Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 674–691

Jung’s shadow:
negation and narcissism of the Self

William Meredith-Owen, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

Abstract: The cave walls of prehistoric man record two contrasting hand impressions:
the one positive – a direct imprint; the other negative – a blank defined by a halo of colour.
Jung’s disturbed, displaced contact with his mother led to a struggle in establishing
an integrated sense of ‘I’; instead to create a sense of Self he brilliantly contrived to
illuminate the darkness around that blank impress. The resulting lifework, enhanced by
Jung’s multifarious capacities as artist and philosopher as well as physician, is deeply
impressive; yet Winnicott (1964) in his review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
nevertheless alludes to Jung’s ‘own need to search for a self with which to know’ (p. 450).
Passages from the autobiography are considered that appear to corroborate Winnicott’s
contention that Jung had a ‘blank’, potentially psychotic, core. Yet it is also argued that
the psychoanalytic mainstream has undervalued the subtlety and creativity of Jung’s
own intuitive response to his shadow and that a sympathetic appreciation of this can
still valuably inform our contemporary approaches to narcissistic disorders, especially
dissociation.

Key words: dissociation, Jung, narcissism, negation, shadow, Self, Winnicott

The blank impress

The instigation for this paper was André Green’s hauntingly evocative descrip-
tion of the two contrasting ways in which prehistoric men left representations
of themselves on their cave walls1 . Images that resonated both with my own
experience in analysis and with my reading of Jung:

On some parts of the ceiling of the caves . . . were . . . what pre-historians call negative
hands. To represent hands, prehistoric man used two devices. The simplest was to
paint the hand and to make an impression on the wall, leaving a direct imprint. The
second was more indirect and sophisticated. Here the hand of the drawer does not
draw itself. Instead it is placed on the stone and the paint applied all around it, allowing
the colours to spread out, perhaps to rather marvellous effect. Then it separates from
the wall, and the blank non-drawn hand appears.
(Green 1994, p. 220)

1 Examples can be found in Werner Herzog’s ‘Cave of forgotten dreams’ (2011), his documentary
on the prehistoric paintings found at Chauvet (France).

0021-8774/2011/5605/674 
C 2011, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 675

Green notes further that ‘Such could be the result of the physical separation
from the mother’s body’ and concludes with the cryptic comment, ‘we do
not expect prehistoric man to have known what the negative is about’ (ibid.,
p. 220). Surely the inference here is that Green does expect contemporary
psychoanalytic man to ‘know what the negative is about’: after all his most
celebrated contribution to our literature was his paper ‘The dead mother’
(1980/1994) in which he tracks the impact of the death of the emotional
bond between mother and child. He argues that if this breakdown is severe
enough it leaves what Green calls a psychose blanche—a blank psychosis—
a discouraged, desolate core to the self that, if not utterly paralysed, yearns
desperately for some alternative revivifying contact. Whether we regard this
resulting drive as a profound creativity born of deep suffering, or as a manic
and often rather ruthless pursuit of compensatory grandiosity, is one of the
watershed issues of our profession: certainly, historically, the dividing line
between analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts. But if we can regard
this tension, so divisive amongst our professional ancestors, as a potential
coniunctio oppositorum, then an open-minded exploration of this territory
might yet yield insight into the roots of narcissistic disorder, and in particular
dissociation2 .

‘Interprefaction’
In this endeavour I appropriate Jung as my clinical example, or rather
exemplar3 . So I should make clear from the start that what I will be presenting
is a partial reading of Jung that makes no absolute claim for historical truth
or objective validity, though I hope my reading will not be felt to flout those
considerations. I am particularly conscious here of Sonu Shamdasani’s (2005)
admonitions towards would-be Jung biographers and commentators, past or
present, regarding the seductive dangers of what he calls ‘interprefactions’: the
presenting as a biographical fact what is actually a selective arrangement of
historical material to suit a preconceived psychodynamic theory. But, for well
or ill, I have not tried too hard to resist this temptation, for Jung was built on
such a grand scale that we are almost invited to see, or to imagine we can see,
writ large in him—in both his creativity and his pathology—what we may catch
only faint glimpses of in ourselves.

2 ‘Dissociation’ is such a broadly used term that I should clarify that here I follow Winnicott’s
usage (implying the ‘unintegration’ he attributed to himself and Jung). It should be distinguished
from the more extreme traumatically engendered condition (Connolly 2011) in which any capacity
to represent self experience is ruptured: a state of paralysis in which even the blank impress is lost
within a void, unmitigated by any ‘colours spreading out’.
3 Appropriately enough one definition of ‘exemplar’ offered in the OED is: ‘an archetype whether

real or ideal, 1618’.

