Case Response II

The analyst's comments that ‘Our work, having started very cheerfully, began to slow down and slow down, until he cancelled the last four meetings’ and ‘Our work, which began so intensively, now seems to be put on pause’, reminded me of Jacobi's (1973) comments about the shadow in analytic work:

the exposure of the shadow in analysis usually encounters great resistance … indeed many analyses fail at this stage; unable to confront the contents of his unconscious, the analysand breaks off in the middle and crawls back into the shelter of his

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illusions or neurosis. An outsider should bear all this in mind when passing judgement on an ‘unsuccessful analysis’.

She adds ‘making the shadow conscious is one of the principal, though often unconscious, reasons why so many persons are afraid to undergo a Jungian analysis’ (1973, p. 113).

Initial shadow avoidance seems to have been an issue for Nikolai, for it took three months to state he was an ‘alcohol addict’ and adding ‘I can't stop’. Avoidance continued, for after his disclosure Nikolai had only one session. Regarding shadow avoidance, Jung (1948a) describes a man who in the first session said he was ‘in the best of health’, was ‘merely pursuing his psychoanalytic interests’ and ‘was not to be considered in any sense a patient’ (para. 478). So Jung (knowingly) asked for dreams, and after the patient's re-telling of one he said:

At this point I interrupted him with the indiscreet question: had his neurosis entirely disappeared since then [that is, being in a sanatorium, which was one of the patient's disclosures regarding the dream]? He tried to worm out of it, but finally had to admit that he still had his neurosis.

Jung (1948a) adds, ‘The dream rectifies the situation. It contributes the material that was lacking…’ (para. 482), that is, it counteracted the patient's falsification that had allowed the ‘neurosis to recede into the background’ (para. 481).

Nikolai's dreams are also signi