Articles by dr. bennett
Theaters of Treatment
Talk therapy usually targets one or more of six “theaters” of intervention: consensual reality space, behavior, relationships, thoughts, feelings, and meaning systems. As may be apparent from the short descriptors of these theaters, the subject matter runs the gamut from prosaic matters of everyday life to purely internal abstractions. If this book, and the model it describes, has no other purpose, it is to stress the importance of dealing with the full spectrum of human experience in a treatment model, whether or not one restricts oneself to certain theaters of intervention in a given treatment plan. After briefly looking at each of these areas in turn, we’ll consider how these areas of inquiry can be broadly grouped into four levels of psychotherapy.
Consensual Reality
Consensual Reality Space denotes the social, cultural, interpersonal, and political environment of the individual. It is the realm of things that “everybody knows.” We often make pronouncements describing or affirming consensual reality by prefacing our remarks with “But everybody knows that you don’t…” or, “Even a chimpanzee would know better than to…” Note that while “everybody knows” the strictures of consensual reality, not everybody knows, and there are differences among cultures and subcultures. There was a time when “everybody knew” that the sun revolved around the earth, or that the earth itself was flat, and to not “know” this, or to “know” something else, was a grave heresy indeed. Nevertheless, such was the consensual reality of the time, and it would be wrong of us to label people who believed in such established order as crazy or stupid. Of course, it is equally wrong to label those who knew better as crazy, stupid, or heretical, either, which brings us around to a point about the relationship of consensual reality to psychology and mental health. The DSM guides, which codify our system of psychopathology in the West of the world, take pains to remind users that beliefs sanctioned by the culture cannot qualify as delusional or psychotic. The reason, of course, for this caution if very practical: it would make a great mess of things to use one form of consensual reality to judge the merit, worth, or accuracy of other forms of consensual reality…that would be a culture war, not a scientific endeavor.
Appreciation for cultural differences forms the basis of egalitarian liberalism, an important element of the intellectual history of western civilization. However, we know that we need not limit ourselves to limitless apologies of every credo that walks the earth, because we know there are many other layers of the psyche and of the human consciousness, not all of which are as absolutely subject to the vagaries of cultural influence. In the era of the world in which I write this, Islamic terrorism presses the western egalitarian ideal to the breaking point, forcing us to draw lines about acceptable behavior that run counter to our egalitarian ideals. So it is with talk therapy. We acknowledge the presence and importance of cultural forces, but we do not, with the exception of the more extreme forms of contextual, feminist, cross-cultural, and Marxist psychology, reduce the individual psyche to a passive receptacle of cultural influence. Nevertheless, the sphere of consensual reality remains present (sometimes intrusively so) in every episode of every course of every kind of talk therapy. Sometimes talk therapy involves education or acknowledgement of consensual reality, or the zeitgeist which has such a profound effect on all our psychologies. Sometimes a therapist will find herself in opposition to consensual reality. I recall a case of a young woman from a Southern Baptist family who refuses to report her father’s sexual abuse of her out of a socially-instilled imperative to “honor thy father and mother.” At other times, consensual reality comes to the rescue: if a young male patient asserts that the only thing keeping him from suicide is because that would represent “weakness,” the therapist will be pressed to accept this, however tacitly. With the exception of a relatively few unusually influential individuals, we don’t create consensual reality; however, we are obliged to work in the midst of it.
Sometimes the object of talk therapy is a matter of reinforcing consensual reality. Examples would include parenting and social skills training, which have the purpose of bringing the individual into compliance with accepted standards of behavior. Other forms of intervention belong less obviously to the sphere of consensual reality. Does anger management treatment target the sphere of consensual reality? It probably depends on the approach. Some approaches might train the client to modulate anger at the intrapsychic level (the work of Habib Davinloo comes to mind), perhaps even using creative visualization to psychologically enact the desired act of lashing out in order to dissipate internalized anxiety and allow more mindful behavior. Other approaches restrict themselves more purely to dispensing with anger in a socially acceptable way, such as hitting a punching bag or beating a pillow.
