Several beings encounter one another. It does not matter whether they are figures from a dream, characters from a novel, ideas from a philosophic treatise, people from a society, objects from the world of things, or the tropes of our own rhetoric: each will be revealed in certain respects and concealed in certain respects by the presence of the others.

Greg Mogenson, M.A., Jungian Analyst
Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts
(London, Ontario, Canada)

Since Being means the coming-forward appearance, the stepping-out from concealment, therefore concealment and arrival from concealment essentially belong to Being. (1)

—Martin Heidegger

Several beings encounter one another. It does not matter whether they are figures from a dream, characters from a novel, ideas from a philosophic treatise, people from a society, objects from the world of things, or the tropes of our own rhetoric: each will be revealed in certain respects and concealed in certain respects by the presence of the others.

When a frame is placed around a painting, the colors, shapes, and textures of the frame "pick up" and emphasize certain colors, shapes, and textures in the painting. No matter how many frames are tried, the painting never presents itself as it "really is" through any one of them. Even if we go the other way, trying to avoid the presence of frames, this stance, also, is a frame.

Whatever a being is, its revelation is always a function of the surround in which it displays itself. Figures from dreams, characters from novels, ideas from philosophy, people from a society, objects from the world of things (and so on, the list is endless), are all metaphors, ceaselessly shifting the valence of their self-display in relation to the other metaphors with which they live, move, and have their being.

But isn't a metaphor simply a figure of speech?—a way of saying things and seeing things in a new light? How can a being be a metaphor? If such concrete realities as persons, places, and things are metaphorical and imaginational, does that mean that those entities we have always considered to be ontologically more insubstantial—dream-figures, characters from fiction, ideas from philosophy, rhetorical tropes—are metaphorical in a different, more "concrete" sense than we had hither to suspected?

To assert that a being is a metaphor is to recognize that the totality of all other beings-in-relationship is necessary to an exhaustive specification of its particularity. Nothing fully displays itself without reference to all other things. In order to know what a thing is, in order to begin to fathom something of its point of view, we must experience the variety of ways it displays itself in figure and ground relationships with what it is not. The grammar school definition of metaphor—speaking of one thing as if it were another without using words of comparison such as "like" or "as"—hits the mark only in as much as that speaking is a Heideggerean "saying," a speaking that is as ontological as it is rhetorical. (2)

What do the beings want? What do people want? What do the dream-figures, ideas, and material objects want? What does the soul want?

Beings want to be revealed (even if that means concealing themselves so that they can be recognized in another aspect); they want to matter (even if that means suicidally eradicating the ways they feel they have already too much mattered); they want to experience their uniqueness (even if that means imitating the ways in which other beings reveal and conceal themselves); they want to be naked with every other form of being (even if that means clothing themselves in vows of chastity, non-attachment, and renunciation); they want to exist forever (even if that means perishing in a brief span); they want to know love (even if that means scalding the object of their desire with paranoid suspicions); they want the attention of others (even if that means seeking it in hostile and unfortunate ways); they want to be consistently and unambiguously what they are (even if that means casting others into roles that play out for them their inner contradictions); they want to be crazy (even if that means applying the strictest rationality to every situation); they want to be found different (even if that difference is only the individuating gleam of a single button on the jacket of uniformity); they want to be metaphors (even if that means exaggerating the literalism and concreteness of their self-display to the point of absurdity).

Although psychotherapy is merely another dasein, merely another form of revealing and concealing beings, we must not fail to notice the multifacetedness of its uniqueness. As soon as a patient walks into a therapist's office, he or she begins to "float" as a metaphor. It is not just that the therapist is a new being who reveals and conceals aspects of the patient's uniqueness. In addition, unique aspects of the therapeutic dasein will be revealed as well. Psychoanalysts refer to this ever unique encounter by the technical terms transference and counter-transference. By appearing in figure and ground relationships with each other, the patient and the therapist render one another metaphorical. It is not a question of "projection" back and forth; rather, it is a question of "appearing," or as Heidegger would call it "stepping out from concealment." Patient and therapist each "appear" in a fresh aspect by "appearing" in and through the other (without words of comparison such as "like" or "as"). It is a matter of "epiphany" and "revelation." (3)

