This Chapter from Chiron's book  (ISBN 0-933029-63-2) is reprinted  by permission of Chiron Publications. If you would like to order the book directly from the Publisher you can try clicking on Chiron Publications, the Company is currently working on their Web Site and it may not be quite finished yet . This material was copyrighted in 1984, 1992 by Chiron, and all rights are reserved.

Marion Woodman is a jungian analyst in private practice in Toronto. She received her training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. She is the author of  The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine (1980) and  Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982) . (note: these books are hyperlinked to Amazon.com. Click on them if you would like to order them).

This reading, originally selected for the Chiron Journal by Murray Stein and Nathan Schwartz-Salant, sometimes calls a familiarity with the terminology of Jungian Psychology (e.g., inferior function) but does not require this familiarity for the most part. It invites the reader to consider the  the symbolic meanings (in myth, for instance) within the clinical processes. 

                                                                         Marion Woodman
 

In the Zen art of archery the arrow, if released at its highest point of tension, a tension constellated between the arrow and the bow, flies directly to its target. In analysis, the highest point of tension between analyst and analysand, depending upon the rapport between them, may constellate itself at any time. A powerful transference onto the analyst may be compared to the release of the arrow. If the transference flies wide of the mark, as it often does, the arrow is not flying on the full energy or strength of the bent bow. Then the analyst has no difficulty recognizing the transference and where psychically it is coming from. When, however, the communion of arrow and bow is such that they fuse into one (the point of highest tension), then the transference in striking home, flying to the dead center of the bull's-eye, produces a very different situation, one that is much more difficult to deal with directly because the arrow may have struck the analyst's most painful complex.

Transference in analysis often has for its true object the analyst's own point of wounding, and when it strikes home, the result inevitably is a countertransference. If the analyst is not fully aware of his or her own shadow response, real damage can be done. If, however, the analyst knows his own autonomous complex and how to deal with it (how far and no further), then the striking of it by the transference can become one of the most creative stages of the analysis, a stage in which the real work can be done. The analysand penetrates the analyst's wound (as the God enters through the wound) and what can flow from it is a healing if-and only if-the analyst has been there and dealt with it, and the analysand in the process is able to recognize that what is going on is, to use one mythical representation, fighting the Medusa by means of the mirroring shield. My image of the analyst at the end of the day is St. Sebastian, his flesh penetrated by arrows, which do not cause undue pain or suffering because he understands the nature of his wounding-an understanding which in the case of the analyst is the product of his or her own analytical experience and training analysis. The healing comes through the consciousness of one's own authentically lived life.

In dealing with eating disorders, it is imperative to separate the symptom from the disease. The symptom may be obesity, loss of weight, and/or vomiting. The analysand usually wants to correct the weight problem." Weight in itself, however, is not necessarily a problem, although current collective attitudes would lead one to believe that success or failure in life and love depends on whether one is fat or thin. Some people by nature carry more weight than others; their big bodies radiate energy and are the right carriers for their psychic dimensions. If through illness or dieting they become thin, they are diminished. Others carry extra weight to counterbalance a highly intuitive, imaginative nature that tends to slip out of its physical home; it therefore needs the extra weight until it finds its grounding in its own earth. Weight gains and losses can vary within a wide range without any change in caloric intake if, for instance, such a person is engaged in artistic creation or is closely relating to someone who is dying. The disease is not the weight, but rather the psychological wounding that is manifesting through the eating disorder. The analyst through her body responses can recognize whether the body sitting opposite is a mound of unconscious flesh or whether it is a conscious body, and, by watching its fluctuation in weight, she can keep a very conscious eye on shadow activity. The process, as I see it in working with eating disorders, is to recognize the wounded instincts, to nurture and discipline them
back to health, and to bring the ego into a loving, firm relationship to them. Then the body gradually and naturally becomes the right container, whether large or small or fluctuating, for that particular psyche.

