The Abandonment Depression: Developmental and Alchemical Perspectives

To begin with I should like to focus upon two qualities of consciousness that inform our work as Jungian analysts. One quality allows us to experience events within a space-time matrix. Another allows us to experience the nature of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Within the transference-countertransference process we can move back and forth between these different modes of consciousness. As has often been stressed, personal and archetypal dimensions cannot be separated but they can be experienced as related aspects of an indivisible process (Williams, 19, Eigen 2). To use Jung's metaphor, the sea is the carrier of the individual wave (Jung 9, para. 354).

Jung describes the soul as ‘the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life’ (Jung 10, para. 56). There are, however, deeply alienated areas of the soul, which, as a result of the experience of abandonment, appear to be lifeless. The process of integration of these split-off areas highlights the importance of seeing the organic linking of personal and archetypal dimensions within the transferencecountertransference process.

Abandonment is a catastrophic experience, different, as Michael Fordham emphasises, ‘From other forms of separation in which sadness, pining, and grief are experienced’ (Fordham 4). On the one hand, the abandoned one suffers a consummate betrayal, the loss of a loved and needed person. On the other hand, persecution by that same person is experienced. As a result, one's sense of reality is totally threatened: the good has become the bad, the nurturing has become persecutory. From a seeming state of well-being a chaotic state of panic becomes imminent because the entire fabric of one's perception of reality has come into question.

A frantic search for a good object immediately takes over, but the persecutory despair remains so intense that the search is doomed to failure, undone by the chaos and pain which defies the attempt at