Unique to most forms of psychotherapy is the attempt to find tactical answers to two ancient and related problems: being and becoming and the problem of the one and the many. No matter whether the unit of treatment is an individual in analysis, a couple in marital counseling, a system of relatives in family therapy, or a disparate collection of individuals in a therapy group, the goal will be the same: to restructure the way in which the many are revealing and concealing the one (s) who has sought treatment and vice versa. Of course, the process of each treatment effects this restructuring in a unique way. Not only does each therapeutic school and practitioner practice therapy differently, each new clinical situation reveals and conceals the therapeutic approach being used and the person of the therapist in a new way. As Jung put it, therapy is like the combining of chemical elements in an experiment: if there is to be any reaction, all the elements that have been combined must change. (4)

Whether a patient is free-associating (Freud), active imagining (Jung), personifying (Hillman), performing a psychodrama (Moreno), talking to an empty chair (Perls), researching family of origin (Bowen), or coming to sessions with relatives (Satir, Minuchin, Whitaker, Haley, the Milan team, etc.) the main thing is that the therapeutic hour is a populated hour.

The distinction between therapies with an intrapersonal focus and therapies with an interpersonal focus becomes less clear when we recognize that each orientation is latent with the other. The players whose interpersonal interaction is being analyzed by the systems analyst are not mere logical abstractions, stock-type characters, or nominal hypostases. They are particular natures, irrepeatable and unique in a multitude of respects. Likewise, the various complexes that compose the character essence of a personality cannot be isolated from the relational context they share with one another. The question of where we should locate these "others"—in the "unconscious" of the individual or in the "objective" world?—must be deconstructed. Microcosm and macrocosm are simply different ways of describing the fact that the "one" requires the totality of the "others" as reference points for the specification of what (how) it is. Therapy does not take place at either the intrapersonal (microcosmic) extreme or at the interpersonal (macrocosmic) extreme. The specific releasing of metaphor that constitutes therapy happens to the extent that the therapeutic process can play both ends against the middle.

When Jack and Jill encounter one another (it does not matter whether they are dream-figures, fictional characters, people from a society, or ornaments on a living room mantelpiece), they each "stand out from concealment" in a unique way. Of course, they do not divide into each other without remainder. Each is bigger than the appearance that is made possible through the witness of the other. We can imagine Jack and Jill each displaying themselves differently in another dream, book, community, or mantelpiece. Just this is what is metaphorical about metaphor. Talking about a person, place, or thing as if it were another person, place, or thing without using words of comparison such as "like" or "as" does not render the two things identical or turn one into the other. It unveils each in a certain aspect even as it suppresses the appearance of other aspects. We resort to metaphor in order to convey the contextuality of stepping out from concealment, the contextuality of being.

But what happens to the part that is left over, the remainder, the part that won't be contained in the comparison and that spills over the denominating sense of the other? What happens when the metaphor breaks down? Psychotherapy has generated a host of theories to describe this phenomenon. Let us examine a few of them.

The family systems theorist Murray Bowen has described two-person systems as inherently unstable. Under stress a two person system will move to include a third person. Examples of this "triangling" include the gossip of friends about a third party, extra-marital affairs, a couple's focussing of concern upon the welfare of a child, therapeutic triangles composed of therapist and couple (whether or not in couples therapy) and of supervisor, therapist, and patient—to name but several. The family, in Bowen's view, can be thought of as an emotional system or ego-mass composed of triangles and interlocking triangles. By crossing generational boundaries, these webs or chains of triangles are the vehicle by which rules, rituals, and myths are passed down through families. While the inclusion of a third player dilutes the anxiety of a two-person interaction and affords a measure of maneuverability to all, it also tends to curb the deviation of any one family member from the status quo of the family emotional system. The family as an autonomous entity, larger than the sum of its parts, tends to perpetuate itself, often to the detriment of the individuality of family members. (5)

