The Not-I Within ­ A Post-Jungian Relationship to Other

Renos Papadopolous argues that 'Other' was a core problematic for Jung, (Papadopoulos, 1992, p.390) and one of the post-Jungian theorists most explicitly engaged with this question of theorising the nature of the experience of Other is Paul Kugler. He too uses the work of Lacan to re-frame some of Jung's insights so that they can then be used from a post-structuralist, and sometimes post-modern perspective (Kugler, 1997, p.83).

The aspect of Kugler's work of specific interest here is his discussion of what (or who) is the subject of dreams. He argues that the traditional view of self-reflection is an entrapping one: '[T]he imagos we see in our dreams as Other reflect those aspects of the psyche estranged from consciousness' (Kugler 1993) (6).

Kugler's notion of the Other that is reflected back employs a version of the traditional Jungian concept of 'Self'. But perhaps there is another answer which offers more to a feminist exploration. Elsewhere in Kugler's work, this is hinted at when he argues that:

Through the acquisition of language the child is ushered into [a] .. . matrix of meaning relations. The importance of this linguistic entry into the collective unconscious cannot be over-emphasised. For in acquiring linguistic competence, the infant (Lat. infari, not speaking) has to learn to speak to the world through a network of . . . related signifiers: language.

The significance of the linguistic matrix lies in the fact that it is a system of unconscious meaning relations organized in advance of any individual ego. The child has to accept the collectively assigned meanings in the linguistic matrix; in doing so, he becomes a meaningful entity himself within the psychological matrix of societal meaning relations (original emphasis) (Kugler, 1983, p.6).

This model brings us back towards a Lacanian view of the world. The Other whom we encounter threaded though our subjectivity and find mirrored back to us when we look at our dreams is the Other embedded in the very language which furnishes us with subjectivity. Kugler describes this as an 'alien presence [which] creates a sense of alterity within the psyche' (original emphasis) (Kugler, 1993, p.7).

Kugler chooses to anchor his work to a notion of archetypal structures. Lacan takes his back to a notion of the unconscious being structured like a language, reflecting the phallic/symbolic code. My aim is to re-present Kugler's ideas without their anchoring archetypal context in order to leave an opening for a notion of a self-structure such as Andrew Samuels' polycephalous network (Samuels, 1989, p.40) (7). This, in turn, may provide a response to the feminist criticisms of psychology's reliance on internal structures which are singular and do not reflect the internal plurality of centres of concern and consciousness many women describe as being a feature of their interiority (Baker Miller, 1991).

Refusing to explicitly anchor the model to a wider universal structure also means that a choice can be made to link it to a process, instead of an entity. Although both Jung's archetypes and Lacan's symbolic order can be re-read as processes, it is difficult to do so given the degree to which they have been reified in both general discourse and by their original protagonists. My interest is in linking this notion of the 'Not-I' to an enterprise which has no single fixed base.

Butler's model of gender production offers an insight into how such a process might work. She sees gender as the result of a discourse which has been re-iterated so many times that it looks 'natural': it looks as if things were ever thus, and ever more shall be so. Mandy Merck makes a similar point when she argues that 'gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy' (Merck, 1993, p.5). Butler also moves to disrupt the notion of fixed sex/culturally determined gender, proposing a understanding in which there is no 'natural order' (8). Part of the value of Butler's version of this model is that she does not naively propose that we can therefore invent what we like and call it gender identity. Her argument is that gender identity is performed within a social discourse which over many reiterations has mapped out and grooved a range of options.

Butler's model offers a perspective from which an individual can choose to disrupt or subvert the gender categories dominant in their culture, but not step outside them or overthrow them. Gender is one of the basic categories on which identity as we know it is predicated. As such, Butler's complex constructivist position is that it is not given 'by nature', but is part of a discourse which we are inserted into at birth and whose momentum of tradition we have great difficulty resisting. Thus, gender categories have such a weight of cultural discourse behind them that they look 'natural', but in fact they are imitations of imitations of imitations . . . ad infinitum.

Using this model, we can move Kugler's insight in a feminist direction and bring further to the fore what Kugler himself articulates when he quotes Worf: 'the unconscious of language is actually dominating our consciousness. When we speak, we experience the 'claim' that language makes upon us. For words come to us already embedded in phonetic clusters and pregnant with signification . . .' (Kugler, 1983, p.1).

