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In the following emotionally charged vignette, we encounter what Jung refers to as the dark side of the Self—manifested through religious abuse and other forms of traumatic experience so pervasive that the psyche of a gifted young woman splinters into dissociated identities as a means of survival.
As one commentator notes, his initial countertransference response to the case was an urge “to lock up” the client's family—themselves lost, generationally abused, and instantiated within a social order that colludes with the abuse of women, young and old. The story of “Alice”, and others like it, brings into sharp relief how destructive religiosity coupled with participant family dynamics may effectively destroy the capacity for reflection within individual members, reducing or annihilating the ability to symbolize their own experience; their capacity to relate to self and others.
The images that accompany this case are disturbing and visceral, revealing the level of trauma to the psyche. It is hard not to feel blindsided and angered by this kind of systemic abuse which, as our commentators wisely note, also carries with it the danger of unconscious sado-masochistic reenactment that must be guarded against as analyst and analysand “descend into the alchemical bath” together, a process asking “not less than everything” from both. As the analyst in this case bravely chronicles, after a long sojourn in the underworld, the emergence of an emotional part in “Alice” able to draw images of her terrifying experiences (be they real or symbolic) allowed both analyst and analysand to further link fragmented emotional parts and begin a process of remembering; the images themselves the beginnings of an analytic “third” thing between them.
We imagine this “thirdness” may have assisted “Alice” in further naming her own experience when she viewed a film that closely documents similar abuses. Such seeing and naming brings a level of validation and support from both the inner object world and