October 1999 Newsletter Archive
Terrill L. Gibson, October, 1999
Incest and Imagination written by Terrill L. Gibson Ph.D. is a chapter excerpted from Psyche and Family: Jungian Applications to Family Therapy edited by Laura S. Dodson & Terrill L. Gibson. Used by permission of the author and publisher.
Copyright © 1996 by Chiron Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Chiron Publications, 400 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091.
Incest and Imagination Intergenerational Family Crisis and Transformation in Jungian Analysis
The family is the purest vessel of our destiny. More than the temenos of analysis, the sacraments of religion, the most transcendent of experiences, it is family that births us, develops us, procreates us, and buries us. We can never be more or less to life than what has been bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Regardless of the pain and travail it may create for us, family is the grail within which the sacred nectar of our physical and psychic DNA is carried from the lips and genitals of one generation to the next.
With family being so essential, it is puzzling to note its near absence from our analytical literature and practice. Most of the brief citations for family in the index to Jung's Collected Works are metaphorical or allegorical. Beyond the occasional work of Eleanor Bertine (1992), Laura Dodson (1983), Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig (1986), Soren Ekstrom (1988), Renos Papadopoulos (1989-90), Hal Stone (1989), or Polly Young-Eisendrath (1984), little of any real analytical or archetypal depth has been written on this important theme. The biological family, the physical manifestations of family, the family of sweat and egg and sperm and tears, is a ghostlike specter in our tradition.
This paper presents a two-part discussion of this dilemma and its implications for our practice. First, some tentative avenues for a renewing integration of family process within analysis are offered, as well as reflections on some of the avoidances and prejudices which have prevented this integration. The central importance of the family incest drama (as a positive, mythic force of development and not just a literal, criminal evil) will be explored. Secondly, some of the possible modifications and examples of technique which might result from such a theoretical coniunctio are suggested.
The Family as the Essential Psychospiritual Initiatory Vessel
When we tell stories about the family without judgment and without instant analysis. . . family history is transformed into myth. Whether we know it or not, our ideas about the family are rooted in the ways we imagine the family. That personal family, which seems so concrete, is always an imaginal entity. Part of our alchemical work with soul is to extract myth from the hard details of family history and memory on the principle that increase of imagination is always increase in soul. -Moore 1992, 32The family is where the imagination seeds. It is the environmental release mechanism for the activation and unfolding of the imaginal soul within us at birth. The hovering, brooding, incessant nurturing of the bio-archetypal Mother and Father validates not only the body and its awakening sensorium but also, much more profoundly, the psyche and its awakening spirit-eros. The mediation of the family helps us see not just the phenomenal outer world, but the noumenal inner world as well.
The central theme of this essay is that the primary imaginal lens of psychic development stimulated by this family process is the incest dynamic. Incest is an unavoidable imaginal instigator of soul-process in the human psyche. In order not only to live but to thrive, the psyche must desire life. It must yearn and even suffer after this life, for suffering is the most potent chemical catalyst of desire -- the desire for personalized meaning and connection and place in this world. Desire is awakened by the gleam in the Other's Mothering/Fathering Eye. That gleam, and its inter-penetrative arousal of our primary soul-self, is our first sexual experience, our first orgasm of total, embodied personhood (Lacan 1977). It is an experience of complete, holistic orgasm where the mystery of being both fully in this world and yet transcendentally assured of a continuity of being beyond this world is mediated. It is a moment primordially incestuous -- for the desire is complete and all-consuming for both beloved infant and the beloving Other.
But it must be a developmentally appropriate and healthy incest which is mediated. Such an incest can differentiate between imaginal and literal incest. Only a parent who has been well and appropriately beloved in childhood can so love appropriately in adulthood. Such a parent has no need for the infant to hold him as beloved. Such a parent does not need to literalize her love for her child. They can live in the incest-driven symbiosis of mutual attraction, willing to absorb the devouring of the physical and emotional feeding of the infant. They can incorporate these often envious infant gluttonies, and can lovingly, empathically guide the child without fear or anger. They are so aware of an autonomous, fully alive, independent infant self that they can gently make this incestuous sacrifice without reactivity or rancor.
This essay advocates the inherent necessity and creativity of this psychological incest process. It sees psychotherapy and analysis as the alchemical krater in which to re-arouse slumbering incestuous dragons and to reinvoke their healing possibilities.
Family as Initiatory Temenos: Finding a Safe, Aesthetic Place for Redemptive Suffering
Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is also quite as horrible. --Jung 1963, 58Analytical psychology is so diverse that generalizations about our commonly held presuppositions are increasingly difficult (Samuels 1985; Stein 1982). But all the varying factions of practice seem to hold a central commitment to the importance of the container of therapy, the temenos, the vas bene secum. That the psyche must feel safely "held" (most often but not necessarily a long-term process) by a trusted guardian seems indisputable. I know of no intentionally brief therapists among Jungians. The long-term provision, securing, and holding of the therapeutic frame seems a universally axial standard of practice in our ranks. The how of that technology may be in dispute, but not its centrality.
In the natural world, two such organically occurring containers exist -- the archetypal family and connection to the biological Self. Analysis exists not to transplant these vessels but to enhance their presence. In a dualist culture, such an artificial invention as analysis seems to be a necessary measure to assure memory of and competent access to both these ancient thresholds of psychic maturation.
Analytical and archetypal psychologies make an undisputed contribution to the engagement of the first of these thresholds. Though our appreciation for, description of, and utilization of the treasures of the archetypal Self may be lively debated (Hall and Young-Eisendrath 1988), its manifest and animated presence in our lives and work is incontrovertible.
Why, then, this puzzling absence of recognition of, or even reference to, family in our work? Why the troubling lack of family involvement and resource? The psyche is inherently tribal. The vast corpus of the cross-cultural investigations of, for example, Campbell (1988) or Eliade (1978) makes this clear. The family first receives the archetypal projections of the emergent Self. The family is the necessary catalyst for the developmental appearance, sequencing, and empowering of these archetypal media both biologically and psychospiritually. To do analysis without the family, then, seems a bit like attempting to blow glass without fire. The gestures and procedures may all be precise, but the annealing catalyst of the process is absent.