Most talk therapies take the position that the individual should maintain, or attempt to achieve, as fluent an understanding with consensual reality as possible. The integrative analytical model suggests that consensual reality represents one important aspect of the profound matrix which guides psychological development (in this case, in the “outward” direction). Discussion of the model has revealed how deeply consensual reality intersects with the psyche. Jung suggested that there is an aspect of the psyche which is above and beyond (or rather, below and beyond) the influence or reach of consensual reality, and our sphere model has illustrated just how this works. The integrative analytical model acknowledges this observation that part of the individual human shows a sort of timeless quality which belongs to all the ages of human evolution, not just the current zeitgeist. However, as we have discussed, consensual reality acts as the opposing pole[3] in the development of the psyche, representing such powerful forces as socialization, morals, relationships, and other vectors of influence which have their origins in the everyday world in which the individual consciousness finds itself. Freud and the neo-Freudians didn’t so much recognize or emphasize consensual reality as they did its hypothesized psychic antecedent, the superego. However, where the Freudians saw superego locked in eternal conflict with their hypothesized source of psychic material (the id), we shall instead emphasize the aspect of consensual reality as something to be balanced with the native (archetypal and symbolic) aspects of the psyche. In short, we will acknowledge that there is indeed something called consensual reality out there, and that it is an experiential field which the developing psyche must negotiate in order to achieve satisfactory psychological adjustment.
This formulation of “opposing poles” and balance suggests the strategy of integrative analytical psychology in actual psychotherapy. One of the relatively few truisms in this form of psychotherapy is that more consciousness is always a good thing. The individual must make peace with consensual reality in some way, just as he must make peace with his own native essence. Analytical psychology sees this process of “making peace” with inner and outer forces the crucible of personality development itself. In fact, personality can be defined as the psychological solution to the strategic challenge posed by consensual reality and archetypal identity. The “layers” of the psyche we have described, the harmonics, represent the psychological means of addressing this challenge. In as sense, the harmonics serve to modulate the dynamic tension between inner and outer experience.
Seen in the way we have just described, the importance of the role of consensual reality in talk therapy is highlighted. It is always advantageous for the patient to be as familiar with consensual reality as possible (keeping in mind that understanding of consensual reality is relative). As we have discussed, such an ability is mediated by the relative fluency of the personality, and may also be constrained by such aspects as reality testing, intelligence, and so on. It is important not only to familiarize oneself with local consensual reality, but also to be aware of its relativity and to maintain one’s internal consistency even when consensual reality is threatened, unclear, or in flux.
Given that we have established the relative importance of consensual reality as part of the matrix for psychological development, integrative analytical psychology cautions the patient from identifying wholly with it. Jung warned, and we shall repeat, the dangers of identifying directly with the archetype (which according to Jung, leads to risky ego inflation). We also must highlight the psychological dangers of identifying directly, or too completely, with consensual reality, for this is to disconnect the waking self (the persona) from the richness and dynamism provided by the native aspects of the psyche. Nevertheless, we are surrounded by people who have identified with consensual reality to the point that they cannot deviate from it in any meaningful way, with the result that crucial aspects of the self are ignored, repressed, or “split off.” This is the solution of the obsessive and compulsive personalities, which attempt to maintain stability by means of leveraging ego consciousness as far away as possible from the “messy” inner harmonics and their zones of emotional turbulence. The predictable result of total identification with consensual reality (which Jung recognized was expressed in alchemy as the “Prima Materia” and which he also called the “the thousand things” of life) is that some important aspect of the self (often it is affect modulation and expression) becomes impaired.
In true psychotherapy, including integrative analytical psychotherapy, the therapist encourages fluent conversancy with consensual reality so that the individual may take effective responsibility for her particular stand with regards to it. The stand that the patient takes “in the world” is the result of a considered process of thinking, feeling, and drawing upon internal resources as necessary, all the while aware of likely side effects, consequences, and implications in the sphere of consensual reality. The result of this considered process is increased psychological health and less reliance on disorganized, automatic, reflexive, or unconscious reactions to this or that aspect of consensual or internal reality.
