Response to the comments

I appreciate the thoughtful comments by my colleagues and would like to make a few remarks about them.

I was impressed by Beebe's autobiographical example, illustrating his interaction with the anima. As I understand it, he was able to transform her by learning to attend to his own needs, including paying close attention to his bodily sensations. Thus he gained insight into his own overprotective mothering tendencies. He convincingly shows how it was possible for him to increase his own vitality and that of his anima which led to a better relationship to self and others. However, I have a different perspective, for I do not believe that, had Beebe interpreted the dream figures as mother imagos, he would have assumed ‘that all I needed to do was to stop taking excessive care of others’. The inner parent representations are stable and lasting structures in one's life but they change as one develops. If you have an inner caring mother who provides protective functioning you are not only able to set boundaries and protect yourself but you also have the capacity for mutually satisfying relationships. The unhappy laundress, impoverished and angry in the author's dream, could also be understood as the concept of André Green's ‘dead mother’ which represents a psychologically unavailable mother. In succeeding dreams she was able to enjoy ice cream and the company of her husband. In my view the orally needy and aggressive mother imago of Beebe's childhood, the pre-Oedipal mother transformed into an Oedipal mother, one with a husband at her side who was able to care for self and others in a mature and realistic fashion.

James Astor writes that Jung's archetypal approach consists in his feeling that there is a great difference between knowing something and experiencing it and that it made him willing to be affected by his patients. This is also the view of Freud and every analyst, I believe. However, as I have mentioned in my paper, this runs counter to Fordham's report; he had o