Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2010, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 3-66
© 2010 Heart-Centered Therapies Association
Immanent Transcendence,
Projection and Re-collection
David Hartman, MSW and Diane Zimberoff, MFT *
Abstract: Spiritual practice is aimed either at accessing transcendent realities
(“ascent” paths) or at bringing spiritual energies down to earth to transfigure
human nature (“descent” paths). This either/or understanding ignores the
existence of a synthesis — immanent transcendence (embodied spirituality).
The same principle applies to the psychological realm; transcendent or
transpersonal methodologies (“ascent” paths of Jungian work, subtle energy,
soul work,) or immanent body-centered and nature-centered modalities
(“descent” paths of bioenergetics, Reichian work, breathwork, shamanic
work). This either/or understanding ignores the existence of a synthesis —
immanent transcendence (mindfulness and bodyfulness) — which embodies
the Hebrew concept daveq u-meyuhady meaning “united or connected and at
the same time separate.” Resolving the tension between any two opposites
means transcending either while blending both on a higher level of synthesis.
Two vital keys are clear regarding how one achieves such resolution: one is to
recognize that opposites contain the seed of each other within, and the second
is to withstand the tension of the opposites without surrendering to one or the
other. The psyche comes complete with those keys in what Jung called the
transcendent function. Introjection is taking in, or making immanent, what
originates outside of me. Projection is seeing as outside of me, transcendent,
what originates within. Jung equates the re-attribution of introjections and the
re-collection of projections with the individuation process.
“To experience your eternity through the vicissitudes of your mortality, that’s
the total goal” (Joseph Campbell, 1982, p.142)
The definition of psychotherapy is “bringing life back to deadened psyches
through the body, and to deadened parts of the body through the psyche”
(McNeely, 1987, p. 10)
“Whereas our mind and consciousness constitute a natural bridge to
transcendent awareness, our body and its primary energies constitute a natural
bridge to immanent spiritual life” (Ferrer, 2008, p. 6).
_____________________________
* The Wellness Institute
3716 – 274th Ave SE, Issaquah, WA 98029
3
425-391-9716
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Ascent and descent
First, let us establish the “lay of the land” regarding the twin
concepts of transcendence and immanence.
Immanence and transcendence are reciprocal terms with the former relating to
something beyond mere materialism participating within material existence,
whereas the latter refers to something that is beyond materialism’s limits and
outside of material existence (e.g., the immanent quality of a so-called deity
would be located within the material world, whereas the transcendent quality
of a so-called deity would be radically outside the material world — and, of
course, any such deity could be seen as having both qualities). (Friedman &
Pappas, 2006, p. 49)
While here the concepts are placed in the context of spiritual
experience, they apply equally well to the field of depth
psychology and the relationship of consciousness to the
unconscious and the collective unconscious. We could replace
the term “material existence” with “consciousness”, so that
transcendence refers to something outside of consciousness, and
immanence to something within consciousness. These categories
are never what they initially seem, however, as we know well.
The same distinction is made in the poetic language of
under-the-ground and beyond-the-horizon. The beyond-thehorizon is an absence that helps to define one’s journey, an
unseen but vital realm. There are many invisible absences of
what is under-the-ground as well: the other side of a tree, or of
the moon, or of my body, the inside of the tree or moon or my
body.
For these would seem to be the two primary dimensions from whence things
enter the open presence of the landscape, and into which they depart. Sensible
phenomena are continually appearing out of, and continually vanishing into,
these two very different realms of concealment or invisibility. One trajectory
is a passage out toward, or inward from, a vast openness. The other is a
descent into, or a sprouting up from, a packed density (Abram, 1996, p. 213214).
And so again, applying this terminology to depth
psychology, one might say that transcendence refers to
something beyond-the-horizon (the vast openness of
consciousness) and immanence to something under-the-ground
(the soul realm of the unconscious). First, let us focus on the
distinction in the context of the spiritual realm.
The ancient Hebrew wisdom teaches: When we refer to G-d
as transcendent, infinite and beyond, we call Him, “He”. When
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
we refer to G-d as immanently here, now, in a nurturing, inner
way, we say She is the Shechinah (Freeman, n.d.).
Shechinah (literally, “dwelling”) is the vessel into which all
the powers from above flow, and everything is “contained” in it.
She is also symbolized by the ocean that contains the water of all
the rivers within it, i.e., she unites within herself the flow of all
other energies and forces.
In reality there are two Shekhinot: There is a Shechinah
above, just like there is a Shechinah below (Schafer, 2000). The
first describes the position of the Shechinah within the highest
realms, “united” (daveq) with God in the innermost chamber of
the king. To this humankind has no access. The second describes
the position of the Shechinah in her state of isolation (meyuhad),
in her separation from her divine origin and in her dwelling
among human beings. Because the Shechinah is at one and the
same time “united” with her divine origin and “separated” from
it, she serves as mediator between God and human beings,
heaven and earth.
The Shechinah below bundles up the powers from above and
transmits them down to the earthly world. This double function,
her orientation towards above and below, is very graphically
expressed in the Hebrew concept daveq u-meyuhady which
means “united or connected and at the same time separate.” The
Shechinah is portrayed in her dual role as female partner in the
divine sphere, and as the mother of the children of the divine on
earth.
Standing on the threshold to the earthly world, the Shechinah
hands over the divine powers assembled within her to this world
and at the same time directs them upwards. She is the foundation
in which all is contained, and yet strives to return back to the
place whence she originated, above.
Only in her position at the bottom edge of the divine world
can the Shechinah fulfill her divinely intended task for the
earthly world; yet according to her own nature she belongs to the
highest divine realm. The task of bringing the two realms
together, divine and earthly, relies on the involvement of human
beings. Through her, God enters the world, and her only task is
to unite humankind with God. If she succeeds in this, she will
not only lead humanity to God but will herself return to her
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divine origin. By taking up residence amid the people of earth,
she has made their destiny her own.
Because she alone belongs to both worlds, it is only through
her that the earthly world can be reconciled with the heavenly
one and only through her that humans can find their way to God.
The feminine force is the key to both worlds. Without her the
heavenly world would be incomplete, and the earthly world
would neither have been created nor be able to find its way back
to its creator. We find a strikingly similar recognition of the vital
role of the feminine in Carl Jung’s work of individuation,
reconciling the tension of opposites.
Another culture provides a similar perspective on the
interrelatedness of ascent and descent (Gibson, 2000, p. 183):
There is a Yu’pik (Alaskan First People) creation tale. The primal
wo/man wakes up startled. The celestial heavens are falling down upon her.
They fall and fall until they are hovering just above where she lies. In her
fright, she starts to sit up and pierces these heavens and finds herself in
another world, where the vaults of the heavens are high as they should be. But
soon they, too, begin to fall and sit just barely above her head.
Startled even more, she sits up further and finds herself in a third world,
where the heavens are held in their rightful place. Then they, too, begin to
collapse upon her. She pierces them into yet another world, where she espies
the first ceremonial lodge. She enters it and finds ceremonial gear laid out for
her. She takes these sacred animal rattles, masks, and dancing regalia as an
inner voice tells her their use. She lies back down, and descends to the first
world, where she creates a replica lodge and enacts the first ceremonies in the
bottom world. The skies have stayed in place to this day. (My very free
paraphrase of Seattle Art Museum Yu’pik installation, 1998.)
The lore of the Yu’piks is full of parallel stories of falling
and rising worlds, descending and ascending spirits. The
universal pattern of these tales intimates that we are all on
esoteric journeys which, while they may begin in the everyday
world, soon cross over into the mystical. Jung suggests the same
in his language of the Unus Mundus (1970)—one world of
transcendent divinity where personal and transpersonal, sacred
and profane, are irrelevant distinctions.
The New Testament parable of The Prodigal Son tells the
same cosmic tale: the involution of spirit into the lower realms of
separation and suffering, and then the evolution of return back to
source and jubilant reunion.
By transcendence, then, we mean extending or expanding
the limits of our ordinary consciousness or experience in ways
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
that connect us with a symbolic or phenomenal reality beyond
the ordinary. It may mean expanding our ordinary sense of
ourselves, who we identify ourselves to be and the nature of our
relationships with visible and invisible others. By immanence we
mean contracting our attention and immersing deep into the
phenomenal world and all that lies below it, visible and invisible.
Three levels of healing
We recognize three layers of healing, of ego development, of
spiritual growth: ego (personal), existential (social/ cultural) and
transpersonal (archetypal).
The ego level is organized around the self-image of ‘I’ as
separate and unique from all that is ‘not I’ – the physical
dimension of being with nature and the social dimension of
being with others. Here psychotherapy is focused on “What I am
not, what you are.” In other words, the client discovers long-held
erroneous beliefs about himself (such as “I am shameful” or “I
am bad” or “I deserve everything bad that happens to me”) and
discards them, declaring his innocence. At the same time, he
must attribute responsibility or guilt onto the perpetrators of
neglect or abuse in childhood. The individual here is myopically
limited to black-or-white thinking – “you and I are nothing
alike.” Work at the ego level builds boundaries, integrates
polarizations, replaces nonfunctional concepts of self and others,
and modifies character structure for more fulfillment. “Once
individuals have developed a more cohesive egoic identity, they
can embark on a process that takes them further on the journey
of self-discovery, that of unfolding their existential self, or their
true inner individuality” (Wittine, 1993, p.167).
