Ego Integration and Patterns of Coniunctio1

In order to define the scope of my paper, I want to say at the beginning that I have tried to deal with my subject only from the feminine aspect. My material is, with one exception, taken from one particular case. With its help I shall try to illustrate the unfolding of the archetypal pattern of the coniunctio as starting from and based on the archetype of incest. I shall further try to show how the individual situation actualizes this archetypal pattern, in a negative way as frustrating it or in a positive way as constellating it. In all this it has to be kept in mind that the paper was originally given as a twenty-minutes lecture, and that I have kept it here to its original content. It should thus be regarded as a sketch of a problem capable of considerable enlargement.

The case is that of a woman in her early forties with agoraphobia. In her case, as in other cases of agoraphobia, I found that the symptom was due to a very early disturbance of the primal relationship to the mother, of what Neumann has called the Urbeziehung (Neumann, 1953, p. 4), plus an incestuous problem on the side of the father. First of all, the absence of the maternal temenos has produced the menace of the open space. The actual mother has proved insufficient, and has thus constellated the negative great mother. Then the infant finds it too difficult to identify with mother and suffers from a lack of primal containment. In the end the infant has not succeeded in producing a secure enough ego, and the ego is, as it were, left without its proper skin, without its own protective temenos. Thus, on the one hand, it is constantly threatened by flowing away into the environment symbolized by the void of the open space; and, on the other hand, as a secondary phenomenon, space constantly threatens to intrude into the confines of an unprotected and too incoherent ego. This danger of intrusion gains even more reality in connection with the incest phantasy, and the latter assumes an overpowering charac