Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1999, 44, 6985

Dissociation and the Self in the magical

pre-Oedipal field
Sherry Salman, Rhinebeck, NY
Abstract: This paper explores the clinical relevance of Jungs idea of the Self in preOedipal and pre-individuation psychology. Incorporating data from neurobiology and
recent theories of memory and narrative reconstruction, a post-modern conception of
the Self is proposed akin to what Jung called a dream of totality. Such a conception of
the Self is distinguished from a reified structure or a deified imago, and is considered to
be that aspect of psychological functioning consonant with emerging meanings, and the
birth of new psychological ground. Links are made back to Flournoy, William James,
and depth psychologys early interest in teleology, the occult, and the creative capacities
of the psyche.
Updating this mystery tradition, clinical material illustrates how narratives of the Self
are present in such pre-Oedipal dynamics as dissociation and projective identification.
These dynamics are understood not only as primitive defences but as reconstitutive
symbolic metaphors and mythopoetic expressions of an emergent rather than a superordinate Self.
Key words: dissociation, emergent meaning, mythopoesis, occult, post-modern Self,
pre-Oedipal, projective identification.

A distinguishing feature of Jungian clinical methodology has been that all

diagnostic, prognostic, and developmental theories are organized with reference to the Self, as well as the ego. Although other depth psychologists have
alluded to the importance of the notion of a self (Kohut 1977; Guntrip 1969;
Khan 1974) only Jungs original model truly relativized the ego, viewing it as
vehicle, executor, or as temenos for the destiny and mystery factors of the Self.
One way for contemporary analytical psychologists to re-assess the validity
of our Self-oriented methodology is to examine its utility in pre-Oedipal process.
Through his exploration of the psyches archetypal matrix, and the dynamics
of magical thinking, dissociation, splitting and projective identification, it is
becoming clear that Jung, and others such as Whitmont (1957) anticipated
many aspects of what in psychoanalytic circles generally is known as the
theory of pre-Oedipal development. Another distinguishing feature of Jungian
methodology has been the great value given to this early level of process, the
00218774/99/4401/69

1999, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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Sherry Salman

depathologizing of its archetypal dynamics, and the verification of its function

as the ongoing creative matrix for the developing psyche.
But what has become painfully apparent in the clinical situation is that
paradoxically, although archetypal dynamics are often most evident during
deeply regressed phases of the treatment process, it is at these very same early
levels of psyche that a Self-driven archetypal perspective on the unfolding
symbolic meaning of psychological process is most difficult to maintain.
Consequently, we have been pulled toward modern psychoanalysis and ego
psychology to help make sense of and ease the terrific demands that working
with pre-Oedipal process places on us. Sometimes we virtually abandon the
Self as a working construct, reserving it for cases which conform to the classic
individuation model. Interestingly, however, there seem to be fewer and fewer
of these.
Jung himself was not explicit regarding a differentiated clinical methodology.
Perhaps he was well aware of, and unable to resolve, a fundamental dilemma
central to the issue of methodology: a dilemma about the Self. How was the
Self both central to the health, integrity, and viability of the entire psyche, and
yet not really to be found at most levels of the psychological process? Jung
(1953) wrote in Psychology and Alchemy:
If the motif of the mandala is an archetype it ought to be a collective phenomenon,
i.e., theoretically it should appear in everyone. In practice, however, it is to be met
with in distinct form in relatively few cases, though this does not prevent it from
functioning as a concealed pole round which everything ultimately revolves. In the
last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason
this realization can also be called individuation.
(para. 330)

This sort of circular statement about the Self is ubiquitous in Jungs writings.
I think it reflects a paradox which needs on the one hand to be received
creatively: namely that the mandala is an image of both the undifferentiated
uroboros and the differentiated Self. But it may also reflect the limitation Jung
encountered when trying to differentiate clinical issues regarding the Self,
particularly its function in the pre-Oedipal field.
In our modern attempt at clinical differentiation, many analytical psychologists
have separated what may be thought of as pre-Oedipal, pre-individuation, and
individuation levels of process. We often assume that in order to work meaningfully with the symbol of the Self, there has to be an ego capable of giving
way to the experience of the unknown, that is of the Other and ultimately, of
the Self. We postulate that in practice there has to be an individual, that is an
ego or identity, who then may participate meaningfully in an individuation
process. We imagine that pre-Oedipal process, which is dyadic, primary, and
two-dimensional, opens up into three-dimensional secondary process, what I
refer to as a pre-individuation level of process wherein stable ego identity and
object relations are achieved. This may then in turn open into a fourth level of