The existential level is organized around the ‘I’ living the
“human condition,” that is, life on earth itself and the social,
cultural and spiritual ramifications of it – the personal dimension
of being with oneself. Here psychotherapy is focused on “What
you are not, what I am.” In other words, the client explores a
deeper layer of unconscious experience including his own
culpability, his secondary gains for maintaining a dysfunctional
status quo, and his shadow side. At the same time, he begins to
have compassion for those who victimized him, recognizing that
they are not the entirely bad people he railed against in the first
layer of healing work. One is beginning to see many more gray
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areas – “you and I are not so different.” People’s existential
issues are related to their mortality and impermanence, their
experience of freedom of choice (or lack of it), their sense of
worthiness, and their sense of separation/ connection with others.
Work at this level is to loosen the rigidity of the self-image, to
expand the relationship to the sacred, and to integrate the
profound influences of prenatal and perinatal experiences and
one’s relationship with death.
The transpersonal level is organized around the parts
experienced as ‘not I,’ including rejected and repressed parts,
introjected and attached energies, and the unrealized potentials –
the spiritual dimension of being with meaning. Here
psychotherapy is focused on “What ‘I’ am when I witness myself
in the same way as I witness the world.” One is opening to the
subtleties of paradox, to the reality of the invisible, to the
possibilities of peaceful coexistence through embracing the
tension of opposites. The work at this level includes identifying
and healing repressed shadow parts and unconscious anima/
animus constellations through re-collecting one’s projections,
identifying and reclaiming the transcendent parts hitherto beyond
reach (such as archetypal, karmic/ past life, preconception), and
establishing collaborative relationships with denizens of the
collective unconscious (such as spirit guides, angels, gods and
demons).
Transpersonal layer
Existential layer
Ego layer
Transpersonal layer
Existential layer
Biographical/ ego layer
Transpersonal layer
Existential layer
Ego layer
Table 1
These three major levels of development are similar to those
proposed by Wilber (1977) as the pathological, existential, and
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
transpersonal. For a more complete discussion, see Hartman and
Zimberoff (2003). Clearly, people do not work on these layers
strictly sequentially, so that for someone who is primarily at the
Biographical/ ego layer there may be occasional forays into both
of the others, and someone who has progressed to working
primarily at the Archetypal/ transpersonal layer it may be useful
to occasionally address the other two. Table 1 summarizes this
distinction graphically.
Notice the shifting emphasis in the progression through these
layers of the perspective of the subject, the one experiencing
being ‘I’, from a separate and unique ‘I’ (what I am not) to an ‘I’
connected to the human condition (what I am) to an ‘I’ that
incorporates both without being limited by either (what I really
am). Clarifying who I am involves discovering early
introjections and dis-identifying with them, discovering all the
many projections and re-collecting them, and discovering the
other psychical subjects who populate the unconscious and
forming alliances with them. One may discover shame or fear or
rage or grief that were early introjections from a shame-filled,
fearful, raging, or broken-hearted parent; indeed, “I am not that.”
Continuing to a deeper layer, an individual will find that she
does, indeed, belong; that she is, in fact, smart and capable and
worthy. She has seen these qualities in others and felt jealous
that they had what she did not, but now she is ready to claim
them for herself; indeed, “I am that.” Yet she also has seen
pettiness, jealousy, and lack of integrity in others and felt relief
that she wasn’t like that; now she is ready to re-collect those
projections and claim those qualities for herself as well; indeed,
“I am that, too.” And continuing to a still deeper layer, one finds
that the reclaimed shadows have turned out to be guides of
introduction and initiation to relationship with the anima and
animus and the other archetypes that inhabit the unconscious.
Before discussing anima and animus, then, what are the
primordial images of the collective unconscious? Jung called
them archetypes, and said “the archetypes are, so to speak, like
many little appetites in us, and if with the passing of time, they
get nothing to eat, they start rumbling and upset everything”
(Jung, 1978a, p. 358). In Jung’s words (1964, p. 67, 69):
Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a
long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind
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is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without a history
than is the body in which it exists. By “history” I do not mean the fact that the
mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and
other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and
unconscious development of the mind of archaic man, whose psyche was still
close to that of the animal.
This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as much as
the structure of our body is based on the general anatomical pattern of the
mammal. The trained eye of the anatomist or the biologist finds many traces
of this original pattern in our bodies. The experienced investigator of the mind
can similarly see the analogies between dream pictures of modern man and the
products of the primitive mind, its “collective images” and its mythological
motifs. . .
The archetype is a tendency to form such representations [“archaic
remnants” or “primordial images”] of a motif—representations that can vary a
great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. There are, for instance,
many representations of the motif of the hostile brethren, but the motif
remains the same. . .[The archetypes] are, indeed, an instinctive trend, as
marked in the impulse of birds to build nests, or ants to form organized
colonies.
Robert Wang (Wang, 2001, p. 273-274) summarizes the
healing progression through the layers of the psyche:
There are two basic aims of the process of ‘individuation’. The first is to free
the real Self from what Jung calls the ‘false wrappings of the Persona; the
second is freedom from the power of those primordial images of the collective
unconscious’ (Jung, 1953, p. 269). This is, at base, a process of discrimination
whereby the Self determines what it is not.
‘Just as for the purpose of individuation, or Self-realization, it is
essential for a man to distinguish between what he is and how he appears to
himself and to others, so it is also necessary for the same purpose that he
should become conscious of his invisible system of relations to the
unconscious, and especially of the Anima, so as to be able to distinguish
himself from her’ (Jung, 1953, p. 310).
Reactions to the soul-image
These archetypal influences reach out to us from the depths
below, the underworld, the expansive collective unconscious.
Many archetypes populate that realm and speak to us through our
dreams and our defensive projections; the anima and animus, the
‘soul-image’, are two of the most powerful and influential. We
can conceptualize our encounters with anima/ animus on three
levels of depth: Projection/ Desire, Identity/ Acting out, and
Inflation/ Enchantment (Wilkerson, 2001). The same
conceptualization can be applied to our encounters with other
archetypes and dream characters as well.
Projection/Desire. The first level is an accumulation of our
personal and cultural opinions of the opposite sex, but also an
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
accumulation of what we don’t know, but need to in order to
move toward wholeness. In our dreams they may appear as our
lovers or unknown others we are attracted to, who carry or
embody what we most desire, what we would sacrifice ourselves
for. The call of this other can be very strong: it calls the child
away from the parents to be an adult; it calls us away from our
secure routines to journey to the Land of the Unknown; it calls
us from partial participation and resistance in life to risking
passionate embrace of the world. There seem to be three main
tasks associated with this: (1) the development of parts of our
self we hardly understand, (2) finding in ourselves what we seek
in others, and (3) learning to recognize when the desires and
attractions are larger and more powerful than we are. The dark
side of this relationship, as in any love relationship, can devolve
into intense hatred, jealousy, or possessiveness. “Projections
occur between parts of the psyche, not only outside into the
world” (Hillman, 1989, p. 89).
Identity/Acting out. This is the level of anima/ animus
relationship in which we become possessed and act
compulsively, subject to brooding withdrawals or fits of passion.
Instead of devotion to creating a real relationship with the anima/
animus, we become dogmatic, argumentative and try to just grab
what we most desire and imitate it, pretending to be it by
possessing it instead of really coming to terms with it and
incorporating it.
Inflation/Imagination. At the deepest levels of anima/
animus encounter, we must let go of the idea that they are
something or someone we can control. There is always a part of
our selves that will forever elude us and be outside our will. So
powerful is the anima/ animus that it has the ability to
completely enchant us and make us believe we are far more
wonderful and great than we are, i.e., ego inflation, grandiosity.
‘Actual’ and ‘potential’ become confused in a person whose ego
is inflated by the anima/ animus. And conversely, we may
believe that we are much worse than we really are, i.e.,
unworthy, inadequate. A powerful inner negative anima/ animus
may continually whisper exaggerated and false truths to us, selfsabotaging our legitimate confidence.
To the degree that we can avoid projection, identification,
and inflation, the anima/ animus becomes our guide to the
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unknown, the mediator of the deep unconscious. They lurk
around our undeveloped parts, and so present a great challenge
to enter unfamiliar and uncomfortable areas of our lives. Yet
precisely for that reason they are our guides to what we don’t
know about ourselves and lead us along the path toward
wholeness. Since they are connected to deeper layers of the
unconscious, they can also be the mediators of our journey
toward the Self.
‘I’ and ‘not I’. Let us begin with a discussion of the
experience of ‘I’ and ‘not I’.
Human beings inevitably split their experience into an outer
world and an inner world, although different persons, cultures,
spiritual paths, and psychological systems may define those two
worlds uniquely.
Humans do not begin life with this split awareness. The
newborn does not recognize a world beyond itself, having not
yet divided experience into “immanent (self) and transcendent
(not-self) domains. . . . So far as the newborn knows, all of
existence lies within the realm of the newborn’s own experience.
