Nathan Schwartz-Salant is one of the truly remarkable pioneers of Intersubjectivity. In his work, he refers to the "Subtle Body" to express the ineffible quality of mutual interactivity between client and therapist. Schwartz-Salant gives several examples of working with this interactive field that highlight the use of imagination, "listening" with the body, and the quality of being-with another person in a way that attempts to address those phenomena (images, feelings, emotions, thoughts…) attempting to come to presence. This reading sometimes requires a familiarity with the terminology of Psychology (e.g., mirror transference, projective identification, somatic unconscious), and often invites the reader to consider the  the symbolic meanings (in myth, for instance) within the clinical processes.If you would like more information feel free to mail me; mstaples@sbcglobal.net.

1. Introduction

In Stage Two of transformation (which again I emphasize intertwines with Stage One), it is especially important that our empathy reach a different kind of depth than was previously demanded. Consequently, it is necessary to consider different modes of relating in the analytical process.

There is much literature which discusses technique, conceptions such as transference resistance, the value of using couch or chair, when and how to deal with rage, the importance of being active or silent, and subtle issues such as how great an analytical depth to work at.¹⁵³ But when we come to the question of the analyst's own ontology, not just descriptions of his subjective process but his way of being in the process, we have much less to consult. It is much easier to speak about interpretations of our patient's material and of our own countertransference reactions, than it is to attempt to describe the nature of our process along the way. But when we come to issues of the Self and identity, it is this process, the nature of how we are in it, rather than the interpretations we come up with, that is the core issue.

As Rosemary Gordon has noted, many clinicians recognize a need for different approaches when the issue is the Self. Discussing, for instance, Kohut and Kahn, she writes:

There can be no doubt that it is necessary to work with an approach of a personal nature. When the Self is the central concern, the analyst's own personality is his major resource. In what follows here, my own subjectivity and choice of metaphor will be only too obvious. But it is also possible to offer a kind of structural analysis for my approach. I believe, for instance, that I am behaving in the analytical process according to mythical structure. Various amplifications will help to describe this, but the principal ones are the Egyptian myth of Isis gathering up the scattered members of Osiris,¹⁵⁶ and that of the Greek god Dionysos and the nature of his consciousness.¹⁵⁷ The notion of primitive logic, as described Levi-Strauss, is also useful.¹⁵⁸ Generally speaking, the quality of consciousness and being that I will be describing follows the alchemical metaphor of extracting the spirit from matter. But in this context matter best understood as the human body, not as an abstraction for the collective unconscious.
 

2. Gathering Information Somatically

There is always information to be gathered in the analytical situation, and this of course is not limited to the patient's transmission of dreams or fantasies. For example, the countertransference is a continuous source of potentially objective data, or of a way, for example, to approach resistance. What I want to describe here, however, is how I went about gathering information before I had much working knowledge of the countertransference, and was very dependent upon patient dream and fantasy material. What came out of this -- which I now recognize was not at all unique -- was an awareness of the value of my own subjective responses, primarily body-experiences. These, as I discovered, are a guide to the patient's process.

It is well known that borderline and narcissistic characters often have great difficulty in associating freely to dream material. With these, and other patients who simply were not bringing dream material to analysis, I devised the following method: First, considering that the dream image of a movie theatre often represents a place for the projection of fantasies, I asked the patient to imagine a blank movie screen. Then I gave a series of instructions such as: 1) Draw a circle in ink on the screen; 2) Allow the ink to flow in toward the center of the circle until you feel a tension near the center, with a white point remaining; 3) Allow the ink to flow back toward the circumference, until there is just a black circle again. Meanwhile I imaginally accompanied the patient's fantasy.

My initial experience of this mutual process was that I had a sense either of being filled or not, a sense that a gestalt was attempting to be closed, and that its lack of closure could be perceived by wanderings of my attention, and generally by a sense of looseness in the energy field between us. But primarily, I discovered that this felt sense of closure was most acute if I followed this imaginal process while I was actively aware of being in my body. That is, there was a greater difference in my sensitivity to a feeling of completeness -- that the act of creating a circle, filling and unraveling it was complete in its own right, a total gestalt -- if I was aware of my actual body size and feeling tone, of being embodied, than if I allowed a more mental, detached consciousness.

Once the sense of a full gestalt was achieved, I further asked the patient to draw lines in the circle, dividing it into four quadrants. Once again the sense of fullness of the gestalt was checked by my accompanying the imaginal process. My own consciousness was always "empty"; I maintained a state similar to that at the beginning of an active imagination, and I took my ability to do this (or not) as a sign of the degree of completeness of the gestalt of wholeness between us. When subjective contents did not interfere, and the sense of completeness prevailed, I then asked the patient to see what images spontaneously emerged into the quadrants, guiding them clockwise around the circle.

