Stepping into the Archipelago

On the 19th December 1981, a coastal freighter, The Union Star, issued a distress Mayday signal as it was driven by hurricane force winds and 60-foot waves on to the lee shore of the far southwestern coast of Cornwall.

At 8.12pm on that night, at the Penlee lifeboat station close to Penzance, eight volunteer crew members of the Penlee lifeboat set out to rescue the crew of the Union Star. There was one brief radio message reporting that the lifeboat was picking up crew members of the Union Star and then the radio went dead. The crew of both the lifeboat and the freighter perished that night. At the Penlee RNLI lifeboat station, a mile west of the fishing port of Newlyn, a garden has been created to commemorate the loss. The plaque on the garden wall starts with the phrase – Service Not Self. I visited this memorial garden as I was working on this paper and was struck by the ways this phrase evoked the difficulty and confusion that surrounds the word self, which is used so often in clinical work. I thought also about how easy it is, in our culture, to see self as being opposed to community, society, others, and the world in general.

This paper follows on from a number of conversations between me and my friend and colleague, Paul Atkinson about the continuities, breaks and meeting points between Jungian and Relational Psychoanalytical ideas of the self. Our dialogue originated out of our different therapeutic formations and also our desire to explore the relationship between these two currents of psychoanalytic thought.

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

In his book, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993) Stephen Mitchell wrote, from a relational perspective, one of the most fluid and enabling of texts of that time about the self. His writing focuses on broadening our understanding of the central paradox about the self, namely that:

“People often experience themselves, at any given moment, as containing or being a ‘self’ that is complete in the present; ‘a sense of self’ often comes with a feeling of substantiality, presence, integrity, and fullness. Yet selves change and are transformed continually over time; no version of self is fully present at any instant, and a single life is composed of many selves”.(p. 102)

I was reminded of the truthfulness of such a paradoxical stance on the self when I was helped by my own therapist to understand that one of the reasons that I continue to be assertive about my own individual creative history and activity might lie in the fact that my parents had four boys, to each of whom they gave a first name starting with an A; and a second name after an English Catholic martyr. I had to find some way to stand out from that crowd… although that biographical truth can also feel, at times, as if it were located in some island called: ‘not me’.

Mitchell was influenced by the legacy of Harry Stack Sullivan and the interpersonalist school. Writing in the early 1990s, he wanted to examine two fairly dominant views about the self in psychoanalysis . The first is associated with Kohut, Winnicott and the UK independent movement and emphasises that the result of an impinging environment in early life leads to the formation of a protective layer, the false self, which protects against further damage. The real self retreats into an inner castle, where it lives in an unknowable and secret state. One of the attractions of this view is that it posits the self as singular, layered and continuous. As Mitchell puts it, “It feels as if our personal self is ours in some uniquely privileged way; we control access to its protective layers and its ‘core’; only we know and understand its secrets” (p. 111). Implicit in thinking of the self like this is the idea that the call of the self from the ‘core’ can be experienced as opposed to others and to service to others, as well as to the outside world of community. This, I imagine, could be what the memorial plaque in

Penlee is referring to, when it opposes self and service.

Mitchell suggested that a second dominant view of the self had originated from object relations theories. Central to this view is the idea that the self is multiple and discontinuous. Today, it is even clearer to see the extent of the influence of psychoanalysts like Philip Bromberg and Jody Messler Davies, who have emphasised dissociation and argued that the core task of therapy is to allow into plain sight those parts (or states) of the self that have been dissociated and become locked away, unknown and foreign to a current definition of who someone is.

Jody Messler Davies,(1998 ) in one of her pieces about multiplicity makes an important clarification when she writes:

“An appreciation of multiple self-organizations and association-dissociation as the predominant dynamic forces of mind must not be confused with the crippling fragmentation of experience that accompanies traumatic dissociation in its most extreme forms. Multiplicity and fragmentation exist at opposite ends of the clinical spectrum, and, as we begin to replace the concept of repression with that of dissociation, I believe we need to clarify this distinction” (p. 196).

As Mitchell states, the “portrayal of self as multiple and discontinuous and of self as integral, continuous, and separable seem to be at odds, mutually exclusive.” However, he continues:

“They are not. People act both discontinuously and continuously; people organize their experience into both multiple and integral configurations. Any given piece of experience can be looked at and felt both in terms of a particular relational context, a particular self/other integration and, at the same time, in terms of a larger variegated, singular process that forms itself into different patterns at different times” (p. 115).

He then offers us the idea that we can think of the self as operating like cinematic film. Each single frozen frame shows us a discrete discontinuous image of the self – a particular self-other configuration, or the self alone. Yet when the projector runs and the frames are run together, what is created has a narrative, history, continuity and integrity.

It seems to me that there is a profound truth in Mitchell’s assertion that “selves change and are transformed continually over time; no version of self is fully present at any instant, and a single life is composed of many selves” (p. 102). Following on from this elegant statement, we are faced with questions as clinicians. At any one time, how do we get in touch with the variety of our own – and the dyad’s – potentialities, and what clinical orientations help a client to be open to such potentiality?

The relational school combines this view of a diversity of self-states with the conviction that in the analytic space there are two subjectivities. Such a combination means it is inevitable that enactments and impasses will occur between client and therapist. Whereas, following classical theory, clinicians are expected to avoid enactments and not focus on them, relational thought sees them as highly valuable events and moments to be enquired into. In its simplest form, this means asking a client the question: “What do you think is going on that when you feel, say or do that, then my subjectivity induces me to feel or say this? What do you think is the interaction between us?”

We can see the difference between this idea of potentiality that may or may not be realised and the position common to therapy in general, and to some versions of British psychoanalysis in particular, which can give an undue weight to a clinical stance of pointing out entrenched patterns of being/relating. The danger in such a position, in my view, is that it can lack balance, in that it does not give enough emphasis to the emergence of the new; to a new good object coming to light in the analytic space, or to new ways of the self coming into being with the other.

Five years after Mitchell’s book was published, Stuart Pizer, another leading thinker in the US relational movement, published Building Bridges: The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis, (1998) which delivers, to my mind, a strikingly useful and creative metaphor for the self: the self as an archipelago of islands of self states. He writes:

“We reflect on the universal structure of the human psyche: a virtually infinite multiplicity of nuclei, or islands, of self state gathering, and variously organizing, elements of percept, memory, personifications, fantasies, physiological adjustments, mood, metaphor, and lexicon clustered around intentions, impingements, and affects that arise during relational experiences” (p. 72).

Pizer then goes on to argue that:

“the primordial structure of the mind is constituted of multitudinous islands, and an ‘aerial map’ of each person’s mind would indicate these islands and the bridges between them. Some of the bridges connect closely allied islands, and their solid multilane construction allows a steady commute in both directions. Other bridges are paradoxical, with their stanchions on either end rising from islands that mutually negate the reality of the other; and yet the capacity to negotiate paradox permits the self to tolerate this straddling and sustain constructive or creative commerce along the span.” (p. 72).

Pizer goes on to note the existence of islands to which all bridges have been destroyed and traffic has been forbidden by the force of vigilant dissociation.

By entering the digital world, where there are near-instantaneous links or portals (but certainly not bridges that have to be built and travelled along) between places of knowledge, image and excitement, I discovered that the Union Star had been on its maiden voyage and had been launched in Ringkogbing in Denmark just a few days before it was lost. It had been carrying a bulk cargo of fertilizer from Holland to Ireland. When the new engines failed off the south coast of Cornwall, the Captain did not immediately issue a mayday call. It is an element of this tragedy that stands out and provokes my curiosity. I wonder if this decision was connected to the fact that at an unauthorised stop on the east coast of England, on the way to Ireland, the Captain had picked up his wife Dawn and his teenage step-daughters Sharon and Deanne. I wonder about those clandestine passengers and what influence their presence had on the Captain’s decisions that day. Sadly, they perished that night along with the other members of the crew.

Philip Bromberg in his book Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys (2006) describes the unique defence of a dissociated state as moving from “a fluid and creative dialectic between self states through the normal process of dissociation” to “a dissociative structure that takes as its highest priority the preservation of self-continuity through turning the act of living into an ongoing reminder that trauma is always waiting around the next corner and that it will be more than the mind can handle” (p. 5).

The view of the self coming from Mitchell and Pizer, with its emphasis on the inherent diversity of the self, emerging and disappearing in relationship to other beings and the world, provides a different clinical framework from the one proposed by Wallin in Attachment in Psychotherapy (2007). Wallin writes of the self as a “collection of structured patterns deriving from the internalisation of interpersonal communications” (p. 85).

Wallin’s view of the self seems almost synonymous with the attachment system and I am not sure how useful that is. In as much as this formulation seems to foster a more mechanistic approach to the inner world, I cannot see how such a stance helps clinical work. But I am not saying that the attachment system is irrelevant to the discussion. Rather, I would propose this metaphor: the attachment system can be seen as the weather that hangs over the archipelago. In those who have secure attachment systems, the weather is largely clear and so the islands and the bridges or lack of bridges can be discerned. When there are storms, they do not linger forever; and invitations can be issued to go on a journey to another island – which may not as yet have broken the surface of the ocean – via a bridge that may or may not have to be built as we go along. In these weather conditions, the archipelago also becomes a way of talking about intersubjectivity and the third.

In contrast to this, my experience of working with clients who have severely avoidant/dismissing attachment systems is that it is as if a huge bank of fog has descended on the archipelago and there is only the island of present consciousness, which must be held onto at all costs. The fog is as threatening in this world of the psyche as it is in maritime life. There can be only brief glimpses of other islands or bridges – which get to be seen as phantoms, and so become threats that are dealt with by dismissal.

What trauma, abuse and deep relational damage seem to do to the archipelago of island self-states is destroy or weaken the bridges and create a speeded-up version of such a collection of islands so that self-states are constantly unexpectedly emerging from the surface of the ocean, as well as suddenly disappearing. One might say that the fear and defensive aggression that many people experience – when faced with a challenging encounter or with a meeting which is not sensed as safe – has its roots in a frightening inner world, where there is no known stability or continuity of self-state islands.

Returning to my thoughts on the Union Star, I became aware that my interest in this ship and its fate was in part stimulated by my own family’s history. My grandfather had started a company of small coastal freighters carrying bulk cargoes around the coasts of Britain and Ireland before the company had to be sold to a large multinational in the early 1970s. Those small ships had voyaged through those Cornish seas. That influence ran deep: my father had become a maritime lawyer.

JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVES

The Jungian tradition comes at the concept of the self from a different philosophical position when compared to the Freudian tradition. Whilst Freudian attention is largely on the ego/id/super-ego constellation, in the Jungian tradition, there is always a world of the self, which unites both the conscious and the unconscious and is taken to exist beyond – and in opposition to – the claims of dominance posed by the rational forces of the ego.

But Jung would also situate egoic experience as a small entity in the wider and deeper reality of the self – the self being the totality of the conscious and the unconscious, the totality of all psychic processes. Jungian Roger Brooke (1991) takes this concept a little closer to the concept of a diverse self when he writes: “the self is the total Gestalt which organises the many ‘parts’, viz. archetypes and experience.” (p. 97) The aim of the need to develop and individuate is to more fully realise the self.

Stuart Pizer’s image of the self as an archipelago of self-state islands seems close to the Jungian concept of autonomous complexes. These are defined by the authors of A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (1986) as:

“a collection of images and ideas, clustered round a core derived from one or more archetypes, and characterised by a common emotional tone. When they come into play (become ‘constellated’), complexes contribute to behaviour and are marked by AFFECT whether a person is conscious of them or not.” (p. 34)

And although this begins to suggest a bridge could be built between these two contrasting psychoanalytic ways of understanding the self, it also seems important to recognise that, at least in this area, these two schools of thought are using very different basic assumptions and languages to describe the self. It is also worth noting how important the word ‘bridge’ is to both traditions.

One of the places that the Jungian conception of the self finds itself moored up to the ‘relational’ self (as seen by the relational analysts quoted above) is in the idea of the self-coming into being through relationships with others. So in Jungian thought there is the idea that it is beneficial that consciousness expands beyond the small, over-sensitised and personal world of the ego.

The importance Jung gave to the relational dimension of human existence can also be seen in this extract from a letter he wrote to the Chilean writer Miguel Serrano (1966) about the self, which reframes the issues that Mitchell was struggling with. For Jung, being an individual was vitally important and he encouraged Serrano to develop the full, “true expression of your individuality. As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egotistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals” (p. 83-84).

Jung is certainly not seeing individuality and relationality as occupying opposing poles; instead he relates these two modes of being dialectically.

From the Jungian insistence on the centrality of the unconscious in psyche as a whole, there flows the clinical thought that it is important to treat the work of therapy in the true spirit of the unconscious being unknowable. George Bright (1997) quotes the poem by Elizabeth Jennings (1979) called ‘The Interrogator’, which describes an encounter with an all-knowing, all-prepared psychoanalyst – a few lines of which sums up her view of this style of analysis:

“He always knows best. He can tell you why you disliked your father. He can make your purest motive seem aggressive. He always knows best. He can always find words” (p. 623).

The poem, in a rather shocking way, certainly summarises one of the reasons why a number of prominent psychoanalysts in the US broke from the established Freudian/Ego Psychology tradition to embrace a way of working that required mutuality, enquiry and intersubjectivity (rather than authority and absolute knowledge) when they founded the US relational movement in the 1980s.

Bright reframes the poem’s sentiment in an important way –

“I think this is a good description of what it feels like to have the personality fighting desperately for the respecting of its totality against possession by the rational ego part of it. We could call it an expression of the dialogue of the ego-Self axis.” (p. 624).

Certainly, in our present-day British culture there is a powerful emphasis on the necessity and virtue of the cognitive and the rational. Such ego-based processes are believed to be of first-ranking importance, because they not only underpin the ever-accelerating digital world, but these rational processes are also imagined as bulwarks against the chaos that is commonly imagined to be just around the corner. Often in my consulting room, the dialogue between the ego-self seems to be overwhelmingly one way. The Self as a totality seems hardly to get a look in. It is so hard to hear the call of the self because the noise/static of the ego seems to drown everything else out. And yet it is surely true that as Roger Brooke (1991) puts it “one’s deepest source of guilt can be seen as the failure to respond to the call of the self which one hears as conscience” (p. 99).

In the Jungian conception, the self is always, in part, under the surface of the ocean, as it is formed in part by the unconscious, which is unknowable. This leads George Bright to issue a warning that any offering of analytic interpretation must be subjective and provisional, rather than certain and objective, or in its most seductive pose, a glimpse of the truth. And that such a tentative approach should be welcomed by psychotherapists because it is a useful antidote to the sometimes overwhelming pressure for the delivering up of some absolute truth. Given how many papers in relational journals talk of the emergence of meaning, and the relational nature of meaning, these two currents – as expressed by Jungian clinicians like Bright, are certainly in the same kind of ocean.

But there are also significant differences between these two currents. One is that analysts like Pizer evidently believe that given the right facilitating environment, islands of a diverse self can emerge from the depths of the ocean; associative processes between different self states can then thrive, bridges be built, and forced dissociations dwindle. Jungians may well be more cautious about that prospect; and place a greater emphasis on the image of the great expanse of the ocean as the locus for the unknowableness of the unconscious, rather than the small islands of the self rising out of the deep.

However, such distinctions are not clear-cut. Relational psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent in a seminal paper published in Relational Psychoanalysis: the Emergence of a Tradition (1999) discusses why surrender should not be thought of as submission and enlists the help of British analyst Marion Milner, who wrote towards the end of her book, concerned with the images/paintings made by her patient, The Hands of the Living God (1969):

“Certainly, some patients seemed to be aware, dimly or increasingly, of a force in them to do with growth, growth towards their own shape, also as not let them rest content with a merely compliant adaptation; and also feared because of the temporary chaos it must cause when integrations on a false basis are in the process of being broken down to order that a better one may emerge” (p. 384-385).

Marion Milner is stating that part of the potentiality in being human is the capacity deep down within ourselves to grow towards our own shape. Not the shape that society, or therapy, deems is normal and non-pathological, but our own individual shape.

A more substantial difference is encapsulated by those Jungians, such as Roger Brooke, who have been influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger. They stress the forming of the Self through interaction with the World. Whilst both object relations therapists and relational psychoanalysts stress that the self emerges from interaction with, knowledge of, and internalisation of other human beings, the Jungian use of “the world” shows us a view of human beingness that does not originate solely out of childhood relationships with other humans, but is also in relationship with a natural order outside of human control, both of the animate world and the inanimate world of hurricane force winds and 60-foot waves.

This use of the word ‘world’ summons up not only the elemental forces dominating Cornwall during that storm in the Atlantic, but also should include, I would venture, the values of the RNLI and of the Penlee seafaring community, as well as the elemental human courage of those eight lifeboat men as they set off into that storm. There is a dialectical openness about the suggestion that the extremity of the Union Star’s situation that night in those wild seas evoked, or maybe facilitated, the courage of those men to come into a well-formed determined being, which enabled them to do their very best to save the crew of the Union Star.

What this in turn evokes is Roger Brooke’s idea that a profound challenge is made to us as to whether we can allow the world to come into being in that individual and irreplaceable way that is each person’s own personal destiny. For Brooke, the self is then the totality of those archetypical individual potentialities.

OPENNESS

Roger Brooke’s “personal destiny” is almost identical in meaning to Marion Milner’s “growth towards personal shape”. Both Ghent, Brooke and Milner, all three from different psychoanalytic schools, place a high therapeutic value on evoking potentialities and fostering openness, prompting the idea that the task of therapy is to facilitate an openness to change, to relating, to being in the world. Jungian Charles Scott (1975) writes:

“We find it immensely difficult to think of ourselves as living, non-substantial, concretely related possibilities that are immediately aware and transitional in nature. We think more easily of ourselves in terms of an identity structure that… moulds the world according to its human and individual perspective. We are then inclined to describe the world as though it were an intentional synthesis” (p. 186).

In the consulting room, such a basic assumption takes us to a place of certainty, of knowingness, of giving a high value to naming what the therapist imagines is going on in the client, rather than providing an evolving-evoking environment. In the current of Jungian thought, I am describing from my position as an outsider, this valuing of openness to the other, to change itself, seems a vital contribution to the project of at-depth therapy.

From the late 1990s onwards, relational analysts are also writing of the importance of openness. Once dissociation/association is thought of as a primary organising structure in the mind, and therapy is seen as helping the associative potentialities in any client’s mind to grow and develop, then the description of an associative passage of work in the analytic dyad starts to look much less like a tight woven rug made up of transference threads , and instead could resemble much more the surface of the ocean – moving, changing, in a constant dynamic between wind, tide, current and the incoming weather pattern. The patches of the ocean that come into the dyad’s consciousness (ie, into intersubjective consciousness) can be patterned with images, feelings, body states, memories, polyrhythmic patterns of speech, silence, breath. Sometimes there are absences, gaps, places where great strange creatures of the dark depths emerge and flash their teeth. Or places of nothingness, but also in the very looseness of the changing breaking surface, there is both openness and potentiality for change. In all this richness of a diverse associative flow of communication, back and forth, body to body, unconscious to unconscious, there may be one or two transferential events, but such events do not hold centre stage in this way of working. This is a very different picture of how analysis works from that which was historically developed in the British school. Messler Davies (1998) writes of this way of doing psychoanalysis:

“The recognition of multiplicity in self-organization can enhance the transitionality and potential creativity of the analytic space. By encouraging a kind of temporary suspension of overarching organizations of meaning, we reopen dissociatively foreclosed domains of interpersonal experience, historically set down yet very much alive in our present interactions… we invite back into active participation ‘old selves’ defensively disavowed, who now carry the potential to enrich and envigorate contemporary experience” (p. 205).

REGRESSION

Within classical psychoanalysis, the issue of openness and openness to change is almost synonymous with regression within analysis. Steven Mitchell (1993) describes the object relations view on the self and regression in these respectful terms:

“The object relations approach focuses… on the kind of person one experiences oneself as being when one does what one does with other people... The basic mode within the object relations approach to the analytic process is correspondingly, not so much an active inquiry but the facilitation of a kind of unravelling. The protection and timelessness of the analytic situation…allows the sometimes smooth but thin casing around the self to dissolve and individual strands that make up experience to separate themselves from each other and become defined and articulated” (p. 107).

I would want to add to this: these strands of the self can then become redefined and rearticulated in a new self configuration. The issue about this form of regressive therapy is not so much that it does not work. Classical psychoanalysis certainly can work. I think Mitchell’s account shows us that classical analysis is, however, a very delicate operation which gives it a high-risk profile – namely that all the variables (including the nature of the contract entered into by therapist and client and other important basic relational factors ) have to line up for the therapeutic journey to reach a good enough destination.

Merton Gill, once an eminent US Freudian psychoanalyst, reflected on the issue of regression and openness to change throughout his professional life. In 1954, Gill still believed that the general phenomenon of regression in analysis was not spontaneous but induced and he still believed that this regression took a form that was relatively free of the analyst’s influence. At this point, the therapeutic impact of psychoanalysis was thought to occur through creating/inducing a regressive transference neurosis with a ‘blank screen’ analyst. By 1979, Gill was writing to Philip Bromberg that he liked the use of the word ‘permitting’ regression rather than inducing it. But, by 1983, Gill had left the safe shores of the analyst’s neutrality, the Freudian community, and had joined the relational grouping. In that year, he wrote (2011) that “the task (of analysis) is to have a relationship” (p. 257). Most interestingly, as he abandoned the hope that the analyst could be neutral, so he thought about openness to change. Philip Bromberg (2011) quotes from Gill’s letter to him that: “I think it misleading to refer to the state of openness to change as regression” (p. 265).

By the time Bromberg wrote his 2006 book Awakening the Dreamer :Clinical Journeys he had become an influential psychoanalytic voice inside the relational world. He writes:

“When the therapist is able to relate to each aspect of the patient’s self in terms of its own subjectivity, each part becomes increasingly able to co-exist with the rest and in that sense is more subjectively linked to the others. This linking of self-states necessarily increases a person’s sense of wholeness, but the active ingredient in treatment that makes this possible is human-relatedness” (p. 27).

Something very ordinary and yet so powerful – human relatedness – something, I suspect, that many psychoanalysts of all persuasions have long known about, thus gets named. Peter Lomas has written eloquently about this (1990).

Allan Schore, a highly influential voice in the rapidly expanding field of neuro‐psychoanalysis, adds an important dimension to this discussion of the diversity of the self. In his article, he adds depth to the metaphors deployed here, as well as, in thinking about enactments, issuing clinicians with a useful challenge, namely that:

The therapist’s effective moment‐to‐moment navigation through these problematic heightened affective moments occurs not by explicit verbal secondary process cognition but by implicit nonverbal primary process clinical intuition.

Allan Schore brings neuroscience knowledge to a particular matrix‐like way of thinking about the self. Such a way of thinking is being actively fostered as bridges are built between the body, mindfulness, brain plasticity, memory as image, and right‐brain centres of feeling and imagery. Schore’s arguments have recently been strengthened by the extraordinary depth of scholarship in Iain McGilchrists’s book, The Master and his Emissary.

The question of how the earliest centres of self/mind might be organised around images, rather than words, again brings together strands of Jungian and relational thinking. On the relational side, James Fosshage writes:

My early work on dreams with Freud’s and even more Jung’s considerable assistance, made clear to me that images register experience and meaning and that sequencing of images creates a narrative and is a form of thinking. I redefined Freud’s primary and secondary processes as imagistic and verbal symbolic modes of encoding and processing, respectively.

EMERGING ISLANDS – A CLINICAL VIGNETTE

My client, Julia, is a highly accomplished, socially dextrous and very likeable software designer in her late thirties. She starts the session by telling me that she has had the most terrible experience whilst attending a software convention in Japan. She got separated from her colleagues inside the vast noisy convention centre and suddenly felt that she could not go on and do the greeting and meeting she was so good at. The conviction grew that she had to return to the hotel, where she stayed for much of the next two days. Julia felt suddenly without resources, fearful and unable to meet and converse with anyone. Her robust professional self-seemed to have abandoned her. She felt young and fearful. In the hotel during those days, she was able to reflect back on our work together to hold on to some basic working model of herself. She discovered that in some ways she was better regulated in this state than in her accessible friendly self-state: she drank much less and did not experience much anxiety. In our session, a set of touching thoughts and feeling states came back as she retold the story of those days: the feelings of weakness, timidity and fear, the sudden openness of being in some other self state; the fearful painful thoughts about what might be happening to her; the recollection of the determined hard slog to pull herself out of poverty and deprivation whilst still a teenager and get herself to university.