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

71

process, Balints imaginal area of creation (Balint 1968; Field 1991), Jungs
image of an individuating Self-oriented ego, the identity of which is both
relativized and enhanced by the ongoing dialogue with subjective elements of
shadow and complexes.
But this differentiation of our model of development has led to an inevitable,
and in my view costly, estrangement from the starting place, the archetypally
determined magical (Whitmont 1956) pre-Oedipal field to which we must
periodically return if any fresh development is to take place. Our present understanding of pre-Oedipal and even pre-individuation levels of process is so prejudiced in a clinical notion of primitivity that it no longer seems to partake
meaningfully of the quintessential Jungian dynamism, the Self.
I propose to address several issues related to this estrangement the first
being, for modern clinicians, whether it is really meaningful to consider the
Self in our work at early levels of process. If so, how are we to envision the
Self at pre-Oedipal and pre-individuation levels of process, and in what ways
is it or isnt it to be differentiated from the Self of the later individuation
process as we see it in a psychologically mature individual? Jung was obviously
not able to answer this question adequately, and Michael Fordham (1985) has
offered a subsequent model of individuation as the cycles of integration and
deintegration which begin with infancy. However, it is interesting to imagine
that even Jung may have originally postulated the notion of the Self in direct
relation to pre-individuation dynamics: as a counterpole to the dissociation
theory. The fact of the Self may have answered for him the question posed by
the fact of the dissociability of the psyche: how are dissociative phenomena
to be organized? The Self provides an image of order within the seemingly
chaotic world of dissociation.
But are the notion and experience of the Self really necessary in order to
work therapeutically at early levels of psychological process? I think that it is,
but why this is so has been obscure. Our understanding of what Self-process
is has to emerge beyond our images of a reified Self, a superordinate concealed pole round which everything revolves, or a redemptive deified Self.
Moreover, we have to accept the constructive scepticism of A. GuggenbuhlCraig (1997): there may be no concealed pole, nor is every life necessarily
the realization of a whole. Rather, wholeness and meaning may be emerging
from moment to moment only as psychological reality emerges, and symbols
of the Self may be the psyches reflections of that very process.
In the light of new scientific data and paradigms about the emergent nature
of the mind, as well as in the light of what we now know about such new constructs as psychological narrative, clinical reconstruction, and the mythopoesis
of psychological experience and healing, we are in a position to re-imagine
what constitutes the essential mystery of the Self. It may be that it is the
capacity for symbolic transformation of psychological reality which is most
intimately connected to the magic of the Self, at all levels of process, however
early.

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Sherry Salman

For example, if analysts consider basic responses like dissociation with

accompanying projective identification to be not only defensive, but also
reconstitutive (Field 1991), they too can be understood, like symbols, to be
transformers of psychic energy: magical modes of communicative metaphor and
expression, ways of creating links to affective experience. These mechanisms
may be ways the psyche reflects to the consciousness of both patient and
receptive analyst the things which are coming into being: the unconscious
material which is evolving from dissociated experience into psychological
ground. They are mythopoetic expressions of an emergent, rather than a
superordinate, Self.
The Self
Jung and post-Jungians (Young-Eisendrath 1997; Weisstub 1997) were not
the first and will not be the last psychologists to struggle with paradoxes of the
self and the Self. William James, Winnicott, and many others have wondered
how it was that what they termed the self encompassed both a stable sense of
identity and an ever-changing consciousness? Jung actually had several different visions of the Self, each paradoxical and containing an intimation of a new
orientation toward the central mystery he was trying to identify.
The first was a structural view, the idea that the Self is made up of
capacities, attributes, temperament and genetic determinants comprising a kind
of virtual-organic Self, all there in concealed seed form waiting to unfold.
Here the Self is that which functions throughout the life of an individual as
the ordering and unifying factor behind all development. This is the Self as the
initiating, structuring, prospective force behind symptoms and symbols.
The other Self was the functional-transcendent Self, the Self which is like the
moving wheel of the individuation process, the unfolding and integration of
what is not given, what is acquired through psychological process alone. This
is the opus contra naturam Self, the Self that functions toward wholeness and
the creation of the panacea, the Self as goal of all process, the transcendent
Self, unique in its infinite singularity. This is the Self related to the god-imago,
religious mythologems, and the redemptive philosophers stone.
Jung amplified and enlarged both these perspectives in the image of the
Selfs alchemical journey from chaotic massa confusa to integrated lapis
The Self here appears in symbolic images of the unfolding genetic blueprint,
seed germ, or mandala, the developing and then individuating Self. What was
there at the beginning is still there at the end, but the Stone is also no longer
just a stone.
More recently, the developmental school arising out of Fordhams extensions of Jung has envisioned a primary self containing all archetypal potentials
which undergo a process of deintegration/reintegration as they are embodied
and meet the world. Although the spontaneous movement that produces deintegration is also seen as archetypal, the self is primary, and forms a background