It was at this stage that I discovered something very new to me at the time. In the state of merger that I had created by the shared imagination technique, I experienced body innervations that went along with the patient's production or resistance to images. For example, a person would see a tree in one quadrant, and I would feel a certain anxiety, perhaps a slight or acute tightening in my jaw. Other images they would produce might result in similar or no body changes. But after they had produced their images, if I went back to the ones that created bodily changes in me, I always found that much more material was nearby. A tree, for example, might have the "strangest image with it," as one person I have in mind said. It had an undershirt near it. In that case we stayed with the image of the undershirt, and eventually uncovered numerous incestuous associations to a prostitute and his mother. But unless I had followed up the clue of my own body response, this "meaningless association" would definitely have been sidestepped. Similarly, it was clear, again by virtue of my own body responses, that when a great deal of time was taken before an image appeared in a quadrant, that too was a sign to follow up this image and what was being withheld.

What impressed me most about this method was the banal nature of the associations that were often suppressed, yet which turned out to be decisive. From a mental point of view, they could be easily dismissed by both of us, if indeed they came up at all. But taking my body as guide, I was surprised to see what lay behind seemingly the most trivial imagery.

(I have often been asked if this approach of listening to the body isn't a matter of typological preference. One might imagine it would be easier for a sensation-feeling type than for an intuitive or thinking type, but I believe a larger issue is involved; namely, the capacity to be embodied in an introverted manner, in a way that also values theobject -- the object here being a combination of the other person, their dream or fantasy and the day's residue they report. For a man this depends on a lunar or anima consciousness, while for a woman it is a consciousness rooted in the feminine Self with its implicit respect for body.)

Another feature emerged: While the patient was in the process of allowing images to appear spontaneously, and while the circle procedure was being followed, random thoughts would at times run through my head, babblings that made no sense. An image of a child, a house, a brook, a battle, a dangerous encounter, etc. As I said, my technique was to allow these and any of my more personal imagery to settle out until my consciousness was emptied. In that way I attempted not to interfere with the patient's imaginal process. But after this was achieved, that is after the imagery was produced and it could be further tracked down by reference to my own body responses -- which I might add were quite varied, from random tensions to innervations that were often but not primarily sexual -- I then returned to the various images and ideas that had previously floated through my consciousness. And these then made sense in terms of the patient's later productions.

It was clear that in some way a form existed that was being filled, but in a manner very strange to me. For example, in noting these random babblings, and the imagery we came up with, it was often possible to reconstruct the events of the previous day. For example, a series of these images and passing thoughts would begin, in the patient, to take on a life of its own. It was as if they were part of a yet unknown pattern whose effect was making itself felt. It was not just a matter of a gestalt being filled, but a sense of a particular, albeit unknown pattern. But everything said by the patient could be referenced to this pattern. Certain associations or thought processes seemed to click, and others did not fit in at all. In this manner, it often was discovered that there were events of the previous day, events that were imaged in metaphorical form, that were especially painful and in need of remembering.

One patient's imagery, for instance, contained a car, a trunk, a tree, a house and seeds. Among my mental ramblings preceding these images were scenes of violence. Working in the way I am describing, he eventually "remembered" an important experience of the previous day-he had masturbated. The imagery was then helpful in reconstructing the masturbatory fantasy, an anal fantasy involving the sadistic rape of his mother. The seeds were his sperm that readily fit in with the trunk of the car, and my violent imaginings were a clue to the sadistic nature of the fantasy material. This is an example of what I mean by a metaphorical replay of the day's events. In this case it was crucial to discover the masturbatory activity, because it was compulsive, occurring four to five times daily. It was a way of discharging his sadistic feelings, resulting in being very passive and undirected in life.

The structure ordering the method I devised is described by Levi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind He calls it primitive logic. He found that primitive thought has its own logic which works through a kind of qualitative method using metaphor, and whose goal is to fit all data into a mythical pattern. Primitive logic has prescribed mythical patterns, whereas I had to discover the pattern.

Another use of primitive logic is in working on dreams. With the ruling idea being to never go beyond the existing dream images, never into a "solution" such as an interpretation, but rather working with the dream as an unfinished gestalt, associations can be elicited and further tracked down in the manner I have been describing. What often then transpires is that the entire dream becomes an image of the previous day's events: The dream is seen as a metaphorical replay of history. Often, the nervous day's history is interwoven with conscious or unconscious fantasies that can be discovered and also appear as part of the metaphorically seen dream. In this process the previous day's events and fantasies take on new meaning. While they might previously be part of a relatively unconscious, often compulsive and acting-out life style, they take on the sense of a life being reflected upon through being remembered.