The newborn’s experience has a center (the incipient ego) but no
circumference and is, therefore, an unbounded, all-inclusive
sphere” (Washburn, 2003, p. 14). At 15-18 months, a child
begins the process of splitting its experience into self and notself, understanding “the full independence of objects and, more
generally, of the transcendent world ‘out there’. . . . This
awakening undermines the child’s sense of security and riddles it
with a fear of being abandoned in a world that has suddenly
become vast and dangerous” (p. 16). This experience of
separateness is profoundly disturbing, and when the child fails to
reconcile its relationship with the two separate worlds, he/she
must repress the unthinkable disconnection from other and from
self into the deep unconscious.
So, in addition to recognizing a split between personal
internal experience and a world “out there”, the child begins to
create a split of the personal internal experience within into an
all-good good child and an all-bad bad child, defending against
being abandoned for “bad” behavior. The child also splits the
representation of the caregiver, of the Great Mother, into an allgood Good Mother (loving without smothering) and an all-bad
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
Terrible Mother (uncaring, negligent, hostile when the child is
“bad”).
The child’s all-good self-representation becomes an ego
ideal or persona, the all-bad self-representation becomes a
shadow, and the external voice of authority becomes introjected
as an internal conscience or superego (commanding, rewarding
and punishing itself to attempt to live up to the ego ideal and
avoid being abandoned). Over time, the child’s splits become
more rigid: the internal shadow is repressed into the unconscious
(“It is literally not me that does the bad things”), the introjected
internal superego becomes identified as self (“I know
automatically, without discerning, what is good and what is
bad”), and the “out there” world becomes more and more
separate and distant (“Everything in my environment is an object
to be consumed, destroyed, or manipulated”).
The development of this split in the mentation of a toddler
actually parallels the same development in the archaic history of
humanity. According to German cultural philosopher Jean
Gebser (1986), this split mental consciousness first appeared in
the Greek Antique period, or the phase of Mental structure of
consciousness—after the archaic, the magic and the mythical
consciousness phases of human development. In this phase, man
for the first time saw himself as an “I” —as a single individual,
one who is opposed to an outside world that he tries to overcome
more and more with his rational mind. This perspective was a
new departure from the collective experience of humanity from
its beginnings: “I am here, in my position in space, from where I
perceive the world. The more distant things are, the smaller they
appear. I am in the world, in space and time, but at the same time
the world is opposite to me. I can try to dive deeper into it by
means of a microscope or a telescope, but the separation, the
insurmountable separation between me and ‘it’ will always
remain. Objects are out there, the perceiver is in here.”
The earliest phase of human consciousness development was
the Archaic structure of consciousness, referred to in myths and
legends, but these references are of a much later time. About all
we can say in this regard is that within the Archaic structure the
consciousness is quite undifferentiated; it is just there, and things
just happen. Man is still unquestionably part of the whole of the
universe in which he finds himself. The process of individuation
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of consciousness, in any sense of the word, has not taken place.
This type of consciousness “can be likened to a dimly lit mist
devoid of shadows” (Feuerstein, 1987, p. 57). This is not
consciousness in any sense that we understand it today. Instead,
it can be likened to a state of deep sleep; one that eludes the
specification of particularity or uniqueness.
Around some unspecified time far back in our past, a change
took place. Man entered into a second phase of development and
gained a new Magical structure of consciousness. This structure
is characterized by five primary characteristics: (1) its
egolessness, (2) its spacelessness and timelessness, (3) its
pointlike-unitary world, (4) its interweaving with nature, and (5)
its magical reaction to the world (Feuerstein, 1987, p. 61.) A
rudimentary self- sense was emerging along with language. This
is a one-dimensional existence that occurs in a dream-like state.
Unlike the dreamlessness of the previous structure, a recognition
is developing in man that he is something different from that
around him. Not fully awake to who he is or what his role is in
the world, man is recognizing his self as an entity. The forms of
expression for this structure can be found in graven images and
idols, and in the ritualistic execution of certain actions and
gestures. Feuerstein feels that this structure persisted until
around 40,000 BC and the advent of the Cro-Magnons.
The Mythical structure of consciousness is ushered in with
the advent of the Cro-Magnons; man became a tool-making
individual who formed into larger social structures that were
religious and shamanistic. This structure can be considered twodimensional since it is characterized by fundamental polarities.
Word was the reflector of inner silence; myth was the reflector
of the soul (Feuerstein, 1987, p. 79). Man is beginning to
recognize himself as opposed to others. The next 30,000 odd
years or so were spent developing these various mythologies.
Many myths deal explicitly with man’s separation from nature;
for example, the story of the Fall in Genesis (and its admonition
to go forth and dominate nature); and the myth of Prometheus
and the giving of fire to man. These both indicate a strong
awareness of man’s differentness from nature. Man is coming
into his own, although he is anything but independent of it. One
could characterize this as a two-dimensional understanding of
the world. The ‘I’ of man is not yet fully developed, to be sure,
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
but it has developed to the point that it recognizes and demands a
separation from nature, from its environment.
The next shift in consciousness took place between 10,000
BC and 500 BC. This was the transition to the Mental structure
of consciousness. It was at this time that man, to use Gebser’s
image, stepped out of the mythical circle (two-dimensional) into
three- dimensional space. The plethora of gods and contradictory
stories of creation, formation of institutions, and so on threatened
to overwhelm the consciousness of man; he practically stood on
the verge of drowning in a deluge of mythological mentation. In
reaction to this, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras
stepped forward to counteract this trend. The mental structure
was inaugurated and this coincides with the “discovery” of
“causality.” Abstraction becomes a key word to describe mental
activity and we find man using his mind to overcome and
“master” the world around him.
Gebser suggests that we are on the threshold of a new
Integral structure of consciousness. For Gebser, this structure
integrates those which have come before and enables the human
mind to transcend the limitations of three-dimensionality.
Significant characteristics of this new structure are the
transparent recognition of the whole, not just parts; the tensions
and relations between things are more important, at times, than
the things themselves; how the relationships develop over time
takes precedence to the mere fact that a relationship exists. It will
be this structure of consciousness that will enable us to overcome
the dualism of the mental structure and actually participate in the
transparency of self and life.
These earlier phases of development of human
consciousness are reflected in individual adolescence and young
adulthood. Individual human beings, in the maturation process,
retrace the developmental steps of the archaic, magic, mythical,
and mental phases of human consciousness development. The
newly emerging integral phase of development of human
consciousness is reflected in a potential midlife turn toward the
numinous.
Adolescence and young adulthood is devoted to creating a
place for oneself, negotiating relationships, establishing family
and community, and keeping silenced what has been buried deep
in the unconscious. Eventually, in midlife, the ego has become
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strong and mature enough to no longer need protection from
others and the “out there” through an independent, autonomous,
well-defined separate self. In fact, the emphasis on making a
place for oneself in the world begins to diminish as a priority. At
the same time, the need for protection from repressed material in
the deep unconscious begins to loosen, and a new priority of
seeking relationship inwardly begins to develop.
Now the ego becomes aware of an immense and irresistible
force: the numinous. “According to Rudolf Otto (1917), the
numinous is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a force that is
‘wholly other’ (transcendent, not-self), unfamiliar (mysterious,
captivating), eclipsing (tremendous, prodigious), compelling
(fascinating, captivating), and bivalent (light-dark)” (Washburn,
2003, p. 27). The emergence of the numinous marks the
beginning of spiritual awakening. “The ego that has just begun to
experience numinous Spirit stands on the threshold of the
beyond. It is a luminal ego, an ego that has died to the world and
to its former identity in the world and is now drawn toward an
extraordinary unknown realm” (Washburn, 2003, p. 27).
The journey on which the ego has just set out leads through
difficult territory, because the unconscious which is now
becoming accessible is the return of the repressed. “Following
initial awakening, then, the first phase of the ego’s journey into
the beyond is a dark odyssey into the unconscious, an odyssey
that has been described in many ways, for example, as a descent
into the underworld (classical Greece and Rome), as a descent
into hell (Christianity, Dante), as a journey into demonic realms
(Hinduism, Buddhism), as a struggle with diabolical phenomena
(makyo: Zen), as a hero’s journey (Jung, 1912; Campbell, 1949),
and as a descent to the Goddess (contemporary feminism). This
odyssey – here called regression in the service of transcendence
– is dark and difficult” (Washburn, 2003, p. 28).
The descent into the underworld “is nonetheless an essential
stage of a longer journey, for contact with the forces of the
underworld is necessary for the attainment of higher life. In our
examples, the hero must endure the challenges of the underworld
if he is to be transformed from a mere human into a superhuman
being; the sun must be swallowed by the sea monster if it is to be
released for the dawn of a new day; spiritual travelers must pass
through demonic realms if they are to free themselves from evil
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
or liberate themselves from the snares of conditioned existence;
the pilgrim Dante must learn about the torments of hell if he is to
be ready for the lessons of purgatory; and the ego of Jungian
depth psychology must encounter the energies and images of the
collective unconscious if it is to move forward on the path of
individuation” (Washburn, 2003, p. 55-56).
