Kafka story, before the Law

“To the doorkeeper there comes a countryman who prays for admittance. But he is told he cannot be allowed in at the moment. Maybe later. On this place the man stays, continually appealing and each time put off until now it was the end of his life. At that time the doorkeeper says no one else was allowed in except the man and now the door will be shut.” The point is that the man did not realize the intangibility of what we must confront stems not from its concealed essence but from its very accessibility. The story also relates to time and taking one’s life seriously, personally.                

Proceeding from the singularity of addiction is a process evolving through inter and intra personal relationships. Jungian analytical treatment illustrates the focus on conscious, unconscious, therapeutic transference, and dreams. The article uses a clinical example rather than classical scientific research.

This paper links the perspectives of Jungian analytical psychology with those of French psychoanalyst Andre Green on the dead or blank mother and narcissism. These theorists describe situations in which the psyche can become narrowed and fragmented, affecting one’s draw to addictive behavior. Addictions are often lonely psychological spaces exemplified by a self-described sexually addicted twenty year old called Daniel.

His addictions from prostitutes to Internet pornography drew him like Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde presenting the psyche split between persona or outer presentation and shadow or those hidden elements. From early emotional disappointments and not being held in the parental mind, Daniel’s affects and desires were relegated to the shadows and expressed in the body.  His compulsive behaviors attempted to mask the shadows of melancholy, fragility and lack of self-animation arising from early parental lack of attachment. He became identified with the destructive and isolative elements of his personality. He was not open to the “fluidity of the unconscious…the not ‘I’ or Self as different from the ego” (West, 2008, p. 371). The self is engaged in combat with itself as his inner resources are hampered. 

The concept of the shadow from the perspective of Jungian psychology encompasses more than the repressed and includes the unconscious, both personal and collective. A person like Daniel is encased in narcissism, isolative self-reference. Daniel embarked on Jungian analytical psychotherapy because he felt something missing; he could not name it, a malaise, corrosive but imprecise, alienating from himself and others. Although Daniel’s addictive behaviors were compulsive isolative acts reflecting inner turmoil, they also contained the unconscious goal of self-creation for accessing his spirit.

Daniel dreamt, “There is a red stockinged lady outside the bookshop in Zurich, where earlier in the day I had bought Jung’s ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul.’ As Jung wrote, “the image is a condensed expression of the psychic condition of the whole” (Jung, 1971, p. 442). This quote addresses the complex issue in Daniel’s dream and presents the potential move from singular to relational. In addition, the dream and quote demonstrate a way into Daniel’s psyche is assisted by the feminine figure. The woman attired as she was, implied her as a prostitute like many of the women he bought for sex. However, no matter how much he acquired or experienced, his needs remained unmet, unsatisfied, and clawing at him. 

Daniel’s life was defined by addictions to food, drink and sex, all serving as disconnections from his body and psyche. The addictions were misguided attempts to fill the internal void, eradicate the emptiness. This emptiness fosters anxiety, despair, loss of meaning, and addiction. The dream places him in the center of a city, or symbolically at the center of himself. For Daniel the addictions maintained an illusory world where he could escape the shame and guilt he also felt. He was uncertain of his worth or lovability, focused on the glare of his personal inadequacy and insufficiency. He felt the hollowing cry of loneliness and not belonging. 

The word addiction originated from the Latin word addīcō and is a compound of ad (to, towards, at) and dīcō (say, affirm, tell). According to Roman law, an addictio was a person who became enslaved through a judicial procedure. Then a debtor could not repay the debt, creditors recovered their losses by the debtor becoming a slave. Today the addict denotes a person who is bonded, enslaved to a substance or any activity deemed pleasurable.

Addiction in its many different and unique manifestations is a growing issue, skipping no boundary of ethnicity, or of social or economical class. Addiction is complex and multidimensional involving the individual as well as his or her environment. The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to biological, psychological, social, and spiritual manifestations. A person compulsively pursues reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors. 

Currently and collectively there exists a widespread crisis of cultural sterility, materialism, and superficiality. Psychic deadness, disembodiment, inner deadness, and that one does not really exist are not uncommon (Connolly, 2011, p. 638). There is internal precariousness, and one feels without inner representation of face or body. Something is needed to combat this pall of emptiness and the addiction is sought to erase the psychic distress. Addiction can be interpreted as derailment from self and others, exacerbating apathy and lack of connection. 

