Soul-Making: Where human relationship is the projective medium

By Madeleine Spencer

Have you ever met someone and felt an instant sense of attraction or repulsion even though you do not know the person? In Depth Psychology this is an unconscious as well as alchemical reaction that is understood as part of psychic projective phenomena of affinity, where a constellated chemistry between two individuals is ignited. This phenomenon was understood by Jung mythically as the unio Mystica, or the union of opposites.

This presentation will share how Jung illustrated this psychological understanding of the transference phenomena in alchemical symbolism and illustrations taken from the 16th-century alchemical text, Rosarium Philosophorum. He utilized these illustrations to show the connections that exist between the transformative process shared by alchemy and an analogous transformative process that he discovered in the psychic growth of an individual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781649796578

Madeleine Spencer

Madeleine Spencer is a critical community psychologist, trained for 10 years at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. Her work is in the field of depth psychology where her studies have involved analytical, archetypal, imaginal, community, eco-indigenous and liberation psychology. Her current focus in community psychology is on the relationship between race, and place and the ways that our relationships to each other, as well as the built environment, architecture, and city planning, have protracted social impacts on the mental health of communities.  

Book preview

Dedication

To Gary Obergfell for always creating space for me to reorder my life and priorities.

To Mark Kelly, Librarian at Pacifica Graduate Institute for all your assistance over all these years-to golden milk, pine mead, and chocolate! Thank you.

To my parents for giving me life.

Copyright Information ©

Madeleine Spencer 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Spencer, Madeleine

Soul-Making

ISBN 9781649796554 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781649796561 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781649796578 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023921507

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

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Acknowledgment

For Jacob King:

Whom I thank for unknowingly initiating me into a full-blown consciousness of the transference phenomenon, from which I shall never return to

complete unconsciousness.

We Are Complicated!

We, Humans, have very complicated relationships, which are never singular—always extending within, without, and far beyond the individual to family, society, culture, and the world. We are psychologically similar; yet, despite this basic kinship, a problem persists in maintaining a feeling of connection. My perception is that this pervasive feeling of disconnection, separation, and isolation is the practical realization of individualism and modernity in Western culture. As a consequence, individuals, seeking security, have erected strong walls of defense against each other. Walls holding individuals at a safe distance from life, with its perpetual onslaught of flux and mutation, constantly threaten to create experiences of conflict, pain, sorrow, inequality, and defensive blocks wrought by sex, temperament, oppositional feelings, beliefs, ambitions, and bitterness. The most debilitating aspect of this sense of disconnection is the feeling of not being profoundly related to one another. Rather than securing peace, love, growth, and vitality, walls create resistance and isolation, individuals manipulate one another with power, conflict is sustained, and individuals are affected both within and without.

This book turns to a vision that I feel is necessary to build effective human relationships by offering communion and an opening for a revelation of the Self, in the personal sense, and ultimately the transcendent Self, which is explained in the definition of terms later in this chapter. This vision reopens a question regarding the purpose of the transference relationship. Transference is defined as a displacement of unresolved conflicts, cravings, expectations, affections, and hostilities onto a substitute object¹. This book explores the notion that the transference phenomenon can act as a portal to Self-revelation. Because all relationships have the potential to act as mirrors, through relationships individuals have the potential to perceive clearly what is dishonest or honest within themselves; thus, through others, one can often discover one’s own motives and thoughts. It explores the hypothesis that once this concept of transference is grasped and chosen as a constructive medium of human development, it has the potential to lead the individual toward profound growth and personal transformation.

In order to understand and agree upon the facts as described in the book, it is necessary to look at the meaning of the main concepts and terms that are employed, in particular, Self, transference, and autopoiesis.

Self

What is the Self? According to Jung, the Self is considered an unknowable essence² that transcends human powers of comprehension. Depth psychologist and scholar, Lionel Corbett, claimed that Jung used the term Self in ways that cannot be described in a unified manner³. Rather than viewing it as developed by accretion out of the internalization of self-object relationships, said Corbett, Jung believed the Self to be a priori archetypal ordering principle within the psyche⁴. Jung’s concept of individuation can be understood as the unfolding of the Self throughout life in an attempt to realize the potential wholeness of the personality⁵. The Self, according to Jung, is also a totality of the psyche, both unconscious and conscious⁶. Considered from the viewpoints of Jungian and Kohutian psychology, the Self is seen as purposive, acting as an organizing center that tries to preserve the integrity of the personality by maintaining intrapsychic homeostasis³.