Karpman, working within the school of transactional analysis, has identified an interactional pattern he calls the "drama triangle." (6) The three points of the triangle are called victim, persecutor, and rescuer. An example of this kind of triangle encountered frequently by policemen and therapists is the domestic dispute. A battering husband may enact the persecutor role, his wife the role of victim. If the policeman or therapist assumes the role of being the victim's rescuer, it frequently happens that the roles all shift: the victim persecutes the rescuer who in turn is rescued by the original persecutor who now tries to quiet down his wife. The "remainder" or "fallout" from the conflictual interaction of any two players gets passed around the triangle like a hot potato, all three players "catching it" on a rotation basis whenever it becomes their turn to play rescuer. This game, which could well develop into a game without end, corresponds to what Bowen refers to when he states that triangles are more stable than dyads.

James Hillman has also stressed the importance of triangles. Working out of Jung's notion of the psyche's inherent tendency to generate fragmentary systems and multiple centers, Hillman views the formation of triangles as the psyche's way of toppling unities and differentiating its native complexity.

...the more we rigidly insist upon unity the more diversity will constellate. The forsaken "other" must inevitably appear: the repressed return.

The situation that then occurs is called a triangle, but the triangle is after the event. First the unity of marriage has constellated the "other", and only after the other has had his or her effect does the triangle appear. Until then, the marriage conjunction has served as a defensive or transformative mandala, keeping out all others, providing a set of habits, a transformative system in which the force of love could be contained. The third releases love from this psychic structure. The mandala breaks. For a while everyone seems crazy, and also is crazily searching for new systems of justifications to encompass the energy.

...The triangle necessarily releases a host of demons, because it breaks up unity of psychic structure and its pairings of balance and compensation. The "other" represents "all others", reminding us of the latently split nature of the psyche into multiples.

...Something archetypal is taking place that has an intensely separating effect on prior unity, yet seems to increase the flow of energy through the parts. One vision no longer holds things together, yet there is a holding together with intense differentiation through so-called negative effects. (7)

For Hillman the third is as inevitable as it is for Bowen. As the folie a deux of defensive mandalic unity becomes a menage a trois, psychic distinctions which had been blurred together in love's blindness become intensely differentiated, appearing in cruel detail through the perceptual windows of jealousy, hatred, and betrayal.

As systems theory has gained popularity a parlance has developed that has tended to reify it. Therapists frequently speak as if certain behaviors were caused by "systems," forgetting that systems theory is a heuristic tool. At the same time an equally reifying popular parlance has developed among therapists from the various schools who stress the polycentric multiplicity of the psyche. Freudians often speak as if the id, ego, and super-ego were not merely heuristic concepts, but real entities. Likewise, Jungians frequently write typological descriptions of the various gods, forgetting Jung's remark that "the archetypes are interpenetrated in a most complete and thorough way."

But if ideas, too, are beings what is so sinful about reification? The error in reification is not the granting of ontological reality to epistemological and heuristic devices. After all, ideas have life, interact with other beings, and have influence upon them. The error is in giving to any one idea denominating ontological primacy. Ideas are beings, but none alone can account for all Being. As Robert Romanyshyn writes, "Western metaphysics...forgets that idea is appearance, the aspect, the perspective of things...[and] presumes that...ideas [are] created apart from the world, and apart from the way things show themselves." (8)

Again we return to the problem of the remainder. An overvalued idea is as unstable as Bowen's two-person system. Its relationship with what it attempts to explain is a stormy relationship, plagued by anomalies, special cases, and exceptions to the rule. Eventually, a rival or rescuing theory is developed to bring these anomalies, which have been repressed by the prevailing view, out from concealment.

Let us leave, for the moment, the world of "real" people—a world to which we so easily grant ontological status—and consider the encounter of images in a dream.

I meet an unknown woman at a party. She is very attractive and I feel I must possess her. I walk over to her and without speaking make my intentions plain. She returns my gaze with an expression which says that, although she may want me too, she won't be taken easily. For some time we banter back and forth, locked in a power struggle over who will ravish whom. Then a noise breaks the spell. In the corner of the room we notice a frenzied cat moaning and shrieking as a tomcat postures to mount her. The woman and I laugh and begin to trade stories about animals we have each owned.