In the realm of counseling, the clinical emphasis itself is on consensual reality. It focuses on objectively defined problems “out there” which the client and counselor endeavor to address. Counseling is rooted in consensual reality in a way that psychotherapy is not. It does not call for the client to go beyond consensual reality in any significant way. Counseling does address behavior and thinking as antecedents to consensual reality, and so does in fact access the higher-order harmonics. However, the end result is the successful resolution of a poorness-of-fit between the individual and consensual reality: abstinence from drugs of abuse for an addict or alcoholic, anger management for a young child getting in trouble at school, increased empathy skills for a bickering couple, development of social skills for a mildly metally retarded young man. Counseling effectively takes the world as it is and helps the client adjust to it in some identifiable way. The more culturally sophisticated counseling approaches recognize and emphasize the cultural differences that complicate the issue of consensual reality, and recognize that established status quo for one group may represent an intolerable tyranny to another. However, even these cross-cultural approaches, by their very emphasis, reinforce the central importance of consensual reality in its diverse forms. By their emphasis on membership in a group (ethnic, racial, gender-based, etc.), the cross cultural counseling approaches de-emphasize the individual dynamic and cast the individual as an identifiable member of a larger group. The “larger group” is always defined and bounded by consensual reality.
In the differences between counseling and psychotherapy as it relates to consensual reality, I am reminded of my Peace Corps days and one of the organizational goals of the agency: sustainable development. The job of the volunteer was not to plant a bunch of crops, but to teach a new form of farming which the host country nationals could then take up on their own. As the Chinese proverb has it: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. In psychotherapy we are, in a way, working towards sustainable development, not necessarily to solve this or that particular problem but to encourage “structural” change which will allow more flexible thinking and feeling, deciding and choosing.
Behavior
In the middle of the 20th century, American psychology, in the persons of B.F. Skinner and John Watson and others, discovered behavior and recognized in it the promise of salvation for a “scientific” psychology. We can say the behaviorists “discovered” behavior because the European psychodynamic theorists blasted past the issue on their way to unconscious conflicts and dynamics, necessitating (in the minds of behaviorists) a return to simpler and more reliable clinical matters. Behavior can be reliably measured and is therefore a useful indicator of change. A pure emphasis on behavior, as we have discussed, allows us to proceed “beyond freedom and dignity” and other messy, nonscientific things. The more behavioral models would have it that behavior change is the sine qua nonof talk therapy; other models use behavioral indicators as measurements of more fundamental change. No model of psychotherapy ignores behavior (although there appear to be therapists, and parents, who do). It represents the sum total of the outward actions of the individual, including verbal behavior. .
We need not belabor the importance of behavior as a means of assessing mental health, and gauging success or failure of treatment interventions. However, depth psychologies, including integrative analytical psychology, stress that behavior is an epiphenomenon of the personality combined with its environment (including consensual reality, as described above). What becomes observable and measurable as behavior is actually the end stage of a complex process of antecedents to that behavior…as a matter of fact, it isn’t even an end stage but an eternal middle point in the ongoing complex behavior of an individual which can only be understood organically. When my patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder makes a “parasuicidal” gesture, I will be missing the point, and probably committing an empathic failure as well, if I restrict my understanding of the suicide attempt to its environmental antecedents, or to boil it down to a “learned behavior.” It is more therapeutic and useful to ask “How did what you do make sense?” or “What were you hoping to communicate here?” By looking for meaning in behavior, we allow ourselves admittance to the phenomenological world of the patient, which is satisfying to the patient (who feels understood) and is diagnostically useful (the therapist learns something about the psychological rules under which the patient operates).
Although the behavior of an individual may be seen as a complex epiphenomenon, behavior change can only be considered a sine qua non of successful talk therapy. “Runes and charms,” writes T.S. Eliot, “are very practical formulae designed to produce definite results, such as getting a cow out of a bog.”[5] So it is with psychotherapy, which in the western world is (or has become) a practical affair. Pure enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense of the word) belongs to a different plane of human experience, and although a welcome eventuality, has no place on a contemporary treatment plan. Insight for its own sake, although a time-honored desideratum and an expressed goal of many psychodynamic therapies, is a leisure that neither psychotherapist nor patient can afford. The integrative analytical model predicts the critical limitations of “insight for its own sake” through its emphasis on the development of the personality towards the outer world of consensual reality through the higher-order harmonics.
In terms of treatment goals, the integrative analytical model suggests that the behavioral goal of talk therapy is the widest possible range of potential adaptive responses to the environment. The psychologically healthy individual must be capable of both resisting and giving in, rejecting and accepting, embracing and attacking, deferring to tradition and breaking new ground. Such “thematic opposites” suggest the bipolar continua anticipated by the sphere model, and represent the “horizontal” content of the various levels of mental representations, or harmonics.