Thus, the 'Not-I' within can be seen not just as a product of language, but as a product of the massive density of cultural history and discourse embedded in that language. This, in turn, anchors us to community, a key vector of identity, and part of what constitutes a sense of unique subjectivity. That is why getting rid of the 'Not-I' within is not only ill-advised, but impossible if subjectivity itself is to be maintained.

Omnipotence and Impotence

In order to explore further the links between the 'Not-I' and aggressive fantasy, we return to Clark's comments on the conflicting impulses which bring a person into therapy. These might be summarised as the desire for, and seeking out the fantasy of/experience of both omnipotence and impotence, and simultaneously, the terror and avoidance of those experiences and fantasies. Marrying this with Rose's psychoanalytic insight that at the core of psychic life there is a resistance to identity, we arrive at a view of the human condition which sees the process of entering into any relationship as a matter of managing the conflicting fantasies and impulses associated with omnipotence and impotence. As with the dissociationist model, pathology is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Joseph Redfearn locates his discussion of omnipotent impulses and experiences of impotence in an exploration of the explosive, bomb-like nature of the self, and the creative and destructive aspects of that.

He makes the point that when it comes to potentially explosive clashes:

. . . it helps to know that a change in attitude towards the clash could transform the fear into a revelation, but it does not help all that much. Talk is cheap, and such a pronouncement is mere talk. The building up of strength and capacity to the point where the union of the relevant opposites can be creatively contained may take a great deal of work (Redfearn, 1992, p.113).

So for Redfearn, considerable work needs to be done before this risk can be taken, if it is to have any real chance of being something other than destructive. Again, it is likely to be no mere accident that Hart's patient was in analysis during the period when he was able to first think creatively about his own destructive impulses. By doing analytic work, this man was able to access something crucial about how his own fantasies of impotence (seeing himself as victim) and omnipotence (pushing the Sherpa to his death) operated, and how the way he had managed them had become polarised (only victim), stuck (always victim), and therefore life-constricting.

The wider point is that this was possible through aggressive fantasy, and such fantasy can provide a 'window' though which to view how we manage our impulses towards and fantasies about omnipotence and impotence. What is visible through this is also how we go about making our psychic world inhabitable in the midst of the tensions and conflicts between identity and core resistance to identity and what compromises we make to create a livable psychic space. What also starts to emerge is the price of some of those compromises, particularly when they become extensive and habitual, as in the case of Hart's patient and his victim role.

Donald Winnicott argued that the impulses towards creativity and destructiveness were inextricable, and that the experience of a sense of healthy omnipotence is necessary. The position being offered here takes this further and argues that a sense of impotence is also necessary. Furthermore, along the lines of Samuels' ideas of gender certainty and gender confusion needing to co-exist and compete, I would take up Clark's point and suggest that a sense of omnipotence, impotence and equality need to coexist and compete if life is to be engaged with creatively. Although consideration of these matters can be undertaken from many psychological perspectives, selecting one which resonates with them is likely to throw up more penetrating insights.

Anxiety About Aggression

Redfearn sees 'Jung as struggling hard with his own omnipotent sub-personalities [with the consequence that] his psychology is omnipotence-kindly, although he was fully aware of the dangers of inflation' (Redfearn, 1992, p.136). This comment alone indicates matters of interest: 'empowerment' (i.e., not experiencing oneself as fundamentally and invariably impotent in the face of life) is an issue of direct interest to feminist theorists.

Considering these questions in the light of Jung's own experience of psychological impotence and omnipotence we might consider the comments made by Winnicott, who, in his review of Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, traces a complex interaction between creativeness and destructiveness in Jung's work.

Furthermore, although (as Walkerdine points out) Winnicott's choice is to theorise attachment and bonding at the cost of desire and passion, (Walkerdine, 1990, p.73) Winnicott's interest does encompass the internal tensions which lie close to madness and which are acknowledged to be vast and terrifying in all of us. He also observes that:

Eventually [Jung] reached the centre of his self. As I have suggested earlier, this seems to have been satisfying for him, and yet somewhat of a blind alley if looked at as an achievement for a remarkable and truly big personality. In any case he was preoccupied with the mandala, which from my point of view is a defensive construct, a defence against that spontaneity which has destruction as its next-door neighbour. The mandala is a truly frightening thing for me because of its absolute failure to come to terms with destructiveness, and with chaos, disintegration, and the other madnesses. It is an obsessional flight from disintegration. Jung's description of his last decades spent in search of the centre of his self seems to me to be a description of a slow and wearisome closing down of a lifetime of splendid endeavor. The centre of the self is a relatively useless concept. What is more important is to reach the basic forces of individual living, and to me it is certain that if the real basis is creativeness the very next thing is destruction (Winnicott, 1992, p.327, emphasis added).

