Who Is My Jung?

Active Imagination

I want to begin with active imagination. Imagine you are sitting in a chair. You look up and see Jung sitting opposite. How do you feel? What does he say to you? The theme "Who Is My Jung?" was borrowed from a London conference, the proceedings of which were published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

Jung is often quoted as saying, "Thank God I am not a Jungian." He meant that we should neither idealize him nor rely on him, but rather develop our own, individual approaches to working with the unconscious. Individuation is a process that continues throughout life, not only in our personal development but also in our clinical work, where we must individuate, becoming the therapists we are meant to be.

Discovering Jung

My relationship with Jung began when I was a graduate student at Yale University. I was very interested in combining psychology and anthropology, my two passions. Just as analysts must undergo the rite of analysis, anthropologists also must undergo the transformative experience of fieldwork. My professor drew my attention to Madagascar, the island continent and the country of the Malagasy Republic, which was then almost unknown. I found my place in the rainforest of the east coast of Madagascar. I saw amazing rituals: spirit possession and healing ceremonies. I saw secondary burial rituals, during which the bones of a deceased relative were exhumed and the soul of the deceased became one of the ancestors, followed by the most joyful dances I have ever experienced. Later, I read in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that Jung described the "unconscious" as "[corresponding] to the mythical land of the dead, the land of the ancestors" (Jung 1961, 216). Then I understood that this was the reality in which I had lived. At one point in Madagascar, I began having visions. Whether this was due to the intensity of my experience or poisoning (a way the community deals with "strangers" and "enemies") was never determined. When I finally returned to university, I sought help from a student psychologist and saw a quite respectable Viennese psychoanalyst who was interested in my hidden aggression towards my mother but seemed not to know what to do with the visions. Fortunately, I discussed these visions with another professor who said, "You would be a good candidate for Jungian analysis."

Jung was never mentioned in my lectures or seminars, although he delivered his famous Terry Lectures at Yale. There was only one analyst in the area, so I went to him. When we began talking about visions and dreams, I realized I had come home. Later I moved to Israel and continued my analysis with another American who personally knew Jung and was one of the first graduates of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. Thus, I could trace my symbolic and direct lineage back to Jung.

In many societies, this adds prestige and status. Although I liked many of Jung's ideas, I never experienced a strong personal transference onto him, as some of his students did.

Many years later, when I was applying for training as a Jungian analyst, I suddenly had serious doubts. Committing to staying in analysis meant not only taking on a serious financial responsibility but also taking precious time away from myself as the father of a growing family. Was this the right decision? On the night before the final interview, I had a dream. I was walking through an old historical European city with high stone walls and narrow alleys. Suddenly I saw stairs leading to beautiful old wooden doors. I knocked on the door. Jung opened the door and invited me in. He showed me glass display cases containing beautiful objects. He slid back the glass, took out an exquisite object, and placed it in my hand. I understood that I had to go through with the training! Because of this dream, I have always felt at home in Jung's world, despite his limitations as a person due to his comments about women, Jews, homosexuals, people of color, and so on.

Jung's Anti-Semitism

For me, as a Jew, the problem of Jung's anti-Semitic statements has always remained in the shadows. In 1934, Jung wrote about "Jewish psychology," saying that Jews never created their own cultural form but always fed off the cultures of their hosts (1934/1970, CW 10, ¶165). He also did not speak out publicly against the great evil that arose in the form of National Socialism.

During my studies, my professors at Yale University challenged me: "How can you be a Jungian when you are Jewish?" and "Don't you know he was a Nazi?" Even my teachers during my analytical training in Israel were very ambivalent and felt much closer to Erich Neumann than to Jung. Tom Singer, a Jewish analyst from San Francisco, said: "To be a Jungian would be to betray being a Jew/Freudian. To be a Jew/Freudian would be to betray being a Jungian" (Singer 2012, 81). Although space does not allow me to elaborate, I have always felt the need to explain to Jung what he did.

