Abstract:This paper is concerned with the operation of envy: it considers its origins and their repercussions, in particular its compulsion to sterilize the evidence of fertility, exemplified by Roger Money-Kyrle's evocation of 'the parental intercourse as the supremely creative act'. The inevitable impact on the analytic relationship is considered in the context of two clinical examples of impasse. It is argued that such fundamentally negative transferences, one full of overt aggression and enactment, the other more c… Show more
“…Meredith‐Owen () beautifully describes a similarly overwhelming experience of an unthought known when he talks about his feelings after first reading Money‐Kyrle's paper on ‘the aim of psychoanalysis’ (): The only analogous experience I can think of was once turning on the car radio at random, only to find myself listening for the first time to what turned out to be a passage of a late Beethoven quartet…I felt profoundly moved, yet almost quite uncomprehending … I felt a distinct sense of ‘recognition’, though of what was still obscure to me.…”
Section: Martin: Experiences Of Self and The Unthought Knownmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A number of psychoanalytic authors come to mind who talk about these kinds of phenomena in different ways, such as Bion's () ‘thoughts prior to thinking’, Bollas's () ‘unthought known’, Money‐Kyrle's () ‘recognitions’, Stern et al's () ‘moments of meeting’ and Tronick's (/2007) ‘dyadic expansion of consciousness’. The Jungian tradition explores them in reference to experiences of the Self, especially concepts such as Cambray's () ‘meaning encountered as emergence’ and ‘feelings of aha’, Meredith‐Owen's () ‘archetypal intimations’ and Colman's () ‘mad thoughts’. Yet there remains something powerfully mysterious and ineffable about these experiences of grace.…”
In this paper we consider states of grace in analysis. These encompass a range of phenomena which share an experience of something being received or revealed rather than produced by the ego. It feels that they are events that happen rather than events that are made to occur. They are marked by a profound sense of transformation of feeling tone. The quality of relatedness in the analytic dyad is also heightened. Some of these phenomena have been referred to as experiences of the self, synchronicities, moments of meeting, the unthought known and Eureka moments. The latter are experiences of sudden realization where a meaningful thought or image emerges which results in a dramatic shift in direction of the analysis and a transcendence of impasse. Although many authors describe these phenomena, we find that a Jungian approach provides a loom on which these threads can be woven together. Jung's concept of the transcendent function and his understanding of the gift of grace are particularly illuminating here. We also consider the conditions which allow grace to be experienced and how these inform our analytic practice.
“…Meredith‐Owen () beautifully describes a similarly overwhelming experience of an unthought known when he talks about his feelings after first reading Money‐Kyrle's paper on ‘the aim of psychoanalysis’ (): The only analogous experience I can think of was once turning on the car radio at random, only to find myself listening for the first time to what turned out to be a passage of a late Beethoven quartet…I felt profoundly moved, yet almost quite uncomprehending … I felt a distinct sense of ‘recognition’, though of what was still obscure to me.…”
Section: Martin: Experiences Of Self and The Unthought Knownmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A number of psychoanalytic authors come to mind who talk about these kinds of phenomena in different ways, such as Bion's () ‘thoughts prior to thinking’, Bollas's () ‘unthought known’, Money‐Kyrle's () ‘recognitions’, Stern et al's () ‘moments of meeting’ and Tronick's (/2007) ‘dyadic expansion of consciousness’. The Jungian tradition explores them in reference to experiences of the Self, especially concepts such as Cambray's () ‘meaning encountered as emergence’ and ‘feelings of aha’, Meredith‐Owen's () ‘archetypal intimations’ and Colman's () ‘mad thoughts’. Yet there remains something powerfully mysterious and ineffable about these experiences of grace.…”
In this paper we consider states of grace in analysis. These encompass a range of phenomena which share an experience of something being received or revealed rather than produced by the ego. It feels that they are events that happen rather than events that are made to occur. They are marked by a profound sense of transformation of feeling tone. The quality of relatedness in the analytic dyad is also heightened. Some of these phenomena have been referred to as experiences of the self, synchronicities, moments of meeting, the unthought known and Eureka moments. The latter are experiences of sudden realization where a meaningful thought or image emerges which results in a dramatic shift in direction of the analysis and a transcendence of impasse. Although many authors describe these phenomena, we find that a Jungian approach provides a loom on which these threads can be woven together. Jung's concept of the transcendent function and his understanding of the gift of grace are particularly illuminating here. We also consider the conditions which allow grace to be experienced and how these inform our analytic practice.