Taking this question of destructiveness further, Elio Frattoroli, in an imaginary dialogue between himself and Polly Young­Eisendrath, raises the point that Jung had very little to say about anxiety, while it was Freud's 'lifelong preoccupation'. Frattoroli also speculates:

. . . maybe Jung's mysticism was never really a fully integrated experience. Maybe the reason it always had a near-psychotic edge to it was because it also represented a flight from profound anxiety which he didn't recognise as such. Probably anxiety about his own destructiveness more than his own sexuality (Frattaroli, 1997, p.180).

This anxiety about destructiveness (and creativity) is of direct relevance to the theorising of women's experience. If Winnicott and Frattoroli's arguments are valid, there is a high probability that some of the clinical phenomena the Jungian and post-Jungian frame draws on will be particularly rich in the kind of material which pertains to the theorising of women's aggressive fantasies. It is also highly likely that the kind of experiences in question will also be the ones most heavily defended against in much Jungian and post-Jungian theorising, though that too will be of interest, since it may tell us something about what is intolerable about such experiences, and how they are defended against.

Samuels uses the phenomenon Jung referred to as enantiodromia as a tactic for turning what is problematic or stuck into something useful (Samuels, 1992b, p.18). Enantiodromia is the reversal that occurs when something is taken so far that turns into its opposite. Reading this in a post-Jungian, non-essentialistic way 'the opposite' means simply 'what is experienced by the individual as opposite' (rather than taking on a notion of eternal, universal, given opposites). Thus what might easily be viewed as theoretical weakness in the work of Jung and the post-Jungians can be turned around to see what strength might be embedded in that weakness. The attraction of doing this is that it is a parallel to the overall project aims: to develop a means by which women can take what they experience as frightening and weakness-producing and see what strength and agency they can draw from it.

Furthermore, as James Jarrett points out, Jung was fascinated by the work and life of Frederick Nietzsche, which Jung saw as being a story of power and catastrophe (Jarrett, 1990). In this context we could re-frame that as a fascination with omnipotence and the disastrous consequences of failing to navigate the boundaries between omnipotent fantasy and attempting to live it as reality (9). This thread of fascination which runs through the Jungian and post-Jungian project has been successfully picked up and exploited by Noll, (Noll, 1994) in his accusations that Analytical Psychology is a cult, with Jung as the cult leader. Shamdasani has done the work of disproving the key elements of Noll's purported evidence, (Shamdasani, 1998) but the fascination with these matters which post-Jungians have inherited needs to be discussed explicitly. The push towards this has been under way for some time in the work of Samuels. His interest in questions of power, politics, pluralism, competition and aggression is evident, and the way he has gone about theorising them forms a substantial intellectual backdrop to this paper.

A final clue to the possible mutual value of a meeting between feminism and post-Jungian studies comes from a comment by Wolfgang Giegerich while discussing the question of Jungian/post-Jungian group identity: '[O]ur identity is not based on some contents of doctrine, not on anything positive, but rather on a crack, a plunge, a hole in that infinitely unknown which is a complete x even when it has been experienced and has taken on a concrete shape' (Giegerich, 1992, p.402). These thoughts would seem to link back and add another thread to our explorations of Rose's comments about resistance to identity as a fundamental aspect of psychological being.

Destructiveness

Returning to the question of the struggle with creativeness and destructiveness, Redfearn shares Winnicott's dislike of the mandala as a symbol of 'wholeness' saying that for him '[mandalas] represent to some degree a disembodiment of feeling' and that '[T]he mandala and other circular containing, and defending images reflect the need of the nucleus of the self to become mobilized when disintegration is feared' (Redfearn, 1992, p.149).

To flesh out this criticism, we return to Winnicott who, while discussing Jung's childhood, comments that:

Jung describes his playing (which had to be done very much alone until he went to school) as a constant building and re-building, followed always by the staging of an earthquake and the destruction of the building. What we cannot find in the material Jung provides is imaginative destruction followed by a sense of guilt and then by construction. It seems that the thing that was repressed in Jung's early infancy, that is, before the infantile breakdown, was primitive aggression . . . (Winnicott, 1992, p.326).