It seems that primitive logic, constrained by the gestalt-filling tendency of a dream, has the capacity to bring life into what was dead matter, bits of discarded history and fantasy. In this "second chance" to be conscious, the rediscovered history always has a tendency to be experienced as if it were happening in the present. Consequently what was once rather totally acted out, without an awareness of being embodied, takes on a conscious, embodied quality. We end with the same dream we started with, not a symbolic interpretation of it. But by then it has taken on meaning in terms of a total pattern.

This kind of logic and constraint to never "problem solve," in the sense of going beyond the given data to something new, is a mainstay of Levi-Strauss' -- critique of the difference between primitive and scientific thought:

The scientist ... whether he be an engineer or physicist, is always on the look-out for that other message which might be wrested from an interlocutor in spite of his reticence in pronouncing on questions whose answers have not been rehearsed. Concepts thus appear like operators opening up the set being worked with.

... Science, "in operation" simply by virtue of coming into being, creates its means and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and theories.

condensed expressions of necessary relations which impose constraints with various repercussions    at each stage of their employment. Their necessity is not simple and univocal. But it is there nevertheless as the invariance of a semantic or aesthetic order, which characterizes the group of transformations to which they lend themselves, which are not unlimited.
…They must be considered as patterns…These patterns actualize possibilities whose number, though it may be very great, is not unlimited.

There is a myth which provides a pattern for working in such a way. It appears in Plutarch's "Concerning the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris,' recounted by Mead in Thrice Greatest Hermes.

In the myth Osiris has been dismembered by Seth, and Isis is searching for the scattered members. Two aspects of the story are relevant to my method of gathering information: 1) she is helped by babbling children; and 2) she is led by her dog Anubis, the child of Osiris and Nephthys. She thus finds Osiris' parts, puts them together, and eventually he is resurrected.

The babbling children correspond to the kind of aimless chatter that goes through my mind while trying to establish a whole-gestalt quality in the imaginal focusing procedure. Keeping track of this chatter or babbling is nearly 'impossible in terms of scientific logic attempting to find solutions in the form of interpretations. But mythical or primitive logic is able to follow the trail and put the parts together in a meaningful pattern. Being led by the dog Anubis corresponds to following the instincts, as they manifest in body feelings. The overall result is the renewal of consciousness, represented in the myth by the resurrection of Osiris.

It is not easy to listen to the body, especially when trying simultaneously to be conscious of the reality of the spirit. In Jung's Collected Works there is not very much about the kind of consciousness that includes the awareness of body states -- somatic innervations, tensions, etc. Usually, we don't view consciousness in this way; rather we think of it as a mental process of connecting images, ideas and affects to the ego. Or we think in terms of discovering consciousness in the unconscious, establishing a relationship with our affect-laden complexes, and so on. We may even think of levels of consciousness, extending to ecstatic states. But what about maintaining a conscious relationship to the unconscious while also being in the body in a conscious way? And why try to do this at all? As a matter of fact, Jung did have strong views about "body consciousness," though they are not generally known. We shall now examine them.
 

3. The Body in Jung's Nietzsche Seminars

The place where Jung deals with the body as such is in the remarkable series of seminars on Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, already referred to at the beginning of this book.

When the body appears in Jung's Collected Works, say in a dream or analchemical text, it is commonly seen as a symbol for some psychic reality or complex. Another approach of Jung's is to take the appearance of the body as denoting the need to integrate intuitive perceptions into everyday reality, through "the fonction du reel, i.e., sensation, the sensible perception of reality." Or, in his paper "On Psychic Energy," he refers to, the psyche as "a relatively closed system," implying that one can analyze the psyche in terms of its imagery and patterns without reference to the somatic at all. This all sounds quite aloof from the body, and one might be inclined to agree with Norman Brown's rather flippant critique of Jung's attitude as "anti-body."

But this is not true at all. Jung was acutely aware of the great difficulties that the body poses, and in his Nietzsche Seminars this is abundantly clear. There he was forced to deal with the body because, for Nietzsche, the Self could not be divorced from the body; in fact at times Nietzsche even identifies the Self and the body -- an inflation of the body, as Jung observes. Jung tells us that he doesn't deal with the body per se because it is too difficult to write about. It inevitably leads to a consideration of the so-called subtle body (which he prefers to call the somatic unconscious), a domain in which events are not causal. One would have to postulate acausal processes. He prefers the way of science, the way of description that can be validated, checked and compared. Would he have said this after he published his work on synchronicity in 1951? Perhaps not, but by then he was not inclined to turn to (or was past dealing with) the problem of the body.

