Pollock’s art negates the traditional procedure of first designing and then making in the creative process. Pollock invents in the face of circumstances demonstrating the presumption that conception cannot take priority over the act of creation. Conception and creation are reciprocally related, each originating from one another in the moment, as do all subject/object relationships (Burnham, 1973, p. 103).
 
 
 
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.

These are the places the ghost of dissociation haunts, charged with keeping the vigils that hide us from ourselves. It walks the darkness as our story unfolds its lonley membranes. "I come into therapy because I cannot stand my walls," wrote Michael Geis, "even though I appreciate their protection" (M. Geis, personal communication, August, 1995).

The experience of transference in psychotherapy begins with a one-sidedness of the apparently obvious. Perhaps you, my partner, become angry. You yell, your face turns red. "I do not belong to this behavior!" I think to myself. You have authored it. So I conclude that what I experience belongs to you . . . .  and only you. This was Freud’s experience of transference, underscored by the perception that the images evoked in his patients originated somewhere in only them.

Hostile Images emerge, living into the spaces of our meeting, swaggering about our dialogues, spontaneously interpreted as yours . . . .  over there, on your side of the room, projected onto me, over here, on my side of the room. As the analyst I am innocent, a Freudian tabula rasa . . . .  clean. I have no part in this thing of yours, as participant or source. I am here to interpret not to experience, to be objective, not to fuse (Dieckmann, 1974). In this, as with the act of naming to control, I don my apotropaic shroud, anonymous to the asymmetries of my vulnerability. I am above, you are below. I am safely curled within an envelope.... for your sake... for the sake of making you well. And yet, in reality I need my objectivity as much to hide from myself (Guggenbuhl-Craig, 1971). How many of our psychologies construct these walls from the fear of coming fully into the room?

This is a spatial locus at times well placed. Indeed, I have experienced my own analyst becoming for all the world my as-if mother. Not physically, but through my responses. And I began acting toward her in ways in which I had acted toward my mother when I was young. It all seemed to fit. And why not? This is the prevailing wind of western culture, blowing us toward the as-if qualities of things perceived. How could it seem anything but natural?

Without doubt, the truth’s "objective" face was there to show that my analyst was not my mother. It was always there in logic. So I have been transferring my unconscious feelings onto my analyst, don’t you think? We continued as if this were the case, falling slowly into a Newtonian sleep. But as the weeks rolled by  I came to feel more the isolation of this fantasy, as everything that came up was immediately thrown onto me in the name of facing my stuff. It was like an echo from the darkness outside the castle walls. "Whose there?" I hurled. "Only you!" the echo returned. After all, I had to "take responsibility for my projections," didn’t I? I had to reclaim those projected parts swelling up, spewing out, spilling over the castle’s cobbled floors.

              He thought he kept the universe alone;
                     For all the voice in answer he could wake
                          Was but the mocking echo of his own
                                 From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
              Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
                     He would cry out on life, that what it wants
                           Is not its own love back in copy speech,
                                  But counter-love, original response.

                                                                   Robert Frost, The Most of It

There were times when this was unbearabe. I was alone with all my stuff, left to wonder where my analyst was. She was in the room and yet nowhere to be found. Is this the place we seek as therapists, finding excuses not ourselves to be found? To wit: "The [experience of the Self]," writes Marie von Franz, " . . . .  can only be found alone, for as Jung writes: ‘The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation" (Von Franz, 1993, p. 291).

Perhaps Margaret Little, in her analysis with D.W. Winnicott, had tasted this. She said of her analysis with Ella Freeman Sharpe:

I think back to one of my own clients, "No! That’s not it!" he shouted when I suggested some act of his might have been his unconscious psyche doing this or that. His was an honest proclamation, an explication born in the margin between thinking about and being with. Indeed, the act in question bore all the earmarks of an unconscious psyche. I was not wrong. I was beside the point! "Forget making room for the experience of meeting the client . . . .  meet him!"

Do you think the intrasubjective space must have been an empty thing for Freud? Even Klein rarely emphasized the space between as a thing-in-itself. Though current psychoanalytic thinkers like Thomas Ogden have reevaluated Klein’s "positions" in a modern light, Ogden admits this evaluation is a posteriori. It had to wait for Kohut and Winnicott (and Ogden) to see into that space in a different way (Ogden, 1994 jump to note 1). This was not the case with Jung. Jung did not require an investment of insight by later interpreters to fill out his vision. His observations cannot in my opinion be relegated to the status of merely providing a quaint nineteenth-century foundation for the mighty theoreticians of the coming Age. Jung’s understanding of intersubjective space was substantially more profound than this.

The Cartesian fantasy of the intrapsychic scored both Freud’s experience of transference and counter-transference. With the later, the coordinates of affect reverse. Already in 1910 Freud had recognized the importance of the counter-transference. Unlike Jung, however, he saw it entirely as a danger to the therapeutic process (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). And indeed it can be this. It is possible for the analyst to use his patient as an object for his own needs and fears, missing entirely the fact that another is in the room (Jacoby, 1984). "The unconscious," as Edinger says, "should not be approached naively. It can be extremely dangerous" (Edinger, 1980). We therapists have to be crafty as well as feeling.

The dangers of projection, according to Jung, arise from the excessive one-sidedness of the consciousness that generates them. Psychic structures can live through us, client and therapist alike. The unconscious may go unappreciated, but it is there. It may be reduced to a set of obscure synaptic flickers, but it is there. It may be drained of juice and pounded into flat phrases, but it is there. The Freudians at first backed away. Jung did not.

Projective Identification was not originally a welcome addition to the transference and countertransference descriptors. Even now its viability is contested. It effectivly confused the issues transference created defined by identifying a piece of the process that simple projection could not account for. It nullified the neat Cartesian categories of yours and mine, describing an unexplained "third" that could not be ignored experientially. Then it attempted to explain this "third" by using the same Cartesian spatial analogies transference and countertransference used. This was confusing. It was confusing with Klein, who was basically expelled from mainstream psychoanalysis for it. It was confusing with Jung, who attempted to creat his own language to explain it.

Jung recognized the dangers inherent in projection, but he did not back away. He knew that an Analyst working from an unconscious space was in danger of loosing more than objectivity. He was in danger of being swallowed by his own complexes (Sedgwick, 1994). Erotic projections are a case-in-point, a plague when we are blind to them. Both Freud and Jung saw this (and both fell prey to them), but Jung’s response was dramatically different from Freud’s. Freud viewed projection as a neurotic defense. Jung did not (Jacoby, 1984).

Jung borrowed the term "projection" from Freud, as he borrowed his early model for the unconscious (Jung, 1959h; Jung, 1959f; Jung, 1959b). But he altered this view, which resulted in a different rendition of the projection process (Jung, 1959j). Because Jung’s early working model of the psyche was similar to Freud’s topology, many of Jung’s interpreters have assumed he too situated the unconscious ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ consciousness, without direct access to the world. Medard Boss, for instance assumed Jung was saying human beings consisted of an independent, stratified psyche filled with energies, forces, and reified things, as did Freud’s model (Boss, 1964). However, a sustained investigation of the meaning and structure of the psyche for Jung indicates a conception very different (See Appendix: Note-2). Freud conceived a personal psyche situated inside the individual. Jung conceived a psyche both within and without, both surrounding and antecedent to (for example, Jung, 1959l, p. 3-105). In this manner, Jung presented his vision of the psyche as neither inside, " . . . any more than the sea is inside the fish" (Jung, 1959n, p. 1-56), nor outside, any less than we are in it (Brooke, 1991). There is simply no adequate reference to notions of height or depth within the Jungian model. Instead, Jung’s context is spatially uncommitted, proclaiming a fundamental interconnection dominating both psychic and somatic worlds. Unlike Freud, Jung insisted the analyst could not avoid the effect of content evoked within the crosshatched tapestry of this interconnection (Jacoby, 1984). In other words, Jung acknowledged encounter as a two-person arrangement (Strauss, 1989).

One clearly sees by this reading, that Jung’s view of the unconscious was intuitively phenomenological. It indicated a structure of "presence absent" calling for revelation and appropriation. Withdrawing projections served to differentiate meaning in the appropriation of blind literalism to metaphor (Brooke, 1991, p. 20). And process according to both Jung and Buber occurs principally if not exclusively by way of the intersubjective field. The kind of meeting between analyst and client Martin Buber described certainly existed in Jung’s understanding of transference countertransference. However, Jung did not elaborate this in a way that would break through the nineteenth-century remnants of Jung’s Kantian world. He lacked the philosophical rigor to propel it into the phenomenological world developing contemporaneously with Hussurl:

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Michael Staples