Of course, the family presence is pervasive in the analytical process. Patients dream of their families' interactions, reactions, and abreactions to their analytical process every night. Murray Bowen, a psychoanalytically trained pioneer of modern family therapies, often saw individuals alone -- profoundly aware, at the same time, that he was always doing family therapy (Bowen 1981). The family -- the whole family, including all of the ancestors -- is always in our offices in every moment of analytic exchange. We cannot escape family and its influence in our practice. Family broods over us from conception until death; family midwives the soul; family makes or breaks an analytical endeavor. We have no choice in involving or excluding the family in our therapies. As with all else in our work, we can only chose to receive and interact with family consciously or unconsciously.
Jungian psychology at its best and worst is a theatrical psychology. It is a psychology with a public nimbus around its head, a therapy of perceived pizzazz and panache. It is a therapy of the Big Event, the Big Dream, the theophanies of the archetypal world. Sadly, it is also a therapy usually reserved for the culturally and materially elite because of its often ominous price tag.
This image is unfortunate and destructive. I want a Jungian psychology of the marketplace, of the everyday. I want an archetypal world without fancy packaging and marketing. I want dreams of bowels and flesh -- psychic encounters in the vernacular. If this everyday is not addressed, it will consume us and destroy us. For the everyday is the most potent container of psyche's essence:
Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever -- every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we're depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world. (Hillman 1992, 5)This "real" world is home to Hillman's anima mundi -- the imaginal realm where real world spirit regains its zest and vision. The real world must be addressed and embraced at the core of therapy's ponderings and sufferings after transformation. In the everyday, the best of the "unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative highly intentional and necessary" archetypal world of both the "noumenal" and the "phenomenal" manifests itself (Moore 1992, 25-32; Hillman 1992, 13). And the best of the everyday is our tribal, familial context.
The Ego-Self-Other Axis: In the Psyche, All Roads Lead Back Home
We bring the dysfunctions of family into the therapy room as problems to be solved or as explanations for current difficulties because intuitively we know that the family is one of the chief abodes of the soul. . . . If we were to observe the soul in the family by honoring its stories and by not running away from its shadow, then we might not feel so inescapably determined by family influences. . . . [A] renewed entry into the family, embracing what has previously been denied, often leads to an unexpected alchemy in which even the most difficult family relationships shift enough to make a significant difference... . Family history is transformed into myth. --Moore 1992, 25-32The ego-Self axis construct has become one of the favorite theoretical shorthands for Jungians in recent years (Edinger 1972, 73). Along with the complex, the opposites, and individuation itself, the ego-Self axis construct has become a significant organizing cluster of considerable power, with all sorts of conscious and unconscious associations. Connotations of development, of depth, of integration, of upper and lower -- much of the best of Jung's original vision into the prospective functions of the psyche -- are amply and respectfully echoed in this felicitous concept. It has become a term both conceptually rich and methodologically useful. But it lacks breadth. The metaphor insinuates and explores the vertical, physio-spatial dimensions of top-to-bottom, heaven-to- earth, psyche-to-soma. But it excludes the horizontal aspects of our companionate, communal, earthly existence. It precludes reference to the tribe, the family, the everyday. It extends the Jungian (and often elitist and solipsistic) metaphor of the individual mining the infinite resources of his her/his own psychic ore shaft, alone, in the pure uncontaminated wilderness of the individuating quest.
Where is the Other in this paradigm -- both the everyday relational other and the extraordinary, but relationally beloved Divine Other? I suggest expanding the metaphor to a trinitarian ego-Self-Other image. For psychic work really demands a covenant with all three corners of the pyramid of psyche -- the ego, the Self, and the Other. All are animated, sentient, contracting partners in the covenantal dialogue and commitment to the individuating project. All three have a profound investment in the outcome of the conversation and contracting an outcome which affects the future health and development of each.
Family is the most prominent landmark on the horizontal plane of relational otherness. Family mediates this world and its essential, phenomenal reality for both the ego and the Self. Family can enhance or dampen, devastatingly, our interaction with this dimension of psyche. How, then, best creatively to anchor the individual in this sea of Otherness within which he or she swims psychospiritually?
The Object Relational Coniunctio
Thus attention to the depths of psyche draws us into the open outside world as much as it draws us down into the personal darkness of our personal experience. It pulls us toward other people and involvement in their lives as much as it withdraws us from them into pondering the images of a dream or the fantasies that arise from meditation. --Ulanov 1986, 91In my practice, I increasingly feel that analysis is incomplete until patients have grounded their work back into their families of origin and procreation (terms used by family theorists to describe one's birth family and one's marital or current relational family). I have found a useful weld between work done by what are now known as the intergenerational family therapists and Jungian analysts. It is interesting to me that, in the past several decades, both movements have been accelerating their approach to each other through the medium of a reassessed and enhanced object relations and self theory. Both schools exhibit a robust interest in the works of Kohut, Winnicott, Klein, Fairbairn, Sullivan, Mahler -- all theorists who have noticed and reflected upon the profound impact of early family life-generated artifacts and imagoes in the formation of the ego-Self-Other synthesis (see esp., Framo 1992, 111-28; M. Stein 1982, 68-85).A relationship arrives de novo and lasts forever~ --Carl Whitaker~ in Neill and Knis kern 1982, 116
No one questions the profound impact the object relations school has had upon the development of the analytical psychology movement. Many other traditional and innovative mental health movements have tapped into the same pragmatic reservoir of dynamic, structural, and interactive practice wisdom. The family therapy movement has been especially activated by object relational thinking in the past decade; their participation has effected substantial and elegant reformations of basic theory and approach. Across the object relational "bridge," Jungian analysts and family systems theorists can most readily meet and embrace each other (Slipp 1984).