I was very surprised to learn from Murray Stein that in his training, Jung never mentioned anti-Semitism (or racial prejudice). Subsequently, Murray Stein and I wrote a play, The Analyst and the Rabbi, based on the historic meeting between Jung and Rabbi Leo Baeck in Zürich in 1946. This play has been performed, made into a film, and published as a book. In the first scene, Jung comes to Rabbi Baeck's hotel in Zürich. Jung knocks on the door, but Rabbi Baeck refuses to see him (Stein and Abramovitch 2019). Part of me feels something similar.

I am so angry at Jung that I don't want to talk to him. But another part knows that the right thing to do is to let him in and confront him, as Rabbi Baeck did. I think many people make the mistake of not confronting those who have hurt them, who are often unaware of their offensive behavior. Then the pain festers, and there is no opportunity for reconciliation. We know from Gershom Scholem's letter to Aniela Jaffé, Jung's secretary and a Jewish analyst, that Jung said, "Ich bin ausgerutscht" ("I slipped off the path") (1984, 97–98). The metaphor of slipping off the path comes from skiing or hiking in the Alps, which was part of Jung's key Swiss identity. It means that there is a moral path that Jung should have followed, but without realizing it, unconsciously, he slipped and went off the path. When Jung meets Rabbi Baeck, he begins to understand that he was aware of the process in which he was participating, until it was too late. We know that Jung made private apologies to specific individuals (e.g., James Kirsch and others), but he refused to apologize publicly. Why he did not make a public apology remains a matter of debate, but it still works against him. However, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung relates his dying cabalistic visions, which, he said, were "the greatest things I have ever experienced" (1961, 295). In the play, Rabbi Baeck suggests that perhaps these visions brought him into contact with his Jewish soul. They undoubtedly connected him to a deep layer in his subconscious where he was one with the Jewish mystic Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai, who legend says was the visionary creator of kabbalah. At the end of the play, Rabbi Baeck shows the way forward, referring to the kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam, pointing to the possibility of repairing the world. I see tikkun olam in how Jung's photographs changed over time. In his youth, he seems fierce, reserved, and judgmental. At the end of his life, he looks calm but playful, a smiling wise old man who doesn't take himself too seriously. I also believe there is an element of tikkun olam in his individuation process.

Individuation, which means getting to know oneself more and more, always involves confronting the shadow. The individual's work with the shadow also defuses the collective shadow, as shown in the kabbalistic doctrine that the holiest sparks can only be found and redeemed on the dark side. Similarly, Memories, Dreams, Reflections not only showed Jung's amazing personal journey, but reading it, I and many others felt that we, too, could embark on a journey. Even in his late book about flying saucers, I sense his search for himself in unexpected places. I am drawn to the topic of siblings. I realized that Jung's personality was deeply influenced by his sibling identity, which is discussed in detail in my book Brothers and Sisters: Myth and Reality (Abramovitch 2014). Jung was evidently a replacement child, born after the death of three previous newborns, into whose psyche his mother's unlived grief was placed. His psyche may have been focused on the absence of dead siblings he never knew (Schellinski 2019). In The Red Book (2009, 296), Jung hints at the intensity of his experience as a replacement child. His life ambitions and striking creativity may have been a way to prove that he was worthy and unique in his own right, solving for everyone what he could not solve for himself.

Types

Jung has influenced me in many different ways, but most clearly through his vivid understanding of the innate differences among people. His theory of psychological types and functions is something that inspires me personally, interpersonally, and clinically. It is the foundation for one of the "Big Five" personality clusters listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5), as well as in the most widely used psychological test in the world, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, created by a mother-daughter team. Jung's theory gave me a simple yet profound way to recognize myself as an extraverted-intuitive type, with auxiliary feeling and thinking functions that have developed over time, but with a very underdeveloped sensation function. It helped me understand why new ideas come easily to me, but I have difficulty changing a light bulb. Moreover, I realized that my path to individuation lies through embracing my inferior function and not relying too much on my natural strengths. Likewise, I realized that my natural extraversion needs to come to terms with my secret introversion so that I can be happy alone, not dependent on others, but as described in the bestseller Quiet (Cain 2012).

The theory of psychological types is also a striking critique of traditional transference theory. Although few believe it today, Freud argued that the analyst should be a blank screen. But analysts can never be neutral, because they see and speak through their psychological type. I try to understand patients' predispositions without putting them into boxes. I try to speak in a language that suits them. If I give an interpretation and it is not received, or is rejected, or does not penetrate, I ask myself whether I said it on the wrong axis: judgment instead of perception, feeling instead of sensation. I look for metaphorical language that makes sense to them. I try to adjust my approach, which often yields good results. I believe much more attention needs to be paid to how we give interpretations, not just their content.