What endures is a dull psychic pain characterized by the incapacity to connect emotionally. Although Daniel did not realize it, the addictive behaviors were forms of stealing and deceit enacted toward him and others. They were expressions of his controlling nature with its fundamental attack on intimacy. His addictive retreat was based on feeling fragile and the need to maintain singularity and safety in a world secluded from others. 

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” 

(Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, para. 335)

A malady of the soul absorbs the ‘as-if’ personality. The self remains hidden, intrigued by fantasy, unable to tolerate reality. This person is acutely tuned into the signals from others and reacting to attain their own gain. Relationships are manipulations for attention and approval. It took time for Daniel to begin his inner journey, as his road was littered with restlessness and addictive behaviors orchestrated to hide from his real self. Jung commented, “When one tries desperately to be good and perfect, then all the more the shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive” (Jung, 1997, p. 391). Daniel’s internal conflict propelled him to defy societal and family conventions. His addictions represented the division between an outer compliant and good-guy facade and the interior, accusatory gaze of the internalized shame and guilt. Jung commented, “Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt” (Jung, 2014, para. 1095). 

Daniel used the addictions as he could not hold the tension between psyche and body. The addictions indicated the other within was ignored, separated, as if a stranger. Emotional wounds were secrets and put into the shadows. Integration was difficult for Daniel. Façade and illusion replaced being seen. He “retreated into a dream world without notice of actual dreams, perpetuating the timelessness of his fantasies” (Steiner, 1993, p. 99). A talented actor, the addictions allowed him to misrepresent reality and perpetuated a romanticized, idealized worldview.

Every attempt to understand this type of person hits a wall. He does not emotionally invest in people, places, or objects, anticipating lack of satisfaction or care, nor does he know how to care for others. There also is the issue of damaged connection to his body as the instincts are off, the spirit dampened and Daniel without genuineness. He felt erased, flawed, lacking. 

Daniel said he was fraudulent and living a sham existence. Although false it was his survival suit to blend in, so nothing suggested any disorder about him. He did not know other than façade and pretend, and was without the tools for intimacy with anyone, most of all with himself. This defense of the self is a protective mechanism preserving rather than permitting the fearful ego to be annihilated. Eventually a psychological crisis occurred as the outer facade and the inner reserves collapsed, revealing the issues at the center.

I have always loved desire. Certainly not that desire which believes itself to be determined according to a lack which raises up and upon which it depends, so much that it cannot get over it.

--Cixous, 1994, p. 29

Andre Green, French psychoanalyst brought attention to the concept of maternal deadness, referring to emotional lack. This described the maternal lack of presence or aliveness leaving her fractured attachments and internal discontinuity in children. We can add the father can have a similar absent constellation with similar results. In either case, the results can be disastrous. Andre Green described the “absence of memory, absence in the mind, absence of contact, absence of feeling all—all these absences can be condensed in the idea of a gap...instead of referring to a simple void or to something which is missing, becomes the substratum of what is real” (Kohon, ed., 1999, p. 8). A depressed, emotionally unavailable, preoccupied, and anxious or deadened mother is introjected or taken into the psyche. Interactions with her were empty where they should have been alive. Although present she was perceived as unreachable and unable to satisfy his emotional needs.

Daniel learned to ignore feelings and his life repeated the early absence of sufficient attachment. According to Andre Green this “constitutes a premature disillusionment and…carries in its wake, besides the loss of love, the loss of meaning, there was no explication to account for what has happened” (Kohon, 1999, p.150). From young, Daniel’s investment in himself became dismantled, leaving behind what can be called psychic holes. These were composed of the wounded places, regrets, the abandonments, and betrayals. Daniel avoided all these feelings with the addictions, and they only increased as time went on. His inner discourse was critical, preoccupied with judgments, self-erasure through addictive thoughts and behaviors. Under this was a pit of emptiness like “a psychic ruin that seizes hold of the subject in such a way that all vitality and life becomes frozen, where in fact it becomes forbidden...to be” (Green, 1986, p. 152). 