676 William Meredith-Owen

Nobody has engaged more intriguingly with Jung in this way than Donald
Winnicott. In his last decade Winnicott was profoundly immersed in Jung, both
through his ongoing exchanges with his fellow paediatrician Michael Fordham,
and through his reading, in German and English, of Jung’s autobiography which
culminated in his controversial review. Coinciding with this he experienced an
extraordinary tri-partite dream (Morey 2005; Sedgwick 2008; Meredith-Owen
2011) whose culmination he described in a letter to Fordham: ‘Here was I
awake, in the dream, and knew I had dreamt of being destroyed and of being
the destroying agent. There was no dissociation, so the three I’s were all together
in touch with each other’ (Winnicott 1989, pp. 228–29). Moreover he goes on
to make the intriguing assertion that this dream had not only cured his own
self-confessed lifelong dissociation but had been dreamt ‘for Jung and for some
of my patients, as well as for myself’ (ibid., p. 229).
Would Jung have appreciated this retrospective benefaction? I suspect not, for
even though he so frequently refers in his autobiography to the tension between
what he calls in shorthand his ordinary, everyday No. 1 self and his visionary
No. 2 self, he nevertheless robustly maintained that ‘the play and counterplay
between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which persisted throughout my life,
has nothing to do with “dissociation” in the ordinary medical sense’ (Jung
1963, p. 62). But if we understand from Winnicott’s dream insight that the cure
to dissociation lies in the simultaneous recognition of both our fear of being
destroyed, annihilated or ‘blanked’, and our fear of the potential destructiveness
of our own elemental aggression, then we might well feel that these issues did
indeed trouble Jung.
I will argue that the text, indeed the very texture, of Memories, Dreams,
Reflections makes it hard for us to accept Jung’s disinclination to describe
himself as dissociated, though here I must acknowledge an important caveat:
I have not studied the original transcripts, the so-called ‘Protocols’, from
which it is derived. We now know, thanks to the exhaustive research of Sonu
Shamdasani (2005), and of his most recent biographer Deirdre Bair (2004),
that the officially published testimony does not always scrupulously reflect
Jung’s original voice. This is because his interlocutor and editor, Aniela Jaffé,
perhaps under pressure to preserve family privacy and uphold Swiss notions
of propriety, apparently bowdlerized the text, toning down some of its visceral
immediacy and removing, for instance, most personal references to Emma and
virtually all to Toni Wolff. This may have had the unfortunate consequence of
exacerbating the impression that Jung could have a somewhat schizoid stance
towards intimate personal relations. So let us remain mindful of that whilst
allowing ourselves an uninhibited exploration of the Jung who in Winnicott’s
view (1964) ‘started off “knowing”, but handicapped by his own need to search
for a self with which to know’ (p. 450); who, in Green’s image of prehistoric
man, represents the diaspora of marvellous colour spreading out from the blank,
negative hand at its centre. The Jung who is the exemplar of creative response to
dissociation.
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 677

Jung’s childhood legacy: ‘either a beast or a God’

This is a challenging invitation. In 1964 when Winnicott first published
his assertion that Jung’s mature theoretical formulations were grounded in
the conditioning experiences of his (Jung’s) early life, many Jungians felt
that Winnicott construed his subject’s creative achievement as nothing but a
defensive product of pathology. But the prevailing climate in Jungian circles has
changed considerably: once even Freud’s celebrated claim that an analysis might
be fittingly compared to an archaeological dig would have aroused suspicion of
reduction, now few would demur at even Bion’s later laconic correction:

Freud’s analogy of an archaeological investigation with a psychoanalysis was helpful

if it were considered that we were exposing evidence not so much of a primitive
civilisation as of a primitive disaster.
(Bion 1984, p. 101)

I think it is difficult to escape the realization that the first chapters of Memories,
Dreams, Reflections are a record of just such a disaster. This may not be
immediately apparent for their aesthetic impact is also so striking as one
stunning image of the natural world succeeds another: the sunlight through the
leaves, the sunset on the Alps, the sand and pebbles on the lake shore lapped
by the seemingly infinite expanse of calm water. But alongside this profound
sense of connectedness to nature we are also struck by evidence of increasing
alienation from the human world. Thus we read:

Dim intimations of trouble in my parents’ marriage hovered around me. My illness,

severe eczema, must have been connected with a temporary separation of my parents.
My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basle, and presumably her illness
had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage. I was deeply troubled by my
mother being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was
spoken.
(Jung 1963, p. 23)

Winnicott notes this curious combination of intimate estrangement on the one

hand and absorption in the natural world on the other, and writes ‘Jung’s early
memories are of a consciousness of beauty but there is a negative to this sort
of positive feeling experience . . . it will turn out to be a distortion of integrative
tendencies secondary to the mother’s maternal failure due to her own illness’
(Winnicott 1964, p. 451). At first glance this assertion looks enigmatic—why
would such a capacity for the apprehension of beauty be consequent on this
‘distortion of integrative tendencies’? What I think Winnicott means by this
is that the containment and sense of reciprocity that Jung missed with his
mother he sought for instead through his immersion in nature, and we might
add, subsequently, his absorption in his own inner world of vision with its
distinctive structure of relatively autonomous archetypal complexes. This was
a characteristic that Winnicott (1962) had already noted as constituting ‘a
678 William Meredith-Owen

sophisticated defence, a defence that is an active production of chaos in defence

against unintegration in the absence of maternal ego-support, that is, against
the unthinkable or archaic anxiety that results from failure of holding in the
stage of absolute dependence’ (p. 61).
But Jung did feel held by his sense of the profound correlation of the natural
world with what he was eventually to call the ‘objective psyche’. His belief in
the intrinsic mutuality of their origins is dramatically evoked in Section 6 of ‘On
the nature of the psyche’ where he describes creation as arising from ‘the arcane
substance—the watery earth, (the mud) . . . of the world essence—“universally
animated” by the “fiery spark (scintillae) of the soul of the world ”. . .’ (Jung
1960 para. 388). One can well imagine Jung assuming the bricks and mortar
with which he constructed Bollingen were infused with just such a spirit. A
spirit shared by an earlier compatriot, Paracelsus, for whom

the characteristic alchemical vision of sparks scintillating in the blackness of the arcane
substance should change into the spectacle of the interior firmament and its stars. He
beholds the darksome psyche as a star strewn night sky, whose planets and fixed
constellations represent the archetypes in all their luminosity and numinosity.
(ibid., para. 392)

Thus we can trace Jung reaching through natural and cosmic analogies into the
collective psyche for the recognitions and connections that he had missed in
the area of relational intimacy: these are the ‘marvellous colours’ streaming out
from Green’s ‘negative hand’.
The element of implicit pantheism in this is reminiscent of Wordsworth,
another who ‘lost’ his mother through her death when he was only seven.
However for Wordsworth immersion in nature became an extension of the
original maternal contact rather than a substitute for it, and he celebrated it
accordingly in this passage from ‘The Prelude’:
Bless’d the infant Babe
(For with my best conjectures I would trace
The progress of our being) . . . who when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul
Does gather passion from his Mother’s eye.

