To be Born was the Death of Him: A clinical study of a self that might have been but never got born

This paper is essentially a re-telling of a creation myth. It is about the genesis of a person: the emergence and non-emergence of that person's potential self out of the psychoid unconscious. It is about how that goes wrong, gets stuck and confused with internalized parental relations right from the very beginning, before birth, creating psychosomatic confusions, distortions in the person's sense of selfhood, preventing differentiation, evoking autistic defence mechanisms, and instigating the introjective process of encapsulation of parts of the self.

Crucial to Jung's thought is the notion of the psychoid realm of the unconscious, the psychoid unconscious being the area where ‘both psychic image and physical instinct mix together, where they unite’ . For Jung, at this most fundamental dynamic base of the psyche, the physiological and psychological world may be seen as two sides of a single coin. Therefore, we can consider that the source of psyche is psychoid based. The archetypes reside in the psychoid realm. Archetypes are defined as the ‘inherited, universal, psychosomatic, structural elements within the human psyche, which can only express themselves by means of an image’ (Samuels, Shorter and Plaut 1986).

Jung described the archetypes as hypothetical structures, invisible in themselves, and able to be experienced only in their manifestation. He spoke of the archetype of the self, the central archetype of order, as a ‘working hypothesis’ (Jung 1921, para. 791). Largely because of the way in which Jung personified and named them, many of his