Chicago 92: The Transcendent Function — Individual and Collective Aspects (Preview)

Copyright © 1993 by Daimon Verlag,
Am Klosterplatz, CH-8840 Einsiedeln, Switzerland.

The Transcendent Function: Individual and Collective Aspects edited by Mary Ann Mattoon.
The translators of individual papers are given on the final page of each translation.

Cover design: Jeanne Fountain, Meta4.
Cover photo: “Chicago: Home Insurance Building.” Undated photograph, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive, Underwood Collection.

ISBN 3-85630-537-8 (hard-cover)
ISBN 3-85630-538-6 (paper)

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Contents

Alphabetical List of Authors

Editor’s Preface

The XIIth International Congress for Analytical Psychology was held August 23–28, 1992 in Chicago, Illinois. It was the second such meeting to be held in the United States. Of the 554 participants numbered, 360 were analysts, 118 were candidates and 76 were “auditors.” Twenty-eight countries were represented.

Since the 1962 Congress (the first was in 1958), such meetings have been triennal gatherings of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the professional organization of Jungian analysts. (A person must be a member of the IAAP to use the title “Jungian Analyst.”)

The IAAP was founded in 1955, with 40 members. At the time of the first Congress, in 1958, the membership had increased to 150, in eight member groups. By 1972, the 11 groups then extant were composed of about 360 members. New groups have been admitted at nearly every Congress until, by the end of the Chicago Congress, the member groups numbered 32 (including a roster of “individual members” — those who had been designated as analysts by the IAAP rather than through member groups) and the membership had increased to about 2000. Currently, the members are about half women. This percentage is far greater than those in such non-Jungian organizations as associations of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Nearly everyone who is familiar with Jungian psychology is aware that Jung had a deep interest in symbols and a symbolic understanding of events and images. When students of Jungian psychology first hear of the “transcendent function,” however, many are surprised to learn that Jung equated it with “symbol.” It is well that he did so; a true symbol is indeed transcendent and “function” suggests its active nature. The symbol transforms by bringing opposites together and transcending them. As Jung put it, the transcendent function is “the transition from one condition to another” (Let-I, p. 268). When this Congress theme was adopted, it elicited a remarkable variety of papers devoted to broadening and deepening our understanding of the transcendent function.

Presentations at the Congress took the form of longer morning papers and shorter afternoon papers, including some grouped in forums. “Responses” to the morning papers, by designated presenters, were given in the afternoon, parallel (in time) to the other afternoon papers. The morning papers (the first ten chapters of this book) adhered to the theme. Afternoon papers (other than responses) dealt with a wider variety of topics.

Each presenter is a Jungian analyst (except where indicated), identified by place of practice and by group membership. If a presenter belongs to more than one JAAP group, the member organization named is the one through which that person holds a vote in the IAAP. (In a few instances, an IAAP member practices in one place and retains voting membership in another city or even another country.)

Many presenters delivered longer papers than appear here. They have graciously abbreviated their remarks to facilitate the publication of a book of reasonable size.

Although all presenters were invited to provide manuscripts for publication, some chose not to do so. Their reasons for this decision included: (1) the interactive nature of the sessions in which the material was presented; (2) the centrality of visual materials, such as videos, which cannot be reproduced in a book, and (3) the need for more than the space available for adequate representation of the presenter’s material. The presenters who made this choice are, with their topics: Peter Amman and Robert Hinshaw (both of Zurich, Switzerland) on “Wilderness Within — Wilderness Without”; Ruth Amman (Zurich, Switzerland) on “The Transcendent Function in Sandplay”; Francesco Bisagni (Milan, Italy) on “Infantile States and the Transcendent Function”; Mara Sidoli (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA) on “When Meaning Gets Lost in the Body”; Richard Stein (San Francisco, California, USA) on “The Transcendent Function as Revealed in Unconscious Drawings” and Harry Wilmer (Salado, Texas, USA) on “Dream: A Jungian Interview with Vera von der Heydt.”

A book comprising papers by many individuals inevitably includes disparate writing styles and points of view. The goal of the editing has been to retain individuality of style, while clarifying and enhancing each author’s contribution.

Jung’s works are indicated in the text, wherever possible, by CW (Collected Works’), volume number and paragraph number. Other Jung references include DAI (Dream Analysis, Vol. 1), MDR (Memories, Dreams, Reflections’), Let-1 and Let-2 (Jung’s Letters, Vols. 1 & 2), FJ (Freud-Jung Letters), VS (The Visions Seminars’), Z (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra). Several papers mentioned VII Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead). It was published privately in 1925, republished in German (Rascher, 1962) and in English (Stuart & Watkins, 1967). It appears in some versions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Freud’s works are indicated as SE (Standard Edition) and their volume number.

Other textual citations follow the format of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: They indicate author and date, keyed to the reference at the end of the paper. Each reference is in the language cited by the presenter.

American-style punctuation and spelling have been used, according to the University of Chicago Manual of Style. NonEnglish words in the texts have been translated into English, unless they are terms — such as those from alchemy — that are well-known to readers of Jungian works, or are available in a standard English dictionary. Names of archetypes are capitalized when it is necessary to distinguish them from often-used words, such as Great Mother. Except for its appearance in direct quotations, “Self’ (capitalized) refers to Jung’s concept of the center, totality and integrating factor of the psyche; “self’ (not capitalized) carries a variety of other meanings.

The official languages of the Congress were English, French, German and Italian. If a paper was delivered in a language other than English, the language from which it was translated is indicated. The translator’s name follows, if it is available. Jennette Cook Jones assisted the editor with refining some translations from Italian. Manuscripts were typed on computer disks by Beverly Cicchese. Final proof-reading of the papers was done by Bonnie L. Marsh, as well as by the Editor.

Mary Ann Mattoon
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
June 1993

Living, Ignoring, and Regressing

Transcendent Moments in the Lives of a Child, a Transsexual, and a Sexually Regressed Adult

Lee Roloff
Evanston, Illinois, USA
C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago

Differentiated and primitive, conscious and unconscious are united in the symbol, as well as all other possible psychic contents. Whenever such a symbol comes spontaneously to light from the unconscious, it is a content that dominates the whole personality, “forcing the energy of the opposites into a common channel,” so that “life can flow on... towards new goals.” Jung called that unknown activity of the unconscious which produces the real, life-giving symbols the transcendent function, because this process facilitates a transition from one attitude to another. A still-living, genuine symbol can thus never be “resolved” (that is, analyzed, understood) by a rational interpretation, but can only be circumscribed and amplified by conscious associations; its nucleus, which is pregnant with meaning, remains unconscious as long as it is living and can only be divined. If one interprets it intellectually one “kills” the symbol, thus preventing any further unfolding of its content, (von Franz, 1980, p. 83)

Todd

When Todd first appeared in the sandplay room he was almost four years old: bright dancing brown eyes, a curious twinge of a smile and a sturdy agile physique that was at his complete command for climbing, crawling, moving quickly. Todd was the older of two siblings. His brother came into Todd’s life when he was two and a half years of age. Before his brother’s birth, however, Todd had experienced serious and invasive surgical procedures in his anus and lower intestines, an experience that his parents knew had been traumatic for Todd. Experiencing the sudden appearance of a brother had not been easy, though by every observable and historical evaluation, his parents had given careful attention to Todd and his needs. They gave a report of two presenting symptoms: an inability to control bowel movement and an unwillingness to allow others to touch or hold him.

Todd’s play world was a complex amalgam of electronic and reactive playthings, an interest in sports and sports figures and a keen interest in music and musical expression through an electronic keyboard. Both parents are brilliant professionals in a highly demanding field of endeavor but, since the second child, the mother has temporarily forsaken her career to be mother and nurturer. The most immediately obvious characteristic of both parents is that they are highly verbal, engagingly articulate and committed to the lives of the two children.