Nonetheless, in the Nietzsche Seminars Jung offers what I find a remarkable model. He says that we have a conscious-unconscious connection that leads on one side to the purely spiritual or psychic realm, and on the other into the body and matter. As we go toward the domain of the spirit, the unconscious becomes the psychic unconscious, and as we go toward body and matter, it becomes the somatic unconscious.

We are accustomed to a spectrumlike model of the psyche from Jung's published writings, especially his later paper "On the Nature of the Psyche," in which the psyche is portrayed as extending from a red or instinctual pole to a violet or spiritual pole. Both end-points enter the "psychoid realm" which can never become conscious. In the Nietzsche Seminars Jung foreshadows this model and goes further into the nature of the experience of the unconscious as the different ends of the spectrum are approached. His later work on the archetype of the unus mundus, which von Franz has done much to elucidate, describes a transcendent level of psychic reality in which both aspects of the unconscious are identical, as are matter and psyche. But when the unconscious is approached from the framework of the ego, its psychic and somatic manifestations are a source of very different experiences.
 

INSTINCTS                                                                                  ARCHETYPES
                                                   experience infra-red________________________________________________ultra-violet

(Physiological: body                                                                                                    (Psychological: ideas,
symptoms, instinctual                                                                                                  conceptions, dreams,
perceptions, etc.)                                                                                                           images, fantasies, etc.)
                                       The psychoid archetype.

The somatic unconscious, Jung's designation for the subtle body, represents the unconscious as perceived in the body. Further, he tells us that the unconscious is in the body, that in fact that is the only way its life can be experienced.

He cautions us not to be thrown by this statement, which contrasts with his more usual one that the unconscious is everywhere; he simply means to emphasize that only in the body can it be experienced, much like experiencing the workings of the sympathetic nervous system. Jung speaks of being able to begin to approach a sense of universal sympathy with everything, and how this is an acausal process, not accessible to scientific discourse. But he must enter it here because Nietzsche does.

Jung tells us that the Self is both body and psyche, that body is only its outer manifestation. And further, that the soul is the life of the body. If one does not live in the body, if one does not represent the Self in life in its uniqueness, then the Self rebels.

This is an important notion that Jung underscored: The Self wants to live its experiment in life, and if it is not willingly embodied it manifests negatively in somatic symptoms and phobias. In the narcissistic character there is always an aspect of the Self that is not living the experiment of life and has accordingly turned negative. Integration of this quality of the Self can often be achieved through the analyst's body consciousness, as I have described above.

I will refer to these views of Jung's on body and psyche when dealing with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (chapter four), the mythological analogue of Stage Two of transformation. It is useful to think of Demeter as representing the somatic unconscious, and her daughter Persephone as the lost soul or life of the body, the split-off feminine Self. Within this context, the myth has meaning for both men and women; it is not only a woman's mystery, else the Eleusinian Mysteries would have been celebrated only for women, and we know that this was not the case.

Since body and psyche are two aspects of the same reality, different only because consciousness views them in different ways -- from a spiritual-mental vantage point or from an embodied one -- one cannot call Jung anti-body simply because he generally refers the symbolism of the body back to a psychic representation. This spiritual emphasis is often necessary. It is always part of the picture.

The essential issue here in terms of therapy is the role of the archetypal dimension, metaphorically spoken of as an experience of ascent in which the soul meets archetypal energies. In Jung's many years of studying alchemical authors, he gave special attention to Gerhard Dorn's images of the individuation process. There, the first stage is a consolidation on a spiritual level, the creation of the so-called unio mentalis. Only then is there a descent back into matter, whence the body is transformed. This means that only when the spirit exists as a reality, when psychic reality is a phrase with objective meaning -- stemming from a transformation of the psyche such that a felt center exists -- then and only then does a descent into the body lead to transformation, and to the experience of the somatic unconscious. Any other kind of descent, such as through body exercises, leads only to temporary changes which must always be repeated, for the lack of the spirit to -- as the alchemists would say --"kill and transform the bodies" leads not to transformation, and surely not to the reality Jung knew as the. somatic unconscious.

Thus Jung's psychology is not anti-body but rather a proper guide to body. And any way that does not recognize the autonomy of the spirit and the existence of the archetypal realm can only lead to a very concrete view of body, which misses the mystery of the fundamental identity of body and psyche.

In discussing the idealized and mirror transferences in chapter one, the analogy was made between them and the ascent and descent of libido in alchemical thought. The idealized transference corresponds to the ascent of the spirit archetype, and its internalization corresponds to the formation of a spiritual center with a strong unifying and stabilizing power. I say "corresponds to" because there is no reason to assume we are dealing with identical processes. The narcissistic transferences are not archetypal processes; rather they are a kind of hybrid product of personal and archetypal factors, forming a mid-way transference phenomenon. But the idealized transference does achieve results also achieved by the integration of the spirit archetype, and conversely. As already noted, the idealized transference can lead to an integration process oriented more around eros in outer relations than does the introverted experience of the spirit archetype. The latter in turn can yield a more potent sense of "center" in terms of better contact with an inner, organizing principle. Thus they are different, but yield results that overlap in important areas.

