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William Meredith-Owen's paper holds a mirror up to the nature of being an analyst. He challenges all of us to think about our own experience of analysis and training and to ask, as he has done, how far Bion's trenchant remark might apply to us.
In my own case, I was reminded of a remark I've often made—that I've made a career out of being depressed. But what I really mean by this is that my career helped cure my depression through offering an arena where I could put it to use, turning the base matter of my inner conflicts into the gold of creative work with a sense of meaning and purpose. Whether this is an example of becoming an analyst as an alternative to ‘getting better’ I'm not sure, but I don't think it involves the kind of ‘substitute for the recognition of loss’ that Meredith-Owen is addressing. On the contrary, it is only through giving up omnipotent idealized illusions that a sense of satisfaction in belonging to a shared creative enterprise becomes possible. It is just this which the three clinical examples in Meredith-Owen's paper all seemed to lack.
Perhaps the key word here is creativity, for this is at the heart of the difficulties that these patients present. Creativity arises from and promotes a sense of personal authenticity rooted in the kind of internal coniunctio on which individuation depends. Meredith-Owen's patients seem to have been unable to achieve this and have instead fallen back on an identification with the super-ego as a substitute for a genuine experience of the self. This view closely echoes the way Jung saw the relation between the self and the super-ego. He regarded the super-ego as the repository of a collective morality, an externally directed set of rules for living that is necessary where individuation, leading to the inner directed ethical responsibility of the self, is lacking1.