I admire Jung when he says that we must invent a new therapy for each patient, personalize it, rather than rely on technique. "If a technique can be spoken of at all, it consists solely in the attitude" (Jung 1973, 234).

Jung said that the analyst should not have fixed ideas about what is right and should not pretend to know what is right... If something that seems to me to be an error proves to be more effective than the truth, then I must follow the error, because in it there is power and life which I lose if I cling to what seems right. (2014, 245) Although there are dangers in such freedoms—mindless analysis or unethical boundary violations—this statement gave me the courage to do what I otherwise might not have dared.

Restoring the Temenos

The case of Ruth was one I did not want to take. I received a call from a senior colleague. She asked me to meet with Ruth—as a personal favor—just for a consultation and to refer her. Her only daughter had died in a car accident, and she was distraught. My colleague was worried about her. Would I see her? I often enjoy playing therapeutic matchmaker. I agreed reluctantly. I was afraid I would be dealing with an acutely suicidal patient and recalled the words of Martin Buber: "What do we expect when we are in despair but still go to someone?" It was an invitation to open active imagination. Buber answers his own question: "Surely the presence through which we are told that there is still meaning" (1973, 46). What presence can I offer?

The woman who arrived was not what I expected. She was a healthy woman in her seventies who sat down uncertainly. She began talking about seeing a psychiatrist who, after a few sessions, declared her hopeless. She said she was not suicidal and even sometimes felt joy in life when photographing or caring for her many pets or wounded strays. Until recently, she had volunteered at the local zoo, and her dream was to run a shelter for injured animals. She spoke openly about her daughter's death, but as often happens in analysis, the real details emerged much later. Here's what happened: her daughter was riding a motorcycle with her fiancé to visit his mother for her birthday. When her scarf flew off, she turned back to get it and was instantly killed by an oncoming semi-truck. The fiancé was unharmed and appeared on the mother's doorstep to deliver the tragic news. "All my life," she said, "I was afraid of losing her. Even when she was little, whenever she let go of my hand, I was afraid I would never see her again. Now what I feared most has happened." I felt Ruth in the countertransference, like Lot's wife, mentally frozen, in the moment, looking back at the trauma (Abramovitch 2020). But her daughter's sudden death was not an isolated tragedy; it was just the latest in a series of incredible losses. Ruth's mother and younger brother died in Auschwitz. Her father survived but cut all ties after telling her that she was not his biological daughter but the result of his wife's marital infidelity. Her older brother died in an industrial accident. Her first husband died of a degenerative neurological disorder. Her second husband, the father of their daughter, divorced her and disappeared. She was a person with no living relatives.

In Hebrew, there is a special term for such a person, galmud, or galmuda in the feminine, "lonely and abandoned." Accordingly, this word can only be found in the Book of Job (3:7). I often feel that analysts are only protected from mental contagion or secondary trauma from the horrendous stories of our patients by the fact that we have heard even more horrendous stories. This was a case of loss, repeated loss, beyond imagination. I felt that I had been chosen as the therapist, and I could not refer her to someone else.

Initially, the sessions did not flow but jerked along with staccato intensity. At the beginning, she told me about her teacher, later a famous writer, who had taken her in as a refugee in Israel. He wrote a memoir in which Ruth was mentioned only in one phrase, ironically describing how they rode a motorcycle together. Her pain at being rejected, reduced to half a sentence, was the first time she showed any hint of emotion. Through active imagination, we revisited her home in Berlin and Prague, her youth, her mother, and then, finally, she began to introduce me to her daughter, whose presence filled the space between us.

Nature documentaries and her animals provided the warmth and acceptance she did not receive from people. Analysis became what she called her "island of sanity," and often her only human contact during the week. We began to say goodbye in French, "à la prochaine," and I realized that parting, literally and symbolically, sounded in a foreign language. Would there be a next time? That was an existential question. Very slowly, a certain trust was built, until kairos (the sudden opportunity) intervened.