The existence and integration of the energies of idealization is essential for approaching body in a way that can integrate the split-off Self in the narcissistic character. The way one approaches the body is always the central issue, not the particular techniques employed. And just as the alchemical process always specified a spiritual consolidation prior to turning to the problem of the body, the same requirement holds, in my view, in the treatment of the narcissistic character. This is especially true in what I call Stage Two of transformation. Without a consolidated idealization, or an integrated, archetypal experience of the spirit, the body will always be experienced differently from the somatic unconscious. It will be a "thing" with drives the various instinctual processes, but it will not be a live energy process with its own form of consciousness.
 

4. Psyche-Soma Complementarity

It is not possible to extract information from both the psychic and somatic unconscious simultaneously, with equal amounts from each. Rather, a relationship of complementarity exists: Orienting toward the somatic unconscious limits the information gained from the psychic unconscious, and vice versa.

If one allows consciousness to sink down into the body, which as Jung said is always a defeat for the spirit, the information gained will be different from the connection to the psychic unconscious. The psychic unconscious link -- for example, operating through thinking, intuition, or any function which filters data through a theory of the organizing center, the Self -- must be sacrificed to get information from the somatic unconscious. Then the primitivelike consciousness I have described can sift and sort data, always within the feeling-sense of a gestalt filling out. Just as Isis in her wanderings is led to Osiris' parts which she must then remember, or Demeter teaches the Eleusinian Mysteries as the procedure for the redemption of Persephone, so the processes of the somatic unconscious can lead to a vision, an emergence of the life of imaginal sight which can see the split-off Self. What we discover is what we see.

This kind of seeing is similar to that described by Carlos Castaneda in his don Juan novels. It is a lunar rather than solar vision, a sight based upon imagination that is real in the sense of being nearly corporeal, and experienced in a very close relationship to one's body. It corresponds to the distinction the alchemists made between "true" and "fantastic" imagination. It is also a kind of vision or imaginal activity that in the analytical relationship has a mutuality about it, as if its existence depended on the patient-therapist interaction. (It is treated as such when, for example, its contents are shared and their accuracy checked with the patient.) In alchemy, imagination the act of imagining, was a major key to the successful completion of the opus. It was a process "half spiritual, half physical," and is as vital today as then, for we encounter it whenever we link psyches with another person and the unconscious is highly constellated.

The importance the alchemists placed upon the body and the material quality of imagination (stemming from its origin in the body) is also just as necessary today. As Levi-Strauss points out, we are dealing not with an archaic, prescientific mode of thought in the sense of something that must give way to a more differentiated and abstract, scientific thought, but rather with another, prior mode of thinking that still exists in us along with the scientific one.

The sacrifice of spirit for the sake of being in the body can in turn stimulate the unconscious so that imagination appears. This kind of perception is not readily had with less body-reference. It is always interfered with by connections the conscious or unconscious tend to make. The ends of the body-spirit spectrum are in a relationship of complementarity. Operating near to the psychic unconscious limits the kind of information gathered, so to speak, near the somatic unconscious, and conversely. Interpreting, going beyond existing imagery through reduction or amplification to a different level of meaning, is also a vital analytical procedure. For this, the connection to the somatic unconscious must be sacrificed. Both are necessary modes; at times it is even important to switch back and forth during a session. Also, a process can be dominated by either one or the other approach. But always, observing from one vantage point limits observations from the other.
 

5. Osiris, Dionysos and the Somatic Unconscious

We have discussed an aspect of the Osiris myth, Isis collecting his scattered members, or tracking down the location of his body. (Both versions exist with the motif of children and dogs as helpers.) But then comes the final mystery of the resurrection of Osiris.

In Plutarch's telling of the story he weaves the Egyptian tale in with the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, with Hades/Dionysos having the same role as Osiris. Later commentators, such as Otto, have shown that the analogy between the figures of Dionysos and Osiris is only partially correct; their myths are also quite different. But I think there are definite grounds for a close association from the vantage point of the somatic unconscious. Both gods are dismembered, and the process of in the Greek, discovery, of Osiris in the Egyptian myth and Persephone requires the somatic unconscious to a large degree. And the kind of penetration of Persephone by Dionysos is a process which requires a gathering up of the god from his dismembered state. In the figure of Dionysos the erotic element is more apparent than in Osiris. But both figures are helpful in understanding the nature of consciousness, which easily dismembers and must continually be brought together again through connection to the somatic unconscious.

Osiris was Egypt's immanent god, a people's god, worshipped daily with great emotional But Egypt also had a transcendent solar principle, the god Re. So there was a worship of many gods-the Osirian religion and at the same time the monotheistic religion of Re.

There are many cultures without an Osiris image. The Hebrew religion had the transcendent Yahweh, while the requirement of immanence only crept back in much later in Kabalistic thought. Religions can do without Osiris-like gods. The Greek religion as recounted by Homer is very alien from its previous Earth gods and goddesses, notably from Dionysos. Homer hardly mentions him; he is totally alien to the Apollonian spirit that rules the religion of the Olympians. One can thus do quite well with only a more distant, solar principle, while the earthly one is nonexistent or only marginally known. This was not the case in Egypt; if anything, the Osirian religion was dominant.

Osiris is not only, like Dionysos (who is often identified with Hades), a god of the dead, he is a dead god. But imagine a dead god that comes back to life: That is a wonderful image of the fact that from the seemingly inert matter of the day's residue, the babblings and random body sensations we experienced, something can resurrect. When sitting "in the body" and doing nothing, knowing nothing -- just being -- we often feel very "dumb." Narcissistic patients can have great difficulty with this, and our narcissism is accordingly injured by the feeling of being dumb. Narcissistic psychic structuring leads to a need to know, to glitter and be smart. But we need to be able to be dumb, to have a dead consciousness. That, in part, is the psychological significance of Osiris.

Osiris is distinguished primarily by the passion with which he was worshipped. He was a god approached through emotion, not with a solar consciousness. And he was a god who suffered.

To experience a dismembered state is to suffer, exactly what the narcissistic character avoids. One major effect of an embodied awareness in the presence of a person who is dissociating, for instance entering a kind of withdrawal which makes any sustained consciousness or attention very difficult, is that one feels pain and depression. It is as if, through induction, one felt the distress of the splitting process in the patient -- who is meanwhile unconscious of it. Similarly, in the Demeter-Persephone myth and the Eleusinian Mysteries the initiates identified with Demeter -- which may be seen as a body-consciousness stemming from the somatic unconscious-experiencing her emotions of grief and rage. Emotional experience dominates the earth religions, and was the key element in the worship of Osiris.

The kind of awareness that Osiris leads to is at first bound up with inertia. It doesn't seem to want to emerge. In the Egyptian myth Osiris is always being thrown "on his side" by Seth, and his worshippers are always bidding him to rise Up. He is drowned in water, shut up in a coffin or tree trunk from which he must be rescued. He is dead in the underworld, encompassed by the coils of a serpent, in a state of absolute harmony until he attempts to rise up. Then the serpent becomes ferocious -- just as unconscious contents "resist" coming to consciousness. And so it often is with us in, analysis. In a state of unconscious, Osirian peace we become sleepy, bored, ready to just allow the hour to pass, hopeful that the regressions we feel will speed the clock along rather than slow it down. But if we recognize that we are experiencing something that has to do with a mutual process it can become interesting.

Awareness of our rage often starts the process of "waking up." Instead of hiding in our own uroboric world (the coiled serpent) as the split-off parts of our patient would prefer, we can become aware of the Sethian forces-rage turned against ourselves, producing dissociation. And then we may reorient toward our bodies, discover it has a life and with that a new kind of being awake. The many babblings, the negative feelings we have for our patient, the boredom and hatred, start to gain meaning, gradually becoming part of a forming whole. Our body reactions aid this if we listen to them and use them to go deeper into the material we hear, rather than ignoring them and grasping for a theory or amplification as a fife preserver. We begin to be able to sit and be dumb, to not know, to listen and respect this process. Most of all, we begin to respect silence, for we know that only if something appears will it have value. We will find nothing, certainly nothing we look for, through theory or introspection. Only a mutual discovery can be of value.
 

6. Seeing through the Body

By being close to our body, with psychic awareness relatively low, we are like a measuring instrument in flowing water or a magnetic field; we can use our own reactions to know when the other person's energy is fading and when it is present. But just as in science, where one must know the characteristics of the measuring instrument, whose own nature distorts the results, so too we must be able to filter out our own personal reactions. In fact this is a much easier process working near the somatic unconscious -- than the psychic unconscious. By not having to know we are much less involved in power-motivated countertransference reactions.

The tightening up of our own body, perturbations of sensation in head, chest, belly, sexual organs, throat and so forth, all help track the parts of the patient that attempt to split off, and reveal the fact that the patient is temporarily leaving the here and now. Just as it is possible to walk into a room of people and "pick up" that something is out of order, perhaps dangerous, or that someone is in a complex, so too body consciousness can operate in the here and now, in a more or less continuous way. It is difficult to explain this process causally, except in the unscientific sense that something going on in another person "causes" something to happen in us. In this way, by listening and organizing according to our body consciousness and physical babblings, a new order can appear. It comes up from below, like the resurrection of the dead god Osiris. The new order is the resurrected Osiris. And it can be a new dimension of vision, an imaginal seeing, as much as an awareness that suddenly puts order into the previous day’s events. Here I must stress that this imaginal seeing is a vague, shadowy vision, not a clear one of solar nature, Trusting it now becomes the cardinal issue. In this state one is often discovering, along with the patient, their split-off parts that begin to feel seen.

Naturally, one never has to work in this way. It is possible to be more objective," to interpret a great range of phenomena, including complicated countertransference issues, while never working through the body. One can do very well with a psychic, more mental, connection, whether one works as a Jungian, Freudian, Reichian, Gestaltist, or out of any other school of thought. And it is so much "cleaner." Unfortunately, it misses a good deal.

The reality is that analytical work from the vantage point of the psychic unconscious is very poor at integrating those aspects of the psyche that are split off and hidden by the narcissistic structuring of the personality. In the underworld of Greek myth, Hades, things are invisible to the eye of solar consciousness. They are visible only to lunar vision, the sight of the blind Tiresias who kept his consciousness in Hades. If we do not make use of imaginal sight, and instead depend solely on the great storehouse of scientific knowledge and the kind of awareness that comes through psychic empathy, then integration of the split-off feminine Self requires considerable regression. Working through the somatic unconscious also involves regression, but often much less and of a more easily controlled kind. Seeing can have a strong holding quality, where interpreting may lead to dissociation.

Consequently, especially in Stage Two of transformation, I find it necessary to "work from the underworld," respecting the spirits of the dead, and attempting to "make the dead alive." And so I work with dead matter, inert bits that babble and sensations that randomly afflict. But through this apparently meaningless process meaning can emerge, and that meaning is Osiris. Osiris is the god of yesterday, Re the god of tomorrow, according to the Egyptians. And that corresponds to the fact that much of the previous day's residue is essential in the resurrection of a pattern and perhaps a vision. All the garbage that "doesn't matter" proves to matter indeed, in fact becomes the "matter" of a new consciousness.

The kind of consciousness that Osiris and Dionysos represent is consciousness of an archetype. It is gathered together from the body, and when it comes together in imaginal vision (or structural awareness) it soon dies. It is as if it rises up and then the moment of awareness fades quickly away, and cannot be recalled with anything that resembles its past, momentary reality. It must be rediscovered yet again, and then perhaps let go of forever; a moment not to be regained, but only recovered as another vision.

In the analytic process it is a mutually shared vision, dependent upon both psyches. It is isomorphic to sexuality. Just as consciousness is gathered up from its 'life in the body, and suddenly comes together as a kind of epiphany, so-called infantile sexuality is gathered up in sexual foreplay until it flows into genital primacy and orgasm. The life that momentarily existed then quickly fades; it will come again, but certainly in its own time.

The analogy of this Dionysian consciousness with sexuality only shows that sexual life exists according to the archetypal model of Dionysos. But so does the quality of consciousness that stems from the somatic unconscious. The Dionysian archetype is responsible for both, and in no way can sexuality or "infantile sexuality" be seen as the cause of the existence of the god Dionysos. The discovery of infantile sexuality is one of Freud's great contributions, and also a back door through which some of what Dionysos stands for entered Freudian thought. But the body is never resurrected from infantile sexuality; its rebirth depends rather upon an archetypal pattern (such as Dionysos or Osiris represents) becoming conscious.
 

7. Psychic and Somatic Empathy

Empathy, like consciousness in general, has a different quality as it shifts from the psychic to the somatic unconscious as its main reference. When close to the somatic unconscious our empathy is very much a function of a mutual participation in which both psyches operate simultaneously. Each affects the other in a way that makes discovery unique to the moment, not easily repeated. At best what is seen can be rediscovered.

Psychic empathy extracts information; for Kohut it is a mode of "knowing":

The more reflective, Apollonian or psychic, empathy is generally appropriate to dealing with the narcissistic transferences. But after the sufficiently transform, the nature of our empathy must shift toward the somatic or Dionysian if we are to successfully penetrate the depths required for the eventual recovery of the split-off Self. While this level of penetration was formerly too intrusive, it now becomes essential.

The following clinical notes are an example of the use of empathy moving back and forth between a somatic and a psychic base. They concern a 35-year-old man whose narcissistic transferences had largely transformed and whose schizoid-like Self had begun to emerge.
 

