

Remembering Jung saying in The Red Book that transformation happens in us, not in containers of religion nor in metaphysical figures of culture or politics outside ourselves, we shift to acknowledge a third kind of healing in Jung’s corpus, in addition to the two with which we are more familiar.

Jung cites a first source of healing in our discovery that our particular problem, the core of trauma that befell us, the still powerful complex that dogs our days even after much work to become released from it, is part of human problems, not ours alone. Our complex mirrors a suffering afflicting our family, and, even wider, our particular culture and time in history. When this insight penetrates consciousness, instead of feeling trapped, we see we are harnessed into working on something that hurts the whole human family, both near – the intergenerational trauma – and afar – the culture of late 20th century, or the breakup of assumed cultural meaning in beginning of 21st century. We are healed or at least lightened from the burden of humiliation and isolation that our complex imposes on us (Jung 1984, 705, 22; Jung 1988, v. 2, 904-905; Jaffé 1963, 335; Ulanov 2013, 9).

We see the suffering that besieges us and our reparative efforts to relieve it compose our service to the whole. That insight confers meaning. Our efforts, however small in the largeness of life, are nonetheless valuable to the human family. Dignity re-forms. Like tellers at a specific window in the bank, we work on a particular problem of cash flow – flow of psychic libido: Where has it gone missing? Who has cheated? Stolen it? Run off with it? Injured it? Our efforts to solve these problems serve the health and wealth of the entire bank.

A second source of healing comes from Jung’s project of making conscious the correspondence of truths in traditional symbols, especially religious and spiritual ones, with truths in images that arise in our own psyche. Such insight links us into age-old patterns of renewal and ritual that bespeak meaning (Jung 1953, para 20). Jung’s intent is not to replace religion but to offer a renewed way into its truths, whatever the tradition, though he focused mainly on Christianity and pivotal views of God in the Hebrew Bible. Light exists, he says; analytical psychology can help us see the light by showing us the correspondence between the truth in religious symbols with the psychic images that appear in each of us. We feel a personal connection to age-old truths, those sighs too deep for words (“for all religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul”) (Jung 1945, 126). We come upon personal meaning of something revealed to us we did not know before, and feel released, indeed, even reborn (Jung 1953, paras 13-15).

Jung writes, “Many hundreds of patients have passed through my hands ... among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say over thirty-five – there has not been one whose spoken problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life ... everyone fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook” (Jung 1933/1958, para 509).

For example, to see our painful being torn apart in opposite directions as in some way participating in the image of the crucified Christ, not knowing (according to Gospel of Mark) whether his death signals the triumph of evil, or that evil itself has been gathered up in God’s plan, (according to Gospel of John) anchors our uncertainty as part of the God-man’s life. It also shows, at least in one account of John’s Gospel, that God does what we cannot do: God enters the suffering that evil causes and kills the death-dealing effects it inflicts.

Such a vision can have a revelatory effect: it communicates that somehow our suffering matters, is acknowledged, while also defeating its power to define our life. Indeed, in participating in that mystery another point of view inhabits us while being also beyond our comprehension. We pierce the boundaries of space and time.

Jung cites the ritual of The Round Dance in Apocryphal Acts of John, the dance of disciples around Christ at the center (Hennecke 1964, 227-232). Commenting on this rite, Jung observes that the one around whom all circle, shows a “symbol for the Deity, illustrating the wholeness of the God incarnate: the single point in the centre and the series of points constituting the circumference” (Jung 1954/1958, para 419). If our struggle with feeling pulled apart by death-dealing conflicts links with symbolic truth in this age-old ritual, instead of isolation from identifying oneself with a single point on the circumference, being drawn into identification with the one at the centre who chooses the suffering imposed on him, binds us together with him and with all others “of like mind” (ibid, para 419). What is thus created is “that ubiquitous participation mystique which is the unity of the many, the one man in all men” (ibid).

Connecting with that radical perspective liberates us from being designated by the complex or trauma that has captured us. The trauma is part of us; we are no longer engulfed in it. Through identification with the one as the nucleus in all persons, the one in the many, we find inner space to relate to the suffering that has fallen upon us and make it our own and win from that relation its life-saving meaning of the deity meeting us even in our suffering.

 

 

 

 

 

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