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Volume XXXVII, No. 1, Winter 2007

From the Editor — Kathryn Madden

This issue of Quadrant offers challenges to closed, in contrast to open, systems of psychoanalytic thought. We are asked to suspend what we know toward an encounter with the Wholly Other, the “projectionist,” the “seeing eye,” the “eye of eternity,” the abyssal eye which observes us from the depths of the soul and longs after manifestation an incarnation.

Through the concepts of archetypes, Self, mysticism, God, experience, wholeness, unitary reality, oneness, and post-modern culture, these authors ask us to enter the territory outside pre-existing knowledge. Kochhar-Lindgren asks us to question the idealist philosophy of archetypes and the idea of a stabilizing narrative. Madden probes the deeply spiritual implications of the Self as it is before the beginning of the individual human psyche. Gorvin emphasizes the raw experience of everything that is too much for mainstream psychoanalysis. Kalsched reminds us that the journey into “wholeness is not for everyone!” In the clinical experience, for instance, opening the feeling self to the raw and real may mean a painful encounter with the anti-wholeness defenses that protect the dissociated, compartmentalized pieces of the self.

And yet each author underscores the suffering tension necessary to delving into the beyond or before of the archetype. Plunging into the experience of a light-dark, God-devil, dream-ego-persecutory figure, the mysticisms of Self/no-self, or an abyss that is simultaneously all and nothing, we may be carried to the edge of our psychic limits. But, these are some of the polarities needed to experience the real, to experience Being and perhaps what is even before Being. In each case, the realm of experience and the centrality of primary process is central.

Proceeding even in light of our psychological limit equates with faith, as these authors would define it. We will never know all that is to be known. This limitation is in itself a faith of sorts — faith in the unknowable.

— Kathryn Madden

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