The dream-ego and the unknown woman reveal and conceal each other in a unique and specific way. We can imagine each of them appearing in other aspects with other characters in dreams of their own. But in this dream it is in the aspect of brute sexuality that they reveal one another. Every other trait and quality latent in them is concealed by the intense focus upon who will make conquest of whom. But just when the chthonic sexual aspect loses its luster there is a hiatus in the dream. Another image appears, stands in for what the dream-ego and the unknown woman would reduce each other to, and breaks the stalemate. The dream-ego and the unknown woman need no longer be locked up with one another in cat-like copulation. Each is freed from that common denominator of relatedness. (9) Presumably, their new conversation will eventually lock them into a new stalemate even though, in the short run, it reveals them in a novel aspect. As more and more images and triangles are generated to free the being of each image from the lowest common terms of its proximity with the others, the dream will become increasingly more populated and complex. (10)

Sometimes it is useful when doing family therapy to imagine the apexes of a family's various triangles to be constellated by the tension of the various dyads in the same way that the copulating cats seem to have been constellated by the stalemate between the dream-ego and the unknown woman in the dream example. Is the "triangulated child" (Bowen), the child through whom the parental subsystem is "detouring" (Minuchin) its conflicts, a metaphor standing in for the mode of being which the couple tend to reduce each other to? If so, precisely what is the reduction to which the parents as dyad have held each other ransom? As family therapists have long known the child's symptom will provide a clue. A child who draws attention to himself by stealing and setting fires may be drawing his parents' attention away from their conflict with one another over money, honesty, or whether to stay together or not. As Cloe Madanes has argued, the child's disturbed behavior may be viewed as an attempt to "help" someone else in the family or to stabilize another relationship. (11)

In individual psychotherapy additional metaphors are generated out of the dyadic nature of the therapeutic relationship no less than they are from the dyads in a dream or a family. When a psychoanalyst makes a transference interpretation, he separates out from the patient-therapist relationship a posture or mode of being that is characterizing the interaction so strongly at the moment that it is repressing all other possible stances, most importantly, the ones deemed by the therapeutic project to be most healthy. In Freudian analysis the transference interpretations are usually confined to fixated postures from the patient's infantile psycho-sexual development. In Jungian analysis, on the other hand, the contents of the transference are considered to be of an unlimited variety. For Jungians the controlling metaphors of a transference may be parental imagos as Freud insisted, but they may also be wind-gods in grain fields, religious personages, screen idols, fictional characters, animal spirits, organic and inorganic objects—anything at all.

But what is it about the nature of each particular being that contributes to the instability of the dyad it forms with another being? What is it about the proximity of one being to another that makes a third being necessary, and so on, ad infinitum?

The uniqueness of a finite being can only be approximately specified because uniqueness is infinitely specifiable. In order to comprehend what a being is we must sense, feel, intuit, contemplate, and/or imagine how it displays itself and displaces itself with respect to all other beings—past, present, and future. In this sense, the number one is an absolutely transcendent term. To be defined by infinity, to be defined as simultaneously relative to everything at once, is to be actually relative to nothing at all and, hence, to be unable to attain the distinctiveness necessary to appear. To express this thought in more Heideggerean terms: no being "steps out from concealment" if every other being steps out at the same moment.

Jung makes just this point in his writings on the individuation process. The individuation of the personality into a "psychological 'in-dividual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole,'" (12) requires, in Jung's view, immersion in the complexities of life and relationship:

Reality consists of a multiplicity of things. But one is not a number; the first number is two, and with it multiplicity and reality begin." (13)

In order to individuate a being must enter into the realm of distinctiveness, incarnating itself into the demands of relationship, even though this implies discarnating itself from the possibility of still other relationships.

The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can only achieve wholeness through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a "You." Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature can only be grasped symbolically, as in the symbols of the rotundum, the rose, the wheel, or the coniunctio Solis et Lunae. (14)

By itself each "I" is everything and, hence, nothing. We can imagine a voided mandala in which an infinite number of qualities, by existing at the same time, cancel each other out. But when this "I" enters into effective relationship with a "You," transference phenomena occur between them which, in the course of being worked through, allow the "I" and the "You" to each actualize and experience at least one face of their respective wholeness.