Such a child becomes -

. . . eager to combine
In one appearance all the elements
And parts of the same object, else detached
And loath to coalesce.

This surely is Wordsworth’s positive counterpart to Winnicott’s ‘distortion of

integrative tendencies’, for he continues:

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed;

Along his infant veins are interfused
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 679

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world.
(Wordsworth 1799/1979)

Jung’s childhood recollections record how resourcefully he turned to the natural

world for respite from his alienation from relational liveliness (‘the filial
bond’). We might even imagine Jung seeking ‘gravitational’ reassurance in his
preoccupation with castles and the maps of their mandala-shaped ground plans
(Jung 1963, pp. 46 & 223). Yet even such consolation as that was played
out against a background of the bewildering omnipresence of death. Vivid
imagery of a helpless victim being overwhelmed accrues around what Jung
describes as his ‘unconscious suicidal urge or it may be, fatal resistance to
life in this world’ (ibid., p. 24). Images of submersion or being swallowed up
become a recurrent motif: the drowned and battered body from the Rhine Falls
whose blood he witnessed trickling down the open washhouse drain (ibid.,
p. 22), his pastor father officiating frequent burials in the next door graveyard
(ibid., p. 24). We have here surely a forerunner of his later construal of the hero’s
journey wherein the exhausted, shattered, ordinary/normal/No. 1 personality
would be swallowed up by the great mother/collective unconscious/No. 2
personality. The awful terror of this fate was later mitigated by Jung’s construing
it as the necessary sacrifice precipitating the engagement with archetypal
energies that led to the emergence of a more divinely infused Self. This was
the template laid out in Symbols of Transformation (1956), explored in the
spiritual journey recorded in The Red Book (2009), and consolidated through
his later researches in arcane practice and tradition. Jung’s advocacy of such an
orientation is an extremely impressive cumulative achievement of great intrinsic
value: that it may also serve, in part, a compensatory role in relation to earlier
deprivation only adds to its interest and potential clinical value. For these
pressures that bore down on Jung are perennial issues, though in my experience
a contemporary analysand is more likely to express analogous anxieties in terms
of disappearing into space, as in being swallowed up by a black hole, rather
than by the earth or the ocean. Whatever the metaphor, the fear experienced is
consequent to a lack of adequate contact, a point of anchorage (Wordsworth’s
‘Mother’s eye’) that can resist the surge of infinitely escalating affect, which
otherwise must be warded off by dissociation. This has pragmatic clinical
implications, for it is the containment offered by prolonged, intensive analysis
that is uniquely well-suited to provide that anchoring contact, which might
allow the once too threatening—and hence dissociated—storm of affect to be
endured and integrated.
But this resource was most certainly not available to the childhood Jung who,
as we have seen, looked to remedy his stark acknowledgement that ‘I could never
succeed in overcoming my secret distrust’ (Jung 1963, p. 29) by turning to the
natural world for the reassurance of womb-like containment: ‘I immersed myself
in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from
the whole human world’ (ibid., p. 47). It is as if Jung sought solace from the
680 William Meredith-Owen

overwhelming unease of his isolated predicament—exacerbated by the failure

to thrive of his own parents’ intercourse—through sublimating this dismaying
absence of intimacy into visions of abstract coniunctios of extraordinary breadth
and depth; though it seems to have come at a cost. As he writes later, ‘I felt
completely alone with my certainties. It never occurred to me that I might be
crazy, for the light and darkness of God seemed to me to be facts that could
be understood even though they depress my feelings’ (ibid., p. 81). This is his
touching acknowledgement that his absorption in the inner world associated
with his No. 2 personality may have come at the cost of a more lively instinctual
life and the flattening of his No. 1 personality. He continues:

the most painful thing of all was the frustration of my attempts to overcome the inner
split in myself, my division into two worlds. Again and again events occurred which
forced me out of my ordinary, everyday existence into the boundlessness of ‘God’s
world’.
(ibid., p. 91)

But, as Jung himself implies, this ‘boundlessness’ of ‘God’s world’ also

threatened the bounds of sanity. It shared some of the characteristics of what
was then known as dementia praecox, or what we would now categorize as
potentially psychotic symptomology: detachment from normal life, immersion
in fantasy, hints of paranoia and inflation alongside of course the visionary
brilliance and profound insight.
This is the more ominous background to the innocent grandiosity of Jung’s
childhood daydreams of his descent from Goethe, his affinity to the aristocratic
coach that passed by one day, his sense of deserving the handsome 18th-century
buckled shoe: his reality was the long, lonely walk to school in worn out boots
with no socks (Bair 2004, p. 29). He describes himself feeling ‘either outlawed
or elect, cursed or blessed’ (Jung 1963, p. 57). With retrospective prescience
Victor White was later, in his correspondence with Jung, to quote Aristotle’s
famous dictum that ‘the solitary man is either a beast or a god’ (Lammers 2007).