At the same time, the psychologically healthy individual must prove capable of “vertical” operations as well, allowing for different psychological processes which occur simultaneously at different levels. For example, mature object relations demands the capacity to “love” and “hate” at the same time without losing the integrity of the internalized object. The capacity to react with righteous fury, seething resentment, or cold indifference to the actions of a loved one, and still maintain the overall loving relations, reflects ongoing psychological processes at different levels of representation. At the behavioral level, these capacities manifest as an effectively broad range of possible behavioral routines available to cope with life as it plays out.
Note that the direction and emotional valence of behavior change depends on the particular set of a given personality. Effective and healthy change for a depressive personality might require development of an ability to express anger, not in an abusive or heedless way, but in the service of appropriate assertiveness. Expressing anger is difficult for depressive personalities because being angry implies assuming that one is right while the other fellow is wrong, which goes against the very grain of the depressive personality. However, the “direction of health” for the depressive personality may well include the capacity to hurt others. I do not suggest that anyone goes out with the purpose of hurting others; however, the complexity of life requires us to make decisions that may hurt others whether we intended it or not. To lack the ability to hurt others handicaps the personality to the extent that healthy functioning is next to impossible: one will always take the course of pleasing others, and where this is impossible (as often happens), the marked distress causes psychological distress or even mental illness.
To put it metaphorically, the individual must have a behavioral “keyboard” that involves as many possible notes as possible. I may rarely make use of my behavioral “D minor,” but if a particular composition requires it, I would be a poor musician if I lacked the ability to sound that note at the right moment. At the phenomenological level, a very broad range of potential behavioral responses enhances the meaning of the responses, and cultivates the development of will and identity. The value of fully “fleshing out” quadrants of the personality is a particular focus of the integrated analytical point of view, and is reflected in all the six theaters of intervention.
Relationships
Anyone with experience doing psychotherapy knows that the interpersonal sphere, particularly intimate relationships, is where the “rubber meets the road,” psychologically speaking. The object relations model is particularly articulate at describing how internal ingredients necessary for psychological health, such as the ability to maintain different points of view at once, and to tolerate ambiguity, represent prerequisites for successful interpersonal relating.
Strictly speaking, the interpersonal sphere of functioning could justifiably be included under our earlier discussion of consensual reality, because entering into and maintaining a relationships requires negotiating a set of “realities” external to ones’s self. However, in a deeper sense, the “reality” defined within an interpersonal relationship’s area of effect isn’t really “consensual.” We might generally agree as a culture that the earth revolves around the sun (a tenet of consensual reality), but when it comes to the issues of power, worth, identity, and loyalty which invest human relationships, then much more of reality is “up for grabs.” Anyone who has suffered working for a toxic, abusive boss (or even worse, a toxic, abusive parent or spouse) can attest to the gravitational power that a relationship can exert on one’s sense of reality, even to the point that one’s moral compass goes askew and it is no longer certain what’s right or wrong, no matter how many sensitivity trainings the boss has been required to attend. An intimate or otherwise intense interpersonal relationships can become the psychological equivalent of a head-on collision, in which the deepest dynamics of one person ignite and intersect with the deepest dynamics of a second person.
A glance at the sphere model will reveal that in order to maintain an intimate relationship, the individual must establish and preserve the supply lines between the inner harmonics that make up one’s identity and the external demands that come with the relationship. If one’s representational horizon is too low, reflecting a relatively primitive state of psychological development in which the higher mental representations cannot be reliably marshaled in the service of the ego, one’s relationships will eventually founder. The nature of the foundering will depend on the individual dynamics of the two persons involved, but will generally involve either a loss of self in the exchange (because the lack of coherent sense of self invites and allows co-opting by the other person in the relationship) or the equally unhealthy primitive projection of one’s own needs onto the other in a blind way (as is the case with the characteristic use of so-called selfobjects by narcissistic personalities, in which the other becomes little more than a source of gratification). Because a successful and mature intimate relationship requires such a planetary alignment of internal resources and external forces, the interpersonal theatre represents one of the most profound tests of psychological health.
“Hell’s bells,” you may protest. “You make it sound like every healthy relationship is a minor miracle.” Well, the human race does go on somehow. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that things probably haven’t always been this tricky. For the greater part of human history, interpersonal relationships have been freighted with enough symbolic, ritualistic, and traditional expectations that individual inclinations were subjugated in favor of following the appropriate script. Only with the West’s recent unprecedented emphasis on individual selfhood, and equally unprecedented disregard for the usual “rules,” have relationships become such a test of that very selfhood.
