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The heart of Rose-Emily Rothenberg's book, The Jewel in the Wound, is in the subtitle: ‘How the body expresses the needs of the psyche and offers a path to transformation’. I have been following Rothenberg's story with much interest for many years. I first heard her speak at a Chiron conference at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, and then at the International Congress in Zürich several years later.
Rothenberg does not focus on the various transference or counter-transference experiences she encountered in her own four therapeutic relationships. Rather she focuses on the relationship of her conscious world with her unconscious inner world as she strove to find meaning, believing that psyche speaks to us in various ways, showing us an archetypal Jungian approach toward transformation. She describes for us how this longing for wholeness became her opus. What we find is a description of the intertwining of body experience with image and emotion.
Her work encourages us to think about our own complexes and the somatic feeling states, the affective core of the complexes. She describes the negative and positive sides of the archetypes. We know from our experience that we have only to delve into the somatic experience of our own embedded complexes to realize how our affects, split off from consciousness and lodged in ungrounded fantasies, encapsulate us.
Rothenberg shows that the deeper purpose in analytic work is to endure the meaning of the split off parts in order to redeem them. The body scars that appeared and the meaning they held became the prima materia which sent her on her journey. The meaning of these scars became the vehicle and the source toward which she journeyed, toward her sense of home and the Self. This is the core of her very sensitive autobiography. The reader is invited to journey with her as she recounts her life long process of listening to the psyche/soma messages, of watching the body markings of scars and the growth of keloids. This hermeneutic process is off