The situation is, however, more complex than Winnicott allowed for. Mario Trevi discerns two tendencies in Jung, the first being that of a systems builder and the second being that of a systems breaker, (Trevi, 1992, p.357) and Samuels points out that the 'rhythm of combining and separating is of special interest to post Jungians' (Samuels, 1992, p.338) (10).

Jung may not have explicitly addressed himself to theorising these dynamics, but a deep struggle with them runs through his work, and through that of some post-Jungians. It would seem fair to say that Jung's own work was born of a struggle to live and die with his own impulses, experiences and anxieties around omnipotence, impotence, and destructiveness, and has given rise to a tradition which has inherited a particular kind of focus on these problems.

Winnicott has a sense of the dangerous, problematic nature of the experiences under discussion and argues that Jung's personal story as one of childhood schizophrenia and that Jung's 'personality displays a strength of a kind which enabled him to heal himself' (Winnicott, 1992, p.320). Whether or not these observations about childhood mental illness are accurate, Winnicott's comments on the shortcomings of the Jungian model sit well with Redfearn's analysis of Jung's interpretation of one of his own dreams. Redfearn writes (of one of Jung's dreams):

This dream explains to me why the world-destructive, exile aspects of the coniunctio ­ the nuclear bomb aspects, as it were ­ have not been fully explored by Jung. The work on the coniunctio, the mandala, the self, and the individuation process perhaps quite rightly emphasize wholeness and harmony. Blackness, darkness, putrefaction are acknowledged fully by him, but the insane, bombing destructiveness that we perforce have to address, not only in some of our young people but in ourselves, is not. This has been left to our generation. Jung had visions of the blood and filth of war but he projected that onto the canvas of history, as I am saying we have all done (Redfearn, 1992, p.220).

Drawing these comments together and extending them in the direction of this paper, a key aspect of the post-Jungian task is to deal with the consequences of Jung's anxiety about his own destructiveness. This entails a closer engagement with the mad, bomb-like elements of the psyche, as well as its more sadistic and colder counterpart, torturous cruelty. Feminism's task in developing a mature model of women's aggression and anger would seem to be operating in a space which bears close parallels to the post-Jungian dilemma described.

Ambivalent Connections

Exploration of this de-literalised boundary between the I and the 'Not-I' through women's aggressive fantasies also, curiously enough, becomes an encounter with the notion and experience of love, since as Redfearn puts it 'love demands the dissolution of [the I/Not-I] boundary'. This is not to say that dissolving the 'I'/'Not-I' boundary is the same thing as love, it is simply to observe that this process takes us into a complex relationship with the experience of love (11).

Taking up Lacan's comment: '[A]nd why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported by feminine jouissance?', (Wright, 1992, p.157) we might speculate that something emerges in women's aggressive fantasies which might have potential to touch levels of awe, horror, power, fascination and ecstasy which have traditionally been regarded as religious experiences. In this context, Lacan's comment can be taken to imply that elements of women's fantasies about impotence, omnipotence and aggression and the experiences of dissolution of the boundaries/interface between 'I' and 'Not-I' (with its associations with jouissance) coincide with what have traditionally been regarded as experiences of God, or, at the very least, of love.

Entwined in this is, however, anxiety about aggression. If Frattoroli's earlier comments are right about the 'near-psychotic edge' to Jung's mysticism functioning out of the need to deny such anxiety, it is here that we should be most careful. Perhaps it is this which accounts for much of the attraction of Jung's work for 'New Age' thinkers (Tacey, 1998).

Such anxiety and flight into defence can be made use of, playing back, as it does, into Clark's insight that self-preservation is a struggle involving:

. . . the desire not to fall to bits, not to lose control or go mad. To preserve a sense of self and self-esteem. Under this there is a need to collapse, to lose control and breakdown (Clark, 1995, p.345).

Thus aggressive fantasy and the anxiety it produces can provide us with a means of exploring the edges of identity, the places where resistance to identity and refusal to slip into role are most visible. The canalisation of women's desire through social discourse is structured so that one of the points of access to these realms is, for women, fantasies or actions which are imaginally and literally self-destructive or O/other-destructive.

It is out on these edges that encounters with the desire to collapse, lose control and break down set the parameters for spontaneous, flexible identity. Likewise, it is here that fantasies of being destroyed and of destroying oneself and/or others lay the foundations for a sense of agency and the responsibilities entailed in exercising it. Through post-Jungian insights into the creative potential of psychic dissociability, this realm could also provide a breakthrough point for feminist thought and ways of thinking about women's experience of interiority in general.