Daniel is unable to access much less repair the weight of grief and loss. The zest or passion for life was compromised and the self folded in on itself. This is an aspect of what has been called anhedonia or the inability to derive pleasure from anything. It parallels the situation of anomie meaning a lack in the usual social or ethical standards and leading to Daniel’s sense of precarity. This indicates instability and tendency towards psychological breakdown resulting in desperation, internal poverty, and diminished dreams.

Consumed with sorrow, life is dimmed. This left Daniel frozen in a state of psychical pain and alienation, disappointment, feelings of incapacity, and without confidence. The thing that endured was, “an essentially conflictual, ambiguous nature of desire, which is conceivable as the desire of the desire of the Other” (Green, 1979, p. 69). 

Daniel’s internal narrative illustrated the despoiling effects of his self-feeling. Emptied of energy or enthusiasm, an emotional morass developed falsely buoyed by the addictive behaviors. To hide all this, Daniel kept people away, lied to make them happy, deceiving them and himself. His efforts were oriented to please others and perform ‘as-if’ real when he felt a fiction of his self (Sheenhan, 2004, p. 420). The problem was he did not know how to do otherwise.

A range of emotions, angers and frustrations disappeared into his daily rituals of pornography, masturbation, drugs and excess drink and food. I do it too much he said but could not stop. Are addictions the problem or the lack of connection, distance from self and others? “The fear of there being nothing or no one worth obeying” (Phillips, 2015, p. 77) drove his addictions. His need to control substituted for his lack of control. His desire in the guise of addictions represented the incessant need for love and attention. All felt tenuous. 

The adaptation of mimicry, the protective fictions and the imposter role began early. “The reality of the person’s self was eschewed by his important others, the other experienced as poisonous to the self” (Solomon, 2004, p. 644). Mother was anxious, depressed, preoccupied and Daniel’s object cathexis or investment in those outside himself became disturbed. Instead, his self became buried within, and he could not summon the energy to make a full attempt at life. He developed distrust of the world, exacerbated by the cult-like claustrum of the family and religion. He put on a happy face and pretended while the roots to his self became increasingly lost. Unable to fit with others, the forbidden addictions increasingly defined his self. 

Daniel dreamt, “I apologize to the Black woman housekeeper I ran out on when I discovered there was work to be done. I ask her if she will help me be responsible and she says she will. As I awaken, I am struck by the fact that I am a liar and that the truth is not in me. I wonder if I have become a compulsive liar, and if there is any hope for me since I have been untruthful for so long. I am struck by how much I lie and deceive for fear of being found out for who I really am”. 

The dream illustrates the complexity to Daniel’s attitudes with the comments he was not doing the housework to be responsible or accountable. He wants help from his psyche in the form of the Black woman housekeeper, but he also notes he is a liar. Having felt so different as a child, his isolative routines kept him under the hegemony of facade. Alienated from relational aliveness, Daniel was run by helplessness, desire embittered, alienated, something withheld (Meredith-Owen, 2008, p. 462). Making these attitudes conscious could allow him to revivify contact with this personality aspect. However, it would take work as the dream so clearly stated.

“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.”                                       

(Carl Jung, vol. 9i, p. 2)Jungian analytical psychology acknowledges the value of integrating the shadow qualities, those projected, undeveloped or deemed unacceptable. In contrast, Daniel’s pull to women, drink and food represents the split-off shadow desperately needing control. This causes psychic numbness, loss of passion and the lure of addictions.

One cannot individuate, that is, become the person he is meant to be, without relating to the shadow. It was the shadow to which Daniel was addictively drawn and equally from which he fled. Jung commented, “The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form…This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality” (Jung, 1959, p. 20-21).

Meanwhile, Daniel through his addictions was seeking the feminine and the masculine. Later in therapy Daniel said he went on chat rooms disguised as a woman because he was more comfortable than upholding what he considered the male image. Jung commented, “Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life” (Jung, 1998, p. 66). For Daniel, a life attitude of distance from his body and ignorance of its needs became the defensive structure he relied upon. He felt weak, uncomfortable in his body, not male enough and needing constant reassurance he was noticed and valued.

The ‘as-if’ person characterized by both omnipotence and impotence avoids the shadow. This leads to affective immaturity and a defensive impenetrability, obscuring the underlying fraudulence. The person experiences a disjointed sense of reality due to anguish, panic, and void. Physical and psychological dissociations become buried in a contrived, mechanistic, and sterile world. Self-esteem and self-worth depending on maintaining superficial images cannot support authenticity.      