I myself have done very little work with couples and therapy. I have a healthy respect for the complexity of the endeavor, which requires tracking the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, unconscious dynamics, and cultural background of not one but two or more persons, even as you keep track of the particular beast that is the relationship itself. In my experience, this begins to feel like juggling flaming balls! If only because of my own personal limitations, I prefer to focus on work that leads to individual selfhood, and by extension to successful relationships with others. However, the decision whether to pursue individual versus couple or family therapy is often a legitimate and pressing one. Like all decisions made during the course of psychotherapy, the choice should be made deliberately and with a rationale in mind. Unfortunately, sometimes there appears to also come a choice between promoting an individual’s well-being or that of the relationship. To these quandaries, integrative analytical psychology contributes the
Feelings
The psychodynamic psychotherapies generally acknowledge emotion (more properly termed affect) as the royal road into the unconscious. As a result, psychotherapists following such models give high priority to the manifestation of emotions in the therapeutic alliance…especially when the emotions manifest in the here-and-how of the therapeutic relationship. Part of the importance that psychodynamic psychotherapy attaches to affect derives from its relatively archaic origins within both the psyche and the brain itself. Even a cursory review of brain structures reveals the relatively “primitive” role of emotions in the context of neuroanatomy and cortical functioning. The emotion centers of the brain belong to the “reptilian” deeper structures which predate the rise of homo sapiens and represent a basic experiential correlate with our colleagues the animals. Integrated analytical psychology acknowledges the primitive antecedents of affect and its importance in the prioritization of psychotherapeutic objectives. We have discussed in earlier chapters that affect represents the “glue” holding together our most basic assemblages of mental representations. Furthermore, it is the experience of strong affect which usually first leads to stratification and differentiation of the psyche in the first place. Such basic experiential postulates as “A is better than B” or even “A is different from B” follow early emotional experiences. We learn not to touch hot stoves or play with poison ivy much in the same manner…by pairing experience with its resulting sensory feedback, with the result that we approach certain objects (teddy bears, warm and fluffy towels) and avoid others (angry dogs, flame, stinging insects). French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu draws some of the obvious and not-so-obvious parallels between emotional feedback and experience of temperature on the skin, which serves as a vessel or container for mental representations. In fact, early exposure to certain emotional experiences tends to shape one’s basic orientation to the world of affect to such a profound degree that certain personalities (such as schizoid or avoidant personalities) tend to shrink from any emotional experience at all. In fact, psychodynamic models of personality go so far as to assert that the manner in which a personality modulates (or fails to modulate) affect represents the sine qua non of the various personality organizations, such as histrionic, narcissistic, or depressive personalities.
Owing largely to the pervasive and relatively primitive origins of affect, effective psychotherapy by definition involves facilitating a new and more flexible conscious attitude towards the vagaries of the patient’s internal and external emotional climate. We discussed above how the personality’s handling of affect represents a defining feature of that personality, and by extension, its manner of relating to others, to the self, and to the world itself. An upshot of this state of affairs is that walled-off affect becomes toxic, and often represents the center of gravity for constellations of mental representations which obstruct flexible and adaptive functioning (see maladaptive schemas, as described previously). Jung was particularly apt and colorful in describing what happens to split-off affect, which he claims becomes part of the “shadow” side of the personality. Similarly, object relations theory elegantly and articulately describes the implications of aspects of the self which have become separated from the psyche and its roots. Integrated analytical psychology contributes to this picture the idea that psychological health depends upon a “clear channel” for unconscious content and external influences to freely interact, with a minimum of defensive hedging, obfuscation, or diversion of emotional material. In other words, internal resources must be rallied in order to meet external demands. Emotional experience will be filtered anyway, through the intervening hierarchies of mental representation that come with being human. Integrated analytical theory reminds us that these natural perceptual filters are all that is needed to differentiate a healthy, high-functioning “ego self” from the chaotic miasma of raw unconscious content. This natural filtering reflects what the psychodynamic models identifies as “healthy defenses” which keep the conscious mind afloat and save it from drowning in unconscious forces. Nancy McWilliams describes how this conceptual “distance” allows most of us to live with even the memories of even our most intense childhood memories:
As the child grows up, these powerful and often painful states of mind are put away and forgotten rather than continually re-experienced and then denied, split off, or projected… [a higher-functioning client] maintains some more rational, objective capacities in the middle of whatever affective storms and associated distortions occur.
