Pathologizing
Iona Miller, ©2011
Entanglement and the Chaotic Field in the Fusion Complex
"Generally,complexes can cause one to encounter the numinosum in its negative form.With the Fusional Complex the negative numinosum is expecially tenacious and difficult to transform,manifesting in the extreme anxiety accompanying
separation of any kind...One often tends to find a safe harbor from the deeper anxieties of the negative numinosum by dissociating from awareness of the opposing fusional pull towards objects through an AUTISTIC-like (sottolineo
somile all'autistico) flight from communication.This dissociation generally takes the form of extreme mind-body splitting and retreat into passive fantasy. However,meeting the disorganizong energy of the archetype consciously can often
turn it into its positive form,i.e.,awe,mystery,love,beauty and compassion". :The activation seems connected to the quality of psychic life -- for example a creative idea or a development of the ego, of a capcity to think or feel, or of a self and associated new identity -- leaving the timeless realm of the unconscious and entering life in space or time. The transition always creates disorder, and that disorderin turn enlivens the fusional complex."--Nathan Schwartz-Salant,The black nightgown.The fusional complex and the unlived life, Chiron Publications,2007
The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with another person in our bodiies.
Often, we tend to avoid it as the dreaded traumatic state of fear of the void, a nothingness, a bottomless pit, or demonic force -- the instabilities in ourself or another or the boundless inchoate flux of impossible opposites. Cultures are also suceptible to it at the collective level. It is a constant companion in the creative as well as spiritual transformative life.
The embodiment of any new form of consciousness and its associated self image comes in this challenging manner. But such powerlessness and nothingness is the anxiety-provoking inexorable pull of the void, which leads to dissociation as a defense against letting go. Atempts to meet the chaos, rather than dissociate lead to change. Even when the numinous is negative it carries the sacredness of the archetype. We learn to lean into the field and feel it's chaos without imposing premature order.
The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity that brings anxiety. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it. It is never conveyed by interpretation, but only by experiential perception. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge as a living reality. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement from the timeless into temporal existence is a creative passage. With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The field becomes the focus.
The Fusional Complex is like the Renaissance alchemists' prima materia, said to be vile and worthless, ubiquitous and easily discarded, and yet essential for the creation of that most highly prized goal of the alchemical opus: the lapis, a symbol of the self. Like the prima materia, the Fusional Complex is found everywhere--in addiction and codependency, in masochistic submissions that sacrifice essence and potential, in the dark corners of relationships that are fixed in old patterns and simmer in contempt and resentment, and in the array of the character disorders. Because it generally goes unseen, however, these disorders do not transform.
Through the theory of the Fusional Complex, and with the non-ordinary perception that detects it, we can learn to make transformative discoveries that are rarely possible through usual analytic procedures. And through the cultural and individual examples of The Black Nightgown, we will see that the Fusional Complex is the doorway through which any new form of consciousness and associated self "the structure that bestows a sense of identity and order within human life" must pass.
AT THE EDGE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF RELATEDNESS.Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Ph.D.
The Fusional Complex in psychotherapy: The opposition between the fusional pull towards an object and the simultaneous impossibility of communicating with it, is characterized by the logically impossible constellation A = -A. This situation is akin to the Duck-Rabbit image used by Wittgenstein and others, notably Malcolm Bull, and the opposites are also experienced within the discontinuity of a psychic container with the topology of the Klein Bottle, as illustrated in the work of Steven Rosen. When a field between two people is characterized by these opposites, the very possibility of relatedness is called into question. The field of the Fusional Complex threatens with chaotic states, and the analyst's countertransference reactions are often severe, and include physical and psychic distress. Commonly, the analysand is experienced as abject, and the analyst often dissociates and becomes reactive in various ways, and generally ceases functioning as an analyst. This poses severe ethical problems, and the work of Emanuel Levinas, especially his "Otherwise Than Being," will be called upon to reflect upon this clinical and ethical issue.
Pathologizing
Jung spoke of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. We can usually deploy three of the them, but the fourth falls into our shadow. The inferior function is often where we act out any pathological tendencies. It has been called “the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality.” Our new attitudes and undiscovered self also emerge from this door, as well as the unexpected. Reality is always coming through an archtypal lens, a point of view, a language -- a fantasy.