Todd had a shyness, however, and a rich interiority of discourse to which few outside the family were admitted. In the sandplay room he spent most of the early sessions searching for the toys of his choice: a miniature word processor, toy soldiers and motion picture and television figures of the Ninja Turtles. Once the toys had been placed in the sandtray elaborate games of divide and conquer would begin. As he progressed, however, he raised the level of articulation so that he might be overheard and his play shared with his observers, who had become parental figures of another kind: silent and permissive overhearers of psyche’s stories. A woman child analyst and I were his observers. Always observant, always caring, always watchful, we became symbolic parents to the child searching for the boundaries of permission and containment.

A precise moment in the life of Todd at age four brought the power and presence of the transcendent function into our lives as a living reality. In a move that has no rational accountability, and drawing only upon the observation that Todd played with swordwielding figures, I withdrew from a container in the playroom a bamboo stick about one meter long. I also withdrew one for Todd and gave it to him, and holding the bamboo stick thrust forward said, “Eri garde, Todd!” Todd, knowing just what to do, matched his bamboo sword to mine, touched it gently and repeated the phrase. “En garde’.” In the middle of the playroom, then, was an adult man and his small charge poised for fencing. I said, “Todd, I want you to hit my sword as hard as you are able.” He gently tapped my stick. “Harder,” I said. Todd allowed a little more striking power, but not much. “Todd,” I said, “I want you to hit my sword as hard as you can!” Finally, swinging his sword as hard as he could, he knocked the sword from my hand. A most engaging, full, and satisfied smile crossed his face. He stood facing me with his arms akimbo and said, “I really did it, didn’t I, Lee?” And I said, joined by my colleague, “You were wonderful, Todd; you are really strong and powerful.” There the session ended.

Before the next session Todd’s father, as it happened, took Todd to a swimming lesson and, because the parental conference had not taken place for that week, Todd’s father had no knowledge of the “sword incident.” The swimming lesson was a diving lesson. The children were asked to walk to the end of the low board and simply tumble into the water. Todd walked to the end of the board and, according to the father’s report, froze. His father urged him to fall into the water. There was no movement from Todd. After what seemed an agonizingly long time, Todd uttered something incomprehensible to his father, who asked Todd to repeat it. Todd, looking directly at his father said, “I have lost my sword’.”

We ask ourselves, “At what age does the symbolic process begin? At what age does the life-giving symbol become a living reality for a child? At what age can a symbol become a facilitating transition from one attitude to another?” The answer is — from one case, at least — by age four. By that age the living transcendence can be experienced. The degree to which it is assimilated by a developing ego remains to be tested. What I do know is this. Sometime later, it became necessary for Todd to undergo another invasive, though less serious, surgical procedure. I promised Todd that I would be with him prior to surgery at the hospital, a promise which I kept. As we sat together on his bed playing with things he had brought to the hospital, I said, “Have you brought your sword? You will need to be strong today.” “Oh sure,” he said, “I brought it.” He went with a tense bravado to surgery and his recovery was quick and swift.

The sword was only a bamboo stick; it became a psychological necessity as well as inner reality. “Ego consciousness seems to depend upon the capacity to differentiate one thing from another and to make value distinctions between them,’’ observe Moore and Gillette (1992). “This idea,” they continue, “is related to the ‘masculine’ principle of discernment. Though not an exclusively male preserve, the mythic image of discrimination is of the sword that cuts through confusion” (p. 141). What, in a four-year-old boy, is the consciousness that knows when a sword is “lost” and “when he has it with him”? It is true that his father and mother were working diligently to empower Todd, and that another “father” (his male therapist) and his biological father were empowering Todd symbolically. But it is Todd who must know the sword, believe in the sword, and hold the sword — acts of considerable psychological complexity, but available, it seems, to a four-year-old.

In assessing the incident of the sword play and its assimilative symbolic presence in Todd’s life I consulted another psychologist and child analyst familiar with symbolic development in children. What happened between Todd and me was in pure play, in an intense moment, in which “playing being strong and powerful” constellated the kairos of the appropriate mythologem, a moment of pure assimilation in which everything became subsumed to “play” necessities. So strong was his sense of safety that Todd could tell his father that he had lost his sword, mitigating the power of the father, at the same time helping the father in a transformative attitude toward his son. In defeat, Todd, at four, made a valiant attempt to claim his own authority. It takes strength to de-integrate; it is play, the ludic moment, that gives the imaginative symbolic power of an assimilative truth. Todd is living a transcendent moment, a life-giving symbolic intensity uncontaminated by rational interpretation.

As Todd matures he will need and gather other “swords” — penetrating intelligence, a capacity to break through confusions, a sensitive “phallic nature” and the discovery of a king within. As Moore and Gillette remind us it is the sword of the masculine that is the sword of gnosis, the knowledge that began one summer’s afternoon at the end of a diving board for one little boy, age four.

Abbey

Abbey is a tall, blond, stunning woman who was born a gendered male. I knew her briefly as a male during high school years when mother referred her son to my office for “emotional reasons.” As it turned out, the son was an active homosexual teenager — attracted to much older men — who, even at that time, loathed his maleness and his genitals. Somehow, things became stabilized enough, and because financial pressures were so great for the family, this teenager left therapy to pursue a college career and sexual life. Two years later, I again received a call, but this time from a young woman, Abbey. The voice I recognized; the name I did not. Abbey informed me that I had known her by a male name, but that now she was in the process of changing her sexual identity and anxious for me to see her. The decision to see Abbey was a fateful one for me.

Nothing in my training prepared me for the challenges I had to face. I was entering into a process that had not been initiated in an analytic setting; I found little understanding regarding transsexuality in the literature of Analytical Psychology; and, finally, I found myself cast upon a journey into a post-modern sensibility augmented by medical and surgical procedures that could be had, in various parts of the world, merely for a price. The case of Abbey precipitated a moral crisis in my soul that I had not anticipated nor, obviously, desired; a phenomenon that is so often the case in working with transsexuals.

In the case of Todd, the epiphanic, living reality of the intangible symbolic potential had a healing and deeply reassuring quality. While the history of Todd’s invasive surgeries could evoke an empathic resonance, the surgeries of Abbey’s journey became nightmarish and disturbing of my own inner equilibrium. There were times my body would become racked with a sympathetic pain, even nausea. Of all these countertransferential somatic responses, not one occurred in a session. My neural nightmares occurred only in reflecting on the case, of reading the surgical procedures to be involved. At one point, I recall, I wondered if I had ever dreamt of a transsexual, if there were a symbolic presence of the case Abbey was presenting in my own personal history. It took going through dream journals for the past 30 years, but I did find a dream that I had met Christine Jorgensen, possibly the best known public personality of the 1950s to make the transsexual journey. I cannot explain why that dream was so re-assuring, but it has helped me in dark recessive ways to grapple with the case of Abbey.

It is the vocabulary of the post-modern era that I want to point out: destruction, reconstruction and deconstruction. These inflected forms of construction provide an understanding of the forces of post-modern cultural consciousness and unconsciousness. For what seems to be true of culture is all too true of the human body: The destruction of one gendered body for the reconstruction of another gender is a frequent occurrence. There is the additional assumption that inner psychological processes lead to this deconstructive/reconstructive process. If there be a facile manner in which to encapsulate the post-modern sensibility, it might be summed up as follows: Gender is not destiny. Everything about the body can be deconstructed and reconstructed through chemistry and surgery. With research currently investigating the possibility of male bodies carrying a fetus, the topsyturvy world is an ordinary deconstructive imagining. The sex act is no longer a necessity for the fertilization of the ovum. The tacitly assumed world of investigation that Freud and Jung explored for the formulation of their shaping of interiorities no longer exists.

