Narcissism

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. --C.G. Jung, Civilisation in Transition, par. 252

Proceeding from oneness to twoness is a psychological process for inter and intra personal relationships. This article is a linking of the perspectives of Jungian analytical psychology, French psychoanalyst Andre Green’s concepts of the dead mother and narcissism and Hester Solomon, British Jungian analyst describing the ‘as-if’ personality. These concepts are elucidated with the composite example of a self-described sexually addicted man called Daniel. His behaviour attempted to mask the shadows of melancholy, fragility and lack of self-animation from early emotional narcissistic wounding. As result, he did not love or know the other.

In the Poetics, Aristotle noted, "our pity is excited by misfortunes undeservedly suffered, and our terror by some resemblance between the sufferer and ourselves . . . a person... involved in misfortune not by deliberate vice or villainy, but by some error or human frailty . . ." The reference to human frailty here represents a person encased in narcissism, isolative self-reference and fear of the other.

Daniel embarked on Jungian analytical psychotherapy because he felt something missing; he cannot name it, a malaise, corrosive but imprecise, alienating him from himself. He dreamt, “There is a red stockinged lady outside the bookshop in Zurich, where earlier in the day I had bought Jung’s ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul.’ As Jung wrote, “the image is a condensed expression of the psychic condition of the whole”(1971, p. 442). This quote addresses the psychological issue in Daniel’s dream opening from oneness to twoness, from the singular and isolated to relationship with other. In addition, the dream and quote demonstrate the way into Daniel’s psyche is through symbols of the feminine. Yet, his life was bounded by a variety of addictions to food, drink and sex, all serving as disconnections from his body and psyche. His behaviours were also symptomatic of our current era of uncertainty and alienation affecting the psyche and the body. Daniel’s addictive behaviours were acts of isolation while they also contained the unconscious goal of self-creation opening the pathways to access his spirit.

‘As-If’ Personality

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” (Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, par. 335)

The malady of the soul rules the ‘as-if’ personality. This type of person finds the border between self and other threatening and they are unable to accept or perceive any others. The zest or passion for life is inaccessible when the self folds in on itself, as the person is insulated and excluding. He recoils from differences, change or anything dissimilar to himself. Integration is difficult for this person living in a state of singularity, needing to appear perfect and without flaws. Through façade and illusions he uses image to replace the real.

It took years for Daniel to begin his inner journey, as his road was littered with restlessness and addictive behaviours orchestrated to hide from his self. His sexual addictions represented the division between an outer compliant and good-guy facade and the interior, ponderous layers of shame and guilt. Yet, he still continued to defy societal and family rules and convention.

What was his psyche trying to compensate and why with the use of these addictions? Rather than holding the tension between psyche and body, grief and memory, the addictions indicated the other within was ignored, separated, as if a stranger and the emotional wounds put into the shadows. The addictions allowed him to misrepresent reality and led to a romanticised world of idealisation. He retreated into a dream world without notice of actual dreams and perpetuating the timelessness of his fantasies (Steiner, 1993, p. 99). Although he was a talented actor, he never really believed in the role or the stage on which he found himself.

Every attempt to understand this person impresses on the observer all seems ‘as-if’ satisfactory. Yet, he does not emotionally invest in people, places, or objects, anticipating lack of safety and being uncared for. Nor does he know how to care for others. There also is the issue of damaged connection to his body as the instincts are off, the spirit dampened and Daniel without genuineness. When things are good, Daniel destroys. Love remains unknown and Daniel feels alone, living from his secret place.

The personality described here has an unlinked up quality, cold. Daniel said he was fraudulent, reacting from pseudo affectivity and living a sham existence. This cover, although false was his survival suit to blend in so nothing suggested any disorder. He did not know other than façade and pretend, as he was without the tools for intimacy with anyone, most of all with him self. This defence of the self is a protective mechanism preserving rather than permitting the fearful ego to be annihilated. Eventually a psychological crisis occurred as the outer facade and the inner reserves collapsed, revealing the void at the center.

Andre Green and the Dead Mother

Andre Green, French psychoanalyst brought forth the concept of maternal deadness. He associated this with the idea that classical psychoanalysis was founded on the question of mourning. His themes emerging out of French culture reflected absence, negation, negativity, and nothingness (Kohon, ed., 1999, p. 5). Andre Green described the child mutated by maternal loss, lack of presence or aliveness left with fractured attachments and internal discontinuity. He described the “lack: absence of memory, absence in the mind, absence of contact, absence of feeling all—all these absences can be condensed in the idea of a gap...instead of referring to a simple void or to something which is missing, becomes the substratum of what is real” (Kohon, ed., 1999, p. 8).

Mourning is part of personality separation and reintegration, but this needs adequate parental/maternal presence. Daniel learned to ignore feelings and his life repeated the absence of sufficient parental attachment. Recognising the wounded places, regrets, the abandonments and betrayals, big and small provoked a troubling, deeply challenging loss of meaning. Daniel avoided all this with his addictions. His inner discourse was critical, demanding with preoccupying daily judgments, self-erasure, thoughts and feelings. Or, he experienced passive emptiness. The investment in self became dismantled, leaving behind psychic holes. Andre Green went on to name the suffering in which all seems to have ended like “a psychic ruin that seizes hold of the subject in such a way that all vitality and life becomes frozen, where in fact it becomes forbidden...to be” (Green, 1986, p. 152).

The person suffers a loss of meaning and inability to repair the mourned object or awaken the lost desire. The daughter cannot fully mourn the loss, does not get corroboration for it, and yet is consumed with sorrow that feels pervasive and tenacious. Green further defined psychoanalysis as dealing with problems of mourning (Kohon, 1999, p. 142). Attachment forms not to the parents but to the gap and the absence. Due to the paucity of what is accessible they cannot connect. The identification becomes with the vacuum or the gap left behind. Attachment forms to the mourning so life is covered over with a grey film.

Green also described the dissociation between body and psyche from the lack of love. Obstructing self-love and frozen in a state of psychical pain and alienation, disappointment and feelings of incapacity and lack of confidence consumed his personality. Singularity rather than sharing and isolation rather than relationship is a result. The vulnerable child longing to love and be loved lives in secret.

In addition the child’s life and the mother’s relationship with the child have been negated, perpetuating psychic impotence. The thing that endures is, “an essentially conflictual, ambiguous nature of desire, which is conceivable as the desire of the desire of the Other” (Green, 1979, p. 69). Daniel’s internal narrative illustrated the despoiling of his self-feeling. Emptied of energy or enthusiasm, an emotional morass developed.

To hide all this, Daniel keeps people away, lies to make them happy, deceiving them and him self. A range of emotions, angers and frustrations disappear into his daily rituals of masturbation, drugs and excess drink and food. He could not control his tendency for sexual boundary breaking and tried to get every woman he encountered. Driven by nagging insecurity his desire in the guise of lust represented the need for love and attention. Even when Daniel got the objects he craved, the feeling remained of them disappearing or being taken away.

The adaptation of mimicry, the protective fictions and the need to be an imposter began early. Mother was anxious, depressed, preoccupied so Daniel’s object cathexis became disturbed. His self became buried within and he could not summon the energy to make a full attempt at life. His distrust of the world was exacerbated by the cult-like claustraum nature of the family church. From young he was supposed to attest faith and belief but could not. This had to be hidden, so he lied, put on a happy face and pretended keeping the cover as the roots to his self became more lost. Daniel was a portrayal of the person whose unfolding of the self early on “met a blank and hostile environment so misattuned that the person felt unseen and/or noxiously related to” (Solomon, 2007, p. 198).

Daniel dreamt, “I apologise to the Black woman housekeeper I ran out on when I discovered there was work to be done. I ask her if she will help me be responsible and she says she will. As I awaken I am struck by the fact that I am a liar and that the truth is not in me. I wonder if I have become a compulsive liar, and if there is any hope for me since I have been untruthful for so long. I am struck by how much I lie and deceive for fear of being found out for who I really am”.

The dream illustrates the complexity to Daniel’s emotional distancing and comments he was not doing the work to be responsible or accountable. Like the ‘as-if’ personality, Daniel lived in “a solitary confinement of the self…There was fear of opening to another at the risk of psychological annihilation” (Solomon, 1998, p. 228). Having felt so different from others as a child, his isolative routines kept him under the hegemony of facade and the singularity of omnipotence. He wants help from his psyche and the Black woman housekeeper but he also notes he is a liar.

The Shadow

“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.” (Carl Jung, vol. 9i, p. 2)

Jung called for the necessity of integrating the shadow to illuminate the opposition between self and non-self, the qualities often projected from what is unpleasant and undeveloped in one self. The personality seeks self-regulation collecting the dissociated fragments and bringing them in relationship. Jung noted the body like the psyche is a symbolic communicator of the wounds, dissociations and unconscious contents.

The pull to women, drink and food represent the split-off shadow perpetuating the ‘as-if’ personality. The shadow, signifying the other is hidden and deemed unacceptable as Daniel avoids life (von Franz, 2000, p. 151). Jung recognised the shadow as part of the individuation process and involved coming to terms with the body (Jung, 1975, p. 338). However, Daniel was uncomfortable in his body, never feeling male enough, strong enough, fit enough and needing constant reassurance he was noticed and valued.

One cannot individuate, that is, become the person he is meant to be, without relating to the shadow. It was the shadow to which Daniel was addictively drawn and from which he fled. Jung commented, “The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalised into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality” (Jung, 1959, p. 20-21).

Daniel dreamed he had a tray of small cakes and is handing them out to others at a party. One has a bite out of it and one is damaged and he turns each around so no one sees. Daniel associated the cakes to his mother and the madeleine that writer Marcel Proust so thoroughly described in his novels associated with desire for his mother. He interpreted this dream showing what he retained from his mother was damaged goods while the better food was for others. The dream illustrated the early unmet needs for warmth and love, the lack sending him into a life of isolation, fears and separateness and as an adult ruled by addictions. Daniel said he does not know how or why he was drawn to these addictions. His personality was lost so long ago, he does not know what he is trying to resurrect. Consciously, Daniel only felt guilt about his behaviours. He presented with a mild demeanor yet there was a voracious side. Or, perhaps this was the desire for the self, hidden within the fear to be real.

Addicts can become enamored of fantasy images of themselves and others as the addictions provide a distorted mirror. Jung stated, “The essential factor is the dissociation of the psyche and how to integrate the dissociation” (1966, pp. 130-132). Meanwhile, the image of himself as someone extraordinary was a way Daniel defended against integrating his personality. His addictions were needed as retreats to prevent contact with the unacknowledged pain and anxiety. This was avoided as parts of the self were split off and projected into objects where they remained welded together thus making significant parts of the personality unavailable (Steiner, 1993, p. 54). It takes a long time to refuse the seductive pull of addictions. This is a process of mourning the losses and is necessary for symbol formation and reflection for recovering parts of the self.

Daniel resorted to grandiose fantasies to anesthetise the decimation of his self and compensate for what he felt as a dark shadow over him. The shadow represented the very parts Daniel could not accept about himself and were reenacted in the addictions and his need to control others while the addictions actually controlled him. Jung commented, “Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded” (Jung, 1998, p. 66). Daniel was not an experiencer of life nor had he learned to be an internal observer of his mental life. He expressed low self-esteem and fears of competency of being male.

Daniel’s sexual addictions were secret, a space reinforcing his perceived need for separation from others. Even though the secret also carries the hope that one day he can emerge, be found and met, he could not feel this as he was so subsumed in it (Khan, 1983, p. 105). There was no other within who spoke or objected, but there was the one inside that looked at him, accused and felt guilt. He had to escape that one and he did so with the women he bought, telling him self they were not only for sex but to be friends and liked by them.

Daniel’s veneer could obfuscate the therapeutic transference he verbally established from the first session as intellectual. This was to reassure he would not break the boundaries, as he was wont to do. “Behind the defences were a terrified infantile part of the self, a devious and cunning tempter and seducer” (Colman, 1991, p. 360). The seductive parts pulled him from his affectual sphere in order to hide the chaos and emptiness from him self and myself. This signified the glass wall between him and the world. Only false contact is all he could offer. The wall had been there as long as he could recall, but behind it also contained the pent up wish to merge. Jung commented, “the degree a person does not admit the validity of the other she/he denies the ‘other’ within the right to exist–and vice versa. The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity” (Jung, 1976, par. 187). Daniel’s inner dialogue was taken up with the addictive behaviours and thoughts. His hidden dependencies, the disjunction from affect, loneliness and depersonalisation resulted in his psychic retreats through the sexual addictions. For Daniel, a lifelong attitude of distance from his body and ignorance of its needs became the defensive structure he relied upon. He retreated to hide and protect as a means of avoiding intolerable anxiety in all aspects of life (Steiner, 1993, p. 12).

Feelings of being fake, unseen and worthless were tangled up with entitlement as Daniel strove to suppress a dimly felt despair. Andre Green, French psychoanalyst described this as an example of what he called death narcissism or the void, emptiness, self-contempt, destructive withdrawal, and self-depreciation with a predominant masochistic quality. He called another attitude life narcissism, a way of living—sometimes parasitically, sometimes self-sufficiently—with an impoverished ego that is limited to illusory relationships but without any involvement with living objects (Green, 2002, p. 644). Neither brings one into connection or intimacy with self, soul or world.

These attitudes can escalate into a crushing of personality and self-annihilation. This arouses a disturbing netherworld of psychological oppression and need for release from its mutilations. These people have acute conflicts with those who are close…an impotence to withdraw from a conflictual situation, impotence to love, to make the most of one’s talents, to multiply one’s assets, or when this does take place, a profound dissatisfaction with the results (Green, 1986, p. 149).

Meanwhile, Daniel through his addictions was seeking the feminine and the masculine, the mother, the others unknown within. But he was controlling, insecure and felt diminished. Later in therapy Daniel said he went on chat rooms disguised as a woman because he was more comfortable than upholding what he considered the male image where he felt weak.

Daniel’s addictions were defences against separation, loss and offered the illusion of omnipotence and manic excitement (Knox, 2011, p. 147). He cannot give up the fantasy of fusion with the other, represented by his addictions, otherwise this meant he was separate and alone. Mixed with this was a defensive/aggressive dynamic in his internal world confused and not knowing what was enough. When he divorced, quit the church, took a mind-altering substance and retired the ties to his former life were severed and his addictions simultaneously ramped up.

The Crime

For years Daniel had a repetitive dream he committed a crime. The dream bothered him. In time the dream escalated from his being an accomplice to becoming the main robber or killer. The reasons for this were never given in the dream. The shock upon awakening was the acknowledgement he had done the crime. Oh, no, he would exclaim in dismay. He was not conscious the crime was still going on and became upset by the dream message. The dream image portrays his avoidance of self-responsibility and shows self-betrayal due to lack of self-knowledge.

However, rather than listening and reflecting, he tried to escape the dream, often not mentioning in therapy the dream recurrence and its upset to him. He resisted attending to his conscience, not listening to the voice from within. This attempt to remain unconscious is also part of the dream crime.

And then the dream stopped. Now he associated the dream to the harshness of his work, the deception and high-powered force he had to muster but now was realising was not his real self. When he stopped being under the gun of this part of his personality, the dreams desisted. Over time he became what he called softer, more open, more a yoga person and less the politico. He liked the yoga part but said it does not make money nor manifest in the aggressive push he needed, even though these aspects were better for forming relationships. Yet he was without love, fearful of intimacy and needing control, all signaling narcissism.

When in a relationship Daniel is subject to losing the Psyche side of him self and Eros is only the erotic. He is aware enough to see love translates into loss of self. He jumps into the other person and from separation anxiety ends up being demanding, possessive, manipulative. He described the bottom going out of his personality and he distrusts. Attention and love must always be on his terms and he feels he must buy love to keep it.

These actions are typical of the one who fears intimacy. For Daniel, once his emotions are aroused reacts with vulnerability anticipating love will disappear. And, here is part of the significance of the crime dream. Emotional relationships are uncomfortable and he panics, as he cannot manage the intensity or threat of intimacy. He cannot give up control and kills the connection to any other. For him relationship means the loss of self so he tries to possess yet nothing satisfies his gnawing insecurity. Saying he is addicted, he also says he can turn on or off the sex switch. Confidence and trust, Psyche and Eros, Narcissus and Echo remain separate yet undifferentiated.

In another dream the pharmacy will not give him the prescription for pain because he lacks the correct government identity. He wonders if he has ever been himself, what his self is, who he is. Behind him is a voice saying the shadow knows and repeats this phrase. The dream is quite direct about what he needs—an identity including the shadow. And, it also implies he cannot avoid pain through medication.

When in a relationship, Daniel pursues various modes of emotional protection and avenues of psychological escape. The inner dilemmas heighten in intensity, creating upset. He fears the demise of the false covers and cannot chance exposure of the real. These are what Daniel denies and ignores. Since life does not tolerate standstill, a damming of energy results. This leads to what Jung called the tension of the opposites. It occurs when the union between consciousness and unconscious resists. When there is no resistance, the union can produce what is called the transcendent function arising from the regression of libido caused by the blockage (Jung, 1963, par. 145) and emerging anew into conscious life.

Andre Green said one has to analyse how the setting is experienced and given meaning by the analysis and by the analyst” (2005, p. 57). In therapy the subjective relation to the interior world and its symbols informs the capacity to create meaning, connect to people and engage with life. Jung stated, “the confrontation of the two positions, (the opposites), generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing…a movement out of the suspension between opposites…a quality of conjoined opposites. So long as these are kept apart—naturally for the purpose of avoiding conflict—they do not function and remain inert” (1960, p. 90).

Narcissism and the ‘As-If’ Personality

“As individual attention is habitually and excessively focused on the façade of the persona, the deeper, neglected aspects of the personality continually sabotage the individual’s conscious intentions” --Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 123

In the myth of Narcissus, it is the hunger to be loved and recognised by him self ultimately bringing about his tragic death. One might argue that having never known adequate mirroring from any other, Narcissus remained searching for his own image rather than for outer relationship. The narcissistic wounds create inertia, stifle life and harken to a form of narcissism that has to do not with self-love but self-hate (Schwartz-Salant, 1982, p. 24).

Similarly, the 'as-if'’ personality is characterised by performance, fraudulence and surrounded a wall of impenetrability, defensive against self and other. There lingers an absence of passion from the noxious childhood experiences originally forcing the self into hiding. A series of identifications and internalisations with external sources of environmental nourishment were substitutes for and constructed around the origins of the internal emptiness (Solomon, 2004, p. 642). Daniel’s early losses formed an internal disillusionment and he withdrew. Arrested in development, he rejected the instinctual, body, earth and time. “The narcissist strives to keep everything of value within the compass of himself because, paradoxically, he is plagued by doubt as to whether there is anything of value within himself” (Colman, 1991, p. 365).

Daniel goes through the world ‘as if’ life were real when he feels it is not. This became even more impossible when in the throes of the addictions, as he was absent from himself. Not being present promoted searching for the ideal but was counteracted by a punishing core of insufficiency. This created an ever-present tension cutting off pleasure in both mental and physical activities. The dissociation from self circumvents psychological movement and thwarts internal union. Life has no permanence or meaning while its impermanence is also denied. The seeking after glitter and accomplishments attempts to waylay mourning or acknowledging the losses. The self has yet to face a long repressed but often suspected, underlying internal reality, a hauntingly ever present background sense of living in a void or facing a vast emptiness” (Solomon, 2004, p. 636). The psychological residue denies time and makes change unimaginable. For example, Daniel had a reminder on his apple watch that he would die, sent 5 times a day to remind him of life.

Like Daniel, those who fail to go along with life remain suspended in midair. They hang onto youth, negatively anticipating life’s descent. With age they look back, clinging to the former glory days and fear death. “They withdraw from life and remain fixed in nostalgia with little relation to the present. The negation of life’s fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical to not wanting to die” (CW 8: 407; par. 800).