But through this process he gradually came to be more comfortable with his power. A very important dream brought in the figure of his grandfather who had a slight association to me. But it was also the beginning of the Self incarnating in him, that is, becoming embodied. With this, he began to help the Self "live its experiment in life."

There were some crucial events over the next few weeks, including the spontaneous imaginal appearance of a four-year-old: once while he was bird watching and in a hypnogogic vision the child was there, pointing to something on the ground; and then while running, trying to "run off" severe anxiety, he got tired and rested, and the child appeared, saying: "Daddy, I'm afraid." This was so intense it brought tears to his eyes.

This contact with not only his own anxiety, but that of the split-off child, all came about after the dissolution of the narcissistic defenses. His defensive rage, his previous controlling pattern, was gone, and he was filled instead with intense fear, now centering upon his job and the relationship with his girlfriend.

In one session, feeling his anxiety and furtiveness -- an in-and-out pattern -- I suggested he image the child, and try to see how the child felt. This brought an immediate feeling of relief, for it was clear that the child was terrified and needed to be taken care of. The patient was now in the position of being the father he himself had never had at this crucial time, 3 to 4 years of age. Soon after this he dreamed:
 

This is exactly what the dreamer himself had shied away from; he has always been "grey," never really allowing his creativity to work in the world, successful only in spite of himself. The other person is the necessary shadow of ambition he is finally having to integrate.

The child is "the fourth," the unconscious component, as is the graveyard, the connection to the underworld. Notice that the connection to the child slows him down, makes him connect to his body, to an embodied life. The graveyard is the place of the corpse, the dead body. The fourth is the embodied connection to the Self, through the child. It is a connection with passion, a "living of the experiment of the Self," instead of the grey, poor me," masochistic quality that had ruled his life, destroyed his relationships and generally had him getting older with nothing to show for it that he could respect.

The ‘grey Self" had given up on the experiment of life. It is the "poor me," masochistically toned identity. As long as this Self-representation dominates the ego, the narcissistic character, even if driven by unconscious power drives, never achieves anything like his potential. There is always a curious lack of depth to his output, a great deal of glitter and talk, often the anticipation of great things, but in fact little that is memorable occurs.
 

8. The Magical Use of Imagination

The use of imagination has been a subject of much dispute throughout history. It has a special role in the great controversy over magic between the Church and magicians such as Pico, Paracelsus, Ficino and others. D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic is a valuable survey of the history of the conflict. Here is one excerpt:
 

From our knowledge of the countertransference, and especially the process of projective identification, we know that Erastus is quite wrong. The unconscious emission of spirits by our patients may be a crude way of putting it, but there is no doubt that "psychic infection" is real; what is going on in one person can immigrate into another. This is an unconscious process that must be realized and dealt with. But conversely, in working with the somatic unconscious, how do I know that I am not inducing what I think I see, and that my patient is not just being suggestible, or perhaps agreeing with me for the sake of maintaining an idealized image?

My experience is that patients have no difficulty at all in correcting my visions, in disputing them, as well as agreeing with them. The wide range of patient responses has convinced me that I am not magically controlling the visions which spontaneously appear. The following brief excerpt from clinical notes illustrates this process:
 

Furthermore, by working in an embodied manner one tends to constellate processes in patients that are capable of being consciously integrated as part of their ongoing individuation process. By contrast, when working in a less embodied and interpretive or intuitive mode, or one of psychic empathy, the analyst is often "right" but pulls up contents and images that are not ego-syntonic. Then these contents have a dissociative effect. Strong defensive idealizations often mount up as a result.

Consciousness rooted in the somatic unconscious is always at the limits of what has been integrated. This is a quality of Dionysos too. He represents going beyond existing boundaries. Consequently, working in this way we are often discovering images and even workings of the unconscious that seem very true at the moment but then vanish and are exceedingly difficult to regain. They are like a dream very far from consciousness, and very difficult to bring back to conscious awareness. But they must be allowed to go back into their domain of invisibility.

One must be able to let them go, else the possibility for becoming the "black magician" quickly takes root. If the analyst has to be right, has to be idealized by his patient, the shadow aspect of this method is dangerous. The boundaries that are always tending to be transcended include the analyst's knowledge of his own dark Self. For the Egyptians, Nepthys was associated with Aso, the queen of Ethiopia which was the land (for the Egyptians) of black magic. Nepthys, we recall, was the mother of Anubis, Isis' guide, illustrating the "boundary quality" of this method.

Our integrated consciousness is always being pushed to its outer limits. Therefore we must always be able not to know; we must be willing to work on those aspects of ourselves that still need mirroring and consequently demand idealization, else analysis can degenerate into a power position, rather than a creative wrestling with this ever-present reality. While this is a problem in any kind of analytical approach, it is far more manageable in one that incorporates an embodied consciousness.