Daniel dreamed he had a tray of small cakes and is handing them out to others at a party. One has a bite out of it, and one is damaged, and he turns each around, so no one sees. They will think the cakes look all right from the front, but the reality is the hidden flaw. Daniel associated the cakes to his mother and the madeleine French novelist, Marcel Proust memorably associated with the desire for his mother. He interpreted the dream illustrating he received damaged goods from his mother while the better food was given to others. The dream illustrated the unmet needs for warmth and love sending him into a life of isolation, fears and ruled by addictions. Daniel said he does not know how or why he was drawn to them. His personality was lost so long ago, he does not know what he is trying to resurrect. He presented with a mild demeanor yet there was a voracious side. Or, perhaps this was the desire to be real.

Addicts can become enamored of fantasy images of themselves and others as the addictions provide a distorted mirror. Meanwhile, the image of himself as someone extraordinary was a way Daniel defended against the shadow. The addictions were retreats to prevent contact with his depressive pain and anxiety. These avoided parts of the self split off and were projected into other objects. There they remained welded together, making significant parts of the personality unavailable (Steiner, 1993, p. 54). Hidden dependencies, the disjunction from affect, loneliness and depersonalization resulted in his psychic retreats enacted through the addictions. He retreated to hide and protect as a means of avoiding the intolerable anxiety in all aspects of his life (Steiner, 1993, p. 12). 

Daniel was not an experiencer of life nor had he learned to be an internal participant in his mental life. Jung commented, “as long as it is a provisional life, your unconscious will be in a state of continuous irritation against you” (Jung, 1997, p. 194). Daniel resorted to grandiose fantasies to anesthetize and compensate for what he felt as a dark shadow over him. The shadow represented the very parts Daniel could not accept as the addictions controlled him. The shadow contained the secret spaces and even though the secret also carries the hope that one day he can emerge, be found, and met, Daniel instead was subsumed in it (Khan, 1983, p. 105). There was no other within who spoke or objected, but there was the one inside accusing him and was guilty. 

Daniel’s veneer, honed from years of facade could obfuscate the therapeutic transference he verbally established from the first session as intellectual. This was an unconscious fear of recurrence of the original relational detachments and loss of love.  “Behind the defenses were a terrified infantile part of the self, a devious and cunning tempter and seducer” (Colman, 1991, p. 360). This pulled him to hide the chaos and emptiness from our therapeutic relationship and contained the pent-up wish to merge. 

Daniel could not sit with the emptiness, the painful state of loss or desolation. Jung commented, “the degree a person does not admit the validity of the other she/he denies the ‘other’ within the right to exist–and vice versa. The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity” (Jung, 1976, par. 187).  Feelings of being fake, unseen and worthless were tangled up with entitlement as Daniel strove to suppress the dimly felt despair. There are “acute conflicts with those who are close…an impotence to withdraw from a conflictual situation, impotence to love, to make the most of one’s talents, to multiply one’s assets, or when this does take place, a profound dissatisfaction with the results (Green, 1986, p. 149). Such attitudes can escalate to a crushing of personality and self-annihilation. This arouses a disturbing netherworld of psychological oppression and need for release from its mutilations. Daniel’s addictions were the defenses against separation and loss while offering the illusion of omnipotence and manic excitement (Knox, 2011, p. 147). Never satisfied, he always needed more but never knew what was enough.            

For years Daniel had a repetitive dream of robbing the neighbor. Upon awakening he was upset and did not understand. The dream immediately bothered him but then he forgot it. He had no idea who he robbed and said he was not conscious of anything. The dream image repeated his avoidance of personal ethics, responsibility, and self-betrayal. He was resisting the unconscious, not listening to the voices within. 

He wanted to hide from the dream. He felt it referred to his addictions and he would be found out. He did not consider the robbed and robber was himself. Daniel had been acting against his Self and denied the betrayal. He cannot chance exposure of the real and frantically compensates through keeping facade. Running so hard keeps him unconscious, anxious, unable to relax, needing to resort to drugs, food, drink, and sex.

