On the Sublime in Psychoanalysis, Archetypal Psychology and Psychotherapy

157 Pages·1997·13.75 MB·English

by  Petruska Clarkson

On the Sublime
in Psychoanalysis,
Archetypal Psychology and Psychotherapy
EDITED BY PETRUSKA CLARKSON
w
Whurr Publishers Ltd
London
© 1997 Whurr Publishers Ltd
First published 1997
by Whurr Publishers Ltd
19B Compton Terrace,
London N1 2UN,
England
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
Dedicated to my husband Vincent Keter with whom I dwell in
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
Sublime and celebrate the ridiculous.
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
"Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
prior permission of Whurr Publishers Limited.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
This publication is sold subject to the conditions that it
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
They shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.
publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or
And when two people understand each other in their inmost heartS
cover other than that in which it is published and
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids."
without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed upon any subsequent purchaser.
I Chil
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
ISBN 1 86156 0192
Printed and bound in the UK by Athenaeum Press Ltd,
Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Contributors xii
Chapter 1 1
The sublime in psychoanalysis and archetypal psychotherapy
Petrriska Clarkson

Chapter 2 15
Placing the sublime - cosmology in the consulting room
Marie Angelo
Chapter 3 46
Sublime moments in the body of the double pelican
Alan Bleakley
Chapter 4 69
Psychoanalytic framing of the sublime in the creative act
Tessa Adams
Chapter 5 85
Everyday epiphanies
Ginette Paris

Chapter 6 96
Reflections on chance, fate and synchronicity
Gerhard Adler
Chapter 7 109
Refathering psychoanalysis, deliteralising Hillman: imaginal
therapy, individual and cultural
Michael Vannoy Adams
vii
viii On the Sublime
Chapter 8 123 Preface
The phallus, alchemy and Christ: Jungian analysis and the sublime
Christopher Hauke
Chapter 9 145
Countertransference, the imaginal world, and the politics of the
sublime
Andrew Samuels
Chapter 10 176
Letter to my daughter
Petriiska Clarkson
Chapter 11 180 This book is based on contributions around the idea of the sublime and
its presence, avoidance or use in contemporary psychotherapeutic
Sublimely sexual: Eros and the sublimation of desire
practice. It is a reply to people's yearnings for an acknowledgement and
Thomas Moore
an honouring of the many incarnations of the sublime enacted in the
tragedies and triumphs of the world soul — the trivial, the transpersonal,
Chapter 12 191
the beautiful, the grotesque, the sensual — in the everyday as well as in
Of castles and melts; Dickens and the dark sublime: the uses of
the foundations of perennial wisdom. It was imagined and realised by
creativity Professor Petriiska Clarkson as an answer to these needs from contem-
Andrea Duncan porary psychotherapy, Jungian practice and psychoanalysis.
This book brings together for the first time some of the most experi-
Chapter 13 219 enced and dedicated academic teachers, professional practitioners and
Conditions for excellence — the coincidentia oppositorum of the supervisors from both sides of the Atlantic in the fields of archetypal
inferior function psychology and psychotherapy. These are all psychotherapists and
Petrtiska Clarkson writers who have seriously engaged with the theme of the sublime in
everyday life, in clinical practice and its place in the world. They come
Chapter 14 244 from universities ranging from Goldsmiths' College, London to Eugene
Elemental images of impossible love' — the brother—sister Lang College in New York, and professional associations/affiliations such
coniunctio as reflected in art as the London Convivium for Archetypal Studies and the Society for
Analytic Psychology. They are: Dr Marie Angelo, Dr Alan Bleakley, Dr
Eva Loewe
Tessa Adams, Dr Ginette Paris, the late Dr Gerhard Alder, Dr Michael

Chapter 15 271 Vannoy Adams, Dr Christopher Hauke, Prof. Andrew Samuels, Dr
Thomas Moore, Dr Andrea Duncan, the late Eva Loewe, Noel Cobb, and
On the sublime: Eva Loewe and the practice of psychotherapy,
Professor PetrUslca Clarkson.
or Aphrodite in the consulting room
Referencing styles may differ due to the exigencies of circumstance,
Noel Cobb
but in this `caravan' of writers each of us speaks with our individual voice
Chapter 16 279 to the matter of our hearts. When we allow the sublime to move us, it is
as Rumi taught — `the soul is tested here by sheer terror'. Yet in our
The archetypal situatedness of supervision: parallel process in place
companionship, our spirit has been quickened. May that be your experi-
PetrUska Clarkson ence too.
Acknowledgements
What is the path?
A self-sacrificing way,
but also a warrior's way, and not
for brittle, easily broken glass-bottle people.
The soul is tested here by sheer terror
as a sieve sifts and separates
genuine from fake.
And this road is full of footprints!
Companions have come before.
They are your ladder.
Use them!
Without them you won't have the spirit-quickness Chapter 1 by Petelska Clarkson is a revised version of the paper, 'The
you need. Even a dumb donkey Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', delivered at the Tenth
crossing a desert becomes nimblefooted Jung Studies Day held at University of Kent, Canterbury 25 November
with others of its kind. 1995.
'What is the path?' by Rumi. p. 112 from One-Handed Basket
Stay with a caravan. By yourself, Weaving: Poems on the theme of work, versions by Coleman Barks.
You'll get a hundred times more tired, Reprinted by permission of MAYPOP books 196 Westview Drive, Athens,
and fall behind. (Rumi') GA 30606, USA.
Quotations from 'The Sweetness of Life' from Men and the Water of
'Rumi (1991) One•Handed Basket Weaving: Poems on the theme of work (versions by Life by Michael Meade. Copyright © 1993 by Michael J. Meade.
C. Barks). Athens, GA: MAYPOP, p. 112.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Quotations from Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva. Copyright ©
1982 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher.
Reproduction of The Wanderer above the Mists by Casper David
Friedrich © Elke Walford, Hamburg.
Chapter 6 by Gerhard Adler is a revised version of a paper in The
Shaman from Elko published by The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
in 1978. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Burnt Norton © 1943 by T.S. Eliot and renewed in 1971
by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace &
Company, and Faber and Faber.
Excerpt from Phoenix by D.H. Lawrence reprinted by permission of
Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material throughout
this book. If any proper acknowledgement has not yet been made, the copyright holder
should contact the publisher.
On the Sublime xiii
Contributors Archetypal Studies, and has over 20 years' experience of supervised
active imagination work with the cosmology of the Sapphire Tree.
Alan Bleakley is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Cornwall College,
where he runs undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Archetypal
Psychology and in Post-compulsory Education for the Universities of
Exeter and Plymouth. Dr Bleakley's publications include two books on
the psychology of imagination: Fruits of the Moon Tree and Earth's
Embrace, and a collection of poetry: Hermes in the Kitchen Drawer. He
is currently completing a book on the animalising imagination.
Petrriska Clarkson is Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy at
Roehampton Institute, London, a Consultant Chartered Counselling
and Clinical Psychologist at PHYSIS, London, in private practice as a
Tessa Adams is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Human UKCP-registered psychotherapist, accredited supervisor and accredited
Sciences, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, where she is organisational consultant with some twenty-five years' experience in
Section Head of Counselling and related Studies, responsible for the MA pioneering innovative, academic and creative professional course design
in Applied Psychoanalytic Theory, Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling as well as providing psychotherapy, supervision and training to
and Certificate in Humanistic Psychodynamic Counselling, and a recog- hundreds of professionals in these fields. She is a visiting lecturer at a
nised Teacher of the University of London for supervising postgraduate number of universities across the world, the author/editor of twelve
work including PhD research. books and over one hundred professional papers in the fields of
Dr Adams is a UKCP-registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a psychotherapy, counselling psychology, supervision, qualitative research
member of the Guild of Psychotherapists, South London Psychotherapy and organ-isational consultancy; and founder supervisor of the
Centre and the Greenwich Consortium of Psychotherapists. Her private Independent Centre for Qualitative Research at PHYSIS.
practice includes individual psychotherapy, supervision and work Professor Clarkson is a Supervisor and Teaching Member of
consultancy. She is also a qualified fine artist (St Martins School of Art) Archetypal Jungian, Integrative Psychotherapy, Transactional Analysis,
and a practising painter. Gestalt, and Group Psychotherapy Organisations and a supervisor for
trainee and qualified BPsS Psychologists (Counselling, Clinical and
Gerhard Adler was a distinguished analyst, child therapist, teacher and Occupational) with substantial experience/supervision from major
lecturer. Between 1931 and 1934 he worked at the BurghOlzli and psychoanalytic bodies. She is also the Principal Founder or Chair (past
underwent a training analysis with C.G. Jung. He subsequently co- or current) of several national and international accredited organisa-
edited the 20 volume English translation of the Collected Works and tions in these fields. She serves the profession (for example) as Chair of
edited two volumes of Jung's letters. Jung said that only five of his the Counselling Psychology Diploma Examination Board of the British
students understood him completely; one of those was Gerhard Adler. Psychological Society, on the Ethics Committee of the British Association
Adler was a founding member, and president from 1972 to 1977, of the for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision, and as a Teaching
International Association for Analytical Psychology, and in the 1970s he and Supervising Member /Mentor of the London Convivium for
helped to found the Association for Jungian Analysts. His published Archetypal and Cultural Psychotherapy.
work includes Studies in Analytical Psychology, The Living Symbol, and
Dynamics of the Self He died in 1988. Noel Cobb, called 'one of the trustworthy fathers of archetypal
psychology' (Thomas Moore), is a psychotherapist, poet, and teacher
Marie Angelo is a senior lecturer in psychology at Richmond College, who works as a consultant in Archetypal Psychotherapy and gives super-
London where she writes and researches on Archetypal Psychology and vision for therapists wishing to revise their practice. He is chairman and
is developing a Practitioner Masters Degree in Archetype and Culture. founder of The London Convivium for Archetypal Studies, created in
She trained in dance therapy, occupational psychology and psychoana- order to give English archetypal psychology 'a local habitation and a
lytic studies. She is a 'founding friend' of the London Convivium for name'. He is author of Prospero's Island — the Secret Alchemy at the
xii
xiv On the Sublime xv
Heart of the Tempest (1984) and Archetypal Imagination — Glimpses of Ginette Paris is a psychologist and core faculty member at the Pacifica
the Gods in Life and Art (1992). He is chief editor of SPHINX — a Journal Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. She has written on the archetypal
for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts, now in its seventh issue. perspective of Greek and Roman mythology for Spring Publications,
including the best-selling books Pagan Grace and Pagan Mediations. She
Andrea Duncan is a principal lecturer in the School of Art and Design at is currently at work on Mythology: CDROM Encyclopaedia, Volume 1,
the University of East London. She has given conference papers and Greek and Roman, to be published in 1998.
published in the field of creativity, psychoanalysis and analytical
psychology. She is co-editor of the forthcoming The Feminine Case: Andrew Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University
Jung, Women's Language and the Creative Discourse (Rebus Press). of Essex and a Jungian training analyst in private practice. He also works
as a political consultant. His publications include Jung and the Post-
Christopher Hauke is an Associate Professional Member of the Society of Jungians, The Father, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis,
Analytical Psychology in private practice with adults and families in Psychopathology, The Plural Psyche, The Political Psyche, and the forth-
Greenwich. He organises and lectures on the MA in Applied Psychoanalytic coming The Secret Life of Politics.
Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London and on the MA in
Dance Movement Therapy at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. Michael Vannoy Adams is Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at
He teaches Jungian psychology at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the New School for Social Research and a psychotherapist in private
the University of Kent and other clinical and academic institutions. He is practice in New York City. Dr Vannoy Adams's new book The
writing a book on Jung and the Postmodern and has co-edited Post Multicultural Imagination: 'Race', Color, and the Unconscious was
Jungian Perspectives: Current Papers from the Society of Analytical published by Routledge in 1996.
Psychology — both to be published by Routledge in 1998.
Eva Loewe was born in Vienna in 1937. After studying at art school, she
raised a family of three and directed a fashion business before becoming
a UKCP—registered Analytic Psychotherapist. From 1985 she practised
and taught Archetypal Psychology, lecturing on it both in the UK and
abroad. In 1987 Eva co-founded The London Convivium with her
husband, Noel Cobb, and became his co-editor on the journal, SPHINX.
The poetess Kathleen Raine has called her 'an artist of life'. This was
particularly evident in the unique women's group, The New Lacemakers,
which she created and led from 1985 to 1995. She died in London on
May 6, 1996.
Thomas Moore is a psychotherapist and teacher. He received his PhD
from Syracuse University where he focused on world religions, Jungian
psychology, and literature, and in the early 1980s he worked closely with
James Hillman, Robert Sardello, and Patricia Berry at the Dallas Institute
for Humanities and Culture. In 1992 he published Care of the Soul
which has sold over two million copies, followed by Soulmates, also a
bestseller. Mediations: On the Monk who lives in daily life, based on his
experiences as a young man in the Servite Order, was published in 1994,
and the third book in the soul series was The Re-Enchantment of
Everyday Life which won the 1996 prize for the best book on spirituality.
His other books include The Planets Within, Rituals of the Imagination,
Dark Eros, The Education of the Heart, and A Blue Fire — a collection of
the writings of James Hillman.
1" I u '1T11111',1 411,11' ',I
Chapter 1
The Sublime
in Psychoanalysis
and Archetypal
Psychotherapy
PETRUSKA CLARKSON
This is Federico Garcia Lorca speaking about duende:
In all Arabic music, either dance, song, or elegy, the duende's
arrival is greeted with energetic cries of Allah! Allah! which is so
close to the Ole of the bullfight that who knows if it is not the same
thing? And in all the songs of the south of Spain the duende is
greeted with sincere cries of Viva Dios! — deep and tender human
cry of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to
the duende, who shakes the body and voice of the dancer. . . . The
duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible.
. . . With idea, sound or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the
creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with
violin and compass; the duende wounds. In the dealing of that
wound, which never closes, lies the invented, strange qualities of a
man's work. [And a woman's work too]
Years ago, an eighty-year-old woman won first prize at a dance
contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against
beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water,
but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and
stamp her foot on the floor. In that gathering of muses and
angels, beautiful forms and beautiful smiles, who could have won
but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of
rusty knives. (Garcia Lorca, 1980, pp.46, 49-50)
The sublime enters into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in a similar way.
In some particular moment some communicative relationship is estab-
lished that celebrates life and death in beauty, in awe and in reverence.
1
On the Sublime The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy 3
2
uncleanliness of the blackness, all death, hell, curse, wrath, and all
Longinus (1899) said that without the sublime, the body is left without soul
poison would depart'. But what she forgot in her Romantic Sublime was
(XI, 21). The sublime lifts up the soul in 'joy and vaunting' (VII, 23);
the necessary manifold work of circulating the tincture through the
gladness and boastfulness; in exultation, 'as though it had itself produced
endless distillations 'in and out of the forms and qualities of nature' —
what it has heard' (VII, 23-4). In this moment there is no 'other'. Creator
'the water . . . and heavenly dew' (Jung, CW16, para.515), but the blood
and created are one, audience and artist vibrate to the same humming-
and the rage — and the mud. For ever and ever.
bird's wing. The space between breaths becomes one soul. Whenever we
speak of the soul, we speak of the sublime. Peri Hypsous. Concerning the Longinus (1899) also said that the sublime must be referred to physis
(nature), for it is by physis 'that mad is a being gifted with speech'
sublime. The elevation. The height.
(XXXVI, 18). So, whenever we speak of the sublime, we speak of physis —
'the original and vital underlying principle' (II, 5). Inadequately trans-
lated as nature by the Romans, physis is the very life-force itself, the élan
vital. The soul of the world and the soul of the word. Physis is also the
root word for physicist, physician, physic (as in medicine). Perhaps the
medicine for the injured soul inextricably embodied. Heidegger thinks
that physis as logos is the poesis of physis 'the ultimate source of
—
thought as well as of language and poetry. The human logos, as it shows
itself in language and poetry, is merely a response to the logos of physis'
(Avens, 1984, p.70).
The Greeks did not learn what physis is through natural
phenomena, but the other way around; it was through a funda-
mental poetic . . . experience of being that they discovered what
they had to call physis' (Heidegger, 1959, p.14).
Physis is growing, becoming, coming into being, healing, creativity,
evolution, very nature. Heraclitus bears witness that physis loves to
hide' (Kahn, 1981, p.33). It represents the eternal cycle. The 'experien-
tial reconciliation of permanence and degeneration' (Guerriere, 1980,
p.88). That means always the opposites of coming into being and being
destroyed. Enantiodromia for ever and ever. From the fullness of one, its
opposite. Breathing in and breathing out, living and dying. Endlessly. Et
saecula et saecula.
Of course logos is not only words. The sublime also speaks in the
silence. 'The silence of Ajax in the Underworld is great and more Sublime
than words'. Thus spoke Longinus (1899, IX). One thousand and nine
hundred years later — approximately — Weiskel (1976) says that 'the
sublime moment establishes depth because the presentation of unattain-
ability is phenomenologically a negation, a falling away from what might
Figure 1. Sublimatio Sapientia veterum philosophorum sive doctrina eorundem de be seized, perceived, known. As an image, it is the abyss.' (pp.24-5) [italics
summa et universali medicina, eighteenth century, Bibliotheque Nationale de
added]. It is the void. 'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living
France, Paris, Ms. 974.
God, but it is a much more terrible thing to fall out of them' (Lawrence,
And a young woman came to see me because she wanted to be a high 1992). A poet speaks the poesis of despair. My patient says: I have always
tincture — to attain 'whiteness and brilliance in Venus and Luna' divinely dreamed that there is nobody on the other end of the phone when I call. It
virgin, to be pure like a distilled Madonna lily, like brilliantly polished just rings and rings and rings as if in an empty house because all the
silver, sanctified, resurrected, purified and made white, so that 'all the people have moved on to another place.' Lawrence (1992) again:
4 On the Sublime The Sublime in Psychoanalysis and Archetypal Psychotherapy 5

(a)
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, THE NEGATIVE SUBLIME
cancelled, Theme (imagery): Transcendence
made nothing? Structure: Dualism

Are you willing to be made nothing? Semiotic occasion: Excess on the plane of signifiers
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change. (p.258) Primary Secondary
Basic fantasy: Oral Nss Oedipal
Without the sublime, the human is bereft of soul, abandoned to a pedes- Wish: To be inundat ed, engulfed TIo possess 'mother'
(ambivalence)
trian existence on crowded and dusty hot sidewalks. Without the
sublime, the world soul is emptied of awe, of mystery — but also of the
Anxiety: Fear of being incorporated, 4 Guilt (superego anxiety)
possibility of nuclear extinction, or obliteration by cyclone, or armies of overwhelmed, annihilated (1) Castration (terror)
jeeps hunting tigers. It is robbed of its particular perilous grandeur. In (2) Loss of narcissistic supplies
denial of the sublime, Freud can say that Leonardo's drawings of
fountains and the wondrously chaotic movements of water are simply to
do with his childhood enuresis, and his translucent Madonnas the subli- Defence: Reaction formation lir (melancholy)
(passive active) Identification (introjection)
mation of his incestuous love for his mother.
(delight)
Semiotic resolution: Metaphor (substitution)
Ethos: Schizoid alienation
Phase of 'influence': Imitation
(b) THE POSITIVE SUBLIME

Past Present Future
Identity
X90 ^ - ";." Identity
(signifier)
161,
'Some other being'? Ideal
t
,91:-041'.;00-1 -c1r).1 -Ott1w R'. '"cf (memory)
Vacancy (desire)
Figure 2. A study of turbulent motion by Leonardo da Vinci. The Royal Collection 0
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Vacancy
The how of the telling has more eternity than the what. The wine-
Intentionality
dark sea or the woods of Dunsinane. (signified)
The keening against the silhouettes of mosques in torture or the
worksongs bled out in painblinded endurance Figure 3. The Negative Sublime and the Positive Sublime (Weiskel, 1976, pp.106
and diamondbright brilliant exuberance in a field of cocoa, or tea and 152, The Romantic Sublime. 0 The Johns Hopkins University Press)
or innocent sunpolished poppies.
Freud's views on the oceanic, the merging, the religious, the spiritual
There was a man who believed the whole world could be put in
and the artist are well known. Without the sublime, we have to practise a
one part of one story — the middle part — and that was a life.
therapy of the psyche which reduces the sublime to diagrams of 'the
He told the story well and many believed him, but many did not.
positive sublime' and 'the negative sublime' (Weiskel, 1976, pp.152, 106).
(Clarkson, 1995a, pp.106-7).