This cannot happen if the analyst is consciously or unconsciously measuring the analysand's progress by watching her weight-and in this paper I use the feminine possessive throughout as all these analysands are female. In most cases, the patient has spent years losing or gaining a few hundred pounds before coming to analysis as a last resort. Her home environment has encouraged a rigid life style, controlled by the clock, examinations, and professional goals. She has attempted to diet by reinforcing these rigid patterns through strict adherence to caloric charts and routine exercises. The real needs of her starving shadow and starving ego have been ignored. The psyche has ultimately rebelled and the rejected instincts have erupted in compulsive eating behavior. To try to deal with that frenzy directly is to face Medusa head on, and, inevitably, Medusa will win. If, on the other hand, psyche and soma are recognized as one interrelated system, the dreams will quite clearly point out when the ego is strong enough to deal with the inferior function. The analyst merely by remaining conscious of the physical proportions in the opposite chair is holding the necessary tension. If that tension is lost, then the unconscious conflict manifesting in the body is forgotten; analyst and analysand are probably flying with golden intuitive dreams, unaware of the abandoned shadow that is too deeply buried even to appear in dreams.

One illustration will make the process clear. Rachel is in her early thirties, the daughter of an extremely rational father and equally intuitive, artistic mother who expected her daughter to be as "charming" as she, which, unfortunately, she was not. The mother's message had long been, "The chocolate cake is in the kitchen. Don't eat it." Rachel's logic is constantly at war with her intuition. Her dream is to walk into a bookstore and find a book, The Answer, by God. Since childhood she has been a rebel against the affluent society into which she was born, a rebellion which has manifested itself in, among other things, drug and food abuse. Her terror of deprivation made dieting impossible. After two years of analysis she had the following dream:

The rejected child in the shadow, the child who would escape to Paradise Island, is the crucial figure in transference/countertransference in dealing with a food addict. Clothed in a persona that seems to reveal self-control, self-confidence, even a certain taciturn aloofness, the immature ego is constantly threatened by the witch child shadow who is terrified of deprivation by the witch mother. However loving the actual mother may have been, if the essence of the actual child was denigrated or ignored and the projections of "best little girl, best little student, best little athlete" accepted, then the unlived life is starving in the shadow. It does not believe that there will always be food or love. Its experience has taught it to take whatever sweetness is available right now because it will surely disappear. The buoyant animal energy that reached out for recognition during infancy has been "corrected" and caged until it no longer recognizes its own fear, guilt, and rage. The addict only knows that her life is intolerable and the only way to survive is to deaden the pain of the inner volcano by swallowing food or concentrating on not swallowing it. If the pressure of the volcano has to be released, then she may resort to ritual vomiting. Because she cannot live her own life in reality, she lives alone in her own imagination where she is queen. There she has her own private jokes, her own bitterness against the world that rejects her, which she in turn rejects. She creates her own moral values and does not hesitate to lie or steal in order to feed herself what she wants and needs. In fact, almost every morsel she puts in her mouth is "forbidden fruit" and eaten with surreptitious glee in mocking defiance of the collective, "Thou shalt not." She is charged with blocked energy which she "knows" would destroy "ordinary" people if it were unleashed; she concretizes her powerful feelings in her body, fearful of rejection if she lets them flow. Often that child is indeed supersensitive, highly intuitive, quick to recognize that others project their own witch child onto her because she is fat and fat is taboo in our culture. Often she is the abandoned one, left for dead in a schizophrenic society that loves her rational mind, exploits her sensitive soul, and rejects her powerful body. She does not want to be seen in sessions any more than she wants to be seen in life, and her smoke screen of silence and lies is impressive.

Yet that infantile, stubborn, treacherous shadow often contains the real feminine ego that has never had a chance to live. She looks to me for the understanding she no longer hopes to find in society. She is willing to allow me to hold the mirror up to her illusions and her lies. Together we can call a spade a spade. Fat is fat, greed is greed, lust is lust, power is power, love is love. I think of myself as a tuning fork which must ring true if it is to resonate with her reality. In a life and death struggle (in anorexia nervosa, for example) there is no time for euphemisms.

In situations where repressed rage and despair have led to eating and starving compulsions of demonic intensity, the patient appears "possessed." The terrorized ego then looks to the analyst for a lifeline. If the analyst fails to recognize the "loss of soul" involved in euphoric bingeing and starvation, or if the analyst is afraid of death, then the rigid body in the other chair may be dismissed as a self-dramatizing hysteric, prone to negative inflation and playing yet another trick to attract the attention of the analyst. The body rigidity, however, may be caused by inundation of the ego by overpowering emotions, as in the catatonic state of schizophrenics. The analysand may be close to a psychotic episode. A life and death struggle may be going on which needs to be dealt with at that level if depth healing is to take place. The obsessive emotions need the shield of the analyst's consciousness to reflect what is constellated. That reflection can drive out the possession and release the petrified emotions. To cope with this, the analyst needs to know her own strength in dealing with or choosing not to deal with the archetype of evil. If the analysand's weak ego is committed to beauty, light, and truth, it is vulnerable to invasion by the dark aspect of the Self, and the analyst may suddenly find herself turned to stone. Speaking of evil, Jung says,