The ‘normal doctor’s’ dream of panic

These descriptions give palpable substance to the so-called ‘vertical split’, the
wound that Jung attempted to self heal in the most extraordinarily resourceful
and creative way. Yet Jung was Jung, intuitively brilliant, perhaps with the gifts
and charisma we might more usually associate with a prophet, most certainly a
quite exceptional individual. But let us see how Jung responds to an apparently
normal man, an ordinary doctor rooted in what Jung would call his No. 1
personality, who happened to apply to Jung for an apparently ordinary training
analysis. The story is taken again from Memories, Dreams, Reflections and
centres on the dream that this would-be trainee brought. And, as it is often
the case that when analysts are in analysis the material they bring about their
patients is saturated with their own projections, we might reasonably assume
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 681

that Jung’s detailed reporting of this dream serves as an extended metaphor

for the tension within his own divided self. And there is a further overlap, the
central architectural motif of the dream is a favourite of Jung’s; as he said of
one of his own dreams, ‘it was plain to me that the house represented a kind of
image of the psyche’ (ibid., p. 184). Here is the story in Jung’s own words:

Once I encountered an entirely normal pupil. He was a doctor, and came to me with
the best recommendations from an old colleague. He had a normal practice, normal
success, a normal wife, normal children, lived in a normal little house in a normal
little town, had a normal income and probably a normal diet.
(ibid., p. 156)

Now Jung is obviously slightly tongue in cheek and making a rhetorical point
here, but he lays it on so thick that the effect is distinctly patronizing. He
continues:

He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him, ‘Do you know what that means? It means
that you must first learn to know yourself . . . therefore you must accept an analysis
of yourself’. ‘That was all right’, the man said, but almost at once followed this with
‘But I have no problems to tell you about’. That should have been a warning to me:
so I said, ‘Very well, then we can examine your dreams’. ‘But I have no dreams’, he
said. ‘You will soon have some’, I responded.
(ibid., p. 156)

And indeed so it eventually proved: a profoundly moving, indeed harrowing

dream came along which, appropriately enough, described a journey. Moreover
as the ‘certain city’ where it starts is later established through the dreamer’s
associations to be Zurich, where Jung was working, the progress of the dream
clearly reflects the dreamer’s, and by proxy Jung’s, intuitive expectations of
where an analysis might take them:

At last an impressive dream turned up. He dreamt that his train stopped in a certain
city. Since he did not know the city and wanted to see something of it, he set out
towards the city centre. There he found a mediaeval building, probably the town hall,
and went into it. He wandered down along the corridors and came upon handsome
rooms, their walls lined with old paintings and fine tapestries. Precious old objects
stood about. Suddenly he saw that it had grown darker, and the sun had set.

This seems to be a watershed moment in the dream when affirmative teleological

expectation gives way to regressive despair and panic.

He thought, ‘I must get back to the railway station.’ At this moment he discovered
that he was lost, and no longer knew where the exit was. He started in alarm, and
simultaneously realized that he had not met a single person in this building. He began
to feel uneasy, and quickened his pace, hoping to run into someone. But he met no
one. Then he came to a large door, and thought with relief, that is the exit. He opened
the door and discovered that he had stumbled upon a gigantic room.
(ibid., p. 157)
682 William Meredith-Owen

Here I interrupt the narrative briefly to summon an image from the preceding
chapter which affords a striking juxtaposition to the climactic scene of this
dream. In it Jung compares his divided selves:

But in the No.2 personality light reigned, as in the spacious halls of a royal palace
whose high casements opened up on a landscape flooded with sunlight. Here were
meaning and historical continuity, in strong contrast to the incoherent fortuitousness
of No.1’s life, which had no real points of contact with its environment.
(ibid., p. 107)

Now back to the dream:

. . . he had stumbled upon a gigantic room. It was so huge and dark that he could
not even see the opposite wall. Profoundly alarmed, the dreamer ran across the great,
empty room, hoping to find the exit on the other side. Then he saw – precisely in the
middle of the room – something white on the floor. As he approached he discovered
that it was an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and
had smeared itself with faeces. At that moment the dreamer awoke with a cry, in a
state of panic.
(ibid., p. 157)

What an extraordinarily powerful image of utter uncontainment this is: the

abandoned child, not in the sunlit royal halls, but in the terrifyingly unbounded
dark interior of the absent breast, becomes the ‘idiot’ child unable to contain
his own thoughts, or retain his own faeces. Jung continues:

I knew all I needed to know – here was a latent psychosis! I must say I sweated as I tried
to lead him out of that dream. I had to represent it to him as something quite innocuous,
and gloss over all the perilous details. What the dream says is approximately this;
the trip on which he sets out is the trip to Zurich. He remains there, however, for
only a short time. The child in the centre of the room is himself as a two-year-old
child.
(ibid., p. 157)

Now so far so good: but here we cannot help stumbling over the marked shift
in tone as this dramatic, gripping narrative drifts off into rather ponderous and
petty reflection:

In small children, such uncouth behaviour is somewhat unusual, but still possible.
They may be intrigued by their faeces, which are coloured and have an odd smell.
Raised in a city environment, and possibly along strict lines, a child might easily be
guilty of such a failing.
(ibid., p.158)

This does read very oddly: it is, frankly, stilted. The passionate immediacy of
the dream’s climactic scene is awkwardly displaced, indicative, I would suggest,
of Jung’s own ambivalent (dissociated) response to his patient’s material. And
he continues:
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 683

But the dreamer, the doctor, was no child; he was a grown man. And therefore
the dream image in the centre of the room is a sinister symbol. When he told me the
dream, I realized that his normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick
of time, for the latent psychosis was within a hand’s breadth of breaking out and
becoming manifest. This had to be prevented. Finally, with the aid of one of his other
dreams, I succeeded in finding an acceptable pretext for ending the training analysis.
We were both of us very glad to stop.
(ibid., p. 158)