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

73

for deintegration. As Judith Hubback (1990) describes it: the embodied

psyche, the person, changes through activating and using the complementary
unchanging archetypal nature of the self (p. 114).
But notwithstanding all there is to imagine about the symbol of the Self,
Jung always insisted that the Self was fundamentally unknowable, and he
continued to insist on its essential mystery. It was not unknowable just because
of epistemological issues, or unknowable because the Self is both the subject
speaking and the object of its contemplation, or because it had not yet unfolded. It was unknowable because it didnt really exist. In a 1957 interview
with Miguel Serrano (1966), Jung said: So far I have found no stable or
definite center in the unconscious, and I dont believe such a center exists. I
believe that the thing I call the self is a dream of totality (p. 50). Is the Self
then a symbol of the stuff of dreams, of a shift in psychic process, of emerging
psychological ground and reality? Is this what Jung meant by the lapis invisibilitatis (Jung 1953, para. 247), and how can we understand this now?
This symbol of the Self as mystery, points the way into an aspect of Jungs
perspective that is essentially post-modern: a perspective whose central metaphor is an ever-changing interchange among subject, object, the intrapsychic,
the interpersonal, the transpersonal, and the world. From this perspective,
the Self is neither a structural entity, actual or potential, nor symbolic of a
redemptive God-imago. A post-modern view of the Self suggests that there is
no Self per se, either structural, functional, or transcendent, that it is unknowable because it exists only as a symbol of process, as part and parcel of the
psyches acts of creation the creation of new psychological reality and ground.
Jung related the Self to process alone when he wrote in relation to the mandala
that:
[It is] the real i.e., effective reflection of a conscious attitude which can state
neither its aim nor its purpose and, because of this abdication, projects its activity
entirely upon the virtual centre of the mandala But that the mandala is a mere
psychological reflection is, however, contradicted For this hypothesis overlooks
the creative capacity of the psyche, which whether we like it or not exists, and in
face of which all so-called causes become mere occasions.
(Jung 1953, para. 249)

The Self as a symbolic image accompanying the emergence of new psychological territory dovetails with modern understandings of personality development, trauma and recovery, and recent advances in neurobiology. For
example, through the work of Hillman (1972), Lacan (Kugler 1987), Daniel
Stern (1985) and others, we have come to realize that there is an ever-present
capacity on the part of the psyche to create key metaphors and narrative points
of origin for itself, including even for the origins of its trauma (Stern 1985,
p. 258). The meaning and even perceived genesis of a traumatic event undergo
successive changes with time and with reconstruction within the transference
field. Personality is now being understood as creatively synthesized by the

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Sherry Salman

psyche through an ever-changing narrative, not as something necessarily

originating in literal events. An organic, synthetic, emergent psyche is presumed to exist, even in infancy.
It also seems clear from clinical process that various archetypal themes move
in and out of the healing fictions we create about ourselves, both individually
and collectively, and that this process of fictionalization is what is central and
indispensable for a healthy and evolving psyche. We spend much of our time
clinically discovering, articulating, living through, and creating new metaphoric traces of archetypal themes. This understanding harkens back to the early
days, when Ferenczi noted the healing that occurred when abused children
were able to translate their traumatic experiences into a private language of
their own (Ferenczi 1933).
Most intriguingly, recent advances in neurobiology provide paradigms and
data suggesting that emergent, synthetic processes are actually evident in the
neural responses of the brain. Jung was aware of the importance of looking
to biology in order to understand the psyche, and I think also felt the lack of
adequate scientific paradigms. At the end of his life, in the Foreword to
Mysterium Coniunctionis, he had this to say about the origins of symbolism
and symbolic capacity:
The structure and function of the bodily organs are everywhere more or less the
same, including those of the brain. And as the psyche is to a large extent dependent
on this organ, presumably it will at least in principle everywhere produce the
same forms. In order to see this, however, one has to abandon the widespread
prejudice that the psyche is identical with consciousness.
(Jung 1953, p. xix)

Today perhaps we can follow Jung in looking to the soma, because in the sciences the brain and mind are already being reconceived of as adaptive systems
geared towards evolution and the ever-changing construction of a coherent
self (Tresan 1996). For example, recent work on the emergent properties of
mind and memory by Edelman, Freeman, and others (see Modell 1997) suggest that what constitutes memory appears to be an experience of neuronal
re-categorization, a re-writing and re-transcription of events rather than a process of retrieval. There is actually no fixed library of memories, no stored replicas,
only potential categories which are formed by correspondences. Memory is
always emerging and created afresh in the light of new experience. When new
experience occurs, the cortical mapping of all similar past experience is reencoded in the light of the new data.
Events, both inner and outer, are categorized, and re-categorized into new
neural schemas which are themselves continuously emerging and updated.
This process is based both on objective facts and phenomena, and also on what
has subjective value and meaning for the individual. Consciousness itself is
increasingly being understood as an active, dynamic, very personal evolutionary process. Anthony Stevens (1995), in his book Private Myths, suggests that