“…In his last decade Winnicott was profoundly immersed in Jung, both through his ongoing exchanges with his fellow paediatrician Michael Fordham, and through his reading, in German and English, of Jung's autobiography which culminated in his controversial review. Coinciding with this he experienced an extraordinary tri‐partite dream (Morey 2005; Sedgwick 2008; Meredith‐Owen 2011) whose culmination he described in a letter to Fordham: ‘Here was I awake, in the dream, and knew I had dreamt of being destroyed and of being the destroying agent. There was no dissociation, so the three I's were all together in touch with each other’ (Winnicott 1989, pp.…”
Section: ‘Interprefaction’mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As evidence he cited Jung's schoolboy belligerence, his game of building brick towers only to ‘rapturously destroy’ them with simulated earthquakes (Jung 1963, p. 33), and the adolescent Jung's ‘blasphemous’ vision of God shattering the beautiful blue roof of Basle cathedral with a turd bomb (ibid., p. 53). For Winnicott this was Jung falling back on the omnipotence of his own unassimilated aggression in such a dissociated way that he was unable to recognize the projection of his own anger into God (Meredith‐Owen 2011). Yet it was Jung's own intuition that brought him to address this very issue in his later preoccupation with the irascible, omnipotent God of Job.…”
The cave walls of prehistoric man record two contrasting hand impressions: the one positive - a direct imprint; the other negative - a blank defined by a halo of colour. Jung's disturbed, displaced contact with his mother led to a struggle in establishing an integrated sense of 'I'; instead to create a sense of Self he brilliantly contrived to illuminate the darkness around that blank impress. The resulting lifework, enhanced by Jung's multifarious capacities as artist and philosopher as well as physician, is deeply impressive; yet Winnicott (1964) in his review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) nevertheless alludes to Jung's 'own need to search for a self with which to know' (p. 450). Passages from the autobiography are considered that appear to corroborate Winnicott's contention that Jung had a 'blank', potentially psychotic, core. Yet it is also argued that the psychoanalytic mainstream has undervalued the subtlety and creativity of Jung's own intuitive response to his shadow and that a sympathetic appreciation of this can still valuably inform our contemporary approaches to narcissistic disorders, especially dissociation.
“…For me the most affecting analytic text that I have come across on this theme of our potential ambivalence about ‘indebtedness’ was the short, last paper of the Kleinian analyst, Roger Money‐Kyrle (Money‐Kyrle 1971), which I have discussed previously (Meredith‐Owen 2008). I think we as Jungians would recognize his paper, to which he gave the simple title ‘The aim of psycho‐analysis’, as being very archetypal in its structure and timbre in so far as he condenses the wisdom of his long and distinguished career into the suggestions that maturational processes proceed, if they can, across three thresholds, or as he puts it, through three ‘recognitions of indebtedness’.…”
Section: Introduction and A Biographical Sketch Of Coleridgementioning
Some of S.T. Coleridge's observations about 'the mind's self-experience of itself' and the nature of faith and trust are discussed in relation to the implicit tensions between 'tradition' (formal structure, received wisdom) and 'originality' (creativity, individuation), especially in the transference. The existential doubts of some analysands may undermine their confidence that their integrity will be fostered by the analytic relationship: so instead the trappings of 'tradition' (e.g. in the case of a trainee the assumption of a professionally endorsed status) may be appropriated as a spurious substitute for 'originality'. It is argued that an anticipatory 'faith', albeit initially rather cerebral, may be necessary to sustain the analytic endeavour until a more intimate, heartfelt 'trust' can release the potential for individuation. Further consideration is given to the 'analytic attitude' that might best facilitate this process, and to how sensitivity to these dynamics may inform one's reading of the transference.
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