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The May 2010 Odyssey conference sponsored by ISAP was offered to all who are interested in analytical psychology. Published in this edition is a comprehensive array of papers on the dynamics of trust and betrayal in life, analysis and myth. Following is a taste of the contents and some thoughts about it.
The first two papers are on God's betrayal of Job. Diane Cousineau Brutsche (‘Betrayal of the Self, Self-Betrayal and the Leap of Trust’), using quotes from the Bible, guides us through Job's betrayal by God and his confrontation with his own personal shadow (vis à vis his children and friends). Job's breakthrough comes when he is able to risk everything and express his anger at Yahweh. Hence, Job comes to wisdom. In Betrayal: ‘A Way to Wisdom’, Murray Stein's Job ‘does not raise the slightest objection’ (p. 9) to his destruction. However, Jung in his ‘syntonic countertransference’, expressed in Answer to Job gives voice to Job's ‘rage’ (p. 9). Because of Jung's treatise on Job, Victor White ‘vents his rage with his transference object’, Jung, for putting his sense of professional integrity in jeopardy (p. 12). Eventually through honesty and anger, Jung and White come to their own wisdom and ‘gratitude’ for each other at the end of their lives (p. 13). Thus, the figure of Job plays different parts in each author's story. The prism of perception is always curious.
Judith Savage's paper contains valuable information about the ‘Four Women Under Jung's Shadow’. She claims their (Hélène Preiswerk, Frank Miller, Sabina Spielrein, and Antonia Wolff) histories have been ‘excised’, ‘each lost as the objects of Jung's projections, subsumed as the proofs to his theories, encased in his secret guilt and personal failings’ (p. 112). Perhaps, but her analysis leaves out historical precedents that have worked against women and other psychological and archetypal possibilities that also affected each of these women's lives.
Donald Kalsched (‘Innocence: Benign or Malignant’) writes that