You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a pleasure to have been part of a stimulus for Zinkin's thought about so important a subject as paradoxes of the self. The paradoxical nature of the self is one of the most important issues we have (generally non-verbally) to communicate to our patients. Yet our embrace of paradox readily degenerates into sloppiness or defensive rationality when impacted by disturbing complexes. This is especially true in dealing with those most paradoxical patients we call borderline, and their splitting defences in particular. Among other issues, Zinkin has caused me to reflect upon splitting. In that defence, in which ‘branches which belong to the same tree seem to belong to different trees’, we may be facing a defence of the self's paradoxical nature through which, and only through which, it can also embody in an ego. Paradox can degenerate into splitting which is, in a way, the true self playing dumb. It was due to the relative lack of paradox in Redfearn's paper (REDFEARN 4) concerning issues so essential as ego and self, a concern he also clearly shares, that I responded with affect and not much concern for his creative effort on a difficult subject. His ‘Reply’ to my ‘Comment’ was not without clinical acumen.
One of the most paradoxical of sayings runs throughout Jung's writings on alchemy. The ‘axiom of Maria’ is generally stated as follows: ‘Out of the One comes Two, out of the Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth’ (VON FRANZ 1, p. 65). All the alchemists, Jung tells us, flounder about in attempts to interpret the axiom of Maria (JUNG 3, para. 68). The paradox embraces the issue of the self's incarnation towards time, and von Franz has developed the idea of a ‘One continuum’ (VON FRANZ 1, p. 63f.) running through the numbers. Can such lofty notions that are complicated and swelled with paradox have any actual, clinical importance? I think so, and will expand more on this. Here I want to note that symbols of the self contain and transcend opp