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The modern vision of ourselves and the world has stultified our imaginations … Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled
This Paper arose out of a coming together of a number of events: the publication in a recent issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology of two papers on Hillman's approach to dreams (SHELBURNE 29, LAMBERT 25); the subsequent discussion of these papers among a group of colleagues; the breaking-off after two and a half years of the analysis of a young man who admired, indeed idealised, Hillman and who exemplifies the desperate state of those referred to in the above quotation; and one of the recurring crises in the analysis of a woman with whom I felt my most needful, and most difficult, task was to hold her in therapy.
My reflections on these two patients form the substance of the paper, interwoven with, and I hope, elucidated by, the concepts and images which I found most helpful in reaching some understanding of them—namely, the nature and development of the ego, especially its boundary-forming function and its relation to the archetypes, and the themes of dependency, separation, envy and death. Both patients had a prime and urgent need to develop a capacity to release themselves from enthralment by unconscious archetypal phantasies which gripped them respectively with fascination and with terror. This capacity is an ego function which, I suggest, Hillman denigrates dangerously, and in favour of which I hope to move towards redressing a balance.
The boundary-forming, containing and holding functions of the ego will be explored in the light of Jung's writings and with reference to Fordham's work on ego development in infancy, as well as to that of the psychoanalysts Klein and Winnicott. It will be argued that the