The ego is now beginning to resolve the split between the
ego ideal and the archetypal shadow. The ego ideal is
humanized, and the archetypal shadow is redeemed. Healing that
split brings spiritual intimacy into relationships, and nature and
one’s body into spirituality. This is the individuation journey
chronicled by Carl Jung. The highly developed ego, through its
transparency to itself, is able to achieve a “therapeutic split”
(Engler, 1983, p. 48), becoming both subject and object,
observer and observed, a witness to the dynamic flow of psychic
events. This “witness consciousness” and the self-transcendence
upon which it is based are also foundational ingredients of higher
stages of human development.
We all experience ourselves as both an object and as a
subject, as a ‘me’ and an ‘I’. McAdams (1998, pp. 29-30)
explains it well:
The ego, or I, is the process of “selfing,” of apprehending subjective
experience and making something out of it. The most cherished thing selfing
makes is the Me, the self-as-object, the concept of the self that is recognized
and reflected upon by the I. Thus, as [William] James suggested, the duplex
self is both I (process) and Me (product). The ego is the I part. The ego
reflects upon the Me. The ego knows the Me. The ego synthesizes the Me out
of experience. The ego makes the Me. . . . Furthermore, positioning the ego in
this way sheds considerable light on both the structure of personality and its
development over time.
The I-self has been called the existential self, experiencing
self, or implicit self. The Me-self has been called the categorical
self, the empirical self, the object of consciousness, the explicit
self, self-perceptions or most commonly the self-concept
(Jacobs, et al., 2003).
It is extremely useful to acknowledge that the ego actually
makes many Me’s (Damon & Hart, 1988; Harter, 1998),
contained within what the “ego realm” or what Jung called the
“ego complex.” Each Me may fall within the general category of
the ego’s personas and shadows. One’s persona is the aspect of
oneself created to present to the world: “the persona is that
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which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others
think one is. In any case the temptation to be what one seems to
be is great, because the persona is usually rewarded in cash”
(Jung, 1940, para. 221).
The ‘me’ is built out of parts from here and there; e.g.,
introjects from parents or early authorities, social and cultural
norms. The ‘I’ is an enduring presence with “subject
permanence” (Alexander et al., 1990, p. 314) that ultimately
accepts or rejects the imported parts. The ‘I’ is equivalent to the
body’s immune system when presented with an organ transplant
or a skin graft, it has the capacity to discern what is native
essence and what is foreign, to claim the former and to reject the
latter. As ego development progresses, defining the object me
becomes less important and transcending the object me
(immersion in the subject I) becomes the focus. Recall Maslow’s
(1971) reference to what he called self-forgetfulness in moments
of peak experience, i.e., becoming less dissociated than usual
into a self-observing ego and an experiencing ego.
What is meant by “object” are those aspects of our
experience that are apparent to us and can be looked at, related
to, reflected on, engaged, controlled, and connected to something
else. Because we don’t see them as “me,” we can be objective
about these things. But other aspects of our experience we
experience as ourselves, subjectively, because we are so
identified with, embedded in, and fused with them (Kegan,
1994). A given subject-object relationship establishes the shape
of the window or lens through which one looks at the world, and
that lens changes as one matures so that more of one’s
experience comes under scrutiny, can be reflected on and disidentified with. We start from a position, in earliest infancy,
where there’s absolutely no subject-object distinction at all,
because the infant’s knowing is entirely subjective. There’s no
“not me,” no internal vs. external. There’s no distinction between
self and other. The self can only be experienced objectively by
the infant by being projected onto parents (Edinger, 1960, 1972)
– it cannot emerge without a concrete parent-child relationship to
function as a “personal evocation of the archetype” (Neumann,
1959, p. 21).
Such a personal evocation of the archetype is pivotal in the
child’s development, because initiation into the mystery of
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
experiencing the archetypal self requires introduction to the
archetypal other, and that can only occur when the flesh-andblood parent is conflated with the archetypal parent. Andrew
Samuels (1985, p. 143) summarizes the necessity and the peril:
Neumann suggested that analytical psychology should attempt to combine the
personal and the transpersonal, the ‘temporal genetic’ with the timeless and
impersonal. . . . Neumann’s own contribution was expressed in his term ‘the
personal evocation of the archetype’. Taking the child’s dependence on the
mother as an example, Neumann pointed out that such dependence is both on
the mother and on the archetypal image of mother. The transpersonal, timeless
archetype cannot be activated save by a personal encounter with a human
being. Yet, because the evocation of the archetype takes place on the personal
level, there is the possibility of disturbance and pathology.
That is, based on the child’s personal experience with a
parent, he/she may well spray paint the graffiti “unreliable” or
“cold and distant” or “smothering” onto the conflated archetype.
That is what gives the Great Mother, or Eternal Feminine (or any
archetype that has been personally evoked) a bad reputation: the
child, and the adult he grows up to become, can only see a
contaminated image of the archaic presence.
As they mature, individuals gradually shift more and more of
what was subject to object. The ultimate end state of this process
is a state in which the subject-object distinction comes to an end
again, in the opposite direction than in earliest infancy. There are
two different ways that you can get out of the subject-object
split. One way is by being entirely subject with no object—the
baby. And the other way is through the complete emptying of the
subject into the object so that there is, in a sense, no subject at
all—that is, you are not looking out on the world from any
vantage point that is apart from the world. You’re then taking the
world’s perspective. That’s mindfulness and bodyfulness. That’s
a Buddha.
And that’s the state that Jung promises, called individuation,
in which one has dis-identified from being the ego or the
complexes or the persona (the subjective subject) through
becoming objective about all of what makes up ‘me’, and then
expanding into being all of that authentically. “Individuation is
practically the same as the development of consciousness out of
the original state of identity” (Jung, 1971, p. 563). Jung defines
identity as “characteristic of the primitive mentality, and is the
actual basis of ‘participation mystique’ which in reality is merely
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a relic of the original psychological non-differentiation of subject
and object – hence of the primordial unconscious state. It is,
therefore, a characteristic of the early infantile mental condition.
Finally, it is also a characteristic of the unconscious content in
adult civilized man, which, in so far as it has not become a
conscious content, remains permanently in the state of identity
with objects” (1971, p. 535).
Another way of describing this distinction is found in the
ancient Hebrew Kabbalah. When the ‘I’ is working on the ‘me’
toward self development, it is with an attitude of It’kafia
(conquest). When I transcend the object me and immerse in the
subject I, it is with an attitude of It’hapcha (transformation).
It’kafia, literally “bending back” as one would a small twig, is
the approach of forcing oneself to submit to a higher standard of
behavior, of subjugating and subordinating one’s lower
motivations, self-indulgences, and self-limiting tendencies.
Higher ends are achieved through force of will, not by actually
transforming those tendencies into something more sublime.
It’kafia subdues but does not transform the inclination.
It’hapcha, literally “transformation”, is the alternative approach
of transforming the lower inclinations into those of one’s purest
essence, lead into gold, darkness into light, bitter into sweet, the
profane into the holy.
The It’hapcha approach is also reminiscent of comments that
psychiatrist Erik Erikson (1969) wrote to Gandhi suggesting that
his political and social activism called Satyagraha (the way of
nonviolence) would benefit from adding a similarly nonviolent
personal therapeutic encounter with oneself to “confront the
inner enemy nonviolently” (p. 433). Erikson contended that
Satyagraha “will have little chance to find its universal
relevance unless we learn to apply it also to whatever feels ‘evil’
in ourselves” (p. 251). Jung’s therapeutic methods are likewise
geared to achieving growth and healing through loving
acceptance of the totality of oneself, shadows and all.
Our inner split between an all-good good part and an all-bad
bad part compels us to see the relationship between the two as a
win-lose war, and naturally we take up the side of “good” to
triumph over “evil”. That makes our judgments of others,
including our political and social causes, simple and easy to
justify, because we have repressed the obvious fact that the good
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
or evil we judge “out there” is a projection of the good and bad
we deny within. But taking up sides in the projected world “out
there” compels us to identify with one part of ourselves
internally and repudiate another, dedicated to a win-lose war
within. “Goodness will reign in the world not when it triumphs
over evil, but when our love of goodness ceases to express itself
in terms of the triumph over evil. Peace, if it comes, will not be
made by people who have rendered themselves into saints, but
by people who have humbly accepted their condition as sinners”
(Schmookler, 1991, p. 191).
This system of internal splits allows for individual
differences. Some people are more introverted, some more
extraverted. Some people have a more internal locus of control,
some a more external locus of control. Some people identify
more with nature, some more with culture. Some people’s
internal split parts are more autonomous, some more wellintegrated. Herein lies our study of the psychology of the modern
human being.
Now we will widen the discussion of human division of
experience into immanent (self) and transcendent (not-self)
domains beyond its origins in infancy, and subsequent
development through early adulthood. Topics to be explored
include:
1. how we identify ourselves;
2. the role of introjection and projection in identity;
3. projection in spiritual practice;
4. re-collecting projections
5. what not to re-collect;
6. complexes;
7. transcendence and immanence
a. transcending polarities
b. transcending everyday reality
c. transcending ‘ego’
d. transcending ego separateness
e. self-transcendence
f. transcending the past
8. transformation, or individuation
Identity (subject and object, psyche and soma)
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The most cherished thing the ‘I’ makes is the ‘Me’ (selfing).