Winnicott’s perspective
Contemporaneous to his reading of this Winnicott (1963/1989, p. 90) wrote
‘there are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be
told that the breakdown, the fear of which destroys his or her life, has already
been’. But of course Winnicott could draw on the insights arising from child
analysis pioneered by Klein and brought to bear on extended clinical work
with borderline patients by Rosenfeld, Bion, and others. Had Jung had access
to what we are now able to take for granted—for instance the centrality of
the concept of container/contained and its roots in maternal reverie—he might
have felt able to take his ‘oh so normal’ doctor on. As it was, he, more than
any other analyst of his generation, had sought out a wealth of experience with
borderline and/or psychotic patients: Freud had nothing to compare to Jung’s
decade of psychiatric immersion at the Burghölzi. But Jung’s interest in these
unintegrated/disintegrated states—recall Wordsworth’s ‘detached/ And loath
to coalesce’—was principally in gathering what he took to be the evidences of
collective coherence emerging from the seeming chaos of personal disarray.
Nevertheless Jung’s intuition ran well ahead of his practice—and indeed of
Freud’s—in anticipating the absolute importance of the personal dimension of
the training analysis:

The psychotherapist must understand not only the patient; it is equally important that
he should understand himself. For that reason the sine qua non is the analysis of the
analyst, what is called the training analysis. The patient’s treatment begins with the
doctor, so to speak. Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and his own
problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same. Only then. In the training
analysis the doctor must learn to know his own psyche and to take it seriously. If he
cannot do that, the patient will not learn either. He will lose a portion of his psyche,
just as the doctor has lost that portion of his psyche which he has not learned to
understand.
(Jung 1963, p. 154)

Now, as Jungians, we may well feel that the narrower focus of the Freudian
tradition has excluded a substantial portion of psyche’s richness. But we must
remain wary of doing likewise; André Green’s image of the blank hand resonates
with Jung’s reference to ‘losing a portion of our psyche’ and poses questions
about our legacy that Jung himself had the prescience to raise. Winnicott’s
commentary makes a convincing case that Jung, dismayed and discouraged by
684 William Meredith-Owen

early and serious disappointments in what we now call his formative object
relations, had become dissociated from his instinctual, affective core. Jung had
used his extraordinary vision and energy to invest in an alternative, his No.2
personality. As Winnicott put it:

He went down under and found subjective life. At the same time he became a
withdrawn person, with what was wrongly thought at the time to be a clinical
depression. From this developed Jung’s exploration of the unconscious, and (for me)
his concept of the collective unconscious was part of his attempt to deal with his lack
of contact with what could now be called the unconscious-according-to-Freud.

Winnicott spells out the consequences of this defence: ‘ . . . it is not possible to

conceive of a repressed unconscious with a split mind; instead what is found is
dissociation’ (Winnicott 1964, p. 453).
Of course within a year of writing these words Winnicott, as we noted
earlier, ‘dreamt for Jung . . . as well as myself’ his own transformative splitting
headache dream of destruction which he felt cured him at long last of his
own dissociation. Sedgwick’s (2008) rich exploration of this overlap suggests a
backhanded compliment here, an acknowledgement that Winnicott’s profound
study of Jung’s pathology had helped him resolve his own. Yet Winnicott
never quite explains why, leaving it in typically cryptic fashion for us to draw
our own conclusions. Mine, following Sedgwick, is based on Winnicott’s late
autobiographical poem The Tree (Rodman 2003, p. 289) in which he laments
that the cross he felt obliged to carry through most of his life was the suppression
of his innate assertiveness which he felt his mother could not bear. Winnicott
passionately believed that what he termed our primary ‘primitive destructive
impulses’ are crucial to our emergence from the maternal matrix and the
developing assumption that we can enjoy a potent intercourse with the world
out there. As a paediatrician his favourite observation was to leave a spatula in
front of the child to see whether they had the confidence and courage to pick it
up, mouth it and then throw it away, thus implying their trust that it could be
retrieved and the cycle repeated. In health this assertiveness, this demonstration
of power to impress oneself on the external object without harm to oneself or
other, led on to wholehearted engagement and intimacy. If it was blocked the
consequence was either inhibition, which in his case occasioned impotence, or
the angry defiance he attributed to Jung. As evidence he cited Jung’s schoolboy
belligerence, his game of building brick towers only to ‘rapturously destroy’
them with simulated earthquakes (Jung 1963, p. 33), and the adolescent Jung’s
‘blasphemous’ vision of God shattering the beautiful blue roof of Basle cathedral
with a turd bomb (ibid., p. 53). For Winnicott this was Jung falling back on the
omnipotence of his own unassimilated aggression in such a dissociated way that
he was unable to recognize the projection of his own anger into God (Meredith-
Owen 2011). Yet it was Jung’s own intuition that brought him to address this
very issue in his later preoccupation with the irascible, omnipotent God of Job.
Winnicott’s model of analysis accordingly prioritized regression and recon-
nection with these troublesome but essential raw ingredients. His biographer,
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 685

Rodman, summarizes this succinctly: ‘ . . . the analyst should understand that

what is needed is the recovery of the breakdown that happened too early to
be experienced and therefore was never gathered into the omnipotence of the
child, nor integrated into the total personality’ (Rodman 2003).
Jung’s solution was not to try to recover those missing portions associated
with the fragility of his No.1 personality, but to rise above them or at least
regard them as a necessary sacrifice, the relinquishment of concern for which
could allow one’s sense of identity to be subsumed in the greater Self. In the
early days of his articulation of his emerging concept of the collective he would
refer to ‘being lifted above the personal and into the supra-personal’ (Brome
1978, p. 305).

