The ‘as if’ Casts its Shadow over Time

Abstract

The descriptor phrase ‘as if’ personality is characterized by feelings of fraudulence and vulnerability surrounded by a wall of impenetrability. Maladaptive responses and dissociations abound even as the person exudes an appealing but elusive manner. This is an aspect of the psyche which needs love and attention yet she engages in deception to herself and others by putting on a performance and acting ‘as if’. There lingers an absence of passion and solidity when life abruptly halts so she can encounter the core. The disconnections and dissociations from self is also a seeking of self, a void that ultimately draws inward.

This psychological crisis occurs when the outer accomplishments that shored up the personality are depleted and the inner reserves collapse, revealing what feels like the void at the centre. This commentary is an explication of the concept of the ‘as if’ personality as furthered by Hester Solomon, Jungian analyst. It derived from the original reference by psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch in the 1940’s. The concept is expanded with the theory of French psychoanalyst André Green. This is further illustrated with a composite clinical example and dreams, reference to the journal writings and poems by American poetess Sylvia Plath and the puella/puer Jungian and archetypal form of narcissism. The basic approach is Jungian analytical psychology.
KEYWORDS: as if personality, dissociation, puella, archetype, Sylvia Plath

The ‘as if’ Casts its Shadow over Time

We discover, indeed that we do not know our part, we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up and remove the counterfeit and be real. But somewhere a bit of mummery still sticks to us that we forget...” (Rilke, 1964, p.194).

The ‘as if’ personality” appears both in and out of therapeutic consulting rooms. There is a long psychoanalytic history to this concept. It is composed of various features indicating in general a situation of psychological arrest. Here the focus is from that of Jungian analytical psychology. An example of this type of person along with reference to a poem by Sylvia Plath, American poetess of the twentieth century illustrates the internal fractured selves. This type is also apparent in the Jungian archetype called the puella/puer that is a form of narcissism and stunted psychological growth. The clinical composite example here includes attention to the issues of transference and countertransference as interpreted in Jungian analytical psychology. This personality type reveals the psyche with splits and dissociations that are formed in defence of the self to the point where the person can be described as emotionally stricken. At internal odds, the adopted cover of ‘as if’ has eventually worn out to expose the interior emptiness and lack of love to self and other.

The person ‘as if’ can be characterized by façade, fragility, fraudulence and vulnerability, bounded by a wall of impenetrability. These people seem to lack a sense of genuineness, warmth and the capacity to love. The overt distress occurs when the outer accomplishments that formerly shored up the personality are used up and the inner reserves collapse, as they are no longer sustainable. From the early missed emotional experiences , life meaning is broken and identity and order are disturbed.

The centre cannot hold due to a lack of attachment at the core, creating part of the maladaptive life response. The secure early experiences were marred by blankness, depression, unrelatedness and lack of sufficient containment with the parental figures. Because they were not there, the child cannot be there for himself or herself. Everything feels inauthentic. There is anguish and despair, a lack of meaning or value in the daily moments of life. The psychological material brings up questions about accessing creativity, and the ability to symbolize, which can become masked and caught in the shadows. There is also the issue of mis-connection to the body as the instincts have gone off and the spirit dampened.

These people are stuck on a treadmill of repetition and fraught with despair, especially as they age. There is often loss of direction and focus. Life has a hole at the centre while she waits for something sparkling to occur or some magical recognition to happen. Sadly, nothing fills the lack of self-love and feeling of being unworthy of love.

The unconscious calls to be more deeply known, relationships with self and others less hidden, life no longer avoided with distancing compulsions or perfectionistic habits. As one person observed, “he doesn’t want to be understood because that would make him vulnerable, but I also think that he doesn’t even know himself well enough to share what he considers to be genuine. His genuine reality is the most superficial one that you can imagine”.

The ‘as if’ personality has split selves as evidenced in their partial engagement in relationships, remaining emotionally hidden, mostly to themselves, unable to find their depth or fulfilment. The talents might be there, the dedication to their life curtailed. There seemed to be a “haunting repetition...of those traumatizing situations that created the original dissociative responses” (Solomon, 2004, p. 642). The ‘as if’ person acting in defence of the self, lacks the inner nourishment and resources, hindered by what they describe as emptiness within.

The central issue of survival was early manifested through dissociation as an adaptive defence to protect the self. To compensate, acts of self-creation occurred through a series of identifications and internalizations with other sources of environmental nourishment, which attempt to substitute for, and were constructed around, the original sense of internal emptiness (Solomon, 2004, p. 641). Without the possibility of developing secure self-identity or attachment, the adaptation of mimicry and the sense of falsity take over. Life seems safer, reduced to illusion and cover.

In Jungian analytical psychology, the therapeutic tasks involve searching for what is called the ‘treasure hard to attain’. This refers to aspects of the personality that have remained hidden and unused, ignored, maybe even despised but connected to the deeper personal and collective ways of being. These elements reside in the unconscious and also speak through the body.


History of the ‘as if’ personality characteristics

In tracing a history of this psychological construct, it appears there has been a lack of attention to the ‘as if’ personality in the psychoanalytic literature. The original description portrays a person with impoverished or absent emotional relationship towards both inner and outer worlds. The ‘as if personality’ was initially described by Freudian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch. In 1942 she depicted a person who was seemingly without genuineness and called basically imitative (Solomon, 2004, p. 637). Deutsch tended to dismiss this personality as only superficial, an imposter type and without depth. However, Solomon by taking it further, noted that genuineness lay hidden within the void where the sorrows and traumas remained. A depth of pains and grief existed under the façade. There is even bewilderment. An adaptation through mimicry is desperately constructed to obfuscate and defend against being known. She feels an abyss, hoping to rid herself of the inauthentic but equally needing it. She fears being herself. Caught in self-deception, debasing the self that she has hated, she reenacts aggression against the original lost object through animosity toward her self. Christopher Bollas (1995, p. 74), a British psychoanalyst, writes that the person deadens herself and her psyche due to the deadened object within. The personality is, “in a state between what they fear in their own minds and what they fear in the outside world… Or, they are living in never land, a place of infinite postponement and half-identity” (Solomon, 2004, p. 639). Self-absorbed, little is fully felt or experienced. Solomon attributes this to what she calls impoverishment of the self from the early traumatizing experiences with the longed for and idealized other (Solomon, 2004, p. 639). From the pain of such experiences, the need arises for the illusionary to compensate for the weight of the depressive anxiety. These illusions and the need for them harden with age.

The ‘as if’ person internalized the absence, emptiness, lifeless void and blank experience that is without access to the true self (Solomon, 2004, p. 641). Heroic striving and its results do not satisfy because they are fundamentally defensive in nature. Rather than mere imitation and falsity, there is a complexity to the challenges affecting this type of person. And, there is complexity in uncovering the denials, fears and resistances needed to access the unconscious layers.

André Green

André Green, a French psychoanalyst in the latter twentieth century, described the type of personality that applies here as 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, 1983, p. 152). The person feels a loss of meaning and suffers an inability to repair the mourned object or to awaken the lost desire. The identification becomes with the vacuum or the gap left behind.

Green also described the accompanying dissociation between body and psyche as the blocking of love. Attachment forms to what is missing. What remains is “an essentially conflictual, ambiguous nature of desire, which is conceivable as the desire of the desire of the Other” (Green, 1979, p. 69). As a result, the child and then the adult are blocked from evolving into their destined meaning.

Green further described psychoanalysis as dealing with the problems of mourning (Kohon, 1999, p. 142). Green avers that psychoanalysis is based on the negative. This refers to the absent, lost and latent like the unconscious itself. It applies to the ‘as if’ person who often cannot mourn deeply yet is consumed with sorrow. In therapy, what is felt as the bad parts are inevitably resurrected while the emptiness is signalled by self-hatred (Green, 1983, p. 55). Manifesting in the formation of destructive inner figures, the detritus haunts and appears in symptoms of depression, depersonalization, despair and anxiety. The shadow, although negated at all costs, haunts the personality. She identifies with the losses. Mourning covers life with a grey film. She fears being at the edge, falling into a crevasse. The fading of the internal representation is what Green relates to in terms of feeling a void, emptiness, futility and meaninglessness (Kohon, 1999, p. 290). The person personifies the internal splits, the fractured selves, arresting the psychological development.

Green also describes the dissociation occurring between body and psyche. Frozen in a state of psychical pain, disappointment, incapacity and lack of confidence consume her personality. Singularity rather than sharing and isolation rather than relationship are the results. She lacks an understanding of self and other because she does not experientially know it (Kohon, 1999, p. 101). This vulnerable person longing to love and be loved resides in isolation and is shrouded in secrets.
In adulthood, the defences fail against the depression experienced in the early stages of development. As attempts at reparation prove vain, feelings of impotence and defeat become dominant. The thing that endures is a dull psychic pain, characterized by the incapacity to attach closely with anything to do with the affects. Green noted that these people exhibit “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).

She assumes depersonalized attitudes toward her self and others, feeling unreal and at odds with the world. She looks functional but is living below her potential. Passion is curtailed, individual thought unformed and life devalued. With little sense of personal constancy or cohesiveness, she fears autonomy but often adopts an attitude of isolation. This is needed to preserve identity but it obstructs intimacy and relationships become stymied. “She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together" (Woolf, 1990, p. 31).

Both André Green and Carl Jung, with the concept of the collective unconscious, note that trauma does not have a locale solely in the self as it is beyond the person yet at the same time being person created (Kohon, 1999, p. 100). In other words, the personal experiences are transcendent as well, linking to the collective in conscious and unconscious experiences and emotions.


Transference/countertransference

“We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing” (Cixous, 1976 p. 880).

In therapy there is a sense this person requires more than continual and concentrated interest and when imagining she does not get it, cuts off, becomes secretly depressed, gives up and distances. Even as the transference issues of disappointment and losses are discussed, she secretly remains ripped apart, the idealized images damaged and concludes that she is not special. She acts ‘as if’ all is repaired but actually the pain and negation are buried in the psychosomatic pocket. This also reveals the psychic panic and the need to reach into the persona cover and its narcissistic grandiosity into what originally fueled the defence of the self. This situation heightens especially when the old defences are ready to be abandoned, a precarious time in the therapeutic process (Solomon, 2004, p.647). The emptiness is of course also felt through the therapeutic relationship. Jungian analytical work is a journey of uncovering through engaging in a minutely attentive process that also includes awareness of its effect on the psyche and body. With care and empathy, the therapist approaches the psychological constellation of trauma and dissociations that indicates the void. This can manifest in various forms of self-attack, despair and narcissistic hatred. They feed an internalized cycle of oppression, parental neglect, abandonment and emotional rigidity. In effect, there is a paralysis of being.

The ‘as if’ person lives a psychic reality that has experienced and internalized the presence of the absent other. Early on the unfolding of the self “met a blank and hostile environment so misattuned that the person felt unseen and/or noxiously related to” (Solomon, 2004, p. 641). This person needs a benevolent inner structure for security, identity and attachment, especially as it was not originally available. In the therapeutic relationship, this can be complex as the client watchfully registers the therapist tone, gesture, expression and movement. This often can be interpreted as the opposite − threatening, rejecting and dismissive. The therapist is identified with the abusive or neglectful parents who did not see the child. And, of course, this tests the therapeutic relationship for the vulnerability, honesty and trust the person needs.

These people were shaken by abuse, neglect and/or absence and the relationship with the therapist becomes the crucible where the personality can regrow. The ‘as if’ person automatically tries to ward off being exposed, abandoned and re-traumatized, the very feelings that cry out to be known. The therapist must tolerate the “real existential anguish, doubt and not knowing and the risk it takes for them” (Solomon, 2004, p. 643).

For this person, life feels illusionary. It may be filled with success but often not driven by desire. One is swept along or the paths open and are taken but not with passion. They often feel fraudulent, a forgery, reacting from pseudo affectivity and living a sham existence. Even though she looks competent, she speaks of embarrassment. The fear is that if anyone got close the inner truths would be seen. This is compounded by pressure to have complete success, every day, even in the smallest details, no slips allowed and continual judgment. She plummets if there is a mistake and life is like riding on narrow rails. To compensate she tries to accurately discern the needs of others and to fit into them. To respond for real, or be real shows a vulnerability and openness that was early checked.

The ‘as if’ personality also experiences physical effects, forming within what is called a psychosomatic space (Solomon, 2004, p.649). This place resides inside the larger personality yet remains separate, isolated. The larger personality is affected and, as in an analogy with a parasite, eventually succumbs to ill health, emotional and physical distress that begins to eat away the rest of the person. The early traumas and losses create body and psychic dysregulation. Much energy is spent hiding the overwhelming aspects from early abusive and/or deficient emotional and physical experiences. The early stimulation was both too high and too low leaving physical and psychological depletion on the personality as it tries to survive. Later in life, the structure has to crumble in order to recollect itself (Solomon, 2004, p. 646). This distressing internal situation limits the capacity for integration, individuation and development of the transcendent function. This concept is key in Jungian psychology with its uniting of conscious and unconscious material for repair. As Jung described it, “At first no solution appears possible and this takes much patience. The suspension thus created ‘constellates’ the unconscious − in other words, the conscious suspense produces a new compensatory reaction in the unconscious. This reaction (usually manifested in dreams) is brought to conscious realization” (Jung, 1969, par. 780-781).

Reference to the transcendent function in Jungian psychology reminds us of the painful paradoxes. Holding the tension of the opposites is part of the psychological work. Jung observed that the psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its own equilibrium just as the body does. That is, a process that goes too far inevitably calls forth compensation. As a basic law of psychological behaviour, the theory of compensation remains at the heart of the Jungian psychological approach. It is a process that leads to the core necessary for transformation. Jung commented that since life does not tolerate standstill, the damming up of energy results. The regression of libido from the blockage allows what he calls the transcendent function to arise quite naturally (Jung, 1969, par. 145). Bridging the gap between what was and what will be, the transcendent function is basic to the self-regulation of the psyche and represents the emergence of new attitudes. Recognized through symbols, the transcendent function is difficult for the ‘as if’ person to access due to a deficit in symbolic functioning. This can be surprising when the intellectual and verbal facility seems to be there but the person is actually too rigid, concrete and inflexible.

This person often has a fear of entering the unconscious and what seems like the void of unremitting and existential abandonment. She looks out for approval while the fear is held inside. There can be incessant activity to fill this place. Through the transference, the patient begins to yearn again for the experiences of attunement formerly missed. The yearning poignantly lays in contrast to those early noxious experiences that originally forced the self away. The subsequent adaptation with its dissociations severs the trauma memory from mental representation and thus it can lodge in the body where the psyche also speaks.

The coldness and guardedness of the ‘as if’ person is distancing and, although off-putting, is based on vulnerability and impenetrability that gives little inner or outer access. This can include feelings of self-alienation, being drugged by inertia, living in a trance-like state with little sense of time or worth. This feeds the internalized cycle of self-hatred, oppression, and vengeance. The person assumes being at fault, a feeling that goes to the core. The feeling may become so severe that she or he slices off contact from the world and, like being half-dead, is taken over by an implacable helplessness, impotence and passivity. The real self remains silent and isolated in a state of non-communication from the rest of the personality.

When remaining unknown and unconscious, the type of personality denoted here becomes hardened. The psychic fragments split off due to the build-up of the traumatic influences. The effects of trauma can leave a person without passion, natural flow or authenticity. There is an aura of aloofness behind which she exists but in an untouchable domain. Attachment problems manifest in symptoms of distorted body and self images. There are feelings of emptiness and restlessness. A wedge develops preventing access to a loving and reparative self. The scared self takes over. The protective layer keeps her inured from anything that is not part of her carefully orchestrated world. She metaphorically locks herself into her room alone to defend against the anticipated outer threats but still feels little safety or security. This is because when the external conditions are stripped away, she cannot find her innermost self.


Example

For this person, the answers form a negative complex, a pull to depression, defeat and resignation. Guilt, shame or other emotions can cause denial and suppression. Sara, a composite of several people, comes to each therapy session with an impeccable appearance and calm voice. Later it comes out that this presentation was purposeful to hide the severe periodic depressions and self-attacks separating her from the world. Indeed, Sara revealed that her presentation, which she called the poseur, was an effort to disguise a deep emptiness. Sara’s word, poseur simulates the Jungian term persona. The pose was set up to protect a terrified and precarious self which could not fully engage with her self or others. She further admitted she needed a “how to be a person manual”.

Sara’s external flair for the dramatic was to hold people off and an indication that the transference, like her other relationships, could remain still-born, the connection not fully taken. Sara seemed preoccupied as if inhabiting a place no one was to enter. She brought favourite passages from the books she read, often poems by Sylvia Plath with the idea to be understood, her life witnessed. Equally, Sara expressed wariness about what she called the abyss and was worried she might fall in. She reported being raised to be compliant, not ask questions, come second, act out when no one noticed and accommodate others. She felt like a ghost, unseen and without substance.

She was floating while everything remained distant and on hold. She was like a statue, acquiring dust as she aged. Unable to awaken, life stagnated. Although creative, her artistic creations stayed in the closet. She feared to present her work, considering it never was perfect enough. She described feeling unreal, like an understudy, especially to her mother who was purported to be the loveliest of all and enticing to men. Mystery and secrets shrouded both parents. Other truths remained hidden. Sara commented that she had not wanted to grow as adults appeared to have no light in their eyes, deadened by conformity to the average.

Over the years she went in and out of therapeutic work, each time stimulated by emotional and physical crises like a complicated hysterectomy, weight gain or the loss of a partnership. All were punctuated by an overwhelming sense of loss and despair of body and soul. As with Sara, the somatic aspects of the ‘as if’ personality comes out in many forms − body changes of significant weight gain or loss, autoimmune diseases, various allergies and general body unease (Solomon, 2004, p. 649).

Sara dreamt, “A woman is going to commit suicide in a trash bin because she needs to be right for once. The importance of being right equals her very life”. The dream figure, the trash and the trash bin can all symbolize that she is in the shadow, the neglected potential and the unrealized aspects. Until recounting this dream in therapy Sara did not take seriously the extent of her self-denial, including the relationship to her body. Missing this connection Sara felt a disturbing shock each time she realized it was indeed hers. She hid her body saying her breasts sagged and her hips had cellulite. Preoccupations with ageing and weight kept her negatively self-absorbed. She avoided being naked. Physical display, like emotional exposure, was threatening to her fragile composure to the point where she was thinking about what she weighed while having sex.

Sara describes times of eating excessively, alone, doing drugs and sleeping, feeling no impetus for life. She admits to not really knowing how to care, what it looks like nor does she have memories of getting personal care beyond the essentials. This adds to a sense of meaninglessness and that nothing she does makes any difference. Sara feels insufficient and tests the therapist about her importance and impact. The dreams show her wanting to be in the therapist’s house, to be at the party, she is feeling ashamed and crowded out by others.

Jung referred to the resonance or not and the conscious and unconscious factors as the dialectics of the analytic relationship influencing both analyst and analysand (Jung, 1985, par. 163). This can be difficult with the ‘as if’ personality. From the deprivation and/or trauma the re-integrative impulse is arrested. To protect against further hurt, she forecloses contact with others. The possibility of relating to a good object is denied and the investment remains in the absent object, confirming cycles of disillusionment and withdrawal. These are intense interactions that consciously and unconsciously affect the therapist’s somatic responses.


Sylvia Plath

Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic: Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate, What ceremony of words can patch the havoc? Conversation Among the Ruins (Plath, 1981, p. 21)
Carl Jung said about poetry: “it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking” (Jung, 1966, par. 130). Sylvia Plath, American poetess of the mid-twentieth century, exemplifies many aspects of the ‘as if’ personality. Her writing is filled with descriptions of psychological and physical splits and dissociations. For Sylvia Plath, the psychological split consisted of a grieving, empty and sad self that was held separate from the image deemed necessary to present to her mother and the world as accomplished and happy. It was ‘as if’ she was the image and that had to take prominence over being real. Behind the outer display of grandiosity and need of recognition lie the losses. Sylvia Plath’s poems decry this in the distance set up between who she is and whom she wants to be.

Sylvia Plath was described as a woman of many masks. The veiled selves she wrote about forestalled anyone from knowing who she really was, despite her quest to discover the answers. Throughout her work appear images of selves that are petrified, cracked, patched up, disillusioned and divided (Ekmekçioğlu, 2008, p. 96). Sylvia Plath poignantly wrote in her Journals, expressing the problem of forging a coherent self from the warring fragments of her psyche, "Putting up pretty artificial statues. I can't get outside myself" (Kukil, 2000, p. 507).

Sylvia Plath’s writing portrays her wrapped in a tenacious self-absorption with the internal material that was emotionally and psychologically disturbing. Like the description of the ‘as if’ personality, it was “organized around a lost moment of origin, which, though endlessly reconstructed, was not recovered” (Britzolakis, 1999, p. 40). She depicts in several of her poems the struggle to be on this earth, to be authentic even as she desperately competed, sought accomplishment and fame. Her writing illustrated the connection between mourning and creativity, a search for reparations in trying to gain an internal good object. Her poetry is replete with mirrors that reflect back and that illustrate the possibilities of rebirth through death. It also was a compilation and self-exploration of conflicts that drew upon her intimate personal matters.

For example, in her poem, “The Mirror”, Sylvia Plath portrays a psychological state that speaks of life without feeling alive, the self divorced from the body, overlaid with a nagging sense of depersonalization (Ekmekcioglu, 2008, p. 94). A woman in the mirror seems undefined, her face portrayed without features and personality. The end of the poem reads, “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” (Plath, 1981, p. 173).

Symbolically the fish/old woman represents the sort of life transformation that is upsetting to the ‘as if’ personality. The fish inhabits the depths as well as the spirit and no doubt this is what Sylvia Plath was also drawn to. Yet, the rigid ego and persona are dependent upon a set image, often that of youth. The mirror in the poem has borders representing tight defences around a state of aloneness. It is attributed to be male and is judgmental but says it is truthful. It expresses aggression more than tenderness and seems to be against the woman. The question is, what is it that she sees in this mirror that keeps her coming back, obsessed day after day, even though she is upset by it? It might be life, disappointments and/or age, inevitably and inescapably taking her over.

In the poem, the mirror shows the image of a woman likened to Sylvia Plath’s repeated dual imaging of herself. The mirror is the brilliant silvered surface Plath presented to the world, as both woman and poet, the strict and tightly disciplined achiever who glitteringly fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and achievement − the persona. It is the social cast of her personality; aesthetic, frozen in a cover girl smile and perfect reflection, a woman who is a reflection and ‘as if’ herself.

Puella/Puer Archetype
Jung (1968, par. 267) commented, “We are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it”.

The ‘as if’ personality can further be expanded by the Jungian concept of the puella/puer archetype. This archetype describes the eternal child, girl or boy, manifesting in a person who is unable to find belonging, place, or the right niche. The person feels precarious, needing internal solidity (Hillman, 1989, p. 25). Combined with this, they are caught in a “childish state of constant dissatisfaction with themselves and the whole of reality” (von Franz, 2000, p. 87). As Sara said, “I am finding that I can no longer garner the energy to keep cycling through the fruitless changes. The anticipation of more years of emptiness is intolerable. The exhaustion with this routine is translating into a deep, abiding urge to simply no longer be.” Jung commented that “some are overflowing with feelings of their own importance…others give up all sense of responsibility, overcome by a sense of powerlessness” (Jung, 1966, par. 222).

The puella and puer archetype represent collective attitudes prevalent in American culture. These appear in the veneration of adolescent qualities and activities and often signify a denial of death and ageing. Naïve fantasies of youth, beauty and power are extant and lift this person out of daily life that is considered merely common. The pressure to live 'as if', bolstered by a persona adaptation is set up to avoid the underlying emptiness and narcissistic wounds.

The archetype itself is a concept that holds the tension of ambivalence and the spectrum of opposites. The puella/puer type has an overriding need for perfection and definition. This eliminates movement from here to there or from past to future. The split from the roots and arrested development creates a rejection of the instinctual and a disconnection from the flow of the physical, earth and time.

The puella/puer can turn into a tragedy of changelessness and at the same time, makes life too compulsive, fast and superficial. An underlying sensitivity exists but it is not the internal psychology. That takes time (Hillman, 1989, p. 25-26). For the puella/puer, awareness of the wounds reveals realities, limits, and mortality. By clinging to one side of the archetypal spectrum, that of youth resisting age, the puer/puella resist life. The facade of needing nothing and no one seems to erase the painful need for relationships. The puella/puer requires love and attention yet deceives herself and deflects others by putting on a performance and acting ‘as if’ (Solomon, 2004, p. 639). Inordinate identification with the persona suggests that a significant part of the personality exists beneath this facade. Living behind walls, she feigns confidence. Her composure might come across exhibitionistic and grandiose and envious.