R.D. Laing has called the voided mandala of the self-apart-from-others the false-self system.

The self, as long as it is 'uncommitted to the objective element', is free to dream and imagine anything. Without reference to the objective element it can be all things to itself—it has unconditioned freedom, power, creativity. But its freedom and its omnipotence are exercised in a vacuum and its creativity is only the capacity to produce phantoms. The inner honesty, freedom, omnipotence, and creativity, which the 'inner' self cherishes as its ideals, are cancelled, therefore, by a co-existing tortured sense of self-duplicity, of the lack of any real freedom, of utter impotence and sterility. (15)

According to Laing, people who are "ontologically insecure," people, that is, who are easily overwhelmed by the impingement of data from the world around them, may split off a part of the self into which they may defensively withdraw. Although, at first, this move may provide them a measure of maneuverability and freedom, in the long run it proves to have been a pathological vanishing act. The isolation from others eventually becomes an isolation from oneself, for, without others there is no effective context of contrasting differences in which to appear.

Paradoxically, the way to wholeness requires the attenuation of it. Transcendent unity and schizoid hovering are not enough. If the painting is to be viewed, a frame must be placed around it; if the dream is to be dreamt, a limited set of images must be selected; if an ornament is to "step out from concealment," it must be removed from the box of its limitlessness and assigned a specific place on the mantelpiece. Like the bird in the hand that is worth the two in the bush, the one-sided actualization of a being has more individuation value than the a priori completeness which potentiates the unlived life.

Jung, of course, defined neurosis as one-sidedness. He felt that we are all more or less neurotic in that our relationship to our psychic totality, our relationship to the Self is always more or less incomplete. The important thing about Jung's view of neurosis is that it does not define it to be a pathology pure and simple. Neurotic onesidedness, for Jung, has a teleology, a purpose. In the course of its development the personality moves from a state of unconscious wholeness through the vicissitudes of relationship to a state approximating conscious wholeness. It is not that we cure the neurosis; the neurosis cures us. (16) Onesidedness, according to the Jungian model, is the inevitable correlate of leaving the nascent sense of oneness (which is everything and therefore nothing) and entering into specific relationships in the realm of "multiplicity and reality." By unbalancing the homeostatic unity of the nascent self with the stumbling block of a partial and, yet, pars par toto incarnation, neurotic onesidedness forces the unity of the self to be realized in lived life.

But as a being incarnates itself into relationships with other beings, actualizing now this face of itself now that face, it continues to be oriented by the utopian sense of unlimited freedom and maneuverability which the adoption of an incarnational life required it to abandon. We can observe this particularly clearly when relationships turn sour. When Jack and Jill fall in love they also fall into a relationship-set that limits the possibilities of each of them even as it renders other possibilities actual. Of course, in the beginning, it is unlikely that either of them will notice the constriction of possibilities which the relationship entails. After all, the possibilities which they each make actual for the other in the relationship are far more tangible than the vague, undifferentiated potentiality of the transcendent part of the self which hovers in the void, uncommitted to the "objective element"—at least for the short run. In addition, as the psychoanalysts would tell us, Jack and Jill may each project their ego-ideal or self onto one another and, hence, initially experience the relationship as releasing them to the unlimited potential of their infinite sense of self. But as time passes and the honeymoon period comes to an end, the two may come to the conclusion that the qualities that had initially attracted them to each other, and the possibilities which their coming together made real, have become the very things which now hold them each back, stunt their growth, and limit their individual freedom. At this point the couple's dyadic system is particularly disposed to forming a triangle. Like the sacrificial lamb who takes the sins and suffering of the incarnational world onto his shoulders, a lover, in-law, symptomatic child, ideological commitment, red herring, white elephant, or pink flamingo may "step out from concealment" at this moment, stand in for the conflict which Jack and Jill have reduced each other to, and set their system free to change.