What the post-modern world view seems to state in psychological terms, at least, is something like this: Where ego is, id shall be. And that, when all the complexities of Abbey’s case are put aside, is precisely what she posited in my consulting room. Transsexuality begins with a conundrum: “I am gendered male, but inwardly I am a woman in a male body.” The reverse pertains likewise: “I am gendered female, but I am a male trapped in a female body.” Transsexuals and transvestites are more concerned with maleness and femaleness than anyone else. The dichotomy is a severe one, and “androgyny” or “unisex” or “bisexuality” are of no interest in the deconstructive movement of transsexuals.

One further observation: in this post-modern world and its sensibilities, it is not psychology that is immutable in its premises against a changing and chaotic world. It is, rather, psychology that becomes mutable, changing and variable in response to the mutability of the collective. Or, in a mode I have come to learn all too well: It is not psychology that changes persons; it is persons who change psychology. Jung taught this and we must learn from it.

Did Abbey ignore the promptings of her inner life, and did I function in such a way that did not adequately mirror and reflect the “promptings of the Self?” “To ignore” suggests “to refrain from noticing, to disregard the nature of something.” This was Abbey’s strong and insistent ego position: “Everyone simply ignored the fact of my true self, that I played with dolls, that as a child I wore girls’ clothing whenever possible and that I had no interest in anything masculine, except attracting the male sexually.” In an autobiography Abbey had to write for her surgeon, she observed:

My sister [younger than Abbey] and I always dressed up in my mother’s clothes. We had several friends from the area whom my sister and I would play with. One of our favorite games was playing “house.” We would all pretend to be members of a family, and I always played the female roles. I wanted to be the mommy, or the sister, or the aunt, or the grandmother. When our father saw me dressed up this way, he would tell me I should be playing in his old clothes and not in my mother’s. I always tried to humor him. because I enjoyed having his approval, but it was not fun. My mother was much more tolerant, although she never encouraged me to cross-dress in play. I also spent many hours playing with Barbie dolls. I wanted to grow up to look just like Barbie, tall, blonde, and beautiful. My mother perceived my “different” behavior as an artistic quality and kept me quite busy after school and on weekends at home with various art projects. The thing I enjoyed most about these times was being given approval to wear an apron.

I mentioned that Abbey is a tall, blond, stunning woman. At that moment I had no awareness that she had, in fact, become the living representation of a Barbie doll. This widely popular doll appeals to pre-pubescent and pubescent girls. As the “baby doll” awakens the mother archetype in the child, Barbie awakens the goddess Aphrodite, a love doll concerned solely with seductiveness, appearance and her beloved opposite, Ken. Together these two inhabit a never-never land of magical weekends, resorts, and “situations,” including marriage. Can one ignore her fascination with the love goddess? Can one ignore the fact that in choosing Barbie over Ken, Abbey might be telling the truth about the viable and living presence of the feminine within her personality at a very early age?

I can report the psychological facts, and I have not ignored them, but I do not know if they are true; I know that they are true for Abbey. If there are archetypes of life, meaning, and transformation, who is to determine what the archetypal forces will become, particularly in a post-modern society when the ego can purchase virtually any transformation of the physical body it desires? With already achieved and maintained levels of estrogen hormone, with already the process of the male body’s deconstruction into the constructed female presence, and with already implanted presences of silicone in the body to augment and emphasize female configurations, what, in truth, can be ignored? Virtually anything but murder.

Abbey spoke often of killing the male she had been. While it was not casual talk it verged, it seemed to me, upon a certain carelessness, of an unwillingness to confront what was being destroyed, a destruction of her past and her birth gender identity. Where, in point of fact, was the so-called transcendent function that would lead her into a consciousness of her new situation? Two important dreams occurred, approximately two months apart, that led her into “accidental” and “injected” awareness.

Dream 1: I am driving south on the drive next to Lake Michigan. I come to a tunnel, a tunnel that does not exist, but in my dream is a part of the drive. I enter the tunnel and I discover that the police are there blocking traffic. A policeman waves me by. At the very center of the tunnel where it reaches its lowest point, I find a small car smashed up, but I drive on. I then know that I must go back to the accident. Behind the wheel of the crashed car is a man. The man has a horrified look on his face. “My god,” I think, “he’s dead!”

Dream 2: I am in a wooded area. I see a low modern building, one story, and the walls are all of glass, a lightly tinted glass. I hear over a loud speaker, “We’re about to make the injection.” I know what this means; it means that there is going to be an execution by means of injection. I look into the building. A man in a white coat injects another man lying upon a table. The man groans. A lab technician asks, Do you need another injection? He’s almost dead, but groaning.” I look at the man on the table and I think, “How attractive he is. He is my Ideal Man.”

These dreams of accidental death and execution by injection brought to memory a recurrent dream that Abbey experienced between the ages of eight and ten, as a young boy living in terror of the father. I am at the end of a bowling alley lane. I feel that I am a part of the pins. I hear a ball rolling down the alley. I am terrified. At the “thump” of the ball on the bowling alley lane, my terror begins. As the ball rolls towards the pins my terror increases and increases until I awaken with my heart pounding.

To observe that Abbey was resistant to the images of the murder she was engaging in is to understate the matter. “I hated him, I did not want to live in his body, and I did all that I could to change my life and body,” she would state again and again. “I suppose that you want me to grieve for him? I suppose that you expect me to be sorry for what I am doing?” she would rhetorically ask me. My answer: a steady gaze into her eyes. And then an astonishing thing occurred unexpectedly and dramatically. She said, “What I have killed, I will love. What I saw in the car and what I saw on the table is my ideal man.”

This much she said. But I would like to put my interpretation into a fictive dialogue that Abbey did not utter, but of which she eventually had some degree of consciousness. What I would have her say is this, “Because I could not become the idealized boy/man my father wanted me to become, I can do that now by having an actual relationship with him.” Or, in the language of Analytical Psychology: Only by crossing over into the body of the feminine can the ideal masculine become the animus energy of my new feminine. This is nothing else but a total and postmodern deconstruction and reconstruction of Jungian psychology. In the old Freudian world, you may recall, men have perversions and women have neuroses (Garber, 1992). Moreover, perversions concern having something and neuroses have something to do with not having something. In the physicalization of transformation, of surgically surrendering the male body, including the penis, Abbey’s task was and is to love what she had ignored, what she had turned away from and turned toward. Something very tender was killed by male balls thundering down her ally in childhood and by being, it would appear, only “a sitting pin” for a destructive and voracious father.

Clearly I have reserved the greater part of Abbey’s personal history in the interest of a specific point: That we can be led to the transcendent moment of the meaningful symbol even by choosing at some level to ignore it. Transsexuality is one of many post-modern elements that causes the profoundest “cultural anxiety,” to borrow Lopez-Pedraza’s (1990) trenchant phrase. “Cultural anxiety,” he suggests, acts us out because “our deepest conflicts are cultural, something that psychology cannot evade” (p. 34). Currently, those most articulate in the social phenomenon of transsexuality are sociologists, behaviorial psychologists, ethnologists and a few medical ethicists. The literature often has what I would describe as an omniscient detachment, of little or no help to the soul.

Fleming and Ruck (1979) have concerned themselves with what they term “a mythic search for identity” in a case of a transsexual, though the case they note is a female-to-male transsexual. They observe, “Some people... do not seem at home in the world in which they were born, and seem to be deviants or anomalies... [inventing] their own private mythology, an idiosyncratic system of beliefs and myths which play as dominant a formative role in their lives as does the traditional mythology in the lives of those from whom they are alienated” (p. 298). For Abbey, the myth is Aphrodite in the banalized form of Barbie; her dread is her Ares father. The children of Aphrodite and Ares are Fear (Deimus), Panic (Phobos), Harmonia and Eros. Abbey has known the extremities of fear and panic; she is finding a measure of harmony in her own nature and, one hopes, love. After a prolonged period of alienation and absence from her biological father she visited him, not without fear and panic. Astonishingly, the boy the father never knew, and who died both an accidental and irrevocable psychic death, appeared to him as a tall and beautiful woman; he accepted her and told her he loved her.