After much consideration, I decided to take a three-month mini-sabbatical to return again within the year. I stopped taking new patients. I worked to terminate with others and offered referrals to those still in the midst of their journey. I tried to do the decent thing. I was afraid to tell her but knew I had to. When I told her about my plans, she said directly, "Do you care about me?" and immediately added, "Then how can you go?" I felt that my departure would destroy all the hard work we had done together, reawakening her deep-seated fear of abandonment. Indeed, she immediately reacted with the fear that I would never return. I felt as if the ship that our work had painstakingly pieced together were being smashed to pieces. Daniel Stern, who speaks about "moments of the present" in analysis, tends to discuss positive, courageous, life-enhancing moments when the therapist leaves the script and ventures into uncharted territory with positive outcomes. But there are deeply destructive "moments of the present"—shadow moments when the analyst knows that something deeply irreparable has occurred. At that moment, I felt like Kali, the destroyer. How could I take my mini-sabbatical and still remain? How could I leave so that she didn't again feel abandoned or, worse, so that the trust that had been carefully built didn't appear as a deep profanation? I felt helpless. I needed inspiration. Intuition. Then the kairos opportunity appeared. I discussed my dilemma with my "Bitter Lemon" analytic group, named after the Schweppes beverage we traditionally drank. There, from a fellow analyst who was herself a child Holocaust survivor, I heard about how she dealt with a fragile patient, also a child Holocaust survivor. When the analyst was away, she allowed the patient to continue to use the therapeutic space during her absence. Here I felt inspired. But how could one raise a question that so fundamentally violated a basic element of the frame? But as if her subconscious heard my thoughts in mystical participation, she asked me at the next session, "Who will take care of your flowers?" Encouraged by what I had heard, I asked if she would like to take care of them during my absence. She said yes. Before leaving, I gave her the key to my office, understanding that she would water the plants and be able to come to my office whenever she wanted. I left. She came, watered the flowers, and used the room for quiet solitude and meditation in a sacred place, as if sitting in an empty church. When I returned, she thanked me for trusting her to care for the flowers. She told me how it helped her get through the painfully long separation. Her ability to keep my plants alive allowed us both to undergo a transformation. Of course, I am not in favor of giving keys to our clinic to our patients. For most patients, this would be highly inappropriate, would harm the therapeutic process, or even be worse. If I heard that a colleague had done that, I would seriously question their clinical competence or even their sanity. But for Ruth, imagination, intuition, and inspiration came together to allow a dramatic exception, which I called the temenos.

Working with Ruth also changed my understanding of analysis. Previously, I thought that analysis aimed at individuation, somewhere in the future, when a person would flourish in the fullness of their life. Wonderful if that happens. Working with Ruth, I realized that the future is not the goal of analysis; the primary goal is the expansion of the present. Sometimes the key moments of analysis occur not with the analyst, but when the patient can feel the analyst's presence in his or her absence. Jung, who demonstrated so much inner strength of spirit in deeply exploring new pathways, gave me the courage to find this creative solution for an extraordinary situation.

Filled and Empty Space

Ruth's reaction pushed me to consider more deeply the influence of the physical space where analysis takes place. I realized that my work was influenced not only by Jung's ideas but also by how he organized his therapeutic space. From the perspective of the philosophy of designing clinical space, there are two schools: empty space and filled space. Empty space derives from the desire for tzimtzum. Tzimtzum is the kabbalistic idea that God had to contract Himself to make room for the creation of the world. Similarly, analysts should diminish themselves to give maximum space for the patient's unconscious projections and fantasies. This school strongly recommends strict minimalism. Nina Coltart, a leading British psychoanalyst, holds this view: "I think that a blank wall gives the patient freer fantasy, and I would certainly always give a personal preference to white walls" (1993, 30). Pictures, she says, can elicit transference reactions or reveal the analyst's obsessive aspects. Minimalism is rationalized as allowing the patient complete freedom of fantasy, but it can also evoke an impersonal emotional atmosphere that hinders the therapeutic process. Moreover, how would the analyst feel sitting all day in white minimalism? Although many Freudians adopted the empty school, both Freud and Jung exemplify the "filled" school. Freud's office was overflowing with countless statues and artifacts that he loved and discussed with his patients. Jung's office was filled with ethnographic treasures from his numerous travels, as well as beautiful stained-glass windows he made to honor his daughter's birth. My room has a distinct ethnographic feel. The style of my office clearly follows this "filled" tradition. Now I want to describe my connection to several photographs in my office that help create a healing backdrop for analysis.