Narcissism is associated with solipsism, egoism, a pathological self-return, a circularity. When unconscious it can unleash a psychological violence on both the other and the self. Narcissism in its singularity can also occlude relationship to the unconscious, as this can seem threatening because different from consciousness. Jungian psychology is founded on the recognition that the dissociated parts, the unknown and the splits in the psyche can lead to or obstruct knowledge of self and other. A question is can the narcissist learn to engage with the other when they try to deny imperfection, depression, vulnerability or dependence. Instead of individuation, they seem concerned to maintain a false and illusory image of themselves.

Andre Green described what he called death narcissism or the void, emptiness, self-contempt, destructive withdrawal and self-depreciation with a predominantly masochistic quality. He called another attitude life narcissism, a way of living—sometimes parasitically, sometimes self-sufficiently—with an impoverished ego limited to illusory relationships but without any involvement with living objects (Green, 2002, p. 644). Neither attitude brings one into connection or intimacy with self, soul or world.

These attitudes can escalate into self-hatred and a crushing of personality. To be freed from the narcissistic shackles requires a significant working through of Daniel’s deep-seated vulnerabilities. The encounter with the other is crucial for overcoming the narcissistic defences. “The narcissistic omnipotent object relations are partly defensive against the recognition of the separateness of self and object” (Colman, 1991, p. 359). Arrival and erasure, promise and excuse constitute two sides of the same oscillating aporia of self-canceling. This means shedding his narcissistic armor he must recognise there are subjectivities distinct from his. Yet, the narcissist feels anxiety and apprehension, as he becomes increasingly impenetrable. The walls are so high and well defended no one gets in nor does he get out. The “I” can never become truly present and spins away from itself in a process of continual self and other alienation. Daniel is punctuated by the intolerance of difference and change and lost in the narcissism of small things while a sense of powerlessness plagued his mind.

In the alcove of his mind Daniel’s grandiose phantasies were based on feeling inferior, dependent on outer approval and being a millionaire by a certain age. Daniel lived in dread of the ordinary as if to say, ‘If I am like everybody, then I must be nobody’. This fostered a frenzy of activity compensatory to the internalised depletion that accompanies the self and other alienation. (Jacoby, 2016, p 156) Although Daniel portended he cared about others, superficial social adjustment, chronic uncertainty, dissatisfaction, exploitative and envious describe Daniel wrapped in his narcissistic cloak. He can appear shy and over-adaptive but internally critical of his glaring deficiencies. His self-image was in a distorted negative way, reflecting little of his true being (Jacoby, 2016, p. 158).

Daniel needed notice but did not know intimacy. “To recognise desire for what it is, dependent on others and also disallowed reveals him as unacceptable to himself, to be in conflict, too much in danger, disturbed by his own needs” (Philips, 2013, p. 35). Although now in a monogamous relationship, the dreams of women he was with sexually continue. In one dream he is with his 30 year old cousin who seems to be with a man in a corridor. The man leaves. Daniel says he will help her. She says no, I will help you. He puts a hand on her arm and this feels good. She puts her arm on his.

Delusion is the word he could not remember in a session. He said the affair with his cousin 30 years his junior was a delusion. In this comment he was attempting to cancel his former modes of adaptation to the world. Yet the persistence of what he called evil thoughts kept telling him he was bad even as they lured him in. This psychologically conflicting situation appears in the dream. Daniel has begun to comprehend this dream situation indicates when he goes unconscious as he has no idea how or why he is there. He has decided he will not lie to his partner and often in dreams like this realises he must tell her. Yet, years into the relationship he has not revealed to her the full extent of his feeling vulnerable and easily rejected. The conundrum is the emotional feelings are there but so submerged he hardly notices his sensitivities.

Daniel has spent his life avoiding feeling and now realises how rapidly he leaves his body, like in the previous dream. He said he needs conscious intention to remain present, as he only knew sneaking and hiding. The current emotional intimacy with his partner brings up the entrenched narcissistic defences as he realises the problem is worse than he thought. Daniel inhabited what he calls separate mind compartments populated with sexual encounters like those depicted in the dream that are on his mind frequently. These signify the solitude of the narcissist filling his world with no room for anyone else.