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

75

the neuronal re-categorization process is part of what is going on during

dreaming. Thus when Jung remarked that the thing I call the self is a dream
of totality, he may have been more precise than he knew.
This model of an emergent psyche and the continuous creation of psychological reality extends Jungs observation of the spontaneous emergence of
symbols of the Self which accompany the transformation of unconscious
experience into psychological ground. What remains consistent with Jungs
original conception of the Self through modern data about mind and personality is the focus on the psyches archetypal capacity for construction and
symbolization, for continuous creation of new coherent syntheses of the real,
the imaginary, and the mystery of what will be.
Emergence may represent a symbolic image more limited, less precise, but
more fluid than a redemptive god-imago or a superordinate organizing principle. But a spontaneously emergent Self retains the subjectivity and relativization of the ego which both the redemptive and superordinate Self provide,
perhaps even more so; as ego encounters other, a symbolic state of mind
emerges, in which the ego is truly entirely transformed. There is no doubt that
the earth revolves around the sun. Ego is informed by Other from moment
to moment. The process reflects our microcosmic lived experience of Goethes
archetypal formula Formation, transformation, eternal spirits eternal recreation.
But an emergent Self is a quiet Self, less like a knowing, definitive, prophetic
voice of truth, which makes an appearance only rarely, less identified with a
redemptive god-imago, and more like the small, still voice of unknowing, whose
whisperings are barely discernible but are always there. What we lose in superordinate authority we gain in companionship. What we lose in coherence, we
gain in on-going generative, creative dialogue.
In Jungs alchemical vision, the Self was the symbolic image of the archetypal fantasy of redemption. But even here, the stone is only a phase in a long
dynamic process, and the alchemists were clear that the stone represented
not the object of the process, but process itself. In this spirit, can we clarify the
symbol of the Self as that which expresses and accompanies the emergence of
evolving psychological ground? This facet of the symbol is clinically relevant
at multiple levels of psychological reality and constructively, I believe, bridges
the distinction between individuation and pre-individuation in our thinking
about the Self. In this view, the narratives of the Self become readable from
dissociation and projective identification at one end of the continuum through
active imagination at the other.
Dissociation and projective identification
Turning now to two features of the pre-individuation field, specifically dissociation and projective identification, I will examine their relationship to the
Self. Following is case material which suggested to me that dissociation, regulated
by projective identification, did not simply interfere with recategorization and

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Sherry Salman

emergent processes of the Self, but also expressed those processes at the preindividuation level of psyche.
As with the Self, Jungs ideas about dissociative states were central in his
model. In the early Zofingia Lectures, he began to argue that the occult experiences of spirits and souls possessed their own psychological reality. This
formulation would evolve into the complex-theory, the personification of autonomous split-off unconscious contents, archetypes and the objective psyche,
and his particular vision of mental illness as loss of soul or archetypal possession. Up to the very end in Mysterium Coniunctions, the fragmentation and
coagulation of the body/soul/spirit triad remained centre stage (Jung 1963).
The seeds of an emergent symbol of the Self had their origins in Jungs prospective approach to the dissociability of the psyche, an approach which was in
place long before Symbols of Transformation (Jung 1956) and the break with
Freud. Jung had always held the fantasy that the psyche had multiple fields of
reality, whose meaningful relationships to each other were expressed in symbolic images. This fantasy had been informed by some very colourful and
important developments which pre-dated Jung, and had paired dissociative
states of mind with the Self.
As now, at the turn of the last century there was a proliferation of multiple
personality disorder (MPD), with spiritualism as the vehicle through which
the reality of the psyche entered the collective. Mediums in trance were the psychopomps to the unconscious. When psychologists William James, Frederic
Myers, Theodore Flournoy, and later Jung entered the spiritualist arena, the
source of what was revealed during an altered state was moved into the intrapsychic sphere, and conceived of as the unconscious. This irrevocable moment
is depicted vividly in Theodore Flournoys From India to the Planet Mars, published in the watershed year of 1900. In his Introduction to the new edition,
Sonu Shamdasani makes a compelling case that this formulation of unconscious multiple selves was the true discovery of the unconscious.
Shamdasani makes it clear that it was Flournoy, studying the fantasies of his
student, Miss Miller (eventually the subject of Symbols of Transformation,
CW 5), who first suspected that within the phenomenon of dissociation the
psyche is re-combining old material into something new. Flournoy used the
term creative imagination to identify the process. And it was Frederic Myers,
an English psychologist, psychic researcher and close friend of William James,
who first suggested a model of the unconscious based on subliminal selves
with creative capacities and a mythopoetic, as he termed it, function
(Ellenberger 1970, p. 313).
This newly discovered unconscious was considered to have an often more
useful, higher intelligence than ones usual consciousness. Remarkable things
had been observed and experienced during those early days in trance: clairvoyance, telepathy, and artistic capacities not available to the conscious mind.
The sum total of secondary selves was conceived in those days as linked up
with a timeless, mythic big Self. William James expressed it by suggesting that