The Altar of My Temenos

My favorite piece of art in my office is a painting by the renowned Dutch artist Vermeer titled "Woman Reading a Letter." The painting depicts a young woman, dressed in a blue jacket, reading a letter. In the lower foreground is a long table and several chairs with leather backs. In the upper background on a white wall is a large map of some distant country. Each object is accompanied by its shadows. The intensity of her feelings is conveyed subtly, indirectly in the timeless tension between the woman, the letter, the map, and the chairs. The woman herself may be pregnant, but even that is ambiguous. The striking blue color was made from lapis lazuli imported in the seventeenth century from Afghanistan, giving this shade an inherent international appearance. The woman is alone in her home, yet very much engaged with an absent other. This painting of a thoughtful, reading woman guards and consecrates my therapeutic space. She is the altar of my temenos.

Jung believed that the image, not the word, is the primary language of the psyche. Images not only precede words in development; they remain the universal language that words can never be. The images in Vermeer's painting give the therapeutic space a sense of holiness. For me, this painting is a symbolic representation of the analytic process. The map on the wall indicates the analysts' need for a map or theory that helps us chart the therapeutic path. We need to know where we are and, perhaps, where we are going. The pregnancy represents that part of the person that is about to appear but is not yet born, as when I dreamed that I was pregnant during my own analysis. The unconscious, as Jung taught, is always sending us messages, if only we can read them with clarity and calm. The letter is akin to a message from an intimate but distant presence. The letter the woman holds is like a dream or symptom, a message from the unconscious that seems very far away but is, of course, very near. In the Blue Lady, the painting calls us not outward but inward, to her inner space of waiting. The map, the woman, and the letter are depicted between two chairs. Vermeer, of course, could not have known about psychotherapy or analysis, but in this painting, I believe, he symbolically depicted much of their essence.

There is another image on another wall; it is a print of a Japanese poster for a 1986 exhibition of woodblock prints at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Haifa. It depicts a large manor house, viewed from above, so that the viewer can simultaneously see the deep inner courtyard as well as its outer defensive roof. From this "impossible" bird's-eye view, we can see not only the heart of the courtyard but also all the series of defensive protective roofs. This "view" suggests how Jungian psychology has a particular view of defense and resistance. On the one hand, it assumes that people naturally do not resist but want to get better. Their symptoms are rather failed attempts at self-healing. On the other hand, when resistance arises in the therapeutic process, its direct interpretation is usually considered futile. I don't like it when someone tells me I am being defensive, especially if it's true. Rather, the analyst sees resistance as a sign that something in the therapeutic container is not sufficiently safe and secure, or that the analyst's communication style is inappropriate, for example, that the patient perceives me as speaking on the judging axis rather than the perceiving axis. In short, resistance is the therapist's responsibility. The woman I will call Lisa spends most of the session detailing everything she did during the week from a list, and any attempt to turn her toward her feelings is met with the reaction "just let me finish"; by the time she finishes, the time is up. I wonder why she is so defensive. I feel despair, feel unnecessary, perhaps through mystical participation and projective identification. But I have no room to speak. Then I see the Japanese print. It reminds me that I need to look into the hidden, invisible inner courtyard of this person, behind her defensive walls. This poster inspires me when I am dealing with a person who is very defensive. It reminds me that I should not act aggressively; instead, I must seek the "seemingly impossible" bird's-eye view to peer into the patient's inner courtyard, where there is life so different from the external persona. This print allows me to imagine—to imagine the inner space where the work must take place. Suddenly I catch myself saying, "It must be hard to be vulnerable." She begins to cry quietly, then sob, and says, "I'm so afraid." Contact has been made. Without Japanese inspiration and intuition, this could hardly have happened.

Analysis as Performance

Jung speaks to me as an artist, especially in his work as a sculptor. I am fascinated by the fact that he was an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) spy, the precursor to the CIA, and correctly predicted Hitler's suicide and the subsequent collapse of resistance. He was called "Agent 488," and his supervisor, Allen W. Dulles, later noted: "Probably no one will ever know what contribution Professor Jung made to the Allied cause during the war" (Bair 2004, 492). My Jung remained creative until his death, always exploring, wanting to know more, and trying to understand.

In addition to well-known concepts such as the shadow, anima/animus, and the Self, I am drawn to some lesser-known concepts: recollectivization, regressive restoration of the personality, the unconscious as the land of the ancestors. But I also admire Jung the writer; Memories, Dreams, Reflections I consider, above all, his masterpiece.

Analysts are extremely reflective. They reflect on what patients feel, their own feelings, the therapeutic interaction, and so on. But there is one area in which they are surprisingly unreflective, and that is how they write about analysis. If analysis is like poetry, then most writing about analysis is prosaic prose. Occasionally, works such as Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner or Naomi Lloyd's The Knife and the Butterfly: A Story of Jungian Analysis appear, written by writers who convey vivid therapeutic experience, almost like a novel, but with little connection to theory. However, the essence of writing is not to give a truthful account but to convince the reader of the correctness of the theoretical formulation. A tradition that began with the works of Freud and Jung. As Kenneth Spence has shown, the goal of clinical writing is to transform clinical failure into narrative success. Freud himself admitted that he was not a good analyst because he was too interested in theory. Indeed, the best analysts are probably people we have never heard of because they were more interested in their patients as people than in writing about them.

But theory is much like a hidden script for analysis—theory not only describes therapy but also predicts how things should unfold. Even Jung, who said we must invent a new therapy for each patient, spoke of the four stages of analysis: confession, clarification, education, transformation. He compared it to the alchemical process and even described it as a journey of self-knowledge. Written accounts of analysis typically rely on what literary critics call "naive realism," in which the clinician-author dominates the therapeutic space. She possesses complete, all-knowing understanding and thus symbolically dominates the patient in what might be called "narrative imperialism." Case studies simplify and make clinical reality too coherent. From a performance arts perspective, when I read a truly compelling clinical article or book, I become extremely suspicious. Such coherence is inherent in theory, not in the living reality of analysis.

I am also an anthropologist, and there is nothing I like more than attending funerals to understand different societies' relationships with death. Anthropologists also used to believe in naive realism until postmodernism hit anthropology like a tsunami. Naive realism reflects the view that the observer perceives the world directly, as it is, rather like an omniscient narrator in a novel. In particular, he believes that the observer, whether ethnographer or analyst, is capable of giving an accurate and truthful account of events. In contrast, postmodernism believes in the absence of objective reality and argues that knowledge is inevitably a social construct that reflects the power structure of contemporary elites. Instead of seeking supposed Truth, one should seek dissonant voices beneath the surface. Anthropologists began to question their ethnographic texts and realized that their task was much more complex than they had imagined. Suddenly, ethnographers realized that there is no external eye that would allow them to describe cultures as they really were. This also prompted anthropologists to consider that there are hidden voices that are not heard, and that there is no single authoritative point of view. This has led to fruitful and ongoing searches for a new form of ethnographic writing and a new understanding of how the ethnographer gains authority, how local informants can be involved in constructing the text, and how they can deal with multiple levels of reality simultaneously. This movement was called "Writing Culture." I believe that analysts need a creative literary revolution, which by analogy could be called writing analysis. We need to think more about how we present and represent what actually happens in analysis, seek more poetic and multi-layered texts, deconstruct our analytic authority, essentially explore and experiment as in the performing arts.

Conclusion: "Who Is My Jung?"

Jung invited me into his home and then inspired me to find my own way. To hear a dream and say, "I have no idea what this dream means," and only then begin to work with my patient. Jung does not have to be my hero. I doubt I would have liked him if we had met; but he shed light on the psyche, the shadow, and the Self, and revealed the secrets of active imagination, and for that I will be eternally grateful to my Jung.

Translation from English: Anna Ortinska, analytically oriented psychologist.
Professional editing: Inna Kyryliuk, Hanna Mitsuk, Olena Pozdieieva, Serhii Tekliuk.