The purpose of Sufi discipline is to prepare oneself for a gift of incalculable value. In preparation for this gift, the searcher becomes a female saint, a waliyeh who, we are told, sits among the women because he is, for the moment, “changed into a woman.” So powerful is this moment that there is a desire to transform the soul into poetry, a soul which is expressed with the feminine pronoun. A concluding line from such a poem reads, “Through her I went forth from myself to her and came not back to myself: one like me does not hold the doctrine of return” (quoted in Bullough, 1976, p. 235). Abbey is far beyond the point of return; in her own fashion she holds to the “doctrine of no return.” After reporting the dreams of the beautiful young man, at the end of that hour of ignoring and facing, Abbey cried. She is not completely unaware.

David

David is 39 years old, a mental health professional with solid educational and professional credentials, including a doctorate. He is respected by his peers. He is openly gay; he would specialize in the treatment of gay and lesbian persons if the opportunity presented itself. He has studied and written on the topic of sexual infantilism or. more precisely, “the adult baby,” and he is obviously familiar with all the clinical languages and discourse surrounding his interests and passions: fetishism, paraphilia, sexual dysfunction, fixation and regression.

He came to a Jungian analyst because (1) the power of his interest — meaning the symbolic power — would be understood best by a Jungian; (2) a Jungian might be more disposed to deal with his issues and be free of the “rant and cant” of clinical language and diagnosis; and (3) he was looking for the “father” he had never had. His statements were, in short, a “no nonsense” approach to me and I could “take him on,” as he put it, or refer him to someone else. After several days of soul-searching, I agreed to meet with him. At the time he began work, he had not completed his degree and monograph on the topic of “the adult baby”; the completion occurred during the time that I saw him.

Though I have been confronted with virtually every aspect of his performed infantilism, I was impressed at our first meeting, as I am presently, by the power and authority of his adult male visage, an almost hallucinatory transposition of image when I am in his presence. And it has been David, perhaps more than any other recent analysand, who has presented me with the analytical conundrum that haunts my speculations: What is it in the lives of persons that absolutely insists that that which might be psychological and hence mental, must be literalized, concretized, behaved, enfleshed, acted out, presented? Even more importantly, what is it when that which is being concretized carries within its enactment the very nature of the transcendent function, and a symbolic possibility becomes actualized? Why is it that a child, Todd, who lives in the unfolding development of play, has the ability to psychologize an inner symbolic reality while astonishingly brilliant and sensitive individuals such as Abbey and David must become what cannot be psychologized?

A child’s play, a physical transformation, and an adult’s enactment of infantilism suggest radically different modes of psychic discourse and behavior; in a post-modern sensibility that culturally condones and provides the services necessary for physical transformations and enactments, the familiar ground of cultural continuity has been replaced by crossing-overs and discontinuities. It is important before reflecting further on these concerns to place David’s “adult child” in a cultural and personal context.

“The adult child” is a performance event, highly charged with sexual overtones and enactments. Through computer networks worldwide, individuals can communicate with other “adult children” 24 hours a day, from Bangkok to Berlin, Chicago to Manila, San Francisco to Haifa. These individuals are not pedo- philiacs nor are they interested in sexualizing relationships with children. The obsession is the helpless child, alone in a crib or playpen, diapers wet or soiled, waiting and desiring to be bathed, held, loved, stroked, kissed, fondled. The fixation then moves to a literalizing and a physicalizing. The adult then becomes the child, discarding adult clothing for diapers, plastic pants, adult made-to-order infant clothing. Once contacts are made, meetings are arranged for periods of time suitable to both, perhaps a day to a week to a month in which the adult baby is cared for, fed, nurtured, held, loved. All aspects of life become regressive, including feedings with bottles and specially prepared foods. After periods of extended play, the roles are abandoned and adult sexual contact occurs.

The hallucinatory response that I experienced in being with David can be understood better now. During various sessions, though not all, there have been presentations of the “the adult baby.” In the intensity of the analytic hour the child becomes a mysterium tremendum in psychological power and presence. Like a thin steel wire, the pull of the undifferentiated and abused child archetype lures both analyst and analysand to a paradoxical moment of differentiation and non-differentiation. Like a colossus, the adult child strides the borders of consciousness and unconsciousness.

Jung noted: “In the individual, the archetypes appear as involuntary manifestations of unconscious processes whose existence and meaning can only be inferred” (CW, 9–1, par. 260). When the transcendent function has become an obsession, when it has become lodged in materia, when it has been an ego-compulsive necessity to investigate and to write regarding it, when the ego has virtually exhausted its ratiocinations; then the archetypal manifestation that is clearly beyond the individual’s choice becomes like “being hit by a projectile sent by an overpowering being that transfixes us and brings us into its power. At the same time we are assailed by fantasies and imaginary images experienced either as proceeding directly from the inner world... or, more often, as caused by an outer object” (von Franz, 1980, p. 24). Yet, it is, I believe, precisely the ratiocinations, the elaborations and the endless defenses that have lodged the archetype of the “adult baby” into the relentless physicalization it demands.

The archetype... is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude to this organ, which thus may be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter... Hence, the “explanation” should always be such that the functional significance of the archetype remains unimpaired, so that an adequate and meaningful connection between the conscious mind and the archetypes is assured. For the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain instinctive data of the dark, primitive psyche, the real but invisible roots of consciousness. (CW9-I, par. 271)

The function of the child archetype, the form in this case being “the adult baby,” is (1) a fragmentary part of a cultural malaise that has seriously endangered the child and the archetypal foundations of the child; (2) a revelation that certain phases of an individual’s life can become autonomous, and actually result in a vision of oneself; (3) an image and symbol functioning in the present to compensate or correct the one-sidedness of the conscious mind.

The meaning of the child for David remained beyond the sophisticated and articulated research and comment submitted for his degree. Yes, there had been childhood deprivations, humiliations and abandonments; their recall was accessible and communicable. For Abbey what psyche materialized and incarnated that might have been psychologized, or transmuted into psychological insight, or relieved from the incarnational, simply no longer was an option. The physical enantiodromia is an irreversible reality in Abbey’s case at this writing. Such is and was not the case for David, but so long as the power of the archetype persisted there could be no change. Then, in a development that was spontaneous and synchronistic, the analysis itself became transmuted by the alchemy of discourse.

The moment of dialogue developed over David’s terrible pain and loneliness that his own “adult child” created.

David: It’s my goddamn naiveness that hurts.

Analyst: What do you mean?

David: Just that. No one likes it when a person is naive. Its just too fucking difficult in a fucking adult world.

Analyst: [pause] I do not know what has happened, but I think we ought to check what the word, naive, carries in its history. What are you saying about yourself that is really important?

David: Yeah. Go ahead. Look it up.

Analyst: Well, it says that to be “naive” is to have an unaffected simplicity, to be untaught, to be unsophisticated, to be frank, to be simple.

David: [begins to cry] I have never been allowed to be that. Only baby can be that way.

A simple word, naive, spontaneously erupting and interrupting — that is “rupturing” a moment’s duress — became an emotional affordance and functioned, in all of its poignancy and affect — as the archetypal presence of truth, healing, possibility. David has not abandoned “the adult baby,” indeed, he must not; he is learning, however, a new candor, frankness, simplicity, and openness in language that is a “baby talk” of an “adult kind.” Through regression, in an astonishing and important way, came the possibility of relief and pursuit of adult relationships based not on dominance and passivity but, rather, mutuality and respect.

