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‘All the tears that I have never cried’.
‘I have to grieve for my parents’.
Joyce McDougall has given me a clear mandate as a Jungian respondent: to offer some thoughts on the archetypal view of countertransference and its affects in certain psychoanalytical encounters. This I will attempt.
First, I wish to comment on and respond to the emotional atmosphere of Joyce McDougall's paper about her analytic engagement with Sorel. In the tradition of this conference, this case and paper disturb and are disturbing in several ways.
I will begin where Dr McDougall ended: ‘I learned with overwhelming sadness that Sorel had died’. Indeed, sadness pervades this presentation, as it pervaded Sorel's history, life, and psyche. I especially felt sadness that Sorel could not approach the images through which her experience might have been given embodied and approachable form. There is also great sadness not just in this woman's mournful plight, but paradoxically in the sense of an absence of mourning, particularly in her parents’ apparent inability to mourn visibly and communicatively. Jung and the child therapist Frances Wickes (Jung 1954, para. 80, footnote 1) noted that a child often carries the unconscious and dis- associated aspects of a parent's psyche. Sorel seemed indeed to have been burdened by her parents' unexpressed grief and guilt. As a twentieth century Jewish child and woman, she is at the affect of a people's great grief, unmediated by her parents, and in any case too great to be metabolized by the psyche.
It is here that archetypal theory is relevant. Jung suggests that whenever there is no personal mediation of experience through significant persons, the energies, emotions, instincts, and responses of that realm are not humanized. As a result the unmediated collective and archetypal images with their possessing affective qualities have a more direct impact on the personal psyche.
Horrors such as the Holocaust can never be contained by an individual or a group. But it is