Visions of the Self

With the archetype of the collective unconscious Jung provides a concept to account for the genetic givens that are ignored by many psychoanalytic developmental theorists. In a previous contribution to this series, I wrote about what I call the intrinsic self, personality givens obvious to devoted baby watchers such as mothers, grandmothers, and fathers too. When the self that evolves within the earliest relational context is significantly divergent from the intrinsic self, conflict is experienced at all levels—conscious and unconscious, affective and cognitive. In a later contribution to a new series for this Journal—“The Voice of the Analyst”—I refer to the patient's search to find his/her own voice and his/her own way. These conscious phenomena will be connected at the deepest level with the intrinsic self.

Winnicott speaks of the true self as manifest in the infant's spontaneous gesture, one of a number of attempts to account for the psychic givens and contributions of the infant to his/her own personhood. In Jung's view this hard-wired self already has a sense of the archetypal mother in place as well. Other than an inborn tendency toward attachment-seeking behavior (Bowlby), object relations theory does not conceptualize a preexisting mother image. From academic psychology we find the infant's preference for the human face over some other design (Fantz), what might be interpreted by a Jungian as the infant's recognition of the archetype. The readiness to see facial features in ambiguous stimuli probably accounts for the reports of the faces of the Virgin Mary appearing in such phenomena as the condensation of steam on bathroom windows as well as the favorite of children, the man in the moon.

As Brookes distinguishes, in Jungian terms, the unconstellated archetypal energy from constellated personal experience, he also calls attention to the problems that arise when these original unconstellated elements are antithetical to determinants derived from the personal e