Daniel dreamt of a woman in the back of a bus who had rough sex with a guy. Daniel was in the front of the bus looking at the woman next to him and her lips. He felt no concern for the one in the back who was with the edgy guy. In the next dream that night he is with people and trying to find a place but does not know why is he with them or where he is going and just seems to be floating along. He feels empty in both dreams. Both dreams point to dissociations from self, other, body and emotion. Unbeknownst to him, Daniel had been suffering, lonely and desiring someone to notice him. He said the compulsive thoughts are there a lot; self-doubt abounds, drawing him to the lewd and despicable. So driven by his actions to erase the pain, all he could register was a sense of difference that felt unfavorable to the self (Colman, 1991, p. 364) making the addictions more insistent to escape such feelings.

Daniel’s addictions substituted for the natural and instinctual self, as the feelings were unbearable and repressed. Andre Green, French psychoanalyst surmised it is “because of the lack of the object and the drives seeking satisfaction that the mind is activated... a destruction of the psychic activity of representation which creates holes in the mind, or feelings of void, emptiness etc. a failure of symbolisation” (Kohon, 1999, p. 290). The sexual addiction does not fill but perpetuates the needs, secrets and lack of self worth.

Jung said, “In this world created by the Self we meet all those many to whom we belong, whose hearts we touch; here there is no distance, but immediate presence” (Jung, 1973, p, 298). The capacity for growth, development, creative agency and love is dependent upon existing in the mind, eyes, and gaze of the other in a dance of attuned, rhythmic and imperfect resonance. The acknowledgement of vulnerability and incompleteness is the psychological work filling in the gap between the subject and his image in the mirror.

The Symbolic

“The symbolic capacity signifies the possibility for integration and the symbolic life through the holding together of the opposites and the creation thereby of a third thing” (Solomon, 2007, p. 159).

The ‘as-if’ personality type contains the complexities, varieties and dissociations for uniting the psyche and body, shadow, self and other. In the psychological work and through the transference and countertransference the former sterility, lack of intimacy to self and others gradually comes alive. The images and symbols in dreams help understand the transformative aspects of the personality. They help a person move out of the one-sidedness of addictions that became the system of defence substituting subjective and singular formulations for reality.

James Hillman, archetypal psychologist, conceptualised what actually individuates is not us, but our passions, talents and places of wounding. Our complexes need to shake off their infantile associations and find maturity, reality and the physical connection with psyche. Then the personality becomes a rich, multidimensional canvas. (Slater, 2012, p. 30)

For Daniel the relation to his interiority and the symbolic evolved over time as his psychological restlessness led to recovery of his spirit. He was now able to find internal supplies for self esteem rather than seek continual external gratification. Accepting the disowned and split off others, meant the body was no longer objectified. Clinging to oneness opened to twoness as an internal couple within him emerged. Abandoning the singularity and isolation meant confronting the shadow and finding love for self and other. “Then the conjunctions of various sorts can begin to happen, where, it might be said, the internal couple can be allowed to come together and generate conception and rebirth” (Meredith-Owen, 2007, p. 389).

The tension between ego and self, surface and shadow is part of forming an identity in which various selves can co-exist. To bridge the tension between what was and what will be is basic both to the regulation of the psyche and the emergence of new attitudes. For the person caught by addictive behaviours and secrets this means facing the emptiness and realising life is no longer sustainable with facade. This occurred through the therapeutic relationship as over time Daniel began to trust and become more consciously embodied, intentional and with self-awareness.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” --Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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Susan E. Schwartz, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist is a member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. She has taught in numerous worldwide Jungian programs and presented workshops and lectures in and out of the USA.

Susan has articles in several journals and chapters in books on Jungian analytical psychology. She has a book coming out from Routledge in 2020 entitled, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters. Her analytical private practice is in Paradise Valley, Arizona, USA and her website is www.susanschwartzphd.com