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

77

consciousness is split up into parts which are dissociated from one another,
nevertheless playing complementary roles. The sum of this complementarity
he considered to be the Self (James 1890). As the doors to the Beyond closed,
for these early researchers the mediums and their trance states became portals
into the Self. The entire sensibility was in line with older, magical Hermetic
traditions in which the one thing was considered to give birth to all dualities
and contradictions, where the notion of a unified Self, and dissociability went
hand-in-hand. Interestingly, this sensibility is mirrored again in Fairbairn
and Grotsteins work (1981), which revisions internal objects as lost images of
the self.
But what was it that had really been discovered? It was the mythopoetic
capacity of the psyche, its capacity to spin healing fictions, to retranscribe and
re-write memory and experience. The creative potential of dissociative states
of mind, working through the vehicle of mythopoetic thought, was a key for
Jung, a cornerstone he found in the black-mud tide of occultism before the
days of Freud. But the resurgence of interest in MPD at the end of this century
does not look primarily to the synthetic approach of Flournoy and Jung for its
foundation, but more to the approach of Janet and Freud, where dissociation
was conceived of as what interferes with integration and emergent processes,
what is not complementary but opposed to the Self. Currently, it is usually
considered to be caused by childhood trauma, to be a defence of the Self
engineered to protect its integrity, but which becomes entrenched and blocks
emergent processes. The destructive aspects of dissociation are the reason
narratives get stuck.
What has remained lost amid current ideas about dissociation is Flournoy
and Jungs differential interpretation of its creative, mythopoetic dimension,
that is to say its individuating function as a generator of new meanings in an
ongoing story of individual development. As Shamdasani points out, this had
been, and is, a simple and startling interpretation of dissociative phenomena,
an explanation which does not need to resort to causation by the dear departed,
spiritual entities, extraterrestrials, or even childhood traumata. As Jung stated
in relation to the constellation of the mandala and its relation to the creative
capacity of the psyche, all so-called causes become mere occasions (Jung
1953, para. 249). It is this aspect of dissociative phenomena which comes into
play when we try to listen to patients narratives less as repetition compulsions, and more as attempts at creating new psychological ground.
But all this teleology, as it was called, fell into the shadow of psychoanalysis, onto the fringes of discourse and legitimacy, into the mysticism and
theosophy projected onto the Jungian model. Jung had, in fact, been drawn initially toward magic and the occult, because he was onto the indispensability
of the emergent functions of mythopoesis, reconstruction and imagination for
psychological health. He understood the magical maxim: It is in the power of
the mind itself that spirits come and go, and magical works are done. But he
was reticent to acknowledge these roots, and as James Witzig (1982) points out,

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Sherry Salman

Jung (or more probably the biographers of Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

did not credit either Myers or Flournoys work in relation to his own later
ideas about the creative capacities of the psyche and their relation to symbols
of the Self.
This suppression has resulted in the occult backdrop to Jungs thinking
falling into our collective shadow, where many strange creatures and misconceptions have thrived, including recent criticism of Jungians for our occult
ambitions (Noll 1994). Much has been made about Jung as what he too regarded as at least his shadow the black magician, a self-serving manipulator
of minds and souls through his occult knowledge of the transformative potential of the mythopoetic psyche. But as it turns out, the ancient tools of magic,
imagination and mythopoesis which Jung indeed understood, have now
become the newly discovered fundamentals in many post-modern ideas about
the emergent nature of mind and psyche. These aspects of Jungs original vision
can be reclaimed as clinical contributions towards a post-modern understanding of the symbol of the Self as indeed a most magical source of personal
history.
Case material
I turn now to the case material as an example of the relationship between
dissociative states, the creative capacities of the psyche and symbols of the Self.
By dissociation I mean splits: split consciousness, double consciousness,
separate selves, subpersonalities, all there due either to the fragmenting effects
of trauma (Freud), or just there as part of a state of primary unintegration
(Winnicott; Jung), or part and parcel of the emergence of new psychological
capacities (Jung and the moderns). These autonomous dissociable splits, in
the form of personified complexes or archetypal affects, are reinforced and
regulated by projective identification. By projective identification I mean the
process of imaginally translocating dissociated splits into an object in order to
purposively regulate the split.
The inability to reconstruct experience and create new meaning, presumably
due to multiple splits, is acknowledged by all as a psychic catastrophe often
termed a black hole (Modell 1993, p. 7). This formulation was descriptive up
to a point, of my patient, a 45-year old woman. Her mother had been paranoid, abusive, and psychotic, and she came to treatment with many split-selves,
whose competing needs made her life an agony of fear, paralysis, and
archetypal fantasies. Initially, pre-Oedipal process was paramount, with
intense needs for mirroring and holding of her material. Through a narrowband controlling transference, she experienced an idealized mother-imago,
which although limiting in its exclusion of shadow elements, managed to
initiate her into a new world of psychological experience. Her life took a turn
for the better, but nevertheless it was striking how slowly her new experiences
actually reconstructed the old.