Hillman warns there may well be more symptoms and psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life--a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death. He cautions, "reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one's spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness." He feels, "The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality."
The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea's edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his "gut experiences" and "emotional problems"; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to "ways of coping"; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul's depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks. (Hillman)
Compounding the typological issue of the inferior function is the fact that some people have recognized or unrecognized personality disorders, which characterize their beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Among these are toxic narcissism (NPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), oppositional or antisocial personality, avoidant and dependant types, obsessive-compulsive (OCD), schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic, paranoid, passive-aggressive and self-defeating types, etc.
The severity of the disorder amplifies the severity of psychosocial stressors. Even sub-clinical tendencies toward these disorders can color the shadow behavior of an individual. Issues surrounding dependency, manipulation/control, and competition are magnified. These disorders run like fault lines, or paths of least resistence, through the psyche forming the underlying matrix of personality, rather than being a part of it.
All types can be subject to normal neurosis, pathologizing, mood disorders, personality disorders or mental illness, amplifying the problem areas of the type and characterizing the way they are acted out in acute events and enduring circumstances. They may be acted-in (denial, introjection, somatization, implosion) on the self or acted out (predation, projection, manipulation, power trips, sociopathy) in the personal, marital, social, or professional worlds.
Trances People Live
Identity is a characteristic of the primitive mentality and the real foundation of participation mystique, which is nothing but a relic of the infantile non-differentiation of subject and object, the primordial unconscious state. The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. Any individual's existential condition is just a typical variation on the collective themes of the eternal human condition. Our particular individuality emerges from a collective mythic existence.
Individuals may have an unconscious identity with some era, person, group, or object. Participation mystique means a mystical connection in which one cannot clearly distinguish self from other, bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity or transference. Unfortunately, that is tantamount to giving part of yourself away. It is the mostly unconscious instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy and mythic emanations leading to literalisms and concretism, the attempt to turn the imaginal into events.
Mythological motifs project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons. Everything unconscious about ourselves is projected. When the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious is blurred, either intentionally or unintentionally, the ego has a hard time differentiating between what belongs to itself and what belongs to the other. The two become identified with each other.
When a projection is strongly fixated, it may be next to impossible to separate one’s projected material from the person who is carrying the projection. Whether it is a person or an object, suddenly, all those things outside become carriers, unconsciously, of what resides within. Such illusory states left unconscious turn toxic and consuming. Denial leaves room for serious errors of fact. It is a warning against extreme conscious attitudes which inevitably get compensated by the Shadow. In the process Jung termed enantiodromia, projections can break or revert into their opposites as psyche seeks to equilibriate or rebalance itself.
Entanglement and the Chaotic Field in the Fusion Complex
"Generally,complexes can cause one to encounter the numinosum in its negative form.With the Fusional Complex the negative numinosum is expecially tenacious and difficult to transform,manifesting in the extreme anxiety accompanying
separation of any kind...One often tends to find a safe harbor from the deeper anxieties of the negative numinosum by dissociating from awareness of the opposing fusional pull towards objects through an AUTISTIC-like (sottolineo
somile all'autistico) flight from communication.This dissociation generally takes the form of extreme mind-body splitting and retreat into passive fantasy. However,meeting the disorganizong energy of the archetype consciously can often
turn it into its positive form,i.e.,awe,mystery,love,beauty and compassion". :The activation seems connected to the quality of psychic life -- for example a creative idea or a development of the ego, of a capcity to think or feel, or of a self and associated new identity -- leaving the timeless realm of the unconscious and entering life in space or time. The transition always creates disorder, and that disorderin turn enlivens the fusional complex."--Nathan Schwartz-Salant,The black nightgown.The fusional complex and the unlived life, Chiron Publications,2007
The closer we come to the deep core of any archetypal experience the more the numinous effect increases, as a confrontation with a power not of this world. The fusional field is invisible to normal perception but contains a welter of unprocessed information. The fusional complex is an archetypal pattern that organizes life between the known and the unknown. We rarely attend to the deep experiential field we experience with another person in our bodiies.
