Jungian Analysts: Their Visions and Vulnerabilities

Edited by J. Marvin Spiegelman.

Newsletter, Volume 14, No. 8, April 1989

Jungian Analysts: Their Visions and Vulnerabilities, edited by J. Marvin Spiegelman. (Phoenix, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1987, 192 pages.)

Jungian Analysts: Their Visions and Vulnerabilities has its origins in Marvin Spiegelman’s desire to compare his approach to the art of analysis with those of other senior analysts. In 1985, Spiegelman, who is associated with the Los Angeles Institute, wrote fifty analysts who were listed in 1959 as members of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. Of these, a third failed to respond (some had died), others declined and twelve submitted papers which met the editor’s criteria.

All the contributors had “experienced” Jung directly. With the exception of two—Vera von der Heydt of London, England, and Alfred Ziegler, author of Archetypal Medicine—all had known Marvin Spiegelman, many of them during his years of training in the late 1950’s at the Zurich Institute.

The exchange did not end with the submission of a paper. Each submission was followed by a response from the editor, and from a candidate-in-training of the Los Angeles Institute, Joe McNair. These were followed in turn by a further commentary or rebuttal from the submitting analyst.

Marvin Spiegelman’s contribution to this endeavour is seminal to the extent that it addresses the subtitle’s “visions” and “vulnerabilities” most directly, and its writing led to the conception of the larger plan. “The Impact of Suffering and Self-Disclosure on the Life of the Analyst” is a delightful blend of self-deprecating humour, appreciation of life in all its forms and sound advice.

Although it would be difficult to conceive of Dr. Spiegelman receiving as he notes “rough treatment from a Jungian collective in the past,” when one considers his choice of Michael Fordham to comment on his paper, one wonders whether he asked for it. Fordham (predictably I might add) replies that he and his patients don’t appear to suffer in the way Spiegelman and his patients do, and that the latter is practising not analysis, but confrontation therapy.

Andrew Samuels, in a further comment, welcomes Spiegelman’s departure from the usual splitting of analysis into two-person interaction or inner journey. “My feeling is that this is a pity and this paper approaches the paradox of oneness co-existing with boundary in analysis; how ‘I’ am only constellates in relation to ‘you’.”

Michael Fordham’s own response to the concern of this book, “How I Do Analysis,” expresses surprise that the question should be asked by senior analysts. Within the Society of Analytical Psychology in London, of which he was the founder, it had not been an issue since the 1940’s. It was then that the London Society moved to the forefront in analyzing the transference and training students under supervision. They also published a number of papers on technique and method.

In a practice where boundaries between self and other are threatened when one attempts to open oneself to patients in an individualized way, he has found supervision (with his wife Frieda Fordham) and writing on therapeutic issues have given him stability.

Despite the emphasis on technique, on interpretation rather than the raw emotional reaction which he found inconsistent with analysis in Spiegelman’s paper, and on the reductive aspect of the work, Fordham tries to apply Jung’s edict “to be unsystematic by intention.” He meets a patient at each interview as if he were coming for the first time. This frees the patient, he believes, to introduce what concerns him most at the time.

The key to his approach lies in listening “within the analytic frame.” Within the carefully defined frame of analysis, the analyst listens to the patient having divested himself, as Bion urged, “of memory, desire and understanding.” “If you listen, there is much less likelihood that your interventions will be ‘stock’ but will have that element of originality, spontaneity, and surprise which indicates not only listening but learning.”

Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig in “How I Do It”, answers many of the questions that this reader had about the author of the classic, Power in the Helping Professions.

From the beginning, he had been attracted to the ideas of Jung but not the person. Initially, it was the large number of uncritical female admirers surrounding Jung which Guggenbuhl-Craig found offensive. Later he concluded that Jung not only received admiration, but sought it. A characteristic which excluded the possibility of friendship on an equal basis.

Although he never felt “in” with his Jungian colleagues, Guggenbuhl-Craig considers himself to be a “classical, conservative Jungian therapist, theoretically and practically,” which is not easy since “Jung gave us a psychology free from causality, confronting us with images of the mysteries of the psyche and its pathology.” It is on this basis he considers the integration of Kleinian and Kohutian approaches a betrayal.

His views are not shared by compatriot, Sonja Marjasch, who trained at the Zurich Institute during the same period as Marvin Spiegelman.

Marjasch has found Heinz Kohut’s studies of narcissism enlightening to her own examination of introspection and introversion. D. W. Winnicott’s concept of “transitional space” has helped her to see her waiting room and the use some of her analysands have made of it as an entry into “poetic time.”

“My Three Offices” describes in terms of the physical characteristics of her working space, the evolution of her practice as an analyst.

Initially, she shared professional quarters with an eye doctor and lawyer in downtown Zurich. She earned more than she spent (a rare occurrence in her life) and her clientele were more men than women. Never was she more lonely and afraid, depending as she did on what she had learned in her training and not on her own resources.

The first crack in her professional facade happened when a patient remarked on the helpfulness of something she had said in a previous interview. To her dismay, it was not what she considered to be a rather brilliant dream interpretation of text book clarity, but some offhand remark which she couldn’t recall.

After that Sonja Marjasch was freed of her overwhelming sense of responsibility, and began to see the humour in her situation. She also started “to explore fragmentary modes of expression in the arts and in analysis.”

What finally shattered her professional facade was the suicide of a young analysand. The experience remains with her to this day as does her understanding of how she might have done it differently, and the importance of weather on dreams as a reflection of the mood of the dreamer.

A hereditary condition which caused the atrophy of her leg muscles had lasting effects on her life style and psychological work. After a summer spent outdoors exercising, she realized how confining her “Little Village” existence was, and how unbalancing a life of the intellect had become for her. She moved to a spacious apartment with a view of a park, away from the city core where she could live with her cats and work.

Based on her experience of the value of exercise, in particular the Far Eastern martial arts, she began to explore the possibility of combining body work and analysis. It was then the early 1960’s. In contrast to some therapists, however, Sonja Marjasch was more interested in improving defense mechanisms than overcoming resistances by violent means.

The enlarged living space meant an opportunity to resume her interest in photography, including darkroom processing. Physically and psychologically, she began developing her own image of the world.

Now the darkroom has been internalized. During an analytic hour, Sonja Marjasch may withdraw to it to process an image which she shares with her analysand. Not infrequently, because these images are a variation of a problem, they help to dissolve a block.

The third transition was not of her own making. Her mother left her a cottage in the country ten miles from Zurich, and when her landlord decided to renovate the block of flats where her apartment was located, she decided to go with the tide.

The immersion of her practice in the natural world has meant storytelling around a family tradition, in place of the more conventional forms of interpretation, and waiting for an insight to drop like a ripe apple. A dream explains itself, “provided it is given enough space and attention.”

My neglect of the other eight contributors is not to suggest that they are without merit. All of them have value. Two of the replies, however—Joseph Wheelwright’s and Alfred Ziegler’s—consist in large measure of material which has previously appeared. Another—Fritz Beyme’s—is a lengthy, tedious compendium of facts.

The remaining five—Mario Jacoby, Vera von der Heydt, Gustav Drefuss, Arwand Vasavada and Robert Stein—suffered the fate of omission because to have included them in limited space would have meant a more superficial reading of the four.

My choice of Marvin Spiegelman is for obvious reasons; of Michael Fordham and Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, because of their stature within and without the Jungian community; and of Sonja Marjasch, because she appears to address herself most effectively to the central therapeutic issues of our day.

The fact that twelve senior analysts hold such widely divergent views on “what Jung really said” suggests not only the complexity of Jung the person and his writings, but the inappropriateness of the question. In its place I would recommend “what I heard Jung say.”

—Alice Johnston