The quest for contact

Is this inspiration or evasion? We do not need to look far in the literature of
ascetic practice and mysticism to realize that negation of egocentric desires and
anxieties are regarded as a prerequisite of unobstructed love of the godhead; in
that sense narcissism of the Self, with a capital S, would describe a fulfilment
rather than a defensive pathology. But I think we need to be very careful as
analysts that we do not oversimplify or idealize that possibility; that we do
not allow it to bypass what may be a necessary and ultimately rewarding
engagement with what might be described as the Kleinian shadow. For if we
take an individual, like Jung, who has had the misfortune not to have enjoyed
much intimacy in early experience, then he or she is going to establish an internal
structure that is predicated on a presumption of absence. Such an individual
may well present for analysis with conscious goodwill and constructive intent,
but the unconscious, right hemisphere part may also be saying: ‘Look, I waited
and waited and waited and you never turned up, so to survive the dismay I had
to adapt by becoming oblivious of my assertive yearnings. I learnt to withdraw
my eager expectation (kept in reserve for future projection onto idealisations),
or else break it up entirely (as in the disintegration of schizophrenia): now you
come along and invite me to reconstitute and reengage with what had turned
out to be a nightmare – that is like rubbing salt into a wound’.
Moreover this wound is exacerbated by the disconcerting mixture of feelings
that inevitably flare up around this fundamental issue of unmet need. Although
originally impelled by this desire for contact—with the breast, the mother, our
partner, our analyst—for some of us, many of us even, the pressing task is to deal
with the consequences of that desire having become embittered. The struggle
is to recover that energizing expectation from its submergence in frustration,
dismay, rage and alienation (Meredith-Owen 2008, pp. 459-80).
These consequences may prove more subtle and extensive than we realize,
influencing even our most apparently constructive aspirations such as the
pursuit of love and knowledge. For we might well react to such early difficulties
in meeting with a source of satisfaction by setting out in determined, but
686 William Meredith-Owen

over-insistent pursuit of that which was lost, or rather never quite found. Put
in mythical terms that combine Jungian and Kleinian reference, we might say
that ‘the good breast’ could be projected into the fantasy figure of Sophia, the
goddess of wisdom, who then becomes the object of the heroic quest. But does
our desire for her embrace, our aspiration to acquire, say, analytic wisdom,
result only in a sterile appropriation that merely masks the underlying sense of
aggrievement at her absence? This is what Green would call the consolation of
the ‘patched breast’ (Green 1994, p. 152).
A more immediately somatic, concrete and erotic version of this would
be the over-investment in the anima figure, or the adhesive idealization of
the analyst, possession of whom is deemed in phantasy to meet all needs.
Jung’s own intense pursuit of the anima through his relationship with Sabina
Spielrein and Toni Wolff appears to have been, in the literal sense of the word,
rather ruthless. ‘Ruth-less’—without compassion or pity—is a word that echoes
through Memories, Dreams, Reflections: it recurs notably in this description of
someone who could, especially at night, appear ‘weird . . . like one of those seers
who is at the same time a strange beast, like a votive in a bear’s cave. Archaic
and ruthless. Ruthless as truth and nature. An embodiment of . . . the “natural
mind’” (ibid., p. 68). This is not, as we might presume, the alarmed report of
some worthy bourgeois Küsnacht neighbour describing Jung prowling round
his stone-built lair at Bollingen, but Jung describing the mother of his early
childhood in her alter ego, her night mode. But this is a mother whom he could
also experience in the daytime, on occasion, as ‘loving’; I do wonder whether in
the environment he created for himself at Bollingen there was not an intuitively
improvised attempt to integrate these two conflictual aspects of his mother. For I
had not realized, until immersing myself in his biographies, how much time, care
and attention Jung devoted to cooking whilst there. And that he should have
obtained such solace from this activity—from the growing of his own food to
the ceremonial washing up of his utensils—in the round containing tower with
its open hearth in a setting of uncompromising naturalness, is surely expressive
of his own long unmet need to bring together the nurturing and ruthless aspects
of the breast. Indeed Jaffé records in the Protocols that Jung once spoke of
Bollingen as ‘a place of maturation, a mother’s womb . . . [where] I could be
myself again, could be in my most personal essence that corresponded to me’
(Bair 2004, p. 323). What an extraordinary concentration of personal referents
we have in that phrase—‘I . . . myself . . . my most personal essence . . . me’—so
evocative of the intensity of Jung’s yearning for integration.
Might we also wonder if the recurrent motif of his seeking contact with stone
throughout his long life was not such another way of his rendering the seemingly
impervious responsive? Perhaps the very solidity of the material offered Jung
implicit reassurance that his aggressive, potentially destructive impulses could be
absorbed and survive? Was it the same spirit that led André Green’s prehistoric
man to impress his hand on the cave wall that brought the boyhood Jung to
sit on the rock that jutted out from the grassy meadow and wonder if it were
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 687

he or he were it . . . to the oval painted ‘soul-stone’ he hid in his pencil box

with the mannequin . . . to the self-invented game of building model houses and
towers with bricks . . . to the stones with which he later built Bollingen . . . and the
meditative carvings with which he ornamented them? This consistent returning
to a relationship with an apparently intractable, unresponsive medium is a
testimony to the enduring creativity of his desire to make contact, to celebrate
his point of anchorage.