Transference

The term transference is so often used in the academic and theoretical discourse of psychology that it is necessary to specify how it is utilized in this book; hence, clarification of the term is assisted by contemporary encyclopedic and dictionary definitions. The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis gave the following definition of transference:

Originally conceptualized by Freud as a reliving of infantile experience in particular, the concept of transference has been broadened… to include all feelings, fantasies, attitudes, perceptions, defensive operations and expectancies toward a person in the present which do not entirely befit that person. That is, transference refers to a repetition of reactions originating with significant caretakers, unconsciously lived-out with figures of the present⁷

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defined transference as follows:

In psychoanalysis, the DISPLACEMENT or PROJECTION onto the analyst of unconscious feelings and wishes originally directed toward important individuals, such as parents, in the patient’s childhood. This process, which is at the core of the psychoanalytic method, brings repressed material to the surface where it can be re-experienced, studied, and worked through. In the course of this process, it is posited that the sources of neurotic difficulties are frequently discovered and their harmful effects alleviated. Although quite specific to psychoanalysis, the term’s meaning has had an impact far beyond its narrow confines, and transference… is acknowledged as ubiquitous in human interactions. The role of transference in counseling and short-term dynamic psychotherapy is well recognized⁸.

Autopoiesis

To understand the term autopoiesis, its roots auto and poïesis, must be considered. The term poïesis, when examined etymologically, is derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω (Poïeô), which means to make⁹. The word, poïeô is the root of the modern word poetry¹⁰. The term poïesis was first mentioned in Plato’s Symposium¹¹ wherein a woman, Diotima of Mantinea, who was both a seer and the originator of the concept currently known as Platonic love, described the way in which mortals strive for immortality. Diotima said this striving occurs in relation to poieses "All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry [poïeô] or making"¹¹. Poïesis is defined as begetting, bringing forth, making, or creating ¹¹.

In poïesis, the generative or procreative movement is emphasized as beyond the transient and temporal and as linked to eternity and immortality¹¹. According to Diotima, three types of poïesis exist: a natural poïesis, a civic poïesis, and a soul poïesis. The poïesis understood in this book is the third kind, a poiesis of soul that, once realized, eventually reveals one’s place in the civic poiesis¹¹. According to Platonic understanding, poiesis of soul occurs through a cultivation of virtue and knowledge, causing an inner expansion and the creation of being.

Currently, an extensive body of work known as autopoietic theory has been developed by Maturana and his colleague Francisco Varela¹². The core of their work is the development of autopoiesis with regard to the dynamics of living systems. In their book, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of Living, Maturana and Varela provided a mechanistically conceptualized definition of the term autopoietic:

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. It follows that an autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations¹².

Adding auto to the ancient Greek term poiesis, Maturana and Varela thus coined the modern term autopoiesis as defined in their book, regarding autopoietic theory. Etymologically, auto is also from the Greek αὐτο, meaning oneself, one’s own¹³. The term autopoiesis is therefore defined literally as Self-making. Adding the prefix auto-emphasizes the autonomy of the molecule whereby this process has been shown to occur biologically; yet, in the original Greek term, poïeô, this emphasis on the term auto was understood or implied by the word poiesis.

Artist and writer on aesthetics, Derek Whitehead in Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be, drew from Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, stating:

What the Ancient Greeks intended by the term poiesis was very different: the heart of poiesis had nothing to do with the exercise of a will and everything to do with the production of aletheia, with unveiling, and with the opening of a world for humankind’s being and action.¹⁴

This book doesn’t harm the idea of soul poiesis as an aspect of the unveiling of consciousness from unconsciousness, yet also explores the concept that the cultivation of virtue and knowledge can occur through the recursive interaction of human relationships, whereby individuals have the potential to realize dynamically what Maturana called a conservation of autopoiesis¹⁵. This condition occurs through the recognition of the boundaries between self and other in a conscious realization of transference. Consciousness of these boundaries advances a process Jung called individuation¹⁶, which accentuates the individual’s ability to act as a singular entity that operates as a totality¹⁷. Living as a totality allows for direct creative expression of individual existence, while at the same time revealing one’s position within the unfolding of the civic poïesis.

While writing this book, two questions were circulating in my head: What is the meaning and purpose of transference in human relationships? How is the transference affectively utilized in the process of psychic growth and development considered autopoietic? In seeking