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According to the Maori, the world was formed in the space between the sky god Rangi and the earth mother Papa. The myth tells us that the lovers were locked in a deep and dark embrace that would have lasted forever had not their children, suffocating in the heat and darkness, thrust them apart in order to be born. Rangi mourned the separation from his wife and his tears became the rain. The earth grew red from the blood that was shed when he was torn from his beloved. Out of the space that opened when the primal parents were torn apart, the young gods came alive and created the universe as we know it (BARROW 1, p. 30).
This creation myth, which combines the longing for merger with the violence of separation, comes home to us with particular poignancy in our psychotherapeutic work with the patient who suffers from the unhealing wound that belongs to the clinical problem of narcissism. In contrast to the gods of the Maori myth, the person with a fragmented sense of self is unable to bring to birth a cohesive world out of an inner emptiness, the trauma of loss, and the need for reconnection. Although it is often inferred from Mahler's formulation that separation and individuation form a single, continuous process (MAHLER 12), the paralysing consequences of unresolved narcissistic injury show us only too readily that a separation process in itself need not always clear a space for creative psychological life—the young gods of the myth—to be born internally. The person who may have been able to experience the boundaries that separate self and other, may still remain filled with a despair and aloneness that is never bridged. Separation may result then, not in individuation, but in a disillusionment that eats away at the creative powers and loving