Notes

1. The ghosts of the early Jungian women haunt this work, in particular that of Marie-Louise Von Franz. To them I owe the recognition that certain imaginal phenomena are both commonplace and crucial in the lives of many women. Personally, however, I find the values and philosophical heritage which the concept of 'animus' (negative or otherwise) is shot through with to be unacceptable.

2. The failure of the assertiveness training movement to engage with these dilemmas is discussed fully by D. Cameron (1994/95).

3. Lacanian psychoanalysis is not the theoretical core of this paper. Since, however, there is so little pre-existing research on the topic under investigation, I have appropriated terminology and ideas from other disciplines. The nature of the task of trying to map what is currently largely a psychological blank-spot will necessitate pushing existing concepts and terms beyond the boundaries they were originally defined within. I am aware of the Lacanian use of the term jouissance to describe something which relates (primarily) to male experience, but have chosen to use the term in connection to female experience since it is a term which create some sense of the transgressive pleasures I am trying to discuss.

4. Kathleen Woodward makes a related point in her article Anger . . . and Anger: From Freud to Feminism, where she discusses the problems of ' "righteous", habit forming anger':

Anger as an 'outlaw' emotion (Jagger) is appropriate when associated with the position of the oppressed. But as we grow older, relations of authority almost inevitably shift. For feminists in the academy, power relations have undergone an indisputable sea change in the last fifteen years. Many women who entered the academy under the banner of the politics of anger find themselves today in positions of authority, responsible to many others. The title of a recent talk by Scheman, 'On Waking Up One Morning and Finding We are Them,' gestures towards this phenomenon. For this generation, which is my generation, 'righteous,' habit-forming anger, once understood as a 'right', can take on the shape of abusive arrogance. 'Anger' may be appropriate as a tool of politicisation but after this inaugurated period in time flat-out anger is a blunt instrument. Expressions of anger in public discourse (in essays, in debate) can have very different consequences from expressions of anger in the close quarters of the classroom, for example, where flat-out anger can produce a flashpoint, escalating personal conflict. Thus we need a historical perspective on the uses of anger. If the assertion of the authority of anger in the academic community (the humanities in particular) has had enabling consequences at a certain point in time, that time has largely passed. The paradigm of oppressor-oppressed, once so useful to feminism, is producing serious consequences of its own in terms of generational politics in feminism. With this paradigm in hand, younger women in the academy, for example, analyze their position in relation to older women 'in power' as that of oppressed, their anger authorized by their epistemological privilege of being a student or an assistant professor. Never mind that the general paradigm of oppressor-oppressed is inappropriate in this case. Certainly from this perspective 'anger' senselessly divided women from one another, creating smaller, oppositional groups. This is indeed a serious consequence of the politics of the authority of anger (p.92).

I quote Woodward's work at length as it captures something of the problems of contemporary feminist praxis, and also illustrates the issue under question: how might we go about generating a mature theory of aggression (which would include anger) which serves women's interests?

5. I have never actually been able to find Douglas's reference in Jung's own text. I have tried to locate the copy of the Visions seminars she refers to in The Woman in The Mirror, without success (she gives the reference as Jung: Visions Seminars, p.413). Recently I purchased a copy of the Visions Seminars edited by Douglas herself but have (as yet) been unable to track the reference as it might translate to that edition. I would be most grateful if any reader is able to supply the full reference (date of publication, publisher, editor and page or paragraph number).

6. Kugler comments that imagos: perform '. . .a synthetic function, integrating both external sensory experience with internal psychic reactions. The significant point is that the imago is not simply a reproduction of the outer world (that is a copy of an historical event), but rather, a psychic production' and generally refers to Jung 'having adopted Kant's productive view of imaging' (Kugler, 1993). Support for Jung's position from the findings of contemporary neurology, as well as a discussion of the limitations of the use of Jung's position by some post-Jungians is given by Samuels (1989). One of the important points which emerges in this discussion is that we do not experience imagery directly, but that the ego is constantly changing its position ' as it confronts shifting patterns of imagery . . . consciousness is as labile as its objects' (Samuels, p.44, 1989).

From the point of view of this thesis, the crucial comments from Kugler are that:

[The] model of self-reflection found in classical psychology and philosophical epistemology works from the assumption that self-reflection is a mirror reflection. The subject-imago being objectively reflected upon is symmetrical (identical) to the subject doing the reflecting. This model of reflexivity adopts the logic of physical reflection. When applied to psychology, the process keeps the reflecting subject always caught in the solipsism of ego consciousness.

. . . Self-reflection in Jungian depth psychology is a process through which the personality turns back on itself in an asymmetrical fashion. This provides a way out of the philosophical solipsism and therapeutic narcissism inherent in the humanistic model. The mirror at work in the Jungian hermeneutic does not reflect the self-same face. Rather it mirrors back the face of the Other (1993).

7. Andrew Samuels, comments that:

Lipnack and Stamps suggest several ideograms that capture the essence of network as the word is used in its contemporary social or organizational sense. As with pluralism, network offers us both a metaphor for personality and an instrument for monitoring activity within the personality. Once again, the political/social lexicon is relevant for depth psychology (p.40, 1989).

The example of a segmented/polycephalous/ideological/network is given (SPIN) which has fuzzy boundaries. Samuels quotes Lipnack and Stamps:

[C]onnections based on shared values are bound to wax and wane as circumstances change for individuals and society. Just as we cannot enumerate our personal network, which in any case would change by tomorrow, so a group network rarely knows the extent of its membership influence and resources (p.41, 1989).

Samuels then goes on to point out that:

It is not hard to see how the psychology in and of this model of social organisation resonates with what has been proposed so far. A pluralistic psychology is polycephalous; the moral factor constantly intrudes; we never completely know the extent of our inner 'membership, influence and resources' ­ they are unconscious (ibid.).

This pluralistic model is not without critics and Alexander McCurdy (1990) raises questions about the 'shadow' of pluralism in his review of Samuels' book.

8. Butler argues that:

Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives 'of women'. But is there a political shape to 'women,' as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? How is that identity shaped, and is it a political shaping that takes the very morphology and boundary of the sexed body as ground, surface, or site of cultural inscription? What circumscribes that site as 'the female body'? Is 'the body' or 'the sexed body' the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate? Or is 'the body' itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping the body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex? (pp.128-129, 1990).

Butler's complex, anti-hetrosexist position on the performative nature of sex, gender and desire seems to me to be richer in possibilities for feminism than the often adopted position that sex is a biological given, while gender is a cultural construction.

9. One of the other recurrent Jungian and post-Jungian interests is the myth of Dionysus. It is particularly interesting that this is a story in which Dionysus, god of wine (Baccus to the Romans), and 'the loosener' is eventually torn to pieces by his female followers, the Maneads or Bacchea (see Hubback, 1990). Questions of the extent to which Greek myth is itself patriarchal notwithstanding, it is interesting to note the centrality of this story in which women tear two men (Penthus and Dionysus) apart in ecstatic frenzy. Perhaps this is the ultimate statement about the nature of female jouissance, or perhaps it tells us more about male fears of what female jouissance might be like.

10. Samuels comments:

In the SAP (Society of Analytical Psychology, London), where I trained, there has been a vogue to focus on Jung's person problems, for example his supposed infantile psychosis: the idea sanctioned by Winnicott (1964) as vitiating the utility of his ideas. Such personalization of the issues is something I have tried to avoid; psychobiography should not be decisive in theoretical dispute (1997).

In many ways, this present work could be accused of something similar. The obvious difference is that here, psychobiography is not being used to resolve a theoretical dispute, but as a means of illustrating a point which would stand without it (albeit a little less strongly).

11. It must be born in mind, however, that the 'I'/'Not-I' boundary is actually an illusory figure of speech ­ a convenient way of talking about what is within and sits close to one's sense of identity and what is within and feels as if it cannot belong to oneself. Furthermore, as family and group therapy practices and feminist therapy have pointed out, 'I' is not singular: we exist in complex inter-relationships to other people, social structures, places and institutions. Individuals exist only in contexts, and context frames the discourse through which what is 'I' and what is 'Not-I'/Other is defined for and by the individual. Thus these 'boundaries' are not literal, although we tend to necessarily hold strongly and defend our views and experiences of them. As Kugler (1993) points out, quoting Octavio Paz 'Otherness is above all the simultaneous perception that we are others without ceasing to be what we are and that, without ceasing to be where we are, our true being is in another place' (Kugler's reference is to Paz p.245, 1975).

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(Reprinted with permission from Harvest, Journal of Jungian Studies, V.45, No. 2, 1999, pp.7-28 .The English spelling and punctuation have been retained. Only Notes 1. and 2. appear in the text as published in Harvest.)

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