Reversal of libido
Regrettably the psychoanalytic mainstream has rather insistently presumed Jung
to have been either naive or grandiose in his attitude to narcissistic damage: but
this does not do justice to Jung’s nuanced treatment of libido and the defensive
component of its reversal:

As our life is directed outwards and does not normally allow of such introversions, we
have to suppose a rather exceptional condition, for instance lack of external objects,
which forces the individual to seek a substitute in his own psyche. It is hard to believe
that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object of human love – it offers
boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a
person of these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not know
how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and
beautiful. What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an
external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love.
(Jung 1956, para. 253)

This passage from Symbols of Transformation takes us back to those

early chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections where Jung most certainly
succeeded in rendering nature ‘alive and beautiful’, a reciprocal relationship he
appreciatively maintained, mediated through stone in particular, throughout
his life. But we have also seen how the animation of his descriptions of the
natural world contrasted so starkly with the doubt and tension around the
human figures. We are reminded of his shattering aside ‘From then on, I
always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken’. This reading of Jung
suggests that his seemingly unintegrated aggression and, perhaps, his tendency
to ruthless idealization are both consequences of the uncertainty and fragility
of his early attachment. Winnicott woke within the dream he dreamt for Jung
to the realization that his elemental assertiveness, his imperative need, could be
brought to bear without either ruthlessly overwhelming the other or suffering an
annihilating rebuff. This surely reaches to the core of dissociation: our feeling
robustly enough ‘borne in mind’ is a necessary precursor to bearing the full
range of our own affect in mind, to occupying our self.
It is when the necessary containment breaks down, as it did so utterly in
the ‘oh so normal’ doctor’s dream, that we are threatened, as Jung only too
clearly realized, by André Green’s postulate of a ‘blank psychosis’. In the
original French the term Green uses is ‘psychose blanche’, ‘blanche’ here having
688 William Meredith-Owen

connotations of both white and blank, as in a sheet of paper on which there is

as yet no mark. In this state, which Green describes as consequent to the loss of
emotional, instinctual contact with the (affectively withdrawn) ‘dead’ maternal
object, the imprint of emotion can no longer be born. Green differentiates this
white blankness so evocative of dissociation from the red (blood) of anger and
the black of depression. Its hallmark is a cold, bleak core in the unconscious
which, in a resourceful subject, may drive a quest (the reversal of libido described
above) for lost meaning leading to a compulsion to imagine and/or think. This
is the seductive prospect of weaving a ‘patched breast’ to cover the psychic
hole; to leave an overwhelmingly impressive imprint on that blank sheet4 , the
absent breast, the empty echoing hall of Jung’s doctor’s dream. Faced with his
childhood confusions and isolation how inspired was it of Jung, in the absence
of maternal reverie, to turn to ‘the darksome psyche as a star strewn night sky’
(Jung 1960, para. 392)?

Conclusion
Jung expresses his intuitive self-awareness of this quandary with great
poignancy: ‘Part of the psyche really wants the external object, but another
part of it strives back to the subjective world, where the airy and lightly built
palaces of fantasy beckon’ (ibid., para. 253). For me there are both brilliance and
shadow in this recourse: certainly Jungians have long championed the creative
value of such active imaginings, and there may now be emerging corroboration
from recent neuroscience research of their intrinsic value in mobilizing atrophied
circuitry (Knox 2011). Nevertheless if we are to continue to redress the long-
standing, albeit increasingly anachronistic, complaint of the psychoanalytic
mainstream that Jungians seem disinclined to ‘know about’ negation, we should
set an example to our Freudian and Kleinian colleagues, who can still appear
defensively reverential towards their founding figures, by continuing to address
our shadow5 . Those early chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections vividly
record Jung’s frustrated struggle to establish an integrated sense of ‘I’; instead,
to define himself, to create a sense of Self (to individuate), he brilliantly
contrived to allow the colours all around the blank impress of the negative
hand to spread out to marvellous effect. Our sympathetic appreciation of both
the creativity and the pathology implicit in this can still enrich our clinical
capacity to address contemporary narcissistic disorders, particularly dissociative
states.

4 Is this the background to the desperate intensity invested in the painstaking calligraphy of the
Red Book?
5 Jeffrey Satinover’s (1985, 1986) important contributions should be acknowledged here.
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 689

TRANSLATIONS of ABSTRACT

André Green (1994) remarque les empreintes manuelles contrastées laissées par les
hommes primitifs sur les parois de leurs grottes, l’une, positive–empreinte directe,
l’autre, négative–espace vide délimité par un halo de couleur. Les souvenirs d’enfance
de Jung rapportent de manière vivace son combat, né du contact perturbé avec sa
mère, pour établir un sens intégré du « je » : au lieu de se définir lui-même, de
créer un sens intégré de soi (de s’individuer), il s’est brillamment ingénié à « laisser
se déployer les couleurs autour (de l’empreinte vide) ». L’œuvre d’une vie qui en résulte,
rehaussée par les talents multiples et variés de Jung, comme artiste et comme philosophe,
autant que comme médecin, est profondément impressionnante; cependant, Winnicott,
dans son compte-rendu sur Ma vie, souvenirs, rêves, pensées, n’en affirme pas moins
que Jung manquait d’un soi pour connaı̂tre. Des passages de l’autobiographie sont
ici pris en considération, qui semblent corroborer l’assertion d’ un noyau « vide »,
potentiellement psychotique, chez Jung. Pourtant, il y est également avancé que le
courant psychanalytique prédominant a sous-évalué la subtilité et la créativité de la
réponse intuitive de Jung à son ombre: et qu’une appréciation bienveillante de cette
création est encore susceptible d’informer utilement nos approches contemporaines des
désordres narcissiques, plus particulièrement de la dissociation.

André Green (1994) erwähnt die kontrastreichen Handabdrücke, die Frühmenschen auf
den Wänden ihrer Höhlen hinterlassen haben. Die eine als Positiv–ein direkter Abdruck,
die andere als Negativ – definiert über einen Umriß von Farbe. Jungs Erinnerungen
an seine Kindheit belegen lebhaft sein, aus dem gestörten Kontakt zu seiner Mutter
resultierendes Ringen um die Erlangung eines integrierten Sinnes von ‘Ich’. Anstatt
sich willkürlich zu definieren, einen Sinn des Selbst zu erschaffen (zu individuieren)
entwarf er in brillianter Weise einen Weg ‘alle Blumen rundherum [um den freibleibenden
Abdruck] sich entfalten zu lassen’. Das resultierende Lebenswerk, gestützt durch Jungs
facettenreiche Fähigkeiten als Künstler und Philosoph wie auch als Arzt, ist tief
beeindruckend, doch gleichwohl behauptet Winnicott in seiner Kritik zu Erinnerungen,
Träume, Gedanken, daß ‘es Jung an einem Selbst mangelte, daß von sich wußte’. Teile
der Autobiographie werden herangezogen, die Winnicotts Behauptung zu bekräftigen
scheinen, daß Jung einen ‘leeren’, potentiell psychotischen Kern gehabt habe. Jedoch
wird auch in der Richtung argumentiert, daß die psychoanalytische Hauptrichtung den
Scharfsinn und die Kreativität von Jungs eigener intuitiver Reaktion auf seinen Schatten
unterbewertet habe, und daß eine wohlwollende Einschätzung noch immer wertvoll
sein kann für unsere heutigen Annäherungen an narzißtische Störungen, speziell die
Dissoziation.

André Green (1994) fa notare come siano contrastanti le impronte della mano lasciate
dai primitivi sulle mura delle loro caverne. Quella positiva un’impronta diretta, l’altra
negativa – uno spazio vuoto definito da un alone di colore. I ricordi di Jung della
sua infanzia riportano vividamente la sua lotta, conseguente al disturbato rapporto
690 William Meredith-Owen

con sua madre, per stabilire un senso dell’Io integrato; invece di definirsi, di creare un
senso del Sé (individuarsi), lui riesce brillantemente a ‘permettere ai colori di spargersi
tutti intorno a ciò (l’impronta)’. Il risultante lavoro di vita, migliorato dalle molteplici
capacità come artista, filosofo e medico è profondamente imponente; eppure Winnicot,
nella sua revisione di Sogni, ricordi, riflessioni, asserı̀ tuttavia che ‘a Jung mancava
un sé mediante cui conoscere’. Alcuni passaggi dell’autobiografia vennero considerati da
Winnicot come rafforzanti la sua idea che Jung avesse uno ‘spazio vuoto’ potenzialmente
psicotico. Eppure si è anche sostenuto che la corrente psicoanalitica ha sottovalutato la
sottigliezza e la creatività della risposta intuitiva, individuale di Jung alla sua ombra: e
che un favorevole apprezzamento di ciò può ancora dare forma ai nostri attuali approcci
ai disordini narcisistici, in particolar modo alla scissione.

Andre Ǵrin (1994) pixet o kontrastnyh otpeqatkah ladone, kotorye

pervobytnye ldi ostavlli na stenah pewer. Odni iz nih pozitivny –
to prmo otpeqatok; drugie – negativny: to pustota, okruenna cvet-
nym oreolom. Vospominani nga o dectve ivo svidetelstvut o
ego borbe za formirovanie integrirovannogo quvstva « », sledstvii
naruxennogo kontakta s mater; vmesto togo, qtoby opredelit seb,
sozdat quvstvo Samosti (individuirovats) on uhitrils blestwe
«pozvolit okruawim kraskam rasprostrants vokrug [pustogo kon-
tura]». Poluqivxies v rezultate trudy, rasxirennye mnogoobraznymi
sposobnostmi nga–hudonika i filosofa, ravno kak i vraqa, gluboko
vpeqatlt; odnako Vinnikott v svoem obzore «Vospominani, snovideni,
razmyxleni» vse e utverdaet, qto u nga «ocuctvovala samost, kotora
mogla by poznat». Otryvki iz avtobiografii, kazalos by, podtverdat
octaivaemu Vinnikottom toqku zreni o tom, qto u nga bylo «pustoe»,
potencialno psihotiqeskoe, dro. Odnako v state dokazyvaec take, qto
psihoanalitiqeski mnstrim nedoocenil tonkost i tvorqesku silu
intuitivnyh reakci nga na ego sobstvennu ten, i qto blagoela-
telnoe priznanie togo moet dobavit mnogo cenno informacii k naxim
sovremennym predstavlenim o narcissiqeskih rasstrostvah, osobenno –
dissociacii.

André Verde (1994) hace nota de las impresiones contrastantes que la mano del hombre
primitivo dejó en las paredes de sus cuevas. El un sentido positivo–una impresión directa;
en otro negativo – un blanco definido por una aureola de color. Los recuerdos de Jung de
su niñez registran vı́vidamente su lucha, en el contacto perturbador con su madre, para
establecer un sentido integrado de ‘yo’; definirse, para crear una sensación de identidad
(individualizar) inventó brillantemente ‘el permitir que los colores lo rodearan por todas
partes [la impronta en blanco]y se pudieran esparcir fuera’. El trabajo resultante de
la vida, el desarrollo de las capacidades múltiples de Jung como artista y filósofo ası́
como médico, fue profundamente impresionante; todavı́a Winnicott, en su revisión de
‘Memorias, Sueños, y Pensamientos’ afirma, no obstante, que a ‘Jung careció de un ser
con que saber’. Los pasajes de la autobiográfico son parecen corroborar la afirmación
de Winnicott que Jung tuvo un ‘nucleo’ central, potencialmente psicótico. Sin embargo
Jung’s shadow: negation and narcissism of the Self 691

también se argumneta que laprincipal corriente psicoanalı́tica ha infravalorado la sutileza

y la creatividad dela respuesta intuitiva de Jung a su sombra: y que una apreciación
más amable de esto puedrı́a informar valiosamente nuestra apreciación actual de los
desórdenes narcisistas, especialmente en la disociación.

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