In his poem, "Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood," Wordsworth poignantly describes the nostalgia and sense of loss that haunts us after we have emerged from the infinity and wonder of the nascent self and adapted ourselves to the contingencies of time and space reality. After describing a time in his early childhood, "...a time when meadow, grove, and stream/The earth, and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light,/ The glory and the freshness of a dream," Wordsworth writes of birth as "a sleep and a forgetting."

              Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
              The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
                  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                   And cometh from afar:
                  Not in entire forgetfulness,
                  And not in utter nakedness,
               But trailing Clouds of glory do we come
                  From God, who is our home:
               Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
               Shades of the prison-house begin to close
                  Upon the growing Boy,
              But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
                  He sees it in his joy;
         The Youth, who daily farther from the east
                  Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
                  And by the vision splendid
                  Is on his way attended;
         At length the Man perceives it die away,
         And fade into the light of common day. (17)

Gradually, as Wordsworth's "child" becomes increasingly more related to the world around him, increasingly more answerable to the limits imposed upon him by the gravity and grammar of empiricism, he loses touch with the "visionary gleam" and watches as it fades "into the light of common day."

               Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
         Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
         And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
                 And no unworthy aim,
                 The homely Nurse doth all she can
         To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
                 Forget the glories he hath known,
         And that imperial palace whence he came. (18)

Isn't this what the weary lovers are saying to each other? Isn't this what the fierce incest wishes and the negative transference rages of the analytical hour so haughtily declare? And the ornaments on the mantelpiece: is this what they are saying to one another just before we get triangulated in and rearrange them? In all these examples, are not each of the players accusing the other of being the "homely Nurse," the one through whom each feels himself/herself/itself fallen from the grace of the "imperial palace" of the nascent self?

As crucial as our relationships to others are, an equally critical factor is whether or not we like how we are in them. Do I have enough maneuverability with my mate, lover, dream-figures, ideological commitments, family, friends, time schedules, consumer goods, career? Would I have more maneuverability if I could somehow free myself from these others, or would that maneuverability be only in a vacuum? Do the other beings contemplate these questions?

"The decisive question for man," writes Jung, "is:

Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.... In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.

The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination—that is, ultimately limited—we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then! (19)

To assert that a limited, bounded being is a metaphor is to remind ourselves of its link with the infinite. Persons, places, and things, though revealed in terms of the relational contexts in which they appear, need also to be in touch with the "limitlessness of the unconscious," the aspects of themselves that are concealed by the face in which they have been most literally revealed.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, one way people profoundly limit their freedom is through what he calls mauvaise foi, "bad faith." (20) Whenever we relate to ourselves or others as if to a thing, or even to a thing as if it were utterly devoid of physiognomy, we have lied in our souls and are in bad faith. To make categorical statements about who, what, how, or why we were as we were in the past or are as we are in the present renders our future a forgone conclusion. As we vacillate between the one-sided actualities of our incarnational life and our nostalgia for a discarnated one, our relationships become more and more complexly tangled with "nothing but" appraisals of self and others, rigid role identifications, self-stagnating prophesies—bad faith. Projective identification, marital skew, double bind, pseudo-mutuality, rigid family structure, polarization, reciprocal escalation, shadow projections, abandonment/engulfment, collusion: these are but a partial listing of the concepts developed by psychotherapy to untangle the relational "knots" in which the member parts of a relationship may be caught.

"You're too hard on the kids." "You're too soft on them." "Don't be such an hysterical female." "Don't be such an insensitive brute." No matter how compatible Jack and Jill may have appeared at the outset of their relationship, slight discrepancies between them can polarize into extreme differences. By the time one or both of them seek therapy, each may be utterly identified with their position in the escalation and view either themselves or their partner as sick. As Sartre would say, both are in bad faith, and so is their therapist if he takes the stock-epithets his patients brand themselves with literally, or if he introduces some of his own from the DSM IV.