Key to both systemic object relational and Jungian world-views is a recent reinvigoration of transference conceptualizations and -- most importantly -- methodologies. However, the trick in relational uses of this very fertile depth phenomenon is the aiming and plotting of the therapeutic trajectory. In intense, individual work, that trajectory is always low-arched and immediate -- enfolded in the projections and projective identifications of the analyst/analysand container. It is more concentrated, focused, and, in that way, somehow more relaxed and controlled. The cathartic intensity can build and implode/explode according to the cycles discovered in the analytic process.
Systemic transference, though rooted in the same individually mediated archetypal powers, possesses a higher arched, more diffuse, less contained trajectory. It is higher arched because it has the lift and propulsion of so many participants, all crowding onto the same therapeutic launch pad. Transferential explosives are ignited and potentially blown sky-high in such an intense environment.
In fact, the best wizards of systemic therapy (Haley, Mmuchin, Whitaker, and Papp, for instance) look for ways to orchestrate and creatively trigger such propulsiveness (see esp., Gurman and Kniskern 1981, 1991; Nichols 1984). Whereas, in individual work, the therapist seeks to be the target and co-author of the projective and transference processes, in systemic work the therapist seeks more to appreciate, direct, and monitor the process. Therapists still participate; no one can avoid being projectively absorbed, as the alchemists have taught us, but it is not so personally arresting and consequential. The therapist notes and excites the transference realities; once these realities are noted and activated, the therapist returns them to the family system field, to blend them with the family's communal transferences. The therapist provokes and stands back, letting the system incubate its own transformative alternatives.
Unlike an analyst working with an individual, the family therapist may never have the pleasure of co-experiencing, in the same time and space frame, the transformative fruits of this colabor with the family. Rather, the family therapist artfully seeds the system and sends it home, where the real, reabsorbed transference fruit is digested within the more relaxed and organic developmental cycles of ongoing family life.
Comingled and implicated with the transference mechanism is another core integrative concept -- projective identification. However, it is a projective identification cast in the broader and bolder reconfigurations of recent years. Melanie Klein's original elaborations of nearly five decades ago have undergone impressive new theoretical adjustments. Among depth theorists, for example, Schwartz-Salant plays provocatively with this concept in his formulations on the "subtle-body couple" concept (1988). Among systemicists, the Scharff team emphasizes the "real-relational-world" dynamics of the concept (as opposed to its intrasubjective stress in the psychoanalytic literature) as it functions to bring both madness and meaning to relationship. Jill Scharff brilliantly and succinctly observes:
I conclude that, in the family context, multiple individual processes governed by shared unconscious assumptions about family life eventually lead to the identification of parts of family experience inside individual personalities. At the same time, the intrapsychic situation is projected onto the intrafamilial group unconscious. An individual is selected as host for, or object for projection of, the disavowed parts of the central self of the family. In healthy families the host role rotates among the members, but when projective identification focuses and fixes on one member, a pathological situation has arisen, with an index person standing for a family group problem in metabolizing unwanted parts of the family group unconscious. (1992, 37-8)Such a comprehensive merger of theoretical fields opens up a new universe of dialogue about the intrapsychic and interpersonal dimensions of the therapeutic process. In fact, analysis helps a person indexed as a static, "scapegoated" host to call upon personal and archetypal resources to permit a shift not just of intrapsychic position but of interpersonal position as well. Analysis propels individual and family complex rigidities and pathologies into new, more resilient and functional configurations. There is broadened analytic interest in the object relational way we literally get under each other's psychic skin through family inter-experience. Therapeutically, what results is what Framo describes as a "re-contouring of internal objects," and a reanimation of the phenomenally "real" outer family. The outer family frequently has become listless and defeated under the often decades-long, relentless droning of these ancient introjectively and projectively identified voices of despair and pain (Framo 1992, 117, 119).
Incest and Triangulation
A family is like a gun. If you point it in the wrong direction somebody is going to get killed. --Matthew Slaughter character in Hal Hartley's film, TrustNow that we have an archetypal model of family systems operation, and a developmental, object relations image of this process moving across the life cycle, how can we express the catalytic activator of this process? Again, the universal and unavoidable incest dynamic fills this activator role well. An interesting, almost provocative, operational parallel exists between Jung's notion of the complex and the intergenerationalist's insight into triangulation. For both theory structures, the crucial conceptual hinge is the dynamic of psychological incest. Increasingly, the perspective is that psychological incest and its developmental absorption and transformation will come to be seen as primary in our psychotherapeutic culture -- more primary even than gender in the process of identity formation and individuation.It is not incestuous cohabitation that is desired but rebirth. --Jung, quoted in R. Stein 1973, 32
Triangulation is one of the most universally accepted theoretical concepts in the systemic therapies. It was "discovered," almost simultaneously, in a number of independent research and treatment facilities across the United States in the 1950s. But it was Murray Bowen who gave triangulation its most widely accepted orthodox description and application (Bowen 1978, 238-9, 273-6; Kerr and Bowen 1988, 134-62). The classical definition of triangulation is the way a weaker-resourced, third-person "scapegoat" is co-opted when a relational dyad develops a threatening instability. A common example is of a marital couple at a severe intimacy impasse, reaching across generations to one of their children and "triangling" that child as a deflector and dissipator of marital despair.
For example, mother teaches high school during the day and is a city councilwoman at night. Father is left at home evenings, alone with the responsibility of child care and home maintenance. He feels increasingly lonely and resentful. He attempts to entice mother sexually when she comes home late; she says she is too tired for sexual play. He flies into a rage and threatens divorce. Mother flees their bedroom and sleeps with her two oldest daughters. Next week their oldest daughter, thirteen years old, is found intoxicated with two boys in an alley in a high crime district of town. The parents pick up their daughter up at the juvenile receiving center, take her home, and then berate her shameful behavior. The parents have successfully, and unconsciously, triangulated and deflected/projected their relational impasse upon their scapegoated daughter.
This inter-generational "perverse triangle" (Gurman and Kniskern 1981, 279) is a very compelling construct -- inherently unstable, fluid, and, most essentially, unavoidable. After his early years of recognition of and fascination with family triangulation patterns, Bowen went to Jane Goodall's African research station to watch primates in their natural jungle habitat:
I just sat up in those trees watching those monkeys through binoculars with Jane and was amazed to discover that monkeys triangulate just like humans -- the whole damn mammal world triangulates it would seem. Amazing. (Bowen 1981)Bowen's view of this ontogenetic, mammalian triangle is pro- found. The triangle is a major adaptational safety valve -- "where anxiety increases, a third person becomes involved in the tension of the twosome, creating a triangle . . . . [The trianglel decreases anxiety by spreading it through the system." This new "interconnected" triangulate whole has a much greater capacity to hold anxiety than the sum of the former separate family unit members, "because pathways are in place that allow the shifting of anxiety around the system." Therefore, the triangle is more stable than the often more volatile dyad in the essential "anxiety-binding process" that lies at the core of human inter-personal survival (Kerr and Bowen 1988, 135).
In function, triangles are eternal. Though their content is constantly shifting, their form is dynamically and often perniciously enduring. They outlive their creators. Grandchildren act out the remnant reactive processes of their dead grandparents. Triangles are the "building blocks" of family "chaos." In the face of the most traumatic of family stress events, this "anxiety-induced loss of differentiation" becomes so taxing that not only do single-unit triangulations occur, but complex interlocking systemic triangulations are brought into play (Kerr and Bowen 1988, 134-42).
Bowen discovered systemic triangulations unexpectedly, during clinical observations behind a psychoanalytic mental hospital's one-way mirror. Courageously, he explored this powerful experimental concept and applied it to his own family of origin. Resistance to his personal family amplifications ran so high that he had to present his original professional paper on this topic to his colleagues under disguised conditions. Later, they were published in "anonymous" form (Framo 1972, 111-73). In this pioneering effort, Bowen discovered that what transforms the pernicious drain of multi-generational triangulations is the building of a conscious awareness of and presence to the triangulating matrix of family itself. This crucial process he called differentiation. He created a "coaching" process wherein persons were carefully educated in methods to re-enter, non-reactively and dyadically, the "undifferentiated family ego mass" (Framo 1972, 113) of their originating families without surrendering their conscious calm, perspective, and sense of well-being. Bowen's model, as further elaborated by Framo, Friedman, and Williamson, serves as the major basis for my analytical elaborations of this powerful technique (Framo 1992; Friedman 1985; Williamson 1991).
This triangulation process is one half of the central psyche systems synthesis which I advocate. The omnipresent incest dynamic is the other. The incest theme was indisputably a driving theoretical and methodological vision for Jung, especially in the years of his mature clinical formulation, from 1912 onward. Incest was the burning match that incinerated his close bond with Freud, in the 1911 and 1912 publications of what eventually became Symbols of Transformation (Jung 1967). Incest-libido work was still central to his thinking in his late career -- so central that he extensively revised Symbols of Transformation in 1951.
From the beginning, Jung was aware of his deep psychic fascination with incest issues. He warned Freud in the fall of 1910 to "be prepared for something strange the likes of which has never yet been heard from me" (Wehr 1987, 133). Looking back at that portentous publishing event from the vantage point of his 1951 revision, Jung commented, "I was acutely conscious, then, of the loss of friendly relations with Freud and of the lost comradeship of our work together" (Jung 1967, xxvi). All of this was brewing in the same vat of prima materia experience as Jung's now well-documented affairs with Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Incest dynamics course through every thread of the complex weave of these relationships: the homoerotic bond (of that nascent, inspiring variety found between creatively engaged fathers and sons) between Jung and Freud; Jung's cranky defensiveness over the ethical breach with Spielrein ("She [Spielreinl has caused a nasty scandal for me, simply because I chose to forgo the pleasure of begetting a child with her"); and the intense, post- Freud break involvement with Toni Wolff, in which Wolff arguably functioned both as lover-therapist and as mediator of the central Jungian anima construct (Weir 1985, 138-43 and 187-90; Carotenuto 1980).
The intergenerationalist would see in these charged events the strong possibility of a determined, though proto-conscious, effort on Jung's part to shatter the remnant incestuous attachments of his family of origin -- where the pre-Oedipal Jung lived in a home atmosphere permeated by the broodings of seriously symptomatic parents -- and subsequent projective parental figures, most notably Freud (see esp., Weir 1987, 31-8, 47-54, 138-45). The relationship-shattering quality of these publications and affairs served to distance the devouring threat of key incest figures in much the same way that people are emotionally "cut off," often violently and finally, from this same regressive incest pressure within their families of origin (Kerr and Bowen 1988, 271-81). Jung eventually came consciously to understand the deep, psychoid power of these mechanisms, and theorized brilliantly about them. He came to understand that these were complexes -- charged, feeling-toned, psychic asteroids of great numinous power. And he realized that they floated around freely in the matrix of repressed personal experience and the collective inheritances of the Objective Psyche. He knew that individuation would come only with their conscious confrontation and transformation.
By 1912, Jung understood these complexes as issuing originally from the incestuous womb of the Great Mother, the organic engine of regression, absorption, and ultimate personal annihilation -- unless one consciously sojourns back within the Great Mother to find the slumbering Divine Child "awaiting his [sic] conscious realization":
[T]herapy must support the regression, and continue to do so until the "prenatal" stage is reached. It must be remembered that the "mother" is really an imago, a psychic image merely.... The "mother" as the first incarnation of the anima archetype, personifies in fact the whole unconscious. Hence the regression leads back only apparently to the mother; in reality she is the gateway into the unconscious, into the "realm of the Mothers." (Jung 1967, par. 508)The incest complex, if left unanalyzed and unconfronted, keeps us chained forever to the regressive instincts; it paradoxically creates the very kind of death that incestuous clinging seeks to avoid: "The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reason to do so: ultimately it is the fear of death that holds him there" (Jung 1967, par. 415). The essential therapeutic aspect of each individual's psychic growth is consciously to face this regressive, incestuous substrate in all of our experience, and to mature through, suffer through, and evolve through the struggle of that encounter. All of us need to be "dissolved in 'friendly water'. which is equated with the maternal womb and corresponds to the prima mater-ic" (Edinger 1985, 48). Incest is the key transforming alchemical operation of individuation. This individuation process has both a literal, real-family-world dynamic and an archetypal, mythic-family-world dynamic. Any therapy which attends only to one portion of this equation is partial and incomplete.
As always with Jung, the solution to this massive incest lure is a conscious return to the archetypal, incestuous world of the unconscious. Without such an individuating journey, one cannot gain the "non-specific" instinctual nectar of libido and its sexual, self-preservative, spiritual, and aesthetic flowerings in the psyche (Jacoby 1990, 34). But as visceral and earthy as this language and these metaphors seem to be, they apparently worked for Jung at the symbolic level only. The possibility of a literal return and transformative connection to the actual, biological family of origin, and introjectively enfleshed mothers and fathers, is often subtly disparaged:
The development of consciousness inevitably leads not only to separation from the mother, but to separation from the parents and the whole family circle and thus to a relative degree of detachment from the unconscious and the world of instinct. (Jung 1967, par. 351)Jung discovered that incest is an imaginal opportunity as much as a symptomatic affliction. Like many of the current transgenerational family therapists, he came to appreciate that the incest dynamic is embedded in the developmental process. It is a key activator of major phases in psychic maturation. It becomes an abortive dynamic when it becomes literalized and reductive. The incestuous, transgenerational chemistry is an imaginal chemistry, a medium-of-image through which parental love embeds in the child the deepest soul contents of both personal and archetypal learnings.
It is not surprising that a materialist culture like ours has literalized and deformed this symbolic matrix. Incest is seen only as an illegal evil, to be hunted down and eradicated by the well-meaning but often soulless bureaucratic legions of child protective services. The old Hermetic wisdoms of ages past are discarded in such a positivist world view. The universal, symbolic incest process is a mystical process, a child of the ancient anima mundi -- the non- dualist, holistic world where both spirit and matter couple, create, and reproduce ever more healing image-processes. Without question, we must stop the devastating enactments of literal childhood sexual and physical abuse, with their withering, enduring torments to the child's, and future adult's soul. But, just as urgently, we must differentially seek never to cripple or interfere with the imaginal, alchemical, developmental, and spiritually benevolent aspects of the psychological incest process. Wise, vibrant cultures know the difference. Brutal, immature cultures blur the difference.
The intergenerational family therapists confirm, from an independent line of insight and therapeutic technique, the same crucial importance of the incest dynamic. They would readily agree with Jung that "a new adaptation or orientation of vital importance can only be achieved in accordance with the instincts" (Jung 1967, par. 351). But they would disagree that this transformative event can occur only with archetypal compensation beyond the actual unconscious bonds and attachments of the originating biological family matrix. For them, the instinctual can work its transformative magic only through a literal return to that family medium, from within the chrysalis of a new stance or attitude. Literal return is unavoidable if transformative change, the Jungian individuation or the Bowenian differentiation, is to occur.
Triangulation. The incest complex. The fuel is the same: incestuous family bonding. For Jung, the complex casts its spell across that mysterious hinterland between the personal and the archetypal unconscious -- a conduit and bridge, at one and the same moment allowing for the personal and the mythic, the individual and the collective, to meet and reify, to ignite the fire of consciousness or to annihilate the unaware soul.
For the inter-generationalist, the triangle is equally portentous. Bowen felt it to be a universal experience across all of the known mammal species, and maybe the entire biosphere (Bowen 1981). It is the frontier between generations. It is that liminal zone where the species-future and the ancestral past encounter and provoke each other. It is the touchstone of species-memory and anticipation, the housing of the family's psychic DNA, the place where the next generation is bound and coerced, instructed and prepared. Triangulation is unavoidable. It is the central organ of generational transmission and enablement. Triangulation can crush one's individuated destiny and differentiation, or can fulfill it. Individuation/differentiation, seen from this broader perspective, depends on the right balance of systemic forces and an individual attitude of nonreactive calm. Only within the embrace of such a synthesis can an individual consciously flow through the familial labyrinth, across both individual and family life cycles. We cannot individuate just intrapsychically but must, with equal conviction and intensity, "reciprocate fully, both backward and forward through time" with our families, if we are "to experience well being" (Williamson and Bray 1988, 366). The flesh of the Objective Psyche derives its very life and continuity from both of these sources. In fact, the inner complex almost inevitably "fires" in reaction to outer triangulations. These two processes are opposite faces of the same processual coin. For both Bowen and Jung, there is profound appreciation for the dynamic and often volatile flow of unceasing complex activity in both the individual and family psyche. To remain unconscious and passive in this living stream of ancestral being is to remain a vulnerable victim of blind individual and family fate.
A Synthesis Model: Systemization Mirroring Individuation
People change. Not everything stays with you all of your life. --Emilina Domingos, in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, 1988Psyche unfolds both within our skins and without. Psyche produces consciousness within our personal experience and beyond. Individuals -- and the families of which they are an inextricable part -- mature, evolve, go crazy, regress, and transform. There is individuation and differentiation, within a depth system both intrapsychic and interpersonal at once. The depth task cannot avoid the responsibility of seeking, theoretically and operationally, to blend these two process-twins.
My cross-generational work, within a clearly defined analytical context, seeks to respect both the inner-familial, mythic aspects of the incest dynamic and the outer-familial, systemic aspects of the triangulating dynamism outlined above. The actual "live" cross-generational encounters are usually positioned near the end of the analytical experience, because I am profoundly aware of the immense family-systemic and mythic-archetypal energies which are aroused by such a direct and unveiled exploration of these ancient affects. Lighting such a psychic firestorm intentionally needs careful therapeutic preparation and protection. Both Freud and Jung recognized the essential role of the incest dynamic in shaping and motivating the psyche and its destiny. To approach this dynamic without careful analytic awareness and sensitivity would be dangerous and potentially devastating folly. The intergenerational theorists have shown us that to approach this same incestuous vortex without a careful systemic awareness could provoke an equally devastating result.
The intergenerational model is a genuinely systemic/relational model and is temperamentally best suited for the analytic frame. Bowen's coaching model of working with families "at a distance" is the foundational approach (Framo 1972, 127-8). Acutely aware of the disruptive power of reactive anxieties and triangulations within the family-of-origin matrix, Bowen found that a period of careful, almost didactic, preparation of patients for encounters with their families is crucial. Using his now famous innovation of the family genogram (a schematic family tree), Bowen clearly traces multi-generational patterns of triangulations and reactive anxieties -- going back at least three generations -- which have ensnared the family field (McGoldrick and Gerons, 1985). He behaviorally rehearses both the information and its impact for the patient in these sessions. He uses the genogram to instruct and to relieve cognitively (by discharging unconsciously generated anxieties often decades old). It is overtly a cognitive model, through which Bowen attempts to get the patient to think about family dynamics as a way to avoid affective possession and inducement to unconscious repetitions. I find the genogram invaluable not only in mapping out the obvious patterns of triangulation but also in expressing the mythic and complex fields which also "possess" the family. When patients were ready, Bowen sent them home to their families of origin. These visits were carefully prepared for, and the agendas were kept painstakingly circumscribed and focused (Richardson 1984; Kerr and Bowen 1988; Gurman and Kniskern 1981; Kerr 1993). Donald Williamson, in an often sharp revision of Bowen's process, has framed this coaching movement in therapy as a preparatory phase to live family "consultations" (Williamson 1981, 1982a, 1982b, 1991). As patients gain insight (in therapeutic small groups) into the family force field, they are instructed to write practice letters and make practice audio tapes~ in preparation for sending actual letters and tapes. This whole process culminates in the invitation to parents to participate in an intensive, multi-day, intergenerational consultation.
Though the authors of this consultative mode of intergenerational family work vary as to the form and content of preparatory and live family sessions, certain factors are consistent across methodologies. All emphasize the care needed to conduct these events. They are acutely aware of what analysis would describe as the complex-field in place when this transgenerational family comes together. All the power of the ancestors, of family archetypal pattern, and of unconscious family trauma pulsates in the consulting room during these visits. Everyone is terrified of blame and judgment being laid at their feet and, most of all, is terrified of the fear of irreparable disaster, which may result from attempting such a meeting in the first place. There is great apprehension that the truthful and personal telling of pain will annihilate rather than inform and heal. The therapist must proceed with great directive caution, humor, sensitivity, and genuine caring in order to dispel these ominous affective fears.
Most of these consultative modelers claim success (a) when the patient is able to navigate the experience not only intact but having exercised the non-reactive leadership they were tutored to accomplish and (b) when inappropriate generational boundary violations have been sealed and terminated. Williamson believes that this last factor focuses sharply on the culminating event: the adult patient child turning to his or her opposite-sexed parent in the physical presence of the same-sex parent, and clearly declaring that their love-affair is now terminated, and that she or he is autonomous of caretaking responsibility for this perseverating and debilitating transgenerational incest (Williamson 1981, 1982a, 1982b).
Analytic Improvisations on an Intergenerational Theme
I was in a vast train station, like Grand Central. I was scurrying all around in a frenzy . . . trying to find my son. I looked on platform after platform and he was not to be found. Then I saw him. He waved at me and touched me through the barricade and then he said, gently but firmly, that he had to go. I knew he was gone for good. And that it was okay somehow. I awoke in deep tears. -- Dream of a mother during a family consultation process with her analytic patient sonI have executed an analytic adaptation of these transgenerational models. Like Williamson and Framo especially, I use a flexible, eclectic approach within the solid, grounding structure of the analytic frame. This normally means that I build gradually toward the introduction of one-at-a-time family consultations with parents (and maybe siblings). However, I have changed these rules in special circumstances and seen people in all assemblages -- from the full family to differing sub-system combinations. Or, I have simply coached patients in preparation for their own visits home to their families. What is presented here is a normative, not dogmatic, model.
Throughout these proceedings, the analyst functions primarily as facilitator, and guarantor that the family "consultants" are not violated or tricked into unfair revelations, vulnerabilities, and judgments. The patient is left primarily responsible for the content and accomplishment of the learning agenda, as rehearsed for many months or years in anticipation of this crucial sequence of dialogues. Scheduling sessions is critical, and should allow enough time between these hyper-intense encounters for family members to process both consciously and unconsciously, and to accommodate themselves to the inevitable and often massive shifts in individual and family self-images. All are told that the effects of the consultative event can be experienced in strong "flashbacks" of feeling and arousing images for a long time after the consultations. This process of normalization, and naming of the momentous nature of what they are undergoing, is followed by the warmly communicated readiness of the analyst to be available for subsequent continuing and "refresher" consultations if these are desired.
Admittedly, once the intergenerational encounter occurs, enormous therapeutic expectation is placed on the potential results of this interaction. The actual real-time, face-to-face experience is built on the careful, prefatory, analytical working of the unconscious materials, and on exploratory expressions of these new visions through "coached" letters, audio or video tapes, brief home visits, and family travels together (to places of historical, affective significance for the family, such as graves of ancestors, childhood homesites, etc.). Despite this preparation, the "live" encounter is always charged. For the invited family consultant it is inevitably a frightening experience to enter another family member's therapeutic space.
Normally, I structure at least two extended patient/family member sessions with each parent and, often, with each sibling. As mentioned already, these intergenerational sessions are encouraged to occur near the end of mid- to long-term personal analysis, but the unpredictable turns and torque of the dynamic analytic process can warrant such sessions at about any stage of the process. For example, one analysand's mother contracted a rapidly progressing terminal cancer, and we necessarily and fruitfully conducted these sessions at the commencement of analysis. What is crucial above all else is that these sessions be carefully rehearsed and prepared for; if the patient is still significantly reactive and unconscious to much of the family complex-field, there is significant potential during these consultations for therapeutic harm and re-wounding of both the patient and family member(s). Responsible analytic use of these powerful systemic tools demands respect for the potentially devastating downside of the consultative encounter. A poorly contained "mega" therapeutic event like this can almost guarantee years of continued individual and family entropy, suffering, and avoidance -- "We tried family therapy once and we were really hurt -- it was awful."
In the ideal circumstance, the patient will bring in the family member consultant for a late Friday afternoon session of ninety minutes. Then, they are encouraged to play and enjoy themselves over the weekend, and to avoid much overt processing of the often volatile content introduced during the opening session. However, they are instructed to remember dreams and to privately record internal feelings, ideas, images, and questions that surface during the weekend. A follow-up session is held Monday morning, with both patient and family consultant, to process their reactions to the first encounter.
As analyst, I define myself as a facilitator during these sessions. The patient is clearly the convenor and director of the event. The patient describes, as rehearsed, why she or he came into therapy, and presides over the asking of the consultative questions. The visiting family member is genuinely thanked for his or her courage and generosity in attending such an unusual therapeutic gathering, and is given permission to say volumes or nothing at all in response to the questions asked, questions of real developmental moment and urgency raised by the patient. The family member is simply guaranteed that his or her role is purely consultative; he or she will not be tricked into any personal therapy or exposure. As analyst, I simply hold the frame, shape and deepen the process as helpfully as I can, and seek to prevent violation of the promised protective covenant and rules of engagement.
Most often, four question-clusters are explored in some depth during these family-of-origin consultations:
- Vocational/Developmental: How did the consultant handle such a crisis as the patient has been facing?
"Dad, mom, I came into therapy feeling forlorn after my divorce at 38 and my job loss at 41. I felt suicidal and crazy -- full of despair. Did you ever have such a crisis? If so, how did you handle it -- how did you survive?"
- Relational/Sexual: How did the consultant handle the relational life dilemmas the patient is struggling with?
"Dad, Mom, I had three affairs during my marriage. The last one broke up my marriage. Did you ever have an affair or think about having one? If so, how did you process the deep strains and wild emotional surges of such an event in your life?"
- Incestuous: How did the consultant manage the strong incestuous pulls of the family-of-origin, pulls which the patient has discovered have survived into his or her adulthood and adult relationships?
"Dad, I realize, as your oldest daughter, that I have strong, uncontested loyalties to you and deep fears of your disapproval if I violate those loyalties. I realize in many ways I am more "wedded" and loyal to you than to my husband. I intend gracefully but firmly to end the unhelpful aspects of that loyalty this weekend. How did you deal with your incestuous loyalties to your mother?"
- Existential: What does the consultant feel is the central purpose and destiny of her or his life?
"Mom, Dad, what has been most important for you to accomplish in this life? Have you succeeded or failed? Are you ready for or afraid of your death? When do you imagine you will die and what shape will your life be in then?"
The case study that follows is a cameo of a courageously disclosed inner-family domain of soul. It is an example of implementing the coaching model described earlier. Unlike much of my analytic work, where the intergenerational encounters are staged live in my office, the real life encounters for this patient occurred in visits to her European home. Hers is a useful illustration of the rich and manifold adaptations possible using the basic systemic, intergenerational principles within analytic practice. It also features a way that analysts practicing in traditional formats could begin to integrate and adapt the analytic container to absorb some useful and powerful systemic notions about the life of the family psyche. I am deeply grateful to this patient for her willingness to share her intergenerational ancestral journey. Of course, the case study is masked to maintain confidentiality.
The Secret
Gretchen arrived in my lobby pert, coiffed, and controlled. Her impeccable diction was deepened by the residual charm of her native German tongue, lightly and melodiously accenting the stream of her English speech. She was cosmopolitan. She was Vogue. She was Dietrich, pre-war Berlin.
Gretchen was also deeply dysphoric, and adrift inside that cosmopolitan mosaic. After deploying an initial flare of precise and coy reasons for having had sought out analysis with me, she grew wary, tight, and pensive. Long silences filled our encounter. Very early on, her eyes became haunted, almost vacant. She stared guardedly at me as though at a specter from out of the past: "Your eyes . . . they are like my husband"s eyes . . . so wounded . . . it scares me to look at them . . . I cry . . . I hate to cry, she told me in simple agony.
She remembered a dream of entering her bedroom and finding, there in the corner, an old, cheap curtain which she pulled apart. There she discovered another room with a bare, harshly-glaring light bulb dangling by a frayed cord from an unfinished attic ceiling. Below it sat her husband in a dirty T-shirt and underwear. He was unshaven and somnolent, sitting in an unkempt, despairing silence:
He was horrible looking. His eyes were bulging out and he was emaciated. He was staring at me but he almost looked dead. He resembled one of those guys from Buchenwald . . I screamed .... I could not remove my eyes from his horrible looking eyes and face. I thought. "What have I done to him.?"This was the "real" Gretchen, undoubtedly carried and projectively identified with by her repressed husband. This was the unkempt, somnolent aspect of her deeply wounded inner self that she had kept hidden in the closet behind the culture and poise of her outer-world persona. This was the shell-shocked remnant of infantile intrusions upon the sanctity of the Self. Beneath Gretchen's outer vivacity and charm sat this impoverished, famished, lost, narcissistic soul.
She amplified this material to memories of her father's distant despair. He held some still unrevealed secret about an earlier marriage "which we all discovered after I had been in the family for quite some time. A government census office had called and said my mother's and his marriage was invalid because he had not gotten a legal divorce from his first wife. I was illegitimate overnight. And we had known nothing of all of this! So much of him is secret, hidden. His emptiness feels like mine. If he won't talk, somehow I cannot really speak either."
And, so, the problem of Gretchen's living, the problem in her psyche, was both an inner impoverishment and a mirroring outer familial impoverishment. An empty, outer father/husband fed and contributed to an inner emaciation and despair. To treat one necessarily required treating the other. Therapy is Janus-headed, looking both outward and inward all of the time, sometimes sequentially but sometimes -- maddeningly -- simultaneously. This poignant image of her outer paternal pain and her inner masculine vacancy claimed a dual regard in my treatment plans and images for our work together. Effective analysis had to treat both the inner father-complex and the outer real-father relationship. The psyche was frozen by both the paralyzing introject and the mesmerizing project.
Early in the therapeutic process, I began gently coaching Gretchen in ways to interact not only with the wisdom of her inner psyche but with the outer-relational, familial psyche as well. She was to cast a disciplined and caring eye on both her dream life and her family-of-origin life. She wrote down her dreams and she wrote to her parents. The early work was delicate. Gretchen was testy, touchy about the slightest actual or perceived empathic violations. She wavered about her commitment to analysis, threatening at almost every session to end "this silly mistake. This is too painful, it just isn't the right time for me."
But, then, over a year into the process, the psyche began to manifest itself vibrantly after a long series of desolation dreams (such as the one about her staring, starving husband). She dreamed of entering "a huge Gothic cathedral . . . so high and large that it was breathtaking." She was dancing and talking with a Jewish woman "about the suffering that she, as a Jew, had experienced, the rejections, the pain"; but, "also the bonding of her people and the joy she experienced in the dances and the music." She was in Buddhist temples full of light and mystery. She was in ancient Goddess circles and ceremonies around fire and blood and sacrament. The Self was alive indeed after years of abuse and repression. The deep soul had survived intact and the ego knew where the connecting paths still could be found.
Gretchen experienced childhood in a cramped suburban Berlin apartment. This apartment brooded with a daily office of compulsive risings and retirings, inane work, and stifling affective silences. The blood of the family emotional organism grew more and more anemic over the years -- especially after the secret of the father's past family intruded into the present family's conscious psychic sphere. Parental repression and affective disavowals were harsh and sometimes punitive. For the first time in her life, Gretchen was letting something else into those eviscerating family quarters, as exemplified by this poignant dream vignette:
At that point it was as if there were no longer two Cars, but Terry [the analyst] and I were sitting one behind the other in the car. I could feel his body against mine. I could feel his penis against my leg. I could feel it become alive and grow against me. We sat there for awhile. I thought I could not take the closeness. I did not want it for fear. . . . I came out of the car and went home, that is, in my parents [old, childhood] apartment. It was summertime. The windows in the dining room were wide open. I looked through the window to see if Terry would leave. He did not. I stayed in the dining room wondering what to do. In a way I wanted him to leave because of my fears; on the other hand I was hoping he would stay. My parents' place seemed to be a very secure place. I heard a car leave. I looked out the window to see if it was Terry. It was another car. I saw Terry still sitting in his car~ I still had strong mixed feelings. I wanted him to go, yet I wanted him to stay and I so wanted to be able to run downstairs to go and be with him.A new season had fallen across the inner and outer familial apartment. New windows of eros and relation were open. New penises of insight, passion, and promise were penetrating secret complexes and tyrannies. Ego was still frozen in fear, but now ego was at least imagining running after new loves and destinies. All the while, Gretchen was writing to her family and taking extended visits to her childhood home in Germany. She was imagining in analysis the "feeling-questions" and fearful things she would like to explore with her sister, mother, and father during these visits. Paradoxically, she alternatively felt much more anxious on these home visits and, "sometimes as calm as I've ever been, there or anywhere," as she non-reactively asked provocative consultative questions, especially of her parents. As Gretchen gained insight and mastery in dialogue with her complex-self, she gained mastery of her environmental self as well. The two were simultaneously building and reinforcing energies.
Eventually, Gretchen decided to explode the family secret: "I know I have half-siblings somewhere. I am going to find them and tell them what I know of the past and ask them for what they know. My parents' terror can no longer control my life." This flowering self-assertion followed a dramatic dream of finding a lost child in a dungeon (the French word in her dream was oubliettes) or catacomb, in the side of a hill. Gretchen found this child and awoke as she was trying to lure the weary waif into the light: "The lock was broken, the child was free to go but still she was terrified to leave that awful place. I feel so much connection with and sorrow for her -- so much grief." Gretchen was becoming her own child protective services worker. Interestingly, the French derivation of the word oubliettes is medieval. It was the underground dungeon in castles where the political and debtor prisoners were kept. The word literally means "forgotten." Gretchen was recovering the forgotten parts of her soul and lost innocence which had been languishing in an unconscious inter-projective prison.
Creatively utilizing our analytic coaching process and entrepreneurially tracking therapeutic resources in Germany, Gretchen choreographed a dramatic event. She gathered the family and defined the structure and agenda. Firmly and without inflaming her parents, she asked to learn all that her father and mother knew of the past and of the lost family of half-siblings. She asserted her right to connection with these forgotten blood kin.
Gretchen discovered that her mother, out of the raw fear of change, was even more invested in maintaining the secret, and the isolation than was her father. Over the next year, Gretchen, and her now fully mobilized sister, rifled government records for leads. Eventually, she located the half-siblings and choreographed poignant reunions. Throughout, she met regularly with both her parents and sister (in whole family sessions and one-on-one encounters). Rather than provoking the heart-attack or death of one or both of her aging parents that Gretchen had feared, she instead discovered that, for her father at least, a new vibrancy of inner life and interpersonal resilience emerged. Only her mother grew more neurotic and brooding -- another clear indication of the mother's masked but prominent collaborative role in architecting the years of childhood emotional abuse and restraint. The unhealthy, incestuous collaborations of this family system were opened up to new developmental horizons by Gretchen's conscious, nonreactive labors.
October 19, 1999