Quadrant 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 …

The Area of Faith Between Michael Eigen and His Readers— Aner Govrin

Keywords: Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, faith, literary criticism, God

Michael Eigen is a romantic writer-poet and analyst whose profound interest in religion and God deters readers as much as it attracts them. The first part of this paper describes basic ideas in Eigen’s writings such as mysticism and duality. How to read Eigen and why is the primary focus of the second part. By using “the area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion” (1981/1993), the paper shows how Eigen attempts to engage his readers in a totally new type of interaction with his texts, one that poses great demands and aims at making contact with something outside preexisting knowledge and psychoanalytic theory..

Wholeness as Image and Clinical Reality in the Practice of Analytical Psychology — Donald E. Kalsched

Keywords: wholeness, anti-wholeness defenses, complex, early trauma, self-care system, inner child, protector/persecutor, active imagination, spiritual reality of Self as center, lesser vs. greater coniunctio, transitional space

The concept of wholeness and its relationship to individuation and the ordering, integrating agency of the Self, is central to Analytical Psychology and its understanding of individuation. Less recognized is the idea that certain “anti-wholeness defenses” may operate within certain individuals, conspiring to keep the personality dis-integrated in the service of survival-in-pieces. The author explores the two psychologies in which these differing images of wholeness are operative and looks at the “spiritual” implications of each. He then illustrates his thesis with a clinical case in which the anti-wholeness defenses, pictured in dreams, give up their protective function, allowing for the healing of an early wound to the patient’s relationship with her father — a healing which is mediated by a mysterious presence representing a transcendent “more” that Jung glimpsed in his own experience of wholeness.

Images of the Abyss — Kathryn Madden

Keywords: abyss, unitary reality, Jacob Boehme, Ungrund, Carl Jung, Self

Images of the abyss in traditional Christian theology and psychology are generally symbolic of hell, destruction, or death. Here, the notion of abyss is regarded afresh through the experiences of Jacob Boehme, the 17th century German shoemaker and mystic, and Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst. Boehme’s pre-existent abyss, which he called the Ungrund, or un-ground, saw as underlying all of creation, even God, relates to the unitary reality of Jung’s Self. The Self is before the beginning of the individual human psyche and also its ultimate goal in terms of psychological life.

Gesamtdatenwerk: Peter Greenaway, New Media, and the Question of Archetypes — Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Keywords: new media, Peter Greenaway, archetypes, database, eidos, difference

Gesamtdatenwerk questions the meaning of “archetype” in the digital age. Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper Suitcases serves as an example of how archetypes are resituated within the archive and the studio of postmodern culture. Instead of a stabilized and stabilizing narrative that repeats itself consistently through time, an archetype is understood as an improvisational cultural production that we make, unmake, and remake for particular psychosocial reasons and within particular technological domains. Working with the archetypes as a form of idealist philosophy, the article suggests that we must learn to read this tradition with an eye toward differentiating networks of signifiers. When there are no first principles, nor any knowable ultimate realities, archetypes do not return to a primordial past nor point toward a future end, but become ever-changing signifiers that form and re-form in an unprogrammatical mix.

Book Reviews — Beth Darlington, Book Review Editor

Jung’s Apprentice: A Biography of Helton Godwin BaynesDiana Baynes Jansen. Daimon Verlag, Einsiedeln, 2003. Reviewed by Richard Lewis, M.D.