In another dream the pharmacy will not fill a prescription for pain because he lacks the correct government identity. He wonders if he has ever been himself, what his self is, who he is. Behind him is a voice saying the shadow knows and repeats this phrase. The dream is quite direct about what he needs—an identity including the many layered shadow. And it also implies he cannot avoid pain through medication.    

In therapy the subjective relation to the interior world with its symbols informs the capacity to create meaning, connect to others and engage with life by listening to the language of the unconscious. Jung stated, “the confrontation of the two positions, (the opposites)…so long as these are kept apart—naturally for the purpose of avoiding conflict—they do not function and remain inert” (Jung, 1969, p. 90). Daniel was caught at this place.

“As individual attention is habitually and excessively focused on the façade of the persona, the deeper, neglected aspects of the personality continually sabotage the individual’s conscious intentions”

 --Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, para. 221 

Daniel nullifies his loving dependent self and identifies almost entirely with the destructive narcissistic wounded parts. This denial is overlaid by the obsessive desire for sameness and the status quo must be maintained at all costs. Narcissism indicates a narrowed capacity for experiencing emotions. It eliminates opposition, retains singularity, and the status quo. 

“This self-protective mechanism had become an addictive and self referential activity with a ruminating quality” (Solomon, 1998, p. 234). Arrested in emotional development, Daniel rejected the instinctual, body, earth, and time. “The narcissist strives to keep everything of value within the compass of himself because, paradoxically, he is plagued by doubt as to whether there is anything of value within himself” (Colman, 1991, p. 365). He lived in the illusion of imagining control over his existence in a rather empty universe. “The self has yet to face the long repressed but often suspected, underlying internal reality…of living in a void or facing a vast emptiness” (Solomon, 2004, p. 636). The psychological residue denies time and in the throes of the addictions, Daniel was even more absent from himself. This dissociation from self circumvented psychological movement and thwarted internal harmony. Not being present promoted the search for the ideal.

Life has no permanence or meaning while its impermanence is also denied. Like Daniel, those who fail to go along with life remain suspended in midair. Under the tyranny of sexual addiction is a defense against vulnerability. This originates when there are disruptions in the process of forming a healthy and stable self. “Impoverishment of the self is due to the effects of dissociation from traumatizing experiences with an original and longed for other” (Solomon, 2004, p. 638). Narcissism is associated with solipsism, egoism, and nothing comes in nor goes out.

Narcissus could not live if he knew himself. The refusal to accept unknown, strange, uncontrolled feelings and thoughts bringing dissonance. This happens when our behavior does not match our self-image, or the image we think or want others to have of us. Narcissism in its singularity can also occlude relationship to the unconscious, as it seems threatening because different from consciousness. Jungian psychology is founded on the recognition that the dissociated parts, the unknown and the splits in the psyche lead to or obstruct knowledge of self and other. A question is if the narcissist can learn to engage when trying so hard to deny imperfection, depression, vulnerability, or dependence. Instead of individuating, he maintains a static, false, and illusory self-image at the cost of being real. 

Arrival and erasure, promise and excuse constitute two sides of the oscillating aporia of self-canceling, escalating into self-hatred. To be freed from these narcissistic shackles requires a significant working through of the deep-seated vulnerabilities. The “I” can never become truly present and spins away from itself in a process of continual self and other alienation. Yet, the narcissistic addict feels anxiety and apprehension, and he becomes increasingly impenetrable. The psychological walls are high, and no one gets in nor does he get out. Daniel’s personality is punctuated by the intolerance of difference or change, and he is lost in the narcissism of small things while a sense of powerlessness plagued him. 

His self-image was in a distorted negative way, reflecting little of his true being (Jacoby, 2016, p. 158).  Residing in the alcove of his mind Daniel’s grandiose phantasies came from feeling inferior while he remained dependent on addictive substances. Yet, he felt if he was like everybody, then he must be nobody. Although Daniel wanted to think he cared about others, it was a superficial social adjustment to hide his chronic uncertainty, dissatisfaction, and envy. “To recognize desire for what it is, dependent on others and also disallowed reveals him as unacceptable to himself, to be in conflict, too much in danger, disturbed by his own needs” (Phillips, 2013, p. 35). 