Yet, as life unfolds, so does confrontation with the shadow of resisted and rejected ways of being. It erupts through chaos and melancholy and signals the need for mourning the losses. It can feel like the darkest time, one of disillusionment without exit. This signals the necessity to reorder psychological elements from accessing the depths of the unconscious. It often means having to do and face the most uncomfortable and unknown aspects of oneself.

The wounds Sara felt, like those of Sylvia Plath, puella/puer and others with aspects of the ‘as if’ personality, arose from early abandonments, neglect and lack of nurturing. What is left is a void at the centre. The lack of presence dammed access to the natural instincts. There lingers an absence of passion and solidity especially when life abruptly halts, and the ‘as if’ person encounters the core.


The Illusions

The process of stripping off the veils of illusion is painful. It takes much patience in therapeutic work. The unmasking of reality can be tricky due to the amount of vulnerability and repression. She enters therapy because; “there is something (she) cannot forget, something she cannot stop telling (herself), often by (her) actions, about (her) life. And these dismaying repetitions create the illusion of time having stopped” (Phillips, 1994, p.15). This description portrays the ‘as if’ distraction, the psychosomatic pocket drawing attention, the emotional arrest keeping her behind glass, removed from her existence and the world. In this way, she sidesteps the dark aspects of the self, which are threatening to the fragile sense of identity (Schwartz-Salant, 1982, p. 22-24).

Aloneness both results in and derives from a lack of engagement, restlessness, depersonalization and inability to inhabit the present. As Jung (1959, par. 457) described, “The fear of life is a real panic…It is the deadly fear of the instinctive, the unconscious, the inner that is cut off from life by continual shrinking back from reality”. Unable to access her foundations, she feels flawed, making the changes required through life more oppressive. With desire and libido devitalized a non-nourishing self-absorption arises as a defence against intimacy to self and/or to others. The sense of emptiness mixes with feeling unlovable. She cannot find love of self. There seems no reason to love or care. The emotional distance creates a vacuum. Feeling unlovable brings alienation to the physical, escalating into various forms of self-attack and mechanisms to remain numb. Eventually, the outer brilliance begins to collapse. This is a narcissism that has to do not with self-love but self-hate (Schwartz-Salant, 1982, p. 24). Frantically, this fuels the search for the ideal rather than the real.

Experiences of shame, embarrassment, smallness and fear are all reactions registered ‘as if’ to this observer of life. “She started out in the world with averted face…and all the while the world and life pass by her like a dream – an annoying source of illusions, disappointments, and irritations” (Jung, 1968, par. 185).


Summary

For the ‘as if’ personality, the creation of self was stunted by absence and environmental failures. There is a profound and “lifeless void and what the psyche does to survive this bleak and often life threatening experience” (Solomon, 2004, p. 642). This personality style affects self and other, body and psyche, patient and therapist, conscious and unconscious. Adept at cover-up, the ‘as if’ person, feels empty, yet is full of sorrows. Opening the doors for psychological understanding takes into account the type of knowledge that must remain watchful of the psyche and body of both client and therapist. And, the “often perilously obtained clinical experience and information along the hazardous analytic journey” is ultimately rewarding (Solomon, 2004, p. 635).
Reference to French psychoanalyst André Green, excerpts from the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath, including the puella/puer type and a brief composite example further describe aspects of the ‘as if’ personality. The disconnections and dissociations from self, are also the seeking of self, propelled by the ‘as if’ aspect of the personality, a void that draws inward.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love” (Rilke, 1984, p. 92).


References

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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 Jungian Analytical Psychology in Poland and South Africa and gives workshops and lectures in and out of the USA.

Susan has articles in the 'International Journal of Jungian Studies', the online journals 'Plath Profiles' and 'Depth Insights' and a chapter in 'Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses of American Media, Literature and Pop Culture'; 'Jungian Perspectives on Rebirth and Renewal: Phoenix Rising' and 'Analysis and the Polis'. She has a private practice in Jungian Analytical Psychology in Paradise Valley, Arizona, USA