Epilogue

Four-year-old Todd, in the miraculous phenomenon that is the development of consciousness and the ability to think, feel, and know the symbolic power of the symbol, is already equipped with some of the “powers of nature and instinct.” He is living for the future. Abbey, who at a crucial point in her own transformation began to dream with a female dream ego, is attempting to transform agonies of the past, self-hatreds, and narcissistic wounds into something altogether different: a post-modern woman in a post-modern world in which aspects of a physical body can be deconstructed and reconstructed in something of her own image, a modern Aphrodite whose knowledge of fear, panic and physical and psychological harmony might be merged with love. The physically completed transsexual is a reality in our post-modern world: their presence creates anxieties whether they write (Jan Morris), compete at tennis (Renee Richards), haunt dreams (Christine Jorgensen) or sit opposite analysts in consulting rooms. David’s sexually regressed “adult baby” is linked with other “adult babies” on all the continents of this globe, in instantaneous communication with each other, and parenting each other in ways that cannot help but, for some, cause extreme cultural anxieties. David found his own “baby talk” and perhaps his new-found language will lead him, as it led Todd, to a moment of consciousness. Death is not usually an immediate association with the words “transcendent” and “function.” And as Abbey discovered, and as we discover from Abbey, we sometimes “kill the thing we love, the thing we shouldn’t kill at all.” Abbey is a beautiful woman originally gendered male. That she has had to ignore, turn away from and kill a part of herself is the story telling her, injecting what once was him; creating what now is her (the objective pronouns the only viable ones to employ). David is a handsome, aging man who knows more about regression than I, though I thought I knew something. It is a new language of the soul that he is learning.

References

The Perverse and the Transcendent

Ann Belford Ulanov
New York, NY. USA
New York Association for Analytical Psychology

A man of 76, Helmut, seeks analysis. “What brings you?” I ask. “I have suffered from a perversion for 70 years,” he answers. Was he sure he wanted to be rid of it? Consciously yes, very much, he said, but unconsciously he did not know. Had he sought treatment before? Once, briefly, years ago, with a Freudian who reduced his perversion to a congenital foot injury corrected after birth. That made no deep sense to him so he stopped therapy. Later he had conversations with a Jungian, conversations which introduced him to Jung, whom he had read ever since, but the discussion of archetypes was too general, never reaching to the core of his complex. Why me? I asked. Because of my dual profession in religion and analysis, he said; the religious part was essential.

This case shows, I believe, that the transcendent function works to loosen the grip of well-entrenched perversion, that it builds up the ego at the same time it constructs the Self and that the transcendent function working within the psyche connects us to the Transcendent itself in whatever ways we experience it. The opening conversation told me that a purely reductive approach would not work, an archetypal approach that omitted the guts and gore of addictive compulsions would not work, and that whatever he meant by religion, it was going to be central.

What he called his perversion turned out to be a complex with many facets. A gripping fantasy — no longer acted out with prostitutes — of domination and degradation by an all-powerful female dressed in black, often with whip or boot, compelled his prostration in complete self-abnegation. “I want to become nothing, to disappear,” he said. In one version he saw himself tightly encased in black leather, including his face, nailed to a cross with silver nails, not able to move an inch, like a parody crucifixion. A compulsive fascination with wide, shiny, black patent leather belts — their smell, taste and touch, their tightness around a woman’s waist or his own — lured him to purchase them and to spend hours fingering them. Donning a woman’s dress and standing before a mirror, he cruelly tortured his nipples and climaxed in orgasm through masturbation.

Maps of Masochism

Various schools of depth psychology map the territory of masochism, fetishism and transvestism in ways that proved helpful in unraveling this man’s vast suffering. For Freud and his followers the erotogenic transformation of pain into pleasure springs from reversal of the oedipal drama. The parent we desire becomes the dispenser of punishment instead of caresses. We disavow our genital inadequacy to satisfy our parent sexually, by exalting pre-oedipal parts, procedures and body zones, thus obliterating at one stroke the differences between the sexes and the generations. The aggression of the death instinct makes one the pleased victim of another person’s power and authority. By fetishistic devices we avoid the oedipal conflict and threat of castration, insisting that we alone are the object of our mother’s desire, thus disqualifying the father. A man in woman’s dress simultaneously displays and defeats his identification with the phallic female because his penis under the dress is real and achieves orgasm. By eroticizing a frightening sense of deadness, we seek control in the theatrics of being controlled.

Berliner (1947), Horney (1939) and Menaker (1979) map masochism as a defensive ego-strategy to survive overwhelming anxiety about being annihilated. Relinquishing ego-autonomy in order to avoid such anxiety, we stay at a preambivalent early stage of development and cling helplessly and dependently to the person who makes us suffer. We introject the other’s disparaging attitude toward us and become unlovable. Neglecting to build other relationships that reflect our worth, we know only experiences of self-depreciation to which we add self-condemnation. Terror of being abandoned stirs our aggression toward our love object; we feel guilty, deserving punishment. Yet we seek secret control of others by relentlessly positioning them in a superior role.

Object-relations theorists see masochism as an expression of psychic pain experienced before the self clearly emerges from the other. Winnicott (1951, 1984) finds the fetish a transitional object that gets stuck in a delusion of an impinging maternal phallus. Instead of the creative living found in the illusory transitional space, the fetish confines us to addictive literalizing of what should be symbolic.

Khan (1979) says that we sexualize events as our way of remembering before an object relationship develops. We build up a collated internal object out of archaic body experience, undifferentiated from bits of mother and father, primarily to cope with a dissociated unconscious element in our parent. We idealize this created object, surround it with intensified fantasy, and substitute it for the more ordinary initiation of experience with a caring parent into an imaginative play space and a developing symbolic life. Hiding in our compulsive routines is psychic pain we have lived and lost in dissociation. We dread total collapse and hold ourselves together against the threat of annihilation by fetish rituals, cross-dressing and libidinized pain that remains under our ego control.

The Self Psychology theorists see masochism as arising from desperate attempts to foster the rudimentary self in a desert of isolation. Kohut (1979) sees such fantasies and activities as feeble attempts to provide a “feeling of aliveness” and to separate in a healthy way from engulfment in the mother. Thus we maintain psychic structural cohesion.

Jung and Jungians

For Jung, neurosis is “a defense against the objective inner activity of the psyche,... to escape from the inner voice and hence from the vocation.... Behind the neurotic perversion is concealed [our] vocation” (CW 17, par. 313). To reconnect with our lost vocation takes a double move: reduction to instinct that leads back to reality and its overvaluation, thus necessitating sacrifice; and synthesis of symbolic fantasies that result from sacrifice. “This produces a new attitude toward the world,... a new potential. I have called this transition to a new attitude the transcendent function” (CW6, par. 427).

We engage in a continual process of “getting to know the counter position in the unconscious” (CW 14, par. 257). We admit the other and engage our differences with it; in turn, it engages us with its views, expressed in image, emotion or behavior pattern. Out of this conversation — which is often a struggle — emerges a symbol, a third point of view that formulates a uniting of the two, conscious and unconscious. It is “a creative solution... which is... not unjustly characterized as the voice of God. The nature of the solution is in accord with the deepest foundation of the personality as well as with its wholeness” (CW 10, par. 856). The “transcendent function is not something one does oneself;... it cannot be invented.... The experience of it does not depend on our will” (Let-I, p. 269). It is “equivalent to a renewal of life;... the soul is born again in God” (CW14, par. 427). But this involves a perilous “descent to the deus absconditus” (CW6, par. 427).