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Eventually the idealized and archetypal transference field opened up, however, into dissociation and projective identification. The timeless quality of the
previous sessions disappeared, and she became aware that she actually could
not remember previous sessions. She became paranoid, feared that therapy
was controlling her, that she was too dependent on me. Interestingly, a third
element had entered the personal transferential arena, a teacher with whom
she was studying. She became convinced that I was jealous of, and competitive
with this teacher, that she would have to choose between us, and that I would
never let her enjoy her new experience. As the dissociated envy and dependency were projected, the stakes rose: Should she terminate therapy in favour
of studying with her teacher, then come back to me when she wanted to?
Would I kill her for this?
I of course found myself having grave doubts about this teacher, alternating
between feeling identified with keeping her in treatment and punitively supporting her exit for the good of her ego-development. I felt victimized and
powerful, controlled and controlling. The confusing field of projective identification was in full swing. In my rational moments, I understood this field as
an attempt on her part to communicate the experience of her psychotic parent,
a creation of a kind of metaphor, an attempt to forge the previously missing
associative affective links to her dissociated experience that is, envy, hatred,
dependency, and fear. The persecution which had been kept in abeyance and
mitigated by the idealization was out.
In the midst of this phase of treatment she had a dream which was quite
startling. In the dream, she and I are in my office, in an uncomfortable session
as usual. But she is amazed to see another woman in the room, a mysterious,
numinous figure who is holding out in her hands a small, shining sphere, which
held both our reflections, and was obviously intended for us. The dream was
so powerful that I had a strong urge to look around the room! It did not,
however, immediately break up the confusing affective field.
I felt that the dream figure was in the tradition of a daimon, genius, or inner
companion, and that it embodied an aspect of the projective identification
associated with the Self. It was offering something helpful, like a medicine
in the form of a reflecting stone, and I wondered if in fact the spontaneous
gesture of the Winnicottian true self, the projective identification, was the
medicine, if it could be understood constructively by the analyst. The clinical
issue began to feel not only a matter of analysing an entrenched paranoidschizoid defence, or of assimilating the compensatory negative pole of the
Mother archetype, but also of witnessing and participating in an act of creation
profoundly related to wholeness, and expressed by the psyche in a numinous
symbol of the Self.
The reflecting stone, like a crystal ball, brought a third, archetypal element
into the transference field: an invitation to skrye the spirit vision (use an
object to enter a trance for the purpose of making a link to other worlds;
Regardie 1984) for, psychologically speaking, a different vision of the inner

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Sherry Salman

world. In the countertransference, my reflections on the projective identification were re-visioned accordingly, shifting from a vision of a defence to be
analysed or merely survived to that of a Self-process, the affects of which were
to be metabolized and contained creatively. In the world of participation
mystique and projective identification every relationship offers the possibility
of a sharing of essentials. The rituals involved link up personal allegory with
archetypal affects through a chain of archaic correspondences. The analysts
role in this linking, and in the sharing of essentials is crucial. The rituals of
projective identification are symbolic experiences, but are also specifically
concrete, and they cannot be replaced or omitted or abstracted from the
imagery in which they are expressed. This calls for the analysts presence in
the here-and-now: for the analyst to experience, metabolize, contain, and
eventually participate in re-writing the affective experience in the transference
field.
The fact that the tremendum of the lapis constellated within the context of
the shared dialogue of projective identification suggested that there was, at
least in part, a mythopoetic relationship between them, and that the lapis
could not be abstracted from this dialogue. But I wondered what facet of the
symbol of the Self it was. Amplification from alchemy tells us that there is a
special medicine which can help prepare the body for the initial separation of
the mind from the unio naturalis. The alchemists envisioned the medicine as a
physical and quintessential equivalent of the lapis, of the Self (Jung 1963,
para. 6778). The medicine was both concrete and symbolic at the same time,
and was healing because it was like the illness; it was, as portrayed in
the dream, a concrete expression of a symbolic process, as was the projective
identification.
This alchemical medicine had constellated in the analysis, and the initial separation of mind from body was now in process with the patient: the medicine
of projective identification was freeing the archetypal dimension from a
concrete life in the transference. Or put another way, disidentification from
archetypal affects was in process. This disidentification appeared as a spontaneous, emergent movement on the part of the psyche, reflected in a symbol of
the Self. However, this emergent movement took place, I believe of necessity,
within a transference field in which the metabolism of archetypal affects was
shared with the analyst in a living experience.
Interestingly, the symbol of the Self which appeared in the dream was not
primarily a compensatory symbol of the Self, expressing order or unification,
or even expressing a transcendent or redemptive sense of meaning. It did not
appear to be a concealed pole around which everything revolved. Neither
was it an image of the formation of the philosophers stone, or a hard-won
achievement of consciousness. In fact, these interpretations might have led into
further splitting on a number of levels, and away from the matter at hand.
But this didnt mean that there was no significant experience of the Self. The
luminous experience of meaning, felt by both of us, was in the emergence of