Until reaching an advanced level of ego development (see
Hartman & Zimberoff, 2008), the ‘I’-experiencing subject
identifies itself as one and the same as the created Me. With
deeper levels of self-reflection, and a great deal more humility
on the part of the ego, one begins to experience a detachment
from the Me, recognizing it as something I have rather than
something I am. Ultimately one may reach the developmental
level of “Samadhi, a reversal of perspective where the waking
consciousness is the object rather than the subject of experience”
(Wang, 2001, p. 167). Jung explains the relationship of the
conscious and unconscious aspects of Self by describing the
conscious mind as a smaller circle within a larger circle of the
unconscious. Thus it is, he says, “quite possible for the ego to be
made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious
personality to emerge in the course of development and take the
ego into its service. . . . The ‘Self’ is an “unconscious substrate,
whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego
stands to the Self as the moved to the mover, or as object to
subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from
the Self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore
supraordinate to it. The Self, like the unconscious, is an a priori
existent out of which the ego evolves” (Jung, 1977, p. 390-391).
Yet before such an ultimate development, the identity spaces
that are opened are potential rather than actual, and may or may
not be inhabited (Galasinski & Ziólkowska, 2007). In other
words, early in the maturing process, the individual creates an
identity space, or a potential identity. We see this in very young
children who “want to be just like mommy” or “want to grow up
to be a doctor,” and in adolescents who try on various identities,
costumed to match a particular social niche where they might
find a sense of belonging. These identities remain potential, not
real, until the person inhabits one of them through embodying it,
i.e., including the body into the constructed self. This process of
inhabiting and embodying an identity varies in ease or difficulty
depending on the level of primal splitting and repression that
prevails. Some people who are extremely self-conscious and illat-ease with themselves and others have not yet inhabited and
embodied an identity. Their identity status (Marcia, 1966) is
foreclosed (committed to an identity based on others’ values,
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
without any exploration of alternatives), or in moratorium
(struggling to commit to an identity while actively searching and
exploring what he or she wants to become) or diffused (an
inability to make decisions and commitments because of doubts
about oneself, and a lack of a sense of continuity of the self over
time). And this is an ongoing process throughout the lifespan.
Individuation can also be seen as the process of embodying
one’s self: mindfulness and bodyfulness. “The permeability of
the body to immanent and transcendent spiritual energies leads
to its gradual awakening. In contrast to meditation techniques
that focus on mindfulness of the body, this awakening can be
more accurately articulated in terms of ‘bodyfulness.’ In
bodyfulness, the psychosomatic organism becomes calmly alert
without the intentionality of the conscious mind. Bodyfulness
reintegrates in the human being a lost somatic capability that is
present in panthers, tigers, and other ‘big cats’ of the jungle, who
can be extraordinarily aware without intentionally attempting to
be so” (Ferrer, 2008, pp. 5-6).
Many spiritual paths and psychology paradigms have
encouraged this disembodiment. In fact, many religious
traditions believed that the body and the primary world (the
heart, emotions, passions) were actually a hindrance to spiritual
flourishing — “a view that often led to the repression, regulation,
or transformation of these worlds at the service of the ‘higher’
goals of a spiritualized consciousness. This is why disembodied
spirituality often crystallized in a ‘heart-chakra-up’ spiritual life
that was based preeminently in the mental and/or emotional
access to transcendent consciousness and that tended to overlook
spiritual sources immanent in the body, nature, and matter”
(Ferrer, 2008, p. 1).
“Whereas our mind and consciousness constitute a natural bridge to
transcendent awareness, our body and its primary energies constitute a natural
bridge to immanent spiritual life. Immanent life is spiritual prima materia—
that is, spiritual energy in a state of transformation, still not actualized,
saturated with potentials and possibilities, and the source of genuine
innovation and creativity at all levels” (Ferrer, 2008, p. 6).
Most Western psychologies have tended to ignore, or
establish as “second-class citizens”, the body and somatic
experience, and with them the archetypal feminine. Jung, Reich,
Lowen, Janov and other pioneers in the field of the mind-body
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continuum are exceptions. Jung said: “Of course, it sounds
funny, but I start from the conviction that man has also a living
body and if something is true for one side, it must be true for the
other. For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of
the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience
of the body. So it is really one and the same thing” (Jung, 1988
[1934–1939], p. 99).
Ego states, particularly those created in moments of trauma,
may be predominantly somatic. Stated another way, symptoms
may be state-specific, and physical symptoms may contain
dissociated memories. For example, the child physically shutting
down to become totally still as a means of defense against the
terror of abuse creates a “somatic ego state” of pervasive
immobilization. Following the somatic bridge (body memory) of
immobilization back in regression leads to conscious access to
the memory of the source trauma which created that ego state —
the incident of terrifying abuse. The dissociated memories are
“physically contained” within the somatic symptoms (Gainer,
1993). That wounded ego state can be dramatically healed by
retrieving it for re-experience in age regression, abreacting the
experience, and allowing a means of reintegration and
transformation of the trauma experience into a physically
corrected experience of empowerment (van der Kolk &
Greenberg, 1987). A corrective experience activates
psychophysiological resources in his/her body (somatic as well
as emotional resources) that had been previously immobilized by
fear and helplessness (Levine, 1991; Phillips, 1993, 1995). The
regressed person is allowed to actually experience the originally
immobilized voice yelling for help, and the originally
immobilized muscles kicking and hitting for protection. These
somatic and emotional corrective experiences reassociate the
individual’s originally dissociated body and emotion in positive
ways to positive outcomes.
Jung documented that the activation of a complex has clear
and measurable physiological correspondences, a fact that
opened up the way for his later understanding of body and mind
as unitary (Greene, 2001; Heuer, 2005; McNeely, 1987). The
psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1942, 1945) discovered a similar
phenomenon which he described in his concept of “muscular
armor”: unconscious repressed emotional and psychological
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
processes are literally anchored defensively in the individual’s
muscular structure.
André Sassenfeld (2008, p.7) summarizes the nuances of the
mind-body continuum and the question of transcendence:
McNeely (1987) states that Jung was interested in finding a way to transcend
the body-mind dualism and to integrate the opposites, but Redfearn (1998), on
the other hand, points out that in his writings on alchemy Jung emphasized
repeatedly the need of an existing separation between body and mind. He did
so, however, so that both could be reunited on a superior level of synthesis.
Jung (1928) wrote that if we are able to reconcile ourselves with the
mysterious and paradoxical truth that spirit is the life of the body seen from
within and the body the external manifestation of the life of the spirit, then we
can “understand why the striving to transcend the present level of
consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its
due” (in Chodorow, 1995, p. 401).
Sidoli (1993) has emphasized that Jung’s bipolar theory of archetypes,
according to which every archetype is composed of a psychic pole (from
which archetypal fantasies and images stem) and a pole related to pure instinct
(from which instinctive behaviors derive) is central to analytical psychology.
The archetype, that is, refers to phenomena that invariably include a bodily
facet, if we conceive of the instincts as intrinsically somatic processes.
McNeely (1987) has argued that the notion of the archetype represents a
bridge in the body-mind dichotomy by including in its definition both
psychological and somatic aspects.
As Redfearn (1998) points out, in psychotherapy “the
recovery of lost parts of the self always implies reestablishing a
lost link between the ego and a part or function of the body” (p.
33). “Attention to somatic complaints and symptoms, somatic
sensations, bodily movements and gestures, and subtle impulses
or tendencies is one of the most fundamental ways to enter in
contact with potential shadow contents in another person”
(Sassenfeld, 2008, p. 13). In an article on “Psychological
Typology,” Jung (1936, p. 139) states his perspective begins
with the belief in
the sovereignty of the psyche. Given that body and psyche at some place form
a unity despite being so different in their manifest natures, we cannot help but
attribute to each one of them its own substantiality. Until we count with some
form of knowing that unity, there is no alternative but studying them
separately and, for now, treating them as if they were independent, at least
regarding their structure.
The source factors that determine the development of ego
states are (1) normal differentiation, (2) possession by or
introjection of significant influences, and (3) reactions to trauma
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(Watkins & Watkins, 1993). Through possession or introjection,
the child takes on clusters of behavior and attitude from
significant others. If these are accepted and become identified as
one’s own, the resulting ego state is a clone of the other. For
example, the person’s internalized critical parent ego state can
become “executive” at a particular moment and abuse his/her
own children. The nagging parent once internalized becomes an
interminable nag within. But if the introjected ego state is not
accepted and identified as one’s own, then the new ego state is
repressed, and the individual will suffer internal conflict (such as
depression or authority issues) and may direct the abuse at
himself (such as self-hatred or self-mutilation). The introjected
nagging parent not internalized manifests as an embattled
personality with conflicted perfectionism (highly demanding of
self and simultaneously resistant).
The third primary source of developing ego states is early
trauma, when the child dissociates as a survival defense. If the
experience is too awful to bear, he/she simply stops experiencing
it by separating part of himself (the “weak part” or the observer
or the Soul). If that separation occurs during the narcissistic
period of development, before the ego has fully individuated, the
split off parts are likely to become alter egos (Greaves, 1980).
Otherwise, separation occurring later is more likely to produce
personality disorders (Narcissistic, Borderline, or Antisocial
Personality Disorders). In any case, obviously the estrangement
between the ego personality and the Self, begun in the
rapprochement stage, is not resolved and they remain isolated
from each other.
Jung (1953) speaks of a series of forms of “transformation”
that people can undergo, one of which is “natural
transformation”: individuation or becoming that which is not the
ego. Other forms of transformation are diminution of personality
(“loss of soul”), enlargement of personality (consciousness of an
enlargement that flows from inner sources), change of internal
structure (possession, or identification, of the ego-personality
with a complex), identification with a group (mass intoxication),
identification with a cult-hero (with the god or hero who is
transformed in the sacred ritual), magical procedures (rites and
rituals), or technical transformation (technical means, such as
yoga, to induce transformation). We will discuss how to
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
encourage the natural transformation of individuation in our
psychotherapy through the re-attribution of introjections and the
re-collection of projections.
Introjection and projection
Sam Keen has said, “In the beginning we create the enemy.
Before the weapon comes the image” (1991, p. 198). We have
seen clearly that our inner split between an all-good good part
and an all-bad bad part compels us to see the relationship
between the two as a win-lose war. Not wanting to acknowledge
the bad within, we naturally deny it, repress it, and displace it
outwardly. And not able to acknowledge the good within
(because it is unattainable or inconsistent with introjected
negative beliefs), again we naturally deny it, repress it, and
displace it outwardly. In both cases, we are rejecting our unlived
potential, but we are also confronting ourselves with an
unavoidable self-reflection. Thus, projection of inner qualities is
not wholly defensive. It serves a very important function
psychologically: what is hidden within can only be observed
when it is cast outside and thus is no longer hidden. “Thank god,
then, for the screens upon which we project: our friends, family,
the famous, the infamous, foreigners, infidels, and the forms and
forces of nature. Without those screens, our projections would
simply sail into outer space like errant radio waves, and we
would never get to see our hidden aspects” (Plotkin, 2003, p.
275).
This is so for most people since most people’s attention is
directed to the outer world causing them to myopically overlook
inner psychic events. There is an exception: “Introverted and
introspective people can, however, perceive events in the inner
world directly, without the detour of a projection onto an outer
object” (von Franz, 1980, p. 34). Such an individual’s attention
may be directed inwardly, yet their objectivity may be
questionable. The introverted perspective may well attribute
these inner events or experiences as having arrived from some
invisible realm or spirit world, delivered by guides, ghosts, or
other messengers. In this case, the introverted individual is
deceiving himself from accepting that he is the true source of the
unclaimed material, not by attributing the source to not-me
people outwardly but to not-me forces inwardly.
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“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own
unknown face” (Jung, 1968, para. 17). Projection serves the
important psychological function of helping us to discover that
which is unknown and unknowable.
Let’s return to the initial months of life to review the onset
of projection and introjections. Melanie Klein (1975) observed
two primary kinds of introjection: loving and ruthless.
For the first 3 or 4 months after birth, an infant holds the
Paranoid Schizoid position. Paranoid refers to the leading
anxiety of this position, fear of annihilation of the self. This fear
results from the initial projection outwards of the infant’s own
death-impulses, constituting the origin of its aggression. The
main defense employed against the terror of dissolution is
splitting, hence the term schizoid. Hated or feared (and thus
dangerous) aspects of the self are split off and kept separate and
distinct from idealized parts; the same is done to others (objects).
In fact, these unbearable and unwanted mental contents, once
split off, are expelled, or projected, onto the external world. The
motivation for projecting identity onto an external object can be
to control or possess the object, or to repair it. A child may
project the good parts of self out on the external world as a way
to protect the purity of that quality, or as a way to attempt repair
of what is perceived to be broken. That is, a child experiencing
abuse (and therefore internalizing self-deprecation through
introjection) may find intolerable a simultaneous recognition of
good qualities of self such as innocence, intelligence, or courage.
This expelling of good qualities of self depletes a child of his/her
own capacities of love and goodness, resulting in the ego
becoming actually depleted through splitting and projection. The
valuable quality has been rejected, and remains unavailable to
the person over the ensuing lifetime. This inner resource needs to
be retrieved deliberately and therapeutically (a shamanistic
procedure) to further the individual’s healing. We virtually
always incorporate some form of retrieval of inner resources in
the age-regressed ego state in which those resources were lost/
rejected/ dissociated.
“The counterpart to the projective process of splitting off a
part of the self and putting it into the object, introjective
identification refers to the taking in of aspects or qualities
possessed by and perceived in the object, in such a way that the
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
self can identify with that aspect without a sense of taking over
the object or becoming it. This process implies a developed
capacity for separateness and tolerance of the object’s absence”
(Mawson, online). If all goes well, a child feels sufficiently
secure to explore the external world rather than being content to
see oneself in the external world. A child that does not introject
admired qualities, who remains fixated in projective
identification, develops a ‘pseudo-mature’ character structure,
Winnicott’s “false self.” The child has stolen through imitation
the outward appearance of admired others, without maturing
his/her true self from within.
With this shift comes, in Klein’s terms, movement from the
paranoid schizoid position to the infantile depressive position,
and with it the experience of ambivalence.
The infantile depressive position begins in the second year,
when the child has sufficiently integrated parts of his/her internal
world to recognize that he/she has simultaneously mixed feelings
of both love and hostility toward the same object. This is what
Klein called the child’s experience of ambivalence. In this
second year of life, the tension developing between assertion of
self and recognition of the other can be conceptualized as
Mahler’s (1972) rapprochement crisis. Before rapprochement,
the infant still takes herself for granted, and her mother as well.
She does not make a sharp discrimination between doing things
with mother’s help and doing without it. She is too excited by
what she doing to reflect on who is doing it. “Beginning when
the child is about fourteen months of age, a conflict emerges
between her grandiose aspirations and the perceived reality of
her limitations and dependency” (Benjamin, 1993). Although she
is now able to do more, the toddler is aware of what she can’t do
and what she can’t make mother do, for example, stay with her
instead of going out.
Many power struggles begin here. The toddler’s increasing
awareness of separateness, limitations and vulnerability provoke
a basic tension between denial and affirmation of the other,
between omnipotence and recognition of reality, between
destruction and survival: the wish to assert the self absolutely
and deny everything outside one’s own mental omnipotence
must inevitably crash against the reality of the other.
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Ambivalence is the result, with the inevitable attempts to deny,
avoid and control destined for frustration.
An example of internalized, unassimilated introjection is
the formation of “secondary handicap” (Emanuel, 1997). When a
baby is discovered to be damaged at or soon after birth, the
mother’s unbearable feelings of disappointment may not be fully
processed, and the infant then internalizes a disappointed, hostile
or horrified introject and feels worthy only of rejection. The
infant’s “primary handicap” may be compounded by the
development of a “secondary handicap,” emotional damage,
through projective identification with a disappointed, rejecting
internal object.
Sometimes fully assimilating the negative introject causes
overwhelm, and individuals “split off” the more toxic
(suffocating, intrusive) aspects of the introjected object (e.g.,
mother, father) in order to survive, defensively encapsulating
part of that object while allowing the rest to be assimilated
(Celentano, 1992). That split-off part becomes an autonomous
complex or an alter ego.
There are several special types of projections for us to be
aware of. One is transference, unfinished emotional business
from our past that is unconsciously transferred onto our current
relationships, especially within the psychotherapy relationship; it
can, however, apply to lovers, friends, colleagues, bosses,
teachers, psychotherapists, or spiritual gurus. “That way we can
find ourselves forming current relationships that resemble those
from our past. Consciously, we don’t want that. But our souls
recognize an opportunity. If we can re-create the same kinds of
relationship problems we were unable to solve in childhood, we
have another chance to get it right, to act and relate in ways that
don’t limit us” (Plotkin, 2003, p. 276). This transference is
complicated by our tendency to equate the other’s persona with
their essential inner truth. This causes confusion, of course, since
I may be overlaying the real actual you with not only your
socially constructed face but also with the ghosts of my past
relationships.
Projective identification is another form of projection,
evoking an enactment of the projection by the other who feels
emotionally kidnapped by and identifies with the projection such
that “the person who receives and plays out the projected
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
dynamic will be an actor in the other’s inner theatre” (YoungEisendrath, 2000, p. 134).
A special form of projection is ritual, or what Jung referred
to as “transcendence of life.” We examine these in the following
section.
Another special form of projection is mythology (see
Hartman & Zimberoff, 2009).
Jung described the anima and animus as the real projectioncreating factors of the psyche (von Franz, 1980, p. 123). These
feminine and masculine archetypes, clothed in the contamination
of our personal unconscious and history, demand to be given
form. And we comply in our dreams and in our projections: “as a
projection-making factor, a man’s anima produces mainly
passive, that is, empathetic, projections that bind the man to
objects; the animus, on the other hand, produces more active,
that is, more judgmental, projections that tend to cut the woman
off from the world of objects” (von Franz, 1980, p. 134).
It may seem counterintuitive that our mental health, ego
development, and spiritual maturation require us to project. “It is
necessary for the development of character,” Jung said (1953,
para. 85).
It is precisely the best and the strongest among men, the heros, who give way
to their regressive nostalgia and purposely expose themselves to the danger of
being devoured by the monstrous primal cause. But if a man is a hero, he is a
hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the monster devour him,
but subdued it – not once but many times. It is in the achievement of victory
over the collective psyche that the true value lies; and this is the meaning of
the conquest of the treasure, of the invisible weapon, the magic talisman – in
short, of all those desirable goods that myths tell of (Jung, 1953, p. 478-479).
Projection in spiritual practice
Rituals provide a mechanism for accessing the transcendent
through projecting what is hidden within out onto symbolic
objects in the world in order to achieve initiation, to receive
guidance, or to offer worship. Jung discussed experiences
induced by rituals (1940, para. 208), referring to them as
“transcendence of life.”
The initiate may either be a mere witness of the divine drama or take part in it
or be moved by it, or he may see himself identified through the ritual action
with the god. In this case, what really matters is that an objective substance or
form of life is ritually transformed through some process going on
independently, while the initiate is influenced, impressed, ‘consecrated,’ or
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granted ‘divine grace’ on the mere ground of his presence or participation.
The transformation process takes place not within him but outside him,
although he may become involved in it.
Jung goes on to use the Mass as an example of the effect
internally for a participant or witness to external ritual events.
“The Mass is an extramundane and extratemporal act in which
Christ is sacrificed and then resurrected in the transformed
substances; and this rite of his sacrificial death is not a repetition
of the historical event but the original, unique, and eternal act.
The experience of the Mass is therefore a participation in the
transcendence of life, which overcomes all bounds of space and
time. It is a moment of eternity in time” (para. 209). Using
another example, Jung continued: “Another example is St. Paul,
who, on his way to Damascus, was suddenly confronted by
Christ. True though it may be that this Christ of St. Paul’s would
hardly have been possible without the historical Jesus, the
apparition of Christ came to St. Paul not from the historical Jesus
but from the depths of his own unconscious” (para. 216). Thus,
one becomes capable of accessing a deeply personal connection
with the divine through externalizing it in ritual form.
Jung also used alchemy as an example: “The alchemists
projected the inner event into an outer figure . . . in the
transformation of the chemical substance. So if one of them
sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose
transformation cried out to him, as it were, ‘I am the
transformation!’ But some were clever enough to know, ‘It is my
own transformation’ “ (1940, para. 238).
Upasana is a Sanskrit word which literally means ‘sitting
near’ God, i.e., approaching the chosen ideal or object of
worship by meditating on a physical representation of it. It is a
form of meditation in which the qualities of the divine, assumed
to be accessible within but only indirectly, are projected
outwardly into an object in the world for contemplation and
worship. The object is a symbol that arouses devotion in the
devotee just as the flag arouses martial valor in a soldier. For
example, one might call on the divine qualities of the goddess
Saraswati within one’s deepest Being and project them out into a
statue. The stone or wooden statue is not actually Saraswati, i.e.,
is not an idol, but rather has been activated temporarily with
Saraswati energy (the Saraswati archetypal energy). That energy,
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
which was not internally available to conscious awareness, is
now immanently available in its external projected form.
Jung perceived the same process at work in the way people
utilize symbols, and in the way the unconscious expresses
archetypal meaning. “A symbol is an image that expresses an
essential unconscious factor, and therefore refers to something
essentially unconscious, unknown, indeed to something that is
never quite knowable. It is the sensuously perceptible expression
of an inner experience” (von Franz, 1980, p. 82). Jung drew a
sharp distinction between a projected living symbol and an idol,
referring to an idol as a petrified symbol that causes “an
impoverishment of consciousness” (Jung, 1992, p. 59). A special
case of symbols is the archetype; symbols or archetypes clothe
themselves in a projected form “just as a primitive dancer does
with animal hides and masks. In this way a symbol is created
whose nucleus is a nonrepresentable, consciousness-transcending
archetypal basic structure that emerges from the unconscious”
(von Franz, 1980, p. 82). The archetype lies “dormant” (in a
quiet, unactivated state of potential) until it is projected out onto
an object in the world. “Thus, projection is an essential part of
the process by which the archetype assumes a determinable
shape” (von Franz, 1980, p. 86). The archetypes of Mother,
Trickster, Healer, Home, or Divine Mother only “come alive” to
the conscious mind when they are activated through projection
onto a woman or man or building or symbol in the real world.
And so we need our projections to discover that which is
unknown and unknowable.
Herman Tull argues that the Vedic upasana meditation had
as its purpose the invocation of a microcosmic world order, one
wherein the laws of the greater cosmos were mirrored (Tull,
1989, p. 6). Re-collecting the symbol manifested through
projection also reunites the worshipper with the worshipped: “As
long as an illusion of ego remains, the commensurate illusion of
a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the
idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to
it in love, fear, worship, exile or atonement, will also be there”
(Campbell, 1991, p. 14).
We find a similar schema in other cultures. For example, in
the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we encounter the perspective that
after-death visions of various Tibetan gods and demons,
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appearing to be as “real” as life and in turn terrifying or
seductive, are actually fantastic projections of our anger,
jealousy, grief, fears, grandiosity, or spiritual advancement. The
gods and demons can thereby be viewed as symbolic forms
expressive of the individual’s basic psychic tendencies. The
guidance is to regard them as merely the dream-like reflections
of one’s own inner self, to recognize them for what they are
(projections) rather than accept them at face value, and to choose
not to react to them as if they were objectively real because they
are not. Herein lies the extreme challenge, of course: these gods
and demons erupt into one’s experience just at the most
vulnerable times, in those moments when it is most difficult to
remember that these terrifying and beguiling entities are nothing
more than one’s own psychological projections. To the extent
that a person has the equanimity to remember, and to re-collect
the projections, there is great benefit.
The assumption is that upon seeing one’s own godlike or demonic reflection
as having no more substance than the moon’s shimmering image in a pool of
water, the natural attachment to one’s ego-centered personality will soften. By
interpreting the godlike and demonic objectifications of one’s personality as
illusory, one will be able to see one’s own individuality itself as illusory. In
this way, forsaking one’s ego-centered self-conception leads to enlightenment
(Wicks, 1997, p. 481).
Demons are, in Jung’s language, complexes. “The best
analogy of the way in which a demon tends to compel onesidedness is the way in which the rabies virus works. If this virus
touches a peripheral nerve of a person who has been bitten by a
rabid dog, it travels, as we know, to precisely that place in the
victim’s brain from which it can control the whole person. . . .
Autonomous complexes behave in exactly the same way . . .”
(von Franz, 1980, p. 103). We will return to examine complexes
later in this article.
Just as the dying person is encouraged to recognize all
appearances as a projection of the mind and thus to let go of
attachment to them (Goss & Klass, 1997), so in life we can
experience liberation from the tyranny of belief in our
projections and in the reality of our construction of experience.
The store clerk that we experience as a blood drinking demon,
and the celebrity that we idealize as an unblemished personality,
are in reality neither. Our experience of them is but a projection
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
of some aspect of ourselves, denied, unclaimed, and repressed.
Yet in order to maintain the denial and repression, we must
maintain the illusion.
Another example is the Native American tradition
exemplified by Lakota Sioux medicine chief Frank Fools Crow.
He called the process of projecting some aspect within himself (a
desire) outwardly onto a physical object, luring. When he recollected that projection back within himself, it was activated
with the seeds of manifestation. Here he describes the process
(Mails, 1991, pp. 16-18):
“I first draw a (symbolic) picture on a piece of paper, or on the ground with a
stick, to represent what I want to lure to me. Then I sit down facing it. I put on
my luring mask, take my rattle in my right hand, and I close my eyes and
breathe seven times to relax and to shut out distractions. I need to concentrate
all of my thoughts on what I am luring. As I do this breathing I cup my left
hand because I know Wakan-Tanka and the Helpers are going to fill me with
answers to my prayer. Then I open my eyes, and as I focus on the picture I
shake the rattle and sing my calling song. It goes like this:
“Ho, I am calling you.
Wakan-Tanka hears me.
You hear me.
Come to me.
You can not refuse.
Come to me.
I see you coming.
“I sing this song four times. Then as I continue to shake the rattle, I look
off into the distance, out across a little clearing, and I see standing at the far
side of it the thing I need. Whether it is a person or an object, it is just
standing there and looking at me. I watch it for a minute or two, and then I
close my eyes and look up at the inside of my forehead where my mind-screen
is. Before long, a white cloud begins to form there. I tell the cloud to do its
job, and the front part of it begins to move out in a tube shape toward the thing
I need. It continues to stretch out until it reaches the thing I desire and
encloses it. I put down the rattle. Then the cloud comes back to me bringing
the desire with it. When it has come to me, I put my arms around the desire to
possess it, and I thank Wakan-Tanka for it.”