When caught in perversion, we treat this renewal with disrespect instead of loyalty, getting caught in the shadow side of our psychic need to venerate something beyond ourselves. Connecting to the transcendent function, working within our psyche, opens us to the hidden god in the midst of the opposites and transcendent to our whole psyche. We listen through the perversions to receive a bulletin from the Self to our self. Only thus do we find our vocation, what Jung called living according to the will of God. We break down false organizations of self and other to break through to joyous knowledge that we are known.

History

Helmut had three histories: his life, his perversion, and the unfolding narrative of his analysis which — intertwined with the other two and the transference — produced symbols that brought him home, deep down inside himself and into relation to the Transcendent far outside himself. Work with him had to go backward to the origins of his long-standing masochism and, simultaneously, forward to the purpose it was trying to accomplish.

Born and raised in Germany into an upper-middle-class family, Helmut arrived as the unexpected twin of a sister who was eagerly awaited. He was “found” in the womb after her birth and became the favorite of both his parents. His left foot, originally turned backward, making his left leg weaker and slightly shorter, was corrected early by a cast. He remembers no teasing or fuss made about his leg, and it did not come up in unconscious material. He and his twin sister were the third and fourth of eight children.

He remembers being fascinated with shiny belts at the age of five, and at seven wanting to be beaten. He remembers wanting to be his sister and to dress in female clothes. At six he nearly died from attacks of influenza and meningitis. His next older brother, who was his mother’s original favorite and his own, did die, but Helmut was so ill his parents did not tell him for some weeks.

At the end of our first year of work, many years after the events, he learned crucial facts from his nephew, his sister’s child. (The nephew had been raised by Helmut’s mother after her sister died.) Helmut’s mother, the nephew revealed, had felt very guilty about Helmut’s brother’s death. She felt she had not given him enough food even though, because of rationing at the end of World War I, there was simply not enough to go around. The nephew also described Helmut’s mother as so overwhelming in her display of motherly affection that she ruined life for her brother-in-law, the nephew’s father. He never dared marry again for fear of greater hurt to the already wounded maternity of his sister-in-law, Helmut’s mother.

At puberty Helmut remained utterly naive sexually until he saw dogs copulating and a friend enlightened him. Then masturbatory fantasies of submitting to a dominatrix came to possess him. At the same time he had an ardent crush on a girl his age which he did not live out. In his twenties he had two long affairs with older women, one with a golf pro in Germany, one in Asia. These he described as normal in feeling and sexuality. He remembers his childhood as happy, his mother as beautiful and loving, his father as wanting him to succeed him in business — which he longed to do to emulate his parent. His twin sister, who like his younger sister died in her thirties from stomach cancer, was the aggressive one; Helmut was a gentle, dreamy boy. When his twin grew up she too became another powerful mother. His religion was calm enough; conventional Protestant. Though interested in spiritual matters he felt no connection to God or Christ.

Helmut felt business was the wrong occupation for him and that he had wrecked many opportunities because so much energy had been detoured into fetish and prostitute activities. He felt inferior to other men and, though he had some male friends, never felt himself “one of the boys.” He was often cheated by partners because he lacked ruthless force. In analysis he came to mourn what his perversion cost him: in money, in business failure, in wasted life. “I used so much of my life in pursuit of my complexes which produce nothing.”

An immensely happy, steady part of his life was meeting, marrying, and living for over 50 years with his beloved wife.

Falling in love with her and standing up for her in a courageous way made one of the first bridges between his dissociated life and his ordinary life in business and with his family. He spoke simply and ardently about her and their life together, of their daughter and granddaughter. He said loving his wife had been the most important aspect of his life. She knew about his obsessions but not their extent or their power. Her commonsense attitude, seeing them as nonsense he should conquer, was upset when he entered analysis. Equal to it he now rated the investigation and healing of his perversion.

Just as the Nazis began to rise to power, he fell in love with a beautiful, talented painter from a prominent Jewish family. His parents were not pleased and sent him to Asia on business to get over her. When he returned to Germany, Hitler was in power. It was 1937; Helmut was 26. He saw clearly that the Nazi movement would destroy his country; his opposition to it put him in opposition to both his parents. His father even suggested that Helmut join the Brown Shirts. Stunned, Helmut exclaimed, “I would not dream of it!” The new racial laws which banned marriage with Jews intensified Helmut’s struggle with his parents. His father said, ‘‘Oh, forget about her. You’ve had affairs before. Don’t let her determine your life.” Helmut replied firmly: “It exactly does determine my life and it is the greatest injustice to me and to her to say that. It is insulting to her family, which is a great family, not to care what happens to them.”

Helmut told his mother he would marry. His mother said, “You are no longer my son,” and left the room. “I wept bitterly,” he said, “like a primal scream, for five minutes. Then I finished with it, went downstairs and joined the ongoing dinner party. I never had a warm feeling toward my mother and father after that. I left the country.” After the war he returned to see his parents, who were “extremely nice,” but cool when he spoke of Hitler and the terrible camps. Helmut said he felt he went wrong there: “I was righteous and not forgiving.”

He told this tale in a matter-of-fact way, as if it revealed nothing unusual about his behavior. Yet the theologian, Paul Tillich, said that he had to get out of Germany because, though consciously he knew it was wrong, unconsciously he was not sure he could resist the tremendous pressure and danger of the Nazi environment. And here was Helmut, wracked by psychic illness and chronic inferiority feelings, simply standing up to everyone he loved, to his government and to his culture, saying, “No, it’s wrong and I won’t do it!” His capacity for love and his wife’s connecting with his true self opened a deep channel. The energy usually locked up in his perversion flowed together with his love for his wife and enabled him to begin life anew in another land, another language, another culture.

The Work

Helmut’s history made clear that a whole quadrant of his sexual life occupied itself with libidinizing pain. We found that he reversed his oedipal desire for his mother into being punished for his oedipal strivings and his pre-oedipal incestuous wishes. He was conscious of wanting to disappear into the womb and to become female, thus avoiding oedipal conflict. Helmut received scant support to use his aggression to separate and individuate; instead he detoured it into a fantasy loop enacted in belt and submissive rituals where he projected his aggression onto a dominating female.

In persisting over months in this retrospective analysis, we came upon a live bit of Helmut’s true self, a small boy hiding and surviving in the perverse fantasies. This discovery initiated his awareness of the transcendent function. The masochistic rituals and fetish routines told the story of this lost boy in the only way possible, preverbally and preconceptually. It could not be told in words, but only in symbolic facts. Helmut and I listened again to the perverse fantasies. We found something crucial in this little boy. The man felt deeply touched and his obsession with belts loosened its power. Energy formerly detoured into the loop of masochistic fancy Helmut now used to receive this part of himself. He claimed his ego.

Helmut had been a dreamy little boy, unlike the conventional masculine figures of his family and culture. Imaginative, sweet, speculative, feeling-centered, meaning-preoccupied, he was not a rough and ready boy. His introversion was surely heightened by the confinement in a cast to correct his foot. Full of feminine sensibilities and passion, loving his mother and father, loved by them as their favorite, he was captured by love. How could he disappoint them? Hurt them by being different from what they wanted? Abandon their plans for him in business by pursuing the arts instead? Part of his self-punishment grew from this wish to go another way and thus hurt his parents. This boy of imagination degenerated into a boy of compulsive fantasy centered on punishment.

In therapy Helmut wept for this boy and felt finally that he could love him. Second to meeting his wife, he said, this was the greatest event of his life, to enter into relationship with this lost part of himself. Indeed, it was this boy that his wife — with her artistic sensibilities — touched in the grown-up man, that enabled him to stand against the pressures of family, society, and government.