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

81

the patients unique psychological ground and reality, embedded in, not
abstracted from, the analytic dialogue in which it was born. The symbol of the
Self emerged concurrently with the process of re-categorization within the
transference field, in which the metabolizing and re-categorization of countertransference reactions played an important role. This sharing of essentials is
part and parcel of the creation of psychological territory from archetypal
wilderness in the pre-Oedipal field. The symbol of the Self which expressed
this was not primarily compensatory or redemptive, but rather related to
wholeness and meaning as a kind of marker of the moment when the archetypal and the human co-mingled and gave birth to psyche. In the words of
post-modern narrative theory: this was the moment the analysis yielded up her
story.
Conclusion
In Mysterium Coniunctionis, writing in relation to the symbolism of the Self,
Jung explicates a weird alchemical text which goes like this:
If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen
the pores of the earth, and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers
of wickedness.
(Jung 1963, para. 190)

In deep dissociated states which manifest in projective identification usually

neither reductive nor archetypal interpretations generally serve the process.
What seems necessary is a different sort of clinical dialogue, a full participation
in re-categorization and re-contextualization, a direct mythopoetic experience
of events and images, which is neither personal nor archetypal, but partakes
of both. Through the therapeutic drama of sharing, metabolizing, and reintegrating projective identifications, dissociated pieces of psyche were expressed
by establishing affective connections between them, between love and hate,
dependency and persecution. In the alchemical metaphor, this is a moistening
of the earth with its own water, reflected in a symbol of the Self.
Our health and viability as professionals and the soundness and creative
potential of our clinical model still depend on the notion of the Self and
the experience of wholeness. But an ordering and redemptive symbol of the
Self is not always to be found in the pre-individuation field, and it is certainly
difficult to maintain a reified image of a concealed pole, given what we
know about neurobiology, and about how consciousness and psyche actually
emerge. What I have proposed, in line with these recent formulations, is a
clarification of Jungs dream of totality as an emergent Self, which still
reflects an archetypal process and functions in the service of wholeness. But a
symbol of the Self expressing the emergence of psychological reality, and
embedded in the dialogue through which it was created, operates at all levels
of the developmental process. It is also compatible with what we know about

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Sherry Salman

82

dissociative phenomena, and the contributions of the archetypal school. These

strands of Jungs original occult vision have unfortunately unravelled and
split apart from the whole, one consequence of which has been to leave the Self
stranded in a transcendent dimension.
When working at early levels of process, integration is set into motion at the
archetypal rather than the ego level. The analyst has to help rewrite the archetypal dynamic expressed by the patient, by participating in sacrificial dramas
such as projective identification. Such sacrificial dramas seem to be the archetypal basis of the early transference, requiring the analyst to accept the role of
sacrificial victim and allow the projection onto and into oneself of the patients
affective experience and processing the urge to act-out into a deeper level of
meaning.
At subsequent levels of process, activation of the transcendent function is
the basis for a more developed transference. Both sacrificial dramas and the
transcendent function, however, may be expressions of the spontaneously
emerging Self. In the case I described, the crucial question was how to listen to
the patients psyche in a way which changed the narrative from being one more
instance of a persecutory repetition compulsion into a new story, a different
narrative? The early splittings needed to be held and recontextualized in the
transference, which is what allowed new psychological affective ground to be
claimed. This was the magic moment when the divine became human, when
archetypal affect became psychological experience, expressed by the psyche in
a luminous symbol of the Self: a transformation which seems to suggest the
magic of the Self in the pre-individuation field.