Re-collecting projections
Projection is costly because through it we export our energy,
our power, creativity, vision, and elements of our own vital
essence. And as long as we invest in maintaining the illusion that
those qualities reside “out there”, we continue to experience that
export drain. Gradually we begin to re-collect our projections;
“then at last comes that merciful moment when reflection is
possible, when there is a reversal of the stream of energy, which
now flows away from the object or the idea and toward oneself
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or, better still, toward the Self” (von Franz, 1980, p. 163). And
this is necessary in order to realize the vision of an intelligent
pattern and meaningful purpose to our life. In fact, Jung equates
the withdrawal of projections with individuation (1940, paras.
82ff). Withdrawing one’s projections from the outside world
leads to integrating the unclaimed contents that were scattered
out there. “It is an act of self-recollection, a gathering together of
what is scattered, of all the things in us that have never been
properly related . . . with a view to achieving full consciousness.
. . . in the individuation process what were originally projections
‘stream’ back ‘inside’ and are integrated into the personality
again” (Jung, 1977, para. 398-402). This gathering together of
what is scattered includes past experiences, finished and
unfinished, distant past and current, unconscious and selfconscious, introjected and projected. For this reason, this process
of self-recollection is one of right-brained lyrical reflection and
quiet immersion in dreams and reverie. The rational conscious
mind cannot encompass the whole of it, and so the ego must
finally be willing to accept regression in the service of
transcendence.
That regression reflects both the path to take and the
destination to aim for. Jung traced a profound sequence of
regressions in the journey of individuation. “The regressing
libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step-bystep to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. . . . even there it
does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right
back into the intrauterine, prenatal condition and, leaving the
sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the
collective psyche” (Jung, quoted in Wang, 2001, p. 174).
Regression is difficult, and of course it is not always in the
service of transcendence: “for whoever sunders himself from the
mother longs to get back to the mother. This longing can easily
turn into a consuming passion which threatens all that has been
won. The mother then appears on the one hand as the supreme
goal and on the other as the most frightful danger” (Jung, 1912,
para. 352).
Regression can be taking refuge in times of stress or
overwhelming demands. Most people can relate to the desire to
seek recharging or respite in retreat from life’s demands in
mother’s reassuring arms (although some look for her embrace
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
in various addiction substitutes, such as alcohol, drugs,
gambling, shopping, busyness, sex or romance). The
complication, and the ultimate treasure, arises in that “regression
. . . does not stop short at the mother but goes beyond her to the
parental realm of the ‘Eternal Feminine’. Here we find ‘the germ
of wholeness’ waiting for conscious realization” (Jung, 1912,
para. 508). So we must clarify for ourselves what our projections
are.
In order to begin to withdraw your projections, you must first become aware
that you are projecting. (There is little or no chance you will catch yourself
before you do it. You must first suffer the discrepancy and recognize it as the
source of your suffering.) Then you can ask yourself: What exactly is the
quality I like or don’t like in the other? What emotions are evoked by those
qualities? How have I acted on those emotions? Where do I find these same
qualities in myself? What have I done to disown them and why? In what ways
might my experience of this person be similar to how I experienced someone
from my family of origin? (Plotkin, 2003, p. 277).
The Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz (1980, p. 10)
summarizes five stages in projecting and re-collecting the
abandoned parts of ourselves. In the first stage, we are convinced
that what we are unconsciously projecting is true of the other,
that we see the other accurately. In stage two, (“What I am not,
what you are”) we become increasingly aware of the discrepancy
between who we thought the other was and who they are turning
out to be; we differentiate illusion from reality. Faced with
irreconcilable beliefs, we may judge that there is something
wrong with the other and attempt to control them or change them
into who we thought they were, projecting onto the other the
negative qualities from within and/or people from our past. The
third stage (“What I am, what you are not”) requires us, probably
for the first time, to see more clearly who the other really is. In
stage four, we withdraw the projections by recognizing that we
were in fact projecting, that what we experienced as the other
was actually the inner shadow and/or a person from our past.
And, finally, in stage five, through our inner work, we come to
see exactly what it was in us we were projecting in the first
place, and why. We come face to face with our shadows, who
introduce us, in turn, to our anima/ animus archetypes.
“The archetype of Shadow is of special importance in that it forms a bridge to
experience of the personal aspects of Anima, and thus to contact with the
largely impersonal denizens of the collective unconscious. It is understood
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that the painful encounter with Shadow must precede the even more
dangerous and difficult encounter of Anima, that fascinating and complex
archetype which stands directly behind Shadow” (Wang, 2001, p. 206).
Every man has a feminine component in his psyche; every
woman has a masculine component in hers. Those components
consist of an archetypal core clothed in the beliefs generated by
encounters in early life with actual men and women. Anima is a
personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a
man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic
hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal
love, feeling for nature, and last but not least, his relation to the
unconscious. Animus is the personification of all masculine
psychological tendencies within a woman’s unconscious, such as
rationality, assertiveness, scholarship, expression, and last but
not least, her relation to the external ego-dominated world.
“In Jung’s essay ‘Anima and Animus’ (1953, pp. 296-341),
he explains Animus as ‘the deposit . . . of all woman’s ancestral
experiences of man.’ This male aspect of the female has a very
distinct personality. It is argumentative, self-assertive, and
tending to criticism for its own sake. It involves all of the
polarities that a woman’s individual and unconscious racial
experience would attribute to father, brother, son, etc., and
whereas Anima is usually viewed as a single figure, Animus can
be a collection of figures, a set of father-like judges. Animus
often appears in dreams as a hero figure, a traveler, an explorer
of some sort” (Wang, 2001, p. 37).
There is [in man] an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter,
the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every
mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of
this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality
in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the
loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego; she is the
much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in
disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same
time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with
her Maya-and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its
frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin,
hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest
danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will
receive it (Jung, 1968, par. 24).
Jung described four stages of animus development in a
woman. First he appears in dreams and fantasy as the
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
embodiment of physical power, an athlete, muscle man or brute,
both dangerous and fascinating. In the second stage, the animus
provides her with confident initiative and the capacity for
structured action; for example, a woman’s desire for
independence and a career of her own. In the next stage, the
animus is the “word,” not only conventional opinion but also
philosophical or religious ideas, often personified in dreams as a
professor or clergyman. In the fourth stage, the animus is the
incarnation of spiritual meaning. On this highest level, the
animus mediates between a woman’s conscious mind and the
unconscious.
The most dramatic projections originate in one’s anima/
animus and are directed onto a love interest. Using heterosexual
attraction as an example, a man sees in a particular woman all
the fairest feminine qualities stored in his unconscious. She is
ideal, just the right combination of all the qualities he desires,
and she “makes him feel” a sense of profound connectedness and
belonging, revitalized and fulfilled: “a man, in his love-choice, is
strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his
own unconscious femininity – a woman, in short, who can
unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul. Although such a
choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal, it may turn
out that the man has manifestly married his own worst
weakness” (Jung, 1953, para. 297).
Behind the projections, of course, there is an unknown
human being, no doubt projecting back onto him all of her
deeply unconscious fairytale prince fantasies. “Living together
on a daily basis remorselessly wears away the projections; one is
left with the otherness of the Other, who will not and cannot
meet the largeness of the projections. So people will conclude at
midlife that ‘You’re not the person I married.’ Actually, they
never were. They always were somebody else, a stranger we
barely knew then and know only a little better now. Because the
anima or animus was projected onto that Other, one literally fell
in love with missing parts of oneself” (Hollis, 1993, p. 47).
Jung found that, in general, we project the immature aspect
of the contra-sexed archetype:
• Men project the qualities of the immature feminine onto
the women in their lives.
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• Women project the qualities of the immature masculine
onto the men in their lives.
And, in general, we identify with (and self-judge) the
immature aspect of the same-sexed archetype:
• Men identify with the qualities of the immature masculine,
and judge themselves, and may covet the healthier
expression of those qualities in other men.
• Women identify with the qualities of the immature
feminine, and judge themselves, and may covet the
healthier expression of those qualities in other women.
These archetypes operate so deeply undercover, invisible in
the unconscious, that we face a monumental task in discovering
or uncovering them. “What we can discover about them [anima
and animus] from the conscious side is so slight as to be almost
imperceptible. It is only when we throw light into the dark
depths of the psyche and explore the strange and tortuous paths
of human fate that it gradually becomes clear to us how immense
is the influence wielded by these two factors that complement
our conscious life” (Jung, 1940, para.41).
Mario Jacoby (1985) warns that it is self-delusion to believe
that “one need only plunge into the mythic depths and existence
would be transfigured into a kind of Paradise – psychic deep-sea
diving, as it were” (p. 205). But the bridge across which
communication between the conscious and the unconscious
occurs is a two-way bridge. To reconcile the two realms, they
must first be intermingled, which is as difficult as mixing oil and
water.
So let us not imagine anima bridging and mediating inward only as a
sibylline benefactrice, teaching us about all the things we did not know, the
girl guide whose hand we hold. This is a one-way trip, and there is another
direction to her movement. She would also ‘unleash forces’ of the collective
unconscious, for across her bridge roll fantasies, projections, emotions that
make a person’s consciousness unconscious and collective. . . . As mediatrix
to the eternally unknowable she is the bridge both over the river into the trees
and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown. . .
. She mystifies, produces sphinxlike riddles, prefers the cryptic and occult
where she can remain hidden: she insists upon