With his claiming of this boy, a new impetus entered our investigation of Helmut’s repetitive fantasies that featured two archetypal females: a white and a black fairy. Lilith, the black fairy, claimed him at birth as her plaything, mixing a dreadful brew of incestuous love for his mother, transvestite desires for his sister’s dresses, jealousy of his father. Prostrate at her feet, he lusted to be her slave. In thrall to Thanatos he wished to destroy himself. Then the white fairy, Sophia-like, banished her sister by changing her into a snake. But the black fairy revenged herself with a curse: He would see in every shiny black patent leather belt a symbol of her serpentine power over him. The white fairy countered with a promise to aid him by bringing a wife whose deep love would help overcome the temptations against which he must strive with all his might.

With the boy in mind, Helmut now entered into active dialogues with the black and white fairies, thus engaging the transcendent function. Instead of submitting to the fantasies Helmut took on the fantasy figures in conversation, making his will felt. He no longer wished just to banish the black one and dismiss all his complexes. He looked to see their view of things, perhaps because they had functioned as the hiding place of the boy. Rapprochement grew between the two fairies and one day the resultant fantasy surprised him. The two fairy women decided to exchange belts, so that the one all in black now wore the white belt, and the one all in white now wore the black. This lessened his wish simply to kill off Lilith and live happily forever after with Sophia. I stressed the integration of the split between the two images of the feminine and this led us to the awe-inspiring mother figure behind the split.

Helmut called his mother-image Gaia: lovely, loving and huge in power. She never displayed aggression openly; none of her children did either. The violent aggressivity of Helmut’s fantasies, we came to see, reflected his mother’s dissociated, undifferentiated aggression that lay all about him. Her genuine lovingness frightened anyone who loved and depended on her into stifling any aggression they felt toward her for fear of hurting her. We concluded that the mother’s undifferentiated aggression hindered Helmut’s differentiating his own. She remained in his unconscious as the original phallic mother. In wearing women’s clothes but clearly remaining a functioning male with erection and ejaculation underneath, he was displaying in action something he experienced before words came to him: his mother’s power there under her soft dresses, her phallic aggression under her lovely femininity. He thus showed that his masculinity survived under his feminine identification with her.

It was as if his mother were only the “good breast,’’ and he lacked a personification of the “bad breast” (Klein. 1948, p. 34). Helmut felt a phobic dislike of rubber nipples and pacifiers. We speculated that his twin sister, as the first daughter, more often got the breast and he — the third son — got the bottle, and that he coped with his rage by detouring his aggression into a loop of punishment fantasies. The little boy took on the task of differentiating mother, not just for himself but, we suspected, for her undifferentiated and impinging aggression.

But Helmut was stuck there. No environmental provision encouraged his differentiation into his own self, different from his family. His aggression stayed primordial, archetypal. I risked the interpretation that when his brother died and his mother felt swamped with guilt, Helmut identified with her, taking on her suffering as his own. I believe that his mother identified with the earth-mother archetype; to lose a child was the worst possible sin. Helmut’s punishment rituals were in part to expiate his mother’s guilt. Still more darkly, he may have felt that here was a female who felt herself in charge of life and death, blaming herself for his brother’s death. Helmut may have been struck with terror at her power, thus reinforcing the ban against any show of his own aggression to challenge it. He too might be killed!

The Unfolding

Our reductive analysis opened into synthetic work; we uncovered purposes toward which Helmut’s complexes were striving. The transference figured centrally. Three months into the work Helmut felt he had fallen in love with me, and in his writings called me Athena, as a symbol of an intelligence that allowed him to reflect on the Gorgon-like power of his complexes. His love sprang from his catharsis of confiding in detail secrets he had kept for 70 years, from what he found to be my warm interest and my taking his problem seriously without judging him and from our discovery and care of the little boy together. In addition, I came to link the opposing archetypal white and black fairies for him by refusing to let him spiritualize his problem as a way of getting rid of the perversions. I insisted instead that we engage them and penetrate their meaning.

He also felt power in me; when we had to work out the schedule, he started to position himself submissively, apologizing for pushing me too much and was astonished when I said not to worry, I would push back. That remark broke up any incipient masochism in the transference and brought the dark feminine into the room for Helmut. He could make use of me to carry some of the Lilith power. For the first time, Helmut felt himself in relation to a woman holding both the black and white powers. It was at this time in active imagination that the “exchange of the belts” occurred. During the next month his obsessions decreased so markedly that he declared himself cured. I was touched by his relief but kept to myself the fact that this was a transference cure.

From my side, I respected Helmut, recognizing how much he had suffered and how much effort he was putting into his analysis. I found it hard work to figure so centrally in the transference — to find how to confront without hurting, and to analyze the hot passion without insulting him. At one point I said. “To be obsessed with me is not much better than to be obsessed with the old rituals.’’ He said, “Oh, but it is because it is more normal.” “You have a point,” I agreed. He said, “I see what you mean: it is not the goal.” “Exactly,” I replied; “the goal is to live that energy, to see what it brings you and wants from you when it is no longer dissociated but part of you.”

The belt fetish gobbled up a lot of energy. It expressed the intrusion into his psyche of his mother’s unconscious dissociated aggression. Helmut pulled the belt tight to create a woman’s waist, as if to hold himself together against the disintegration of his fledging masculinity. The belt also linked him to the mother he loved and his feeling of being in thrall to her power which he could now control in her surrogate. The belt joined him to the feminine side of himself, which did not accord with any conventional masculine role and had had little chance to be mirrored and grow. Altogether, the belt functioned as a link to the boy who was the lost true self and to the unintegrated aggression belonging to him.

After the April exchange of belts between the black and white fairies, in July Helmut prayed to Sophia, offering her the patent leather belt and all it stood for. In August, he dreamt that he tried to give me the belt but found half of it grown into his skin. In December he did something dramatic that followed on our fall work. He bought a belt, brought it to the session, asked me to put it on, saying, “This is a sacrifice. I give the whole thing up to you with a prayer to God to be freed and to give it all to God.” I stood up and put on the belt, saying, “I receive and accept it.” After a few minutes I took it off, to Helmut’s distress and said. “This belt is symbolic, an important part of our analytic work. I cannot wear it as a personal gift.” Helmut said, “You take the belt and the perversions. I get the link to Sophia, who loves the boy as he is.” In April of the following year, Helmut threw away his entire belt collection, accumulated over 60 years.

During the previous fall Helmut had been dreaming the sadistic side of the masochistic adaptation of his aggression. He was shocked, but I was encouraged. First, and harmlessly, he dreamt I was teaching him to play tennis. To this he associated his tennis pro’s telling him his game was too defensive; he ought to go on the attack. But then a series of dream images alarmed him. He was looking behind a curtain for murdered children, he was strangling a mouse that would not stay dead, he saw across a gulf between Palestine and Israel a man mercilessly beating a horse, he was being chased by storm troopers. What stood out in all these images was the horrific pain he felt; it was no longer libidinized into pleasure.

His unconscious also punctured his idealization of me, first in an October dream where he and his wife are lying on the ground watching the rise of a giant moon. It suddenly falls and he sees that it is a paper moon, a lamp on a pole which sticks in the ground as if to light the way. He said of the dream, “It shows my love for you is illusion, lighting the way, but not real and grounded as is my love for my wife.”

The second dream came the day after he gave me the belt. We have a session in a hospital, but therapy with a young woman goes on in the same room. Helmut protests, but I say nothing can be done. I look sweaty, grubby from the hard work.

Following this dream he wanted to stop analysis. He said that I had fallen, like Sophia, into matter, where he found how hard it was to attain the treasure, namely, his whole self. In addition to his resistance, the dream also showed a new feminine part quite outside his perversions, one fully occupied with her own treatment.

