Struggles with the ‘Other One’: The Reconciliation of a Pre-Adolescent Boy with his Masculinity

In his Essay ‘The state of psychotherapy today’ Jung points out that psychiatric disturbance often embodies curative powers that can bring an individual in closer contact with his true self. In many instances the illness may be considered as nature's own attempt to heal, containing ‘the true gold we should never have found elsewhere’ (JUNG 5, p. 170). This view corresponds with his conception of the shadow, defined in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as ‘the sum of all personal and collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life’. Since the shadow behaves as compensatory to consciousness, it can be positive as well as negative (JUNG 6). In a paper on individuation Marie-Louise von Franz expounds on the positive aspects of the shadow, which often contains values that are needed by consciousness, and which ought to be assimilated into it and not repressed. What first seems to be negative and dangerous, actually may appear so only because the conscious attitude does not agree with it (von FRANZ 12).

I found these views most useful in my work with Dan, a pre-adolescent boy who entered therapy at the age of ten. During the two years we spent working together I came to regard his various symptoms as manifestations of the healthy, undeveloped part of his psyche, seeking to substitute the one-sided rationality of his conscious ego with a broader development more in tune with the boy's true nature. The shadowy aspects of Dan's psyche finally embodied themselves in a series of enactment figures that I have summed up as the ‘Other one’.

In this article I will concentrate on the shadow aspect of the ‘Other one’, realising, of course, that the figure contains material from different layers of Dan's psyche. At the beginning of treatment Dan's ego was sorely in need of a more healthy base for its further