In this short paper it is not possible to develop the various stages of transference/countertransference. A general pattern must suffice. Usually the obese, anorexic, or bulimic patient has acted as a buffer in an overly close-knit family. As a result, she lacks ego boundaries, physically and psychically. She also lacks close bodybonding with her mother and, therefore, with her own body. She may not appear in her own dreams. She is fearful of having anyone invade her precarious space. During the early stages, the analyst usually carries the transference of the Self, even to the point of answering such a seemingly innocent question as "What will you be eating this week-end?" Generally, the analysand has carried and is carrying a projected, idealized image from one or both parents, but one or both have turned against her internally, and what was once an admiring audience has become an introjected, annihilating judge. Fearful of losing the love of the analyst as well, the analysand will not express her true self. Rather she reveals the idealized, projected image with which she has always lived. The analyst, acting as mirror, reflects that image, only obliquely suggesting the compensating shadow sides. Gradually, the analysand can believe that she will not be rejected if she does reveal who she in fact is; gradually her right hand begins to acknowledge what her left hand is doing.

While the analyst may be acting as both father and mother in the beginning of the analysis, the next stage, if the analyst is a woman, is usually to become a medium for the archetype of the Great Mother, she who re-mothers without the original conflict, the mother who is accepting, somewhat directive, loving, and nonjudgmental. Often a very powerful dream of the Great Mother shakes the analysand's rational roots. "I don't know what's going on," she will say. "I'm not a religious person, but now I have this inner sense of peace. I know somebody up there loves me." During this phase, the analysand can be brought to deal with her eating disorders by trying to incorporate Good Mother into herself: nourish herself with good food, love her body, cherish herself as a woman in a way which her mother was unable to do. Former rigid patterns of behavior and attitudes can be replaced by trust and hope, and relaxation into the body's musculature and into the ground of reality. Dreams of birth and little girls quickly growing from one Year to Puberty appear in this stage.

Grounding in the instincts is crucial. "What do I need to nourish myself? Am I hungry? Will this 'ood satisfy my hunger or is it another kind of hunger? What colors do I like? Do I receive any messages from my body? What is it trying to tell me? Am I angry? Am I frightened? When am I using food to swallow down my feelings? What other types of food would feed my soul? How do I relate to other women? What is this new energy flowing through me?" During this stage, I accept the role of mother to my growing daughter, being firm and loving, encouraging and practical, especially in the details of everyday living. Essentially this is the process in any analysis in which the analysand is not rooted in the body and is without a strong ego structure. The difference with eating disorders lies in the intensity of the conflict. The stakes may be high and immediate.

Last year, for example, I was working with a 33-year-old woman who seemed to have progressed very well during two years of analysis. She had had an eating disorder earlier in her life, but that seemed to have been solved, and so we focused on building her ego. Although she had a highly developed masculine side, and a finely developed intelligence, and although she had a professional position which required all her capacities for leadership and initiative, her feminine side was quite infantile. Her capacity to objectify her own pain deceived me into believing she was more mature than in fact she was. I believed she had a good understanding of a vicious negative mother complex, and together we could laugh at some of the extraordinary images her unconscious would present. After two years of slowly building up trust together, we had what seemed to me to be the best session to date. I had been very straight with her in speaking about her dream ego and said, "You are your mother's daughter." I sensed that that comment had not been accepted, but felt she was strong enough to deal with it or throw it back at me. What I had not taken into consideration was the "solved" eating disorder and the fact that she had been on a fruit fast for almost a month. That night she had a chaotic dream, part of which was as follows:

Another distinguishing factor in dealing with eating disorders is the body in the other chair. The analyst who is sitting opposite 250 pounds of blocked energy in one hour, and opposite 90 pounds of skin and bone in the next, needs to know exactly what unconscious responses are being evoked in the analyst's own body. The analysand is poised for the slightest sign of rejection-conscious or unconscious. Analysts, like everyone else, are the products of a culture that worships the great goddess Thinness, and we have to be careful of our own shadow response to 250 pounds in the other chair. We cannot constellate the analysand's inner healer if we unconsciously reject her size. She and her body are enemies as it is, and our unconscious projection can rend the hostile sisters even further apart. At some point the analyst who has unconsciously rejected the abandoned body will become the target for the pent-up rage that will erupt against her, because the old game is still being played out-the old game of let's pretend "the ugly one" is not here. She has done the same thing to herself by refusing to step onto a scale, by refusing to look into a mirror, by refusing to buy clothes or enter a crowded theatre. If the analyst offhandedly asks in each session how her clothes are fitting, what movie she has seen, what airplane trip she is planning, she begins to think of herself as a member of society. Fat is fact and the body must be accepted and dealt with. Otherwise, at some point, the transference/countertransference will be demolished by the rejected demon the demon who hates God, the demon who has ostracized her from a world into which she never wanted to be born anyway, a world in which she is sick of trying to justify her existence, a world in which she feels her ugliness has no right to exist. The vampire who sucks her life blood has to spew out his vitriolic poison sometime, but he cannot shatter the container if the analyst genuinely believes that psyche and soma are one, that accepting her is accepting her body.

The demon may emerge when enough weight has been lost to bring up the problem of relationship to a man. Now the real problems of her femininity and her sexuality must be faced-problems that have been masked by the eating disorder. in many cases, the body, whether fat or bone, has acted as the glass coffin which sealed the girl-woman into her idealized father, thus sealing other men out. Now if a suitor appears, the demon is threatened. "You are mine," he hisses. "Get that man out." Repeatedly, suicidal fantasies emerge as soon as men begin to find her attractive, or she may regress into the obsession. Suddenly she is forced to recognize the idealized image that father and perhaps mother have projected onto her and the idealized image that she has projected back. She is trapped in an inflation which would make her an impenetrable goddess, and men either gods or rapists. If she rejects what her parents projected onto her, guilt entraps her. However, if the weight loss is to be maintained and continued, she has to recognize the inflation in order to exorcise the weight of the idealized projection and her identification with it. This involves surrendering her perfectionist ideals and accepting her own humanity [For a fuller discussion of this theme see Woodman (1982)] -and the humanity of the man she might love. This is unquestionably the most difficult transition stage and needs to be worked at from the outset of the analysis; otherwise a weight gain or loss is inevitable. The despair of a lifetime surfaces-the recognition of her own unlived femininity. She often has to face her psychically incestuous relationship to her father and her hostile feelings toward her mother. She looks to the analyst for reassurance that she is acceptable, even if she is not perfect. Essentially, she is terrified to walk out of her cage and take responsibility for her own life.

This is a time of woman-to-woman bonding between analyst and analysand; lesbian dreams may appear. There is often a sense of mourning involved which the analyst may have to mirror in order to bring it to consciousness. The body in which the analysand has lived is no longer there to act as whipping post, or armor, or protective home in which she can be invisible. The woman can now recognize what a magnificent friend her body has been and how undeserving of her ruthless punishment. She will also have to own her cage, which she has projected onto other people. Conscious rituals are helpful in allowing the former body image-fat or thinto disappear, leaving room for the new. A new consciousness of the body as the temple of the feminine son I prepares the way for mature sexuality-sexuality integrated with spirituality.

Women often come to me because they say they are afraid to go to a male analyst. "I know I will fall in love with him," they say. "I don't want that. I want to concentrate on my analysis." They know themselves well enough to know that their bonding with their father is so deep that any close spiritual relationship to a man can have only one outcome. These are often women with critical eating disorders because their life is in their spirit. If a girl has been her father's darling, bound to him in spiritual incest, she is doomed to transfer that love onto a male analyst. If she is a creative woman, her creativity is born out of that bonding. Her relationship to her body is negligible because her relationship to her mother is uncertain and her reality is in her imagination. Her archaic sexuality is in her unconscious body, so that while she may have many lovers, no man can conquer her through her sexuality. She may be a femme fatale, but she lives, moves, and has her being through the father or the father surrogate. Although her analysis may be incredibly productive, although her weight stabilizes, and although her life blossoms, once the transference/countertransference is broken, she has once again lost her soul. The analyst has become her trickster father, the complex that drove her into analysis in the first place. Of course, the analyst's pain may be every bit as great as hers. The crux of the situation, as I see it, is that the analyst has allowed the transference to take the place of creating an ego structure strong enough to contain the influx of wealth from the unconscious. To hold the tension between the opposites in such an analysand is a huge challenge. The analyst has to take a long look at his own countertransference and work with it creatively in order to allow the projections to be gradually withdrawn. Body work can be very valuable in the transition period because it gives her soul a home to come back to and to go out from.

Middle-aged women with eating disorders almost always recognize that their real problem is a spiritual one. "If it were right with God," they say, "it would be right with my body." Their children have left, their husbands may be engrossed in business, dead, or divorced, and their sense of despair seems bottomless. With them, as with younger women, it is very important to distinguish whether the eating disorder is lifelong or recent. A woman who has never found herself but who has survived because she is identified with the role of mother and wife may suddenly collapse into the despair which has been dormant for years. She looks to the analyst to save her. The analyst can only strive to develop her commitment to her own dreams and inner life. While the sessions may be sustaining, any transformation comes about only when the analysand accepts responsibility for her own destiny.

If the transference is ultimately the analysand's responsibility, the countertransference is ultimately the responsibility of the analyst. At each stage of growth the withdrawal of projections in the analysand is accomplished by corresponding withdrawals by the analyst. The inner letting-go allows the other to progress; the process is mutually shared. Through the transference and the dreams of the analysand, the analyst discovers unexplored territories in herself; through the countertransference, the analysand experiences herself from a totally new perspective. "The intersection of the timeless moment" (Eliot 1952) is the still point in which both receive healing.

In this paper I have placed greater emphasis upon countertransference than upon transference because I am increasingly realizing the creative role it can play in the healing process. The observer does influence whomever he or she is observing. if the analyst has genuinely confronted her own shadow and learned to love the enemy, then the stone which the builders rejected does become the cornerstone of the new building. Then countertransference may serve as a healing balm. In C-hristian terms, as well as jungian terms, the love of the enemy is not natural, but contra naturam, not Eros but Agape. It is, as Jung described it, a form of grace arising from sacrifice, a resurrection coming out of death.

In playing the many roles assigned by the analysand-Self, Mother, Father, Demon Lover-the analyst must play them "with a differences The essential difference is that they are not roles at all in some theatrical or fictional sense, but psychic realities from which the analysand is cut off. The fiction resides not in the analyst but in the analysand. The obese, the anorexic, and the bulimic do not believe that thev are human because their humanity has been too long rejected. Life for them consists of role playing and one of their sole sources of comfort and compensation is their belief that "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players"-a "phony" role which they disdainfully reject but at the same time despairingly yearn for. Repeatedly they assert that what applies to other people does not apply to them. As Elephant Men, they take refuge in some subliminal conviction that they are invisible, a conviction supported by the fact that people seldom meet them eye to eye or remark directly and honestly upon their appearance.

One day in our waiting room, one of my obese patients was waiting with two or three others, reading at the big table. She was so engrossed in her magazine that she failed to realize she was blocking my way into the next room.

"Good heavens, Louise, move your big fanny," I exclaimed. "Can't you see I can't get through?"

Silence dropped like a pall. The other analysands glared at me with shocked horror, and at her with compassionate curiosity. When Louise came in for her session, she was roaring with laughter, precariously close to sobbing.

"Did you see their faces," she laughed, "when they were forced to recognize me? For over a year I've been sitting invisibly in that room and when I was finally seen, nobody knew what to do with me. I was real."

Her sense of exhilaration, with its undercurrents of rage and despair, filled my office. it was as if she had made her first appearance in the world and I was the midwife announcing, "It's a girl!"

That is what I mean by making the stone the builders rejected into the cornerstone of the building. This is what I mean by creative countertransference. The others in the room could not deal with the piercing by the arrow-the wound of her flesh. They couldn't because they had never confronted it in themselves, or worse, were now in the process of confronting it and had yet to work it through. The obese, the anorexic, and the bulimic who are in the throes of their own pain can hardly endure the sight of an obese woman. To be able not only to endure it, but to love it for the psychic and spiritual journey it may evoke, is, I believe, the countertransference of a love that may assist in the healing process that has behind it and within it the energy of the Self.

Eliot, T. S. 1952. Four quartets. In  The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950, p. 139. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Jung, C. G. 1959.  Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self , In Collected Works, vol. 9, part 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Woodman, M. 1982. Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982). Toronto: Inner City Books.