In the winter his wife’s objections to his analysis intensified and Helmut felt caught. I stood firm against the struggle’s being described as wife versus analyst. That would only preserve the split Helmut suffered, now once again a struggle between two powerful women. He must decide his course and stand for what he believed. So he entered into another dialogue of opposites — love for his wife and love for the self he was finding in analysis. This opposition was a striking replay of his early conflict between either following his soul and hurting the woman he loved, whether mother or wife, or pleasing her at the cost of his soul. The aggression once detoured into perversion was now much more available to Helmut and he used it to differentiate his mother projection from his wife, and consciously to relate to her distress. With conscious psychic suffering, as opposed to sexualized pain, he decided to give up his analysis at the end of June. “This is real suffering,” he said, “not masochism.” This was a sacrifice, born of his love for his wife.

I watched my countertransference closely for I felt vulnerable, not in sexual but in analytic passion. I had added hours to my schedule to work with Helmut because his problem fascinated me psychically and because I felt he really wanted to settle this lifelong complex to live more freely before he died. I was afraid he was once more sacrificing his soul to please the woman he loved, but I remained firm that he must decide and follow his own way. In my way I felt the pain of sacrifice too, because our work was being stopped in the middle.

The next fall Helmut contacted me but I had no free hours and I felt I had to wait on the Self, so to speak, to open up hours if we were to continue. Early winter that happened and we worked again through June. He returned, saying his transference had quieted down but was still there. He had read Jung’s work on transference and apologized for breaking off treatment. He saw now how much the analyst was involved. He also had persisted in telling his wife what understanding his perversion meant to him. to be himself and not just a persona. She grasped this, yet also criticized his tendency to give too much power over to the other — in this case, the analyst.

In the previous year’s work, Helmut had told me of praying to an unknown god for forgiveness for wasting so much of his life. In one prayer he felt no audible answer but knew that “the slate was wiped clean.” In our final spring’s work, he said he had felt a conscious longing to worship something bigger than himself rather than to submit and be punished. He felt that the erotic longing concealed veneration. Reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, these words struck him: “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” He said, “Feeling great love for Athena, I prayed for a miracle and the love turned into a blue flower which grew in my heart, a symbol of God’s love.”

This image shifted the transference in a major way. Helmut thought of me now as a messenger, a link, not a goal. A theological change also occurred. Before, he had asked God to take care of him — wipe the slate clean, forgive him, free him from his complexes. Now he felt he must take care of God — to tend this blue flower within.

Jung’s remarks on the symbol of the blue flower addressed Helmut’s estrangement from any established religion, his longing for connection to the transcendent, and his idiosyncratic sexuality that mixed feminine and masculine. Jung wrote, “the ‘blue flower’ of the Romantics looks back to the medievalism of the ruined cloisters, yet... modestly proclaims something new in earthly loveliness.... A friendly sign, a numinous emanation from the unconscious,” shows the “modern man... robbed of security... where he can find the seed that wants to sprout in him too.... For the ‘golden flower of alchemy’... can sometimes be a blue flower: ‘the sapphire blue flower of the hermaphrodite.’” (CW12, pars. 99, 101).

This sprouting happened in mid-March when Helmut dreamt of visiting a hospital nursery where a baby girl lies critically ill. Small and starving, she may die at any minute. He asks a doctor her chances of survival. Maybe, is the reply, but only if the child is very well cared for.

About his dream Helmut said, “The dying baby is my newly born faith in God, that precious little thing I had felt inside me that I did not take care of.” He felt that I, too, was stern with him for neglecting what had been given him.

He imagined feeding the baby regularly, but in the fantasy it was clearly not enough. Then a series of synchronistic events strengthened his confidence. He remembered suddenly all the paintings of Mary feeding the Christ child; he prayed that she would help him. Then a librarian returned to him a postcard from his daughter, found in a book he had returned. On it was a reproduction of the angel of the Annunciation foretelling to Mary her coming motherhood. He went home to a nap. When he awoke, a vision of the heavens opened to show Mary nursing his baby. Then a blinding light came toward him. When it vanished, he found his baby lying in a cradle, now strong and healthy. Full of gratitude, Helmut also noticed that this baby got the breast, not a rubber nipple.

A dream two weeks later carried the theme further. Here a blue hyacinth in full bloom stood before Helmut and a small pinkish hyacinth grew next to it in the soil, like a daughter of the blue flower. He felt the new life was now grounded, planted in soil. I noted the interchange of the pink and blue flowers, like a new born anima and a faith in something beyond himself.

But, like most of us, Helmut’s road was up and down, off as well as on. In late April he dreamt again of the baby girl, again neglected but now older, about four. This child stands naked and alone on a dangerous subway platform. She enters a train, and curls up in a corner and sleeps. No one pays her any attention. Helmut kneels, full of pity, to care for her and sees that she has vomited in her sleep. What should he do? He worries, then decides to take her to a nearby hospital. He picks her up in her arms, knowing she is his own baby.

Thinking about the dream, he realized she had grown and was strong now, sure of herself, healthy. She was somewhat androgynous, he felt, and reminded him of his early desires to be a girl, though he never really wanted female genitals. How had she been nourished, despite his neglect, he wondered? Who had been taking care of her? He did not feel so guilty as in the first baby dream. He felt this child was his, inside him, and not really his but connected to something outside him. He felt Sophia in the wings.

In May, several dreams recalled young women on whom he had crushes when a youth. He likened his transference to me to that kind of falling in love, a “bolt of lightning” but now these actual women from his life carried that emotion. In these dreams his wife has gone off to the Fiji islands. We talked about the differentiation of this anima part of him as his own, adding unmistakable zest to his life. A final dream, before we ended in June, featured Helmut in bed asleep. His wife enters. “She kisses me and says she loves me. I glimpse Athena in the next room reading peacefully in bed and tell my wife to close the door and lock it.”

Summary

The transcendent function working in a man’s psyche loosened the grip of what he called his life-long perversions. They told the coded story of his effort to keep his true self alive by detouring his aggression into a loop of fantasied masochistic submission, fetishistic compulsion and transvestism.

He entered that inner conversation between opposites — of conscious revulsion and unconscious thralldom, of struggle to free himself from belts and obsession with them, of dialogue between black and white feminine powers, of conflict between analysis and wife, of suffered versus libidinized pain. When he entered it, a solution occurred “in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality, as well as its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego” (CW10, par. 856). The little boy, the blue flower, the baby girl who began to grow up — all symbolize life outside the loop of perversion and link Helmut to life beyond himself.

Through this inner conversation of the transcendent function within the psyche Helmut gained access, as we all may, to conversation between the psyche and what lives beyond it. It is as if we thought we were conducting a two-way conversation only to discover that it was in fact at least three-way. For Helmut this was symbolized by his feeling that some small piece of God had taken up residence within him. which he needed to keep caring for and relating to. Consistent with his love for his mother, and difficulties with her, his love for his wife, his transference and working it through, his image of God was feminine — the divine Sophia.

The November following his June termination, Helmut sent me a dream: “A young female student shows me a postcard she received from Athena who did a little drawing in the left corner in red ink. Suddenly Athena is across the table from me.... I looked long and closely into her face and deeply into her gray eyes and was so overcome by her earnest expression, I had to look away to suppress my tears.”

His immediate association, he said, was that of an encounter with the unconscious. The little-girl anima continues to grow up and is linked to the work of analysis as she receives word — or images — from the analyst. Helmut was most struck by the unforgettable expression in Athena’s eyes — visible compassion and admonishment for the future. It was not the real Athena, he said, because of the gray eyes instead of my own actual blue and brown ones. “What moved me so much,” he concluded, “was that this was an encounter with my unconscious and this new part of me, the anima.”

Helmut had reached a new attitude toward his life and his perversions. This attitude enables him to live more fully before he dies.

References