Incest and Omnipotence in the Internal Family

A PASSAGE in Jung's ‘The psychology of the transference’ serves as an introduction to my theme. On page 179 he writes,

The existence of the incest element involves not only an intellectual difficulty but, worst of all, an emotional complication for the therapeutic situation. It is the hiding place for all the most secret, painful, intense, delicate, shamefaced, timorous, grotesque, unmoral, and at the same time the most sacred feelings which go to make up the indescribable and inexplicable wealth of human relationships and give them their compelling power. Like the tentacles of an octopus they twine themselves invisibly round parents and children and, through the transference, round doctor and patient (JUNG 5, pp. 179-180).

In analysis the analyst becomes a member or, rather, members of the patient's internal family. Thus the patient becomes a member of the analyst's family. Balint puts the difficult side of this well:

The patient somehow seems able to get under the analyst's skin. He begins to know too much about his analyst. This increase in knowledge does not originate from any outside source … The things thus found out are always highly personal, in some ways always concerned with the patient, and are in a way absolutely true and correct, and at the same time utterly out of proportion, and thus untrue (BALINT 2, pp. 18-19).

Two other areas of interest have emerged. First, I am trying to bring together archetypal theory and psychodynamics for the sake of both rapprochement and critical comparison. The theme of incest enables the psychologist to talk two apparently contradictory languages. On the one hand incest leads one to questions of a social and philosophical nature and on the other to the part-object style of operating characteristic of early infancy. In this paper I look at phantasies attached to the loss of infantile omnipotence and then link these to uroboric incestuous phantasies implying that an individual suffering an unacceptable loss of omnip