In our conversation in the session, Julia was keen to propose that what she thought had happened in Japan was that the false professional self she had created had crumbled away. We had previously worked extensively around the subject of her childhood: her determination and desperation to get out of an East London childhood that was marked by parental indifference and hostility, amid the chaos of her parents’ heroin addiction.

I found myself in the session being quite firm about not thinking like that about it – and not agreeing with her that her real and creative professional accomplishments should be seen as a false self-construction. My response was in part because I genuinely did not experience this capable professional self-state of hers as an inauthentic part of her. I did think this more fearful retiring self-state, that emerged in Japan, was not a symptom of breakdown / disintegration / psychosis but instead a sign of growth and development. It also seemed to me that the incident in Japan could more helpfully be seen as the emergence of another new island self – a painful experience to be sure, but also one to be welcomed and treasured. Certainly not to be thought of as a pathological broken-down state. In our work together it seems clearly beneficial to Julia to hold on to the idea that she can – and indeed was – standing in more than one island of her self.

With those clients that I have shared the core idea of standing among the islands of the self, in the archipelago itself, it is interesting that a large number of them have let me know it is a conception they have been able to hold onto and find valuable.

THE UNION STAR

As I was starting to write the first draft of this paper, describing the Penlee memorial plaque with the one line: Service not Self, I thought it might (or might not) work in the whole piece in some unspecified metaphorical way. Maybe it would stay in or get edited out at a later stage.

It was not until the half-way point in the writing of this paper that a particular memory suddenly came into my mind that explained to me why I had shown so much commitment and energy to keeping the Union Star story in the frame.

The trigger for this memory was reading that as the Union Star drifted without engines towards the rocks near Lamorna Bay, assistance was offered by a tug, the Noord Holland, under the Lloyds Open Form Salvage contract. The Captain of the Union Star initially refused the offer of help, only later accepting after consulting his owners. By that time, it was too late to save the ship from the rocks.

What came up clearly, suddenly out of the depths, is the memory that when I was 14 or 15 at boarding school I had a book of stories of the salvage of ships on the open seas by ocean-going tugs. It was a book I remember treasuring. Then the image of its front cover surfaced – with a heroic-looking tug saving a huge ship by towing it off the storm-lashed rocks. I remember being desolate and unhappy when I had finished reading it because it could no longer accompany me. I read it again trying to recapture what it had offered me on first reading.

I had no idea when I started writing this that I had a buried, dissociated memory from school days of salvage tugs and ships in danger. There was no memory of that in my mind. But such a memory, now it has emerged, does indeed express eloquently the pain of being sent to a harsh, frighteningly impersonal authoritarian boarding school without discussion or consent. In this context, it is very heartening to read Joy Schaverin’s article (2011) on what she calls ‘boarding school syndrome’.

Now the images of this harsh school environment have returned to me, it helps me see that there was a submerged self that was longing for rescue, but that self-state could only express itself mutely through the image of the rescuing tugboat.

Reflecting on this paper, I have the thought that there is still there in me that island self-state, which contains the image of me sitting at my school desk on some dark autumnal evening, gazing out onto the wild fells of North West England. As I sit there, looking at that book’s cover illustration, feeling there was no option but to try and survive until something - or someone - new could come along.

Pulling back from such a tightly framed image, I think that it is helpful to imagine bridges between Jungian conceptions of the self and Relational ones which can foster mutual exploration within a wider island community.

Andy Metcalf

London

December 2012

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

FPC member

IARPP member

References:

Bright,G. (1997) Synchronicity as a Basis for Analytic Attitude. Journal of Analytic Psychology: 42. 613-635. London. Wiley.

Bromberg, P. ( 2006) Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys. Mahwah. NJ. Analytic Press

Bromberg, P.M. (2011) “Afterword” to the Gill/Bromberg Correspondence. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21 264-268. Hillsdale NJ. The Analytic Press

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