Often, we tend to avoid it as the dreaded traumatic state of fear of the void, a nothingness, a bottomless pit, or demonic force -- the instabilities in ourself or another or the boundless inchoate flux of impossible opposites. Cultures are also suceptible to it at the collective level. It is a constant companion in the creative as well as spiritual transformative life.
The embodiment of any new form of consciousness and its associated self image comes in this challenging manner. But such powerlessness and nothingness is the anxiety-provoking inexorable pull of the void, which leads to dissociation as a defense against letting go. Atempts to meet the chaos, rather than dissociate lead to change. Even when the numinous is negative it carries the sacredness of the archetype. We learn to lean into the field and feel it's chaos without imposing premature order.
The field is a paradox of fusion and distance, an impossible simultaneity that brings anxiety. We need to practice seeing the field, as well as seeing into and through it. It is never conveyed by interpretation, but only by experiential perception. Non-ordinary perception evolves through kinesthetic perception. It calms the chaos of the transition and allows the new self to emerge as a living reality. We have to maintain faith in the process. Movement from the timeless into temporal existence is a creative passage. With a sense of containment within a higher dimensional field, the opposites reconcile and new potential is created. The field becomes the focus.
The Fusional Complex is like the Renaissance alchemists' prima materia, said to be vile and worthless, ubiquitous and easily discarded, and yet essential for the creation of that most highly prized goal of the alchemical opus: the lapis, a symbol of the self. Like the prima materia, the Fusional Complex is found everywhere--in addiction and codependency, in masochistic submissions that sacrifice essence and potential, in the dark corners of relationships that are fixed in old patterns and simmer in contempt and resentment, and in the array of the character disorders. Because it generally goes unseen, however, these disorders do not transform.
Through the theory of the Fusional Complex, and with the non-ordinary perception that detects it, we can learn to make transformative discoveries that are rarely possible through usual analytic procedures. And through the cultural and individual examples of The Black Nightgown, we will see that the Fusional Complex is the doorway through which any new form of consciousness and associated self "the structure that bestows a sense of identity and order within human life" must pass.
AT THE EDGE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF RELATEDNESS.Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Ph.D.
The Fusional Complex in psychotherapy: The opposition between the fusional pull towards an object and the simultaneous impossibility of communicating with it, is characterized by the logically impossible constellation A = -A. This situation is akin to the Duck-Rabbit image used by Wittgenstein and others, notably Malcolm Bull, and the opposites are also experienced within the discontinuity of a psychic container with the topology of the Klein Bottle, as illustrated in the work of Steven Rosen. When a field between two people is characterized by these opposites, the very possibility of relatedness is called into question. The field of the Fusional Complex threatens with chaotic states, and the analyst's countertransference reactions are often severe, and include physical and psychic distress. Commonly, the analysand is experienced as abject, and the analyst often dissociates and becomes reactive in various ways, and generally ceases functioning as an analyst. This poses severe ethical problems, and the work of Emanuel Levinas, especially his "Otherwise Than Being," will be called upon to reflect upon this clinical and ethical issue.
Pathologizing
Jung spoke of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. We can usually deploy three of the them, but the fourth falls into our shadow. The inferior function is often where we act out any pathological tendencies. It has been called “the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality.” Our new attitudes and undiscovered self also emerge from this door, as well as the unexpected. Reality is always coming through an archtypal lens, a point of view, a language -- a fantasy.
Hillman warns there may well be more symptoms and psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life--a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death. He cautions, "reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one's spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness." He feels, "The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality."
The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea's edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his "gut experiences" and "emotional problems"; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to "ways of coping"; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul's depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks. (Hillman)
Compounding the typological issue of the inferior function is the fact that some people have recognized or unrecognized personality disorders, which characterize their beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Among these are toxic narcissism (NPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), oppositional or antisocial personality, avoidant and dependant types, obsessive-compulsive (OCD), schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic, paranoid, passive-aggressive and self-defeating types, etc.
