Case Response II

On my first reading of Alice's story, I felt nauseous, horrified, furious and terribly sad for this young woman and for the split-off feminine aspects her analyst has encountered, welcomed and helped safely contain. It constellated within me yet another level of confrontation with my own complexes related to the wounds of childhood trauma and informed by the intensity of affect I felt in reading Alice's story. I also believe my feelings to be a response to a collective conscious attitude of bias and discrimination against the feminine that continues to negatively affect women, girls and the feminine principle in boys and men. Nevertheless, to respond to this invitation by the Self to another “level of confrontation”, I had to admit an avoidance, a facet of a defence apparent early last year when I first streamed the movie Women Talking: I had watched the beginning and couldn't continue as the violation, abuse and poisonous silence inflicted on the girls and women had evoked those initial affects with which I introduced this commentary. However, because of my commitment to write a commentary, because of Alice's experience of the film and, finally, because of my previous emotional response to it, I watched Women Talking in full.

Jung explains in Dream Analysis that theatre is a kind of “psychotherapeutic institute where complexes are staged” and that movies, which are less restricted than theatre, produce “amazing symbols to show the collective unconscious” (McGuire, 1984, p. 12). Alice would agree: “This is my story,” she weeps with her analyst after watching Women Talking on Christmas Eve, a momentous date for the Christian community. After years of Alice and her dissociated little-girl-selves “talking” in and through the analytic relationship, Alice, herself, heretofore detached from and impassively reporting on Lindy or RP or CareTaker Girl's drawings, begins to feel the “realness” of hers and her little girls' emotional and physical trauma.

Although archetypal imag