One of Jung's definitions of individuation is differentiating oneself from archetypes. (21) As necessary as relationship is to the actualization of one's wholeness, the onesidedness which incarnation into relationship initially entails is extremely prone to be exaggerated into archetypal proportions. By the time polarization, reciprocal escalation, and projective identification have worked their magic, the relationship has cast the players into such extreme positions that they each become little more than mouthpieces of the archetypes they have become identified with. The repertoire of possibilities of being-with-the-other constricts. The number of available persona is reduced to one or two. The "nothing but" appellations become empirically true.

The job of therapy is to break up these polarizations, throw a monkey wrench into the escalations, deliteralize rigid role identifications, and introduce more complexity and maneuverability into the system. It does not matter which school of therapy is employed; each of the therapeutic schools has a variety of methods by which it can facilitate a change in how feelings, thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, ideas, fantasies, and persons "step out from concealment" with one another. The strategic therapist may prescribe the persistence of symptoms and caution against change in order to interdict the self-helping behaviors which have been maintaining the problems. A Freudian analyst may conceal himself in an attitude of analytical neutrality, dislocating the patient's habitual style of "stepping out from concealment" by refusing to play a supporting role. The structural family therapist may work to loosen up rigid boundaries and tighten up lax ones by asking family members to change their seating positions at various times during the interview. A follower of Bowen may coach a patient to relate one-to-one with the various members of his or her family of origin as part of an overall strategy to differentiate a free-self. A Jungian analyst may use an insight approach to help the analysand to accept the qualities he projects onto others as parts of his own "shadow."

All these techniques "work" for the same reason: they introduce a sense of metaphor, allowing the players to appear in a new light. By reframing problems, and speaking of symptoms as if they were really symptomatic of quite other problems or strengths than the complainants had suspected (with or without words of comparison such as "like" or "as"), the literalness of the reading which has attenuated the wholeness of each of the players is challenged. When the meanings become fluid, the one-sided incarnation of wholeness into symptoms can be shifted such that a new face of the wholeness of each player can find expression. It does not matter whether the therapy is long-term analysis or short-term symptom alleviation. Both will be effective to the extent that they promote something of the other's most cherished values. Long-term therapy, even when the focus is "individuation," must pay close attention to the individuation needs of the problems which won't be integrated into the growth project of any one complex. (22) Likewise, the short-term therapy approaches must always consider the individuation value of a problem when planning strategies for its resolution.

If psychotherapy is a "talking cure," as Freud thought his psychoanalysis to be, it is because its rhetoric is its ontology and its patients are metaphors. The images and metaphors which populate our conversations are not simply clever tools and wise saws; they are participants in the great relational field of being. They express the contextuality of a being's mode of appearing and are a living part of that contextuality. Our therapeutic hours are literally overflowing with metaphors. Not only may there be whole families present in the sessions, dreams may be shared, stories told, and philosophical positions stated. Freud, Jung, and a multitude of modern masters continue to practice in our hours, taking command of our speech centers, lending us their glasses. An infinity of characters are always encountering one another, irrespective of logical level, class distinction, or ontological commitment. It does not matter whether they are figures from dreams, characters from fiction, people from a society, philosophic ideas, objects from the world of things, or the tropes of rhetoric: They are all "bound each to each," as Wordsworth had hoped his days might be, "by natural piety," the "glory and the freshness" of metaphor.

This essay has been an attempt to speak in the same breath to beings from several orders of reality which are usually segregated. It has been an attempt to do psychology in a fashion that is as intrapsychic as it is interpersonal and as mindful of the soul of the external world as it is of the human proprium. Although ostensibly a contribution to the theory of psychotherapy, it is at the same time intended as a contribution to a modern angelology. We are, as Jung stressed, in the psyche, bounded to the utmost. We can no more touch a blade of grass without troubling a star than we can number the innumerable angels who dance on the head of every pin. All we can do is dance along with them. After all, we too, are metaphors.