The severity of the disorder amplifies the severity of psychosocial stressors. Even sub-clinical tendencies toward these disorders can color the shadow behavior of an individual. Issues surrounding dependency, manipulation/control, and competition are magnified. These disorders run like fault lines, or paths of least resistence, through the psyche forming the underlying matrix of personality, rather than being a part of it.
All types can be subject to normal neurosis, pathologizing, mood disorders, personality disorders or mental illness, amplifying the problem areas of the type and characterizing the way they are acted out in acute events and enduring circumstances. They may be acted-in (denial, introjection, somatization, implosion) on the self or acted out (predation, projection, manipulation, power trips, sociopathy) in the personal, marital, social, or professional worlds.
Trances People Live
Identity is a characteristic of the primitive mentality and the real foundation of participation mystique, which is nothing but a relic of the infantile non-differentiation of subject and object, the primordial unconscious state. The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. Any individual's existential condition is just a typical variation on the collective themes of the eternal human condition. Our particular individuality emerges from a collective mythic existence.
Individuals may have an unconscious identity with some era, person, group, or object. Participation mystique means a mystical connection in which one cannot clearly distinguish self from other, bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity or transference. Unfortunately, that is tantamount to giving part of yourself away. It is the mostly unconscious instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy and mythic emanations leading to literalisms and concretism, the attempt to turn the imaginal into events.
Mythological motifs project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons. Everything unconscious about ourselves is projected. When the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious is blurred, either intentionally or unintentionally, the ego has a hard time differentiating between what belongs to itself and what belongs to the other. The two become identified with each other.
When a projection is strongly fixated, it may be next to impossible to separate one’s projected material from the person who is carrying the projection. Whether it is a person or an object, suddenly, all those things outside become carriers, unconsciously, of what resides within. Such illusory states left unconscious turn toxic and consuming. Denial leaves room for serious errors of fact. It is a warning against extreme conscious attitudes which inevitably get compensated by the Shadow. In the process Jung termed enantiodromia, projections can break or revert into their opposites as psyche seeks to equilibriate or rebalance itself.
Culture Vultures
Rightly or wrongly, every phenomena is subject to being named, labelled and interpreted, including the sense of self as the biological basis of consciousness. In the struggle to narrate its experience, the mind tends to label phenomena and to spontaneously generate ideation and imaginally fill in the gaps in awareness. Subcultures are dynamic marketplaces for knowledge construction, authenticating and authorizing claims within an overall belief structure. Such authority structures may be benign, toxic, exploitive or malignant.
It's only a small step from known psychological mechanisms that generate illusions to perceiving an entity 'out there' with the archetypal characteristics of a personality - e.g. the pater noster or any 'other', the Not-I, who interacts with us in the way we interact morally with others. This is where social selection really favors mirror neurons that can produce neurological tricks we interpret subjectively, according to our beliefs.
Social order is organized around both faulty and plausible knowledge of reality. Ritual is a creative process used to construct meaning worlds. But they don't reliably produce intuitive experience with consensual meaning. Most often such experience and interpretations are idiosyncratic, cannot be validated, and are rooted purely in beliefs as assumed truths.
Most of this retrieved esoteric knowledge reflects superstitious ideas arising prior to the seventeenth century. Archaic consciousness of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic lies buried within us, but to try to relive them today may mean being less than wholly present now. Such beliefs effectively 'teleport' one back in time into less sophisticated modes of ideation.
In archaic identity there is no differentiation between object and subject and no distinction between lived experience and what the subject believes he or she perceives about the world. Perceptual competence is self-assessed in grandiose terms without cognitive and emotional balance. Credibility is conferred by the untutored crowd based on otherwise unworthy persons, with charisma and emotional appeal. Orthodoxy of interpretation gives rise to organizations.
The recognition and withdrawal of projections usually provokes a state of disenchantment or, conversely, elation and inflation of the ego. However, these processes can also open the way to a practice of the symbolic life and of human relations without too much alienation or mystification in the therapeutic process. This is a ‘knowing’ of the things of life and their inherent mysteries through the experience of the mundane as well as the spiritual. It is an immersion in the mysteries of nature and the seeking of knowledge through mystical participation.
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Iona Miller, ©2011
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