Jung made much of the value of a strategic alliance between ideation and affect (thinking and feeling):
Truth that appeals to the testimony of the senses may satisfy reason, but it offers nothing that stirs our feelings and expresses them by giving meaning to human life. Yet it is most often feeling that is decisive in matters of good and evil, and if feeling does not come to the aid of reason,
Meaning Systems
I use the clumsy phrase “meaning systems” to denote the deepest currents of the human psyche which are intersected by the process of psychotherapy. The lower harmonics, which consist of such dynamic and primitive content as objects and complexes, form the basic bedrock of the mind. Picture these deep meaning systems as the deep undercurrent of a river, which courses through its bed and moves its stones before it. Meaning systems represent the rules that have been carved into the heart: they include the most basic of associations formed by the individual mind, and generally lie beyond the circle of light cast by the conscious mind.
The fact that deeper meaning systems lie beyond the immediate influence of the conscious mind represents both a challenge and an opportunity to the psychotherapist. Accessing this deep content is technically difficult and even risky under certain circumstances; indeed, there are usually many defensive layers in place whose sole purpose is to prevent direct expression of some of this content. However, meaning systems also represent a critically important opportunity for the psychotherapist to operate beyond the effects of those defensive operations, and access material which has not been so heavily edited and counteracted that its usefulness in effecting change is compromised. In the sphere of deep structures of meaning we find the basic foundations of an individual life; the ley-lines along which the individual civilization is founded. It is key for the psychotherapist to realize that this primitive content is “pre-defensive” in the sense that original archetypal content is preserved, as it were, in a nascent state. We have already discussed the healing properties of archetypal content and its “freshening” effects on the psyche. Profound symbols and primordial images provide a quantum level of energy and a range of psychological potential which has been edited out by the action of the defenses. Just as our contemporary society may benefit from long-lost knowledge and philosophies salvaged from ancient archeological sites, the individual psyche benefits from exposure to primitive ideas, experiences, and energies which pre-exist the “contemporary” psyche. In the language of alchemy, the regeneration that follows cycles of decay and decomposition was termed “the greening.” Christian mysticism taps the same fundamental idea with the powerful archetype of resurrection and redemption: a hope beyond death, a promise of continued life beyond the falling of darkness. Making contact with this living contact is immortalized in every myth and legend of a promised land, a hidden paradise, a mythical city of gold, and it is the proper goal of every hero’s journey.
In our discussion of the upper harmonics, we considered the idea that the more conscious and rarified mental representations (such as cognitive schemas and selves) are generally more rigid and “fossilized” than content of the lower harmonics. We have also discussed how a certain consistency across time is to some extent necessary to human life, or else we would appear but kaleidoscopic fields of constant change, and we would hardly recognize each other from one day to the next. However, when such consistency becomes rigid to the extent that it precludes effective change or adaptation, such brittle psychological constructs must be broken. The disruptive momentum for such creative discontinuity originates in the inner reaches of the psyche, in the realm of myths and stories and dreams, where the ego holds no sway and legends still walk the earth. Somewhere among those legends, the psychotherapist knows, is to be found the Hero who will rescue the psyche which has become sick and moribund, healing even as it destroys.
Part of the task of the depth psychotherapist, then, is to investigate the depths of the individual psyche until the living material is discovered beneath the layers of deadness and rigidity which lead to conscious suffering. Having made contact with this living material, therapist and patient must activate that material such that the entire psyche has access to its content. In the process of psychotherapy, there are usually observable indicators when a patient has made contact with deep meaning structures and their life-giving properties. The patient is no longer blithe, or over-controlled, or articulate, or whatever trait normally dominates the patient’s presentation. Intellectualized patients with silver tongues sit stunned to silence; emotionally restricted and compulsive patients weep; kind-hearted and warm depressive personalities radiate an intimidating and surprising power; broken hearted and terrified victims of trauma gaze in calm certainty at the powerful weapon brought back from another world, hefted with a newfound certainty in their now-steady hands.
Jung, C.G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy, p. 8. Routledge.
Eliot, T.S. (1975). The Music of Poetry. In F. Kermode (Ed), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (p. 110). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Anzieu, D. (1989). The skin ego (Chris Turner, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1985)
McWilliams, N. (1994). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the
Clinical Process, p. 54.The GuilfordPress.
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