TRANSLATIONS

OF

ABSTRACT

Cet article explore la pertinence de lide du soi de Jung dans la psychologie proedipienne et pr-individuation. Se reliant des connaissances de la neurobiologie et des
thories rcentes sur la mmoire et la reconstruction narrative, lauteur propose une conception post-moderne du soi sapparentant ce que Jung a appel un rve de totalit.
Une telle conception du soi est diffrencie dune structure relie limage de royaut
ou dune imago dei, et est vue comme un aspect du fonctionnement psychique qui
se met en accord avec le sens qui emerge et le nouveau terrain psychique en train de
natre. Sont tablis des liens remontant aux premiers interts de Flournoy, William
James, et de la psychologie des profondeurs pour la tlologie, locculte et les capacits
cratrices de la psych.
Remettant jour cette tradition du mystre, le matriel clinique illustre le fait que des
narrations du soi sont prsentes dans des dynamiques pr-oedipiennes telles que la
dissociation et lidentification projective. Ces dynamiques sont comprises comme tant
non seulement des dfenses archaques, mais aussi comme des expressions mythopotiques et des mtaphores symboliques reconstitutives dun soi, plus dans son
mergence que dans son rle de surordonnement.

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Dissociation and the Self in the magical pre-Oedipal field

83

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Relevanz des Jungschen Selbstkonzepts im Bereich der prdipalen und pr-Individuations-Psychologie. Unter Einbeziehung von Daten aus der
Neurobiologie und neueren Theorien von Gedchtnis und narrativer Rekonstruktion
wird ein postmodernes Selbstkonzept vorgeschlagen hnlich dem, was Jung einen
Traum von der Ganzheit nannte. Ein solches Selbstkonzept ist abzugrenzen von einer
reifizierten Struktur oder einer deifizierten Imago; es wird als jener Aspekt psychologischen Funktionierens gesehen, der mit entstehenden Bedeutungen und der Geburt
neuen psychologischen Bodens im Einklang steht. Rckwrtige Verbindungen werden
hergestellt zu Flournoy, William James, und dem frhen Interesse der Tiefenpschologie
an Teleologie, dem Okkulten und den kreativen Eigenschaften der Psyche.
Indem klinisches Material illustriert, wie Narrative des Selbst in der prdipalen
Dynamik in Gestalt von Dissoziation und projektive Identifizierung vorliegen, werden
diese Geheimtraditionen auf den heutigen Stand gebracht. Diese Dynamik wird nicht
nur als primitive Abwehr begriffen, sondern als wiederherstellende symbolische Metaphern und mythopoetischer Ausdruck eines entstehenden, nicht eines bergeordneten
Selbst.

Questo scritto si occupa dellimportanza clinica che lidea del S ha allinterno della
psicologia che riguarda la fase pre-edipica e pre-individuativa. Utilizzando dati che
provengono dalla biologia e dalle recenti teore dela memoria e della ricostruzione narrativa, viene proposta una concezione post-moderna del S che pu essere assimilata
a ci che Jung chiam sogno di totalit. Tale concezione del S viene distinta da una
struttura reificata e da unimmagine divinizzata, ma rappresenta quellaspetto della
funzione psicologica che si lega a significat emergenti e al sorgere di un nuovo terreno
psicologico. Vengono fatti collegamenti con Flournoy, con William James e con i primi
interessi della psicologia del profondo nei confronti della teleologia, dellocculto e delle
capacit creative della psiche.
Risalendo fino a questa tradizione del misterioso, il materiale clinico mostra come
manifestazioni del S siano presenti in certe dinamiche pre-edipiche quali la dissociazione e lidentificazione proiettiva. Tali dinamiche sono considerate non solo come
difese primarie ma anche come metafore simboliche costruttive e come espressioni
mitopoietiche di un S emergente pi che di un S sovraordinato.

Este escrito explora la relevancia clnica de las ideas de Jung sobre el Self en la
psicologa pre-Edpica y de pre-individuacin. Incorporando datos de la neurobiologa
y teoras recientes sobre la memoria y la reconstruccin narrativa, un concepto postmodernista se propone como anlogo a aquello que Jung denomin un sueo de
totalidad. Tal concepcin del Self debe ser distinguida de una abstraccin estructural
o de una imago deificada, y es considerada como es aspecto del funcionamiento psicolgico armnico con significados emergentes, y con el nacimiento de un nuevo terreno
psicolgico. Se establecen conexiones con las ideas de Flournoy, de William James, y
los tempranos intereses de la psicologa profunda en la teleologa, lo oculto y las
capacidades creativas de la psique.
Poniendo al da esta tradicin de inters por el misterio, el material clnico ilustra
como algunas narrativas del Self estn presentes en dinmicas pre-Edpicas como la
disociacin y la identificacin proyectiva. Estas dinmicas son entendidas no solo como

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84

Sherry Salman

defensas primitivas sino como metforas simblicas reconstitutivas y expresiones

mitopoyticas de un emergente, ms que como expresiones de un Self sobreordenante.

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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Conference
of Jungian Analysts in New York in 1996. My thanks to John Beebe, Gary
Brown, Don Kalsched and Laurel Morris for their critiques and contributions
to that manuscript.

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