Notes

1. Cited by Roberts Avens, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1984), p.70.
2. Ibid., p.49. Avens elaborates this point: To Heidegger, words are not signs of things nor are concepts signs of words. Things are not prior to words, and words are not labels added to already existing things. [To quote Heidegger,] "Words and language are not hulls into which we pack things for purposes of speech or correspondence. It is in the word and in language that things become and are things." Heidegger's experience of language is rooted in what he calls Saying (Sagen). Contrary to the conventional assumption that "saying" is posterior to knowing, he holds that saying is anterior to knowing. The communicative and informative function of language is only an incidental trait derived from its essential function which is to name anything that is, non-human or human. Only where there is language is there a world.
3. The concept of projection promotes a dissociation between subjects and objects, and, hence, a dead world. The larger world of being is not simply a blank screen which passively reflects the images which have been projected onto it by a magic lantern residing in a special, animate being with a special subjectivity. Although our proximity may be one of the relational factors determining how a thing "steps-out from concealment," the aspect in which a thing appears cannot be reduced to our having imbued it with qualities.
4. C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 16 The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), par. 358. Subsequent references to Jung's writings will be designated "CW", followed by volume and paragraph numbers.
5. Murry Bowen, "The Use of Family Theory in Clinical Practice," Comprehensive Psychiatry 7 (1966), 345-374.
6. Stephen Karpman, "Script Drama Analysis." Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7,26 (1968), 39-43.
7. James Hillman, Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (Dallas: Spring Publications,1975), pp. 89-90.
8. Robert Romanyshyn, "Psychological Language and the Voice of Things," Dragonflies: Studies in Imaginal Psychology (Spring 1979), p.74.
9. These reflections have a bearing on the psychology of sacrifice. Sometimes a talisman can be symbolically invested with the quality which seems to hold a principle relationship in stalemate such that when the talisman is destroyed the relationship is set free. When using this technique a biblical warning should be heeded: sometimes when we sweep one devil from the house a hundred more steal in.
10. Although this example deals exclusively with dream-figures, figures from all orders of reality may interact with each other and multiply in a similar manner. People, ideas, fictional characters, ideas, things: from a phenomenological point of view, all dance together upon the pin-head of their psychic relativity. In the therapy hour, a new symptom, free association, transference projection, or episode of acting-out may spontaneously develop to stand in for the quality which a dream-figure and a redundant interpretive convention have reduced each other to. On the domestic front, a stuck marriage may take precedence over a stuck piece of creative work and vice versa, as if one problem were trying to "help" the other by substituting for it. It is as if all beings are intensely engrossed in a form of Hegelian dialectic. While each figure may be wrestling with another figure in a thesis/antithesis antimony, each may at the same time serve as the synthetic third to another antimony.
11. Cloe Madanes, Strategic Family Therapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981), pp. 66-67.
12. C.G. Jung, CW 9i, par. 490.
13. C.G. Jung, CW 14, par. 659.
14. C.G. Jung, CW16, par. 454. Mandala symbols (i.e., "the rotundum, the rose, the wheel, or the coniunctio Solis et Lunae") represent the sense of boundless maneuverability bounded relationships can be in touch with. Mandalas stand in for the "circumambient atmosphere" (CW 9ii, par.257.) of possibilities, present or absent, that condition how a being appears and behaves in relationship with other beings. To see the chameleon possibilities of a being, to value how it is now appearing with the knowledge that it could also appear in a variety of other possibilities, is to see the with Blake, "Eternity in a grain of sand/ And Heaven in a wild flower."
15. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Pantheon, 1969), p. 94.
16. C.G. Jung, CW10, par. 361: "A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings aways as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere."
17. William Wordsworth, "Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 133-135.
18. Ibid., p. 135.
19. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1963), p. 325.
20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existenitial Psychoanalysis, trans, H.E. Barnes (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962).
21. C.G. Jung, CW 6, par. 757.
22. Cf. James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1983), pp. 105-106: "...The best psychotherapy can do is attune the fictional sense. Then the goals toward which therapy strives—maturity, completion, wholeness, actualization—can be seen through as guiding fictions. Then they do not close the way. Therapy becomes less a support of the great upward drive than it is a job of deliteralizing the fictions in which purpose is fixed and where one is actually defending oneself against the sou's innate 'towardness' by means of one's goals."

Copyright 1995 Greg Mogenson. All rights reserved.

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