The persistence of what he called evil thoughts kept telling him he was bad even as they lured him in. Emotional feelings can be so submerged he often hardly notices them. Daniel spent his life avoiding feeling by control and now realizes how rapidly he leaves his body. He said he needs conscious intention to remain present, as he previously only knew sneaking and hiding. He realizes the problem is worse than he thought. Daniel inhabited what he calls separate mind compartments populated with addictive narratives on his mind frequently. 

Daniel dreamt of a woman in the back of a bus who had rough sex with a guy. Daniel was in the front of the bus looking at the woman next to him and her lips. He felt no concern for the one in the back who was with the edgy and perhaps dangerous guy. In the next dream that night he is with people and trying to find a place but does not know why he is there or where he is going and just seems to be floating along. He feels empty in both dreams. Both dreams point to dissociations from self, other, body and emotion as well as the dispassionate attitude to the feminine. Unbeknownst to him, Daniel was lonely and desiring someone to love him. He said the compulsive thoughts are there a lot; self-doubt abounds, drawing him to the lewd and despicable. So driven by his actions to erase the pain, all he could register was a sense of difference that felt unfavorable to the self (Colman, 1991, p. 364) making the addictions more insistent to escape such uncomfortable conflict ridden feelings. 

Daniel’s addictions substituted for the natural and instinctual self. Andre Green surmised it was “ a destruction of the psychic activity of representation which creates holes in the mind, or feelings of void, emptiness

” (Kohon, 1999, p. 290). The addictions did not fill but perpetuated the needs to reveal the secrets and find self-worth. 

“The symbolic capacity signifies the possibility for integration and the symbolic life through the holding together of the opposites and the creation thereby of a third thing” 

(Solomon, 2007, p. 159)

In the psychological work and through the transference and countertransference the former sterility, lack of intimacy to self and others gradually becomes apparent. The images and symbols in dreams expose the transformative aspects of the personality. They help a person move out of the one-sidedness of addictions with their systems of defense. 

Jung said, “In this world created by the Self we meet all those many to whom we belong, whose hearts we touch; here there is no distance, but immediate presence” (Jung, 1973, p, 298). The capacity for growth, development, creative agency, and love is dependent upon existing in the mind, eyes, and gaze of the other in a dance of attuned, rhythmic, and imperfect resonance. The acknowledgement of vulnerability and incompleteness is the psychological work filling in the gap. James Hillman, archetypal psychologist, conceptualized “what actually individuates is not us, but our passions, talents and places of wounding. Our complexes need to…find maturity, reality and the physical connection with psyche. Then the personality becomes a rich, multidimensional canvas” (Slater, 2012, p. 30).         

For Daniel, the relation to his interiority and the symbolic gradually evolved over time as his psychological restlessness led to recovery of his spirit. He became able to find internal supplies for self-esteem rather than seek continual external gratification. Accepting the disowned and split off others in his personality meant neither the former sterility, lack of intimacy to self and others gradually diminished. Abandoning the former singularity and isolation meant confronting the shadow and finding acceptance for self. 

Over time, relatedness opened to self, soul, and world. This represents the phoenix rising from the ashes, the melancholy in narcissism explored rather than denied. The discovery of what is meaningful counters the existential meaninglessness. Jung explained individuation in the following way. Jung commented, “I use the term “individuation” to denote the process by which a person becomes a psychological “individual,” that is, a separate, indivisible unity or “whole”. It is generally assumed that consciousness is the whole of the psychological individual. But knowledge of the phenomena that can only be explained on the hypothesis of unconscious psychic processes” (Jung, 1959/1968, p. 275)

This process requires the capacity to gather the multiple personal and collective threads. The tension between ego and self, surface and shadow are part of forming an identity. Conscious awareness of the emotional wounds becomes restorative to this process. Hopeless and impasse shift to openness to the unknown and unfamiliar. The personality becomes more relaxed and freer. 

For the person caught by addictive behaviors and secrets this means facing the emotional emptiness and letting go of facade. By attending to the inner world, the self can heal and unify body and mind. One can engage and be active in the external world with a renewed sense of purpose and meaning in life. “Relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself” (Jung, 1966, par. 445). Through the therapeutic relationship and its process over time Daniel began to trust and become more consciously embodied, intentional, and self-aware. 

“If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet