Jung's Shadow: Negation and Narcissism of the Self
Date: 21 April 2012
9.45am - 12.30pm
William Meredith-Owen
André Green evokes an early image of prehistoric man – ‘negative hands’. “Here the hand of the drawer does not draw itself. Instead it is placed on the stone and the paint applied all around it, allowing the colours to spread out, perhaps to rather marvellous effect. But when it separates from the wall, the blank non-drawn hand is revealed”.
Green concludes with the cryptic comment “we do not expect prehistoric man to have known what the negative is about”. But clearly the author of the ‘The Dead Mother’, which tracks the ‘death’ of the affective bond between mother and child, does expect contemporary psychoanalytic man to know. Severe breakdown occasions ‘psychose blanc’ - a blank psychosis - a discouraged, desolate core to the self that yearns desperately for some alternative revivifying contact.
Whether we regard the resulting drive as profound creativity born of deep suffering, or as a manic, compensatory grandiosity, has been the watershed issue of our profession: the dividing line between analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts. I explore this tension, taking Jung as my clinical example, or rather exemplar.
William Meredith-Owen is a Training Analyst of the SAP, teaches and supervises at the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology to which he has contributed papers addressing the interface of Jungian and Kleinian practice and the particular difficulties besetting training analyses. He is in private practice in Stratford-upon-Avon and London.
Email: wm-owen@blueyonder.co.uk
Cost: £17 including coffee
Venue: Friends Meeting House, 91 - 93 Hartington Grove, Cambridge, CB1 7UB
ADVANCE BOOKING IS ADVISED
020 7435 7696
clericalofficer@thesap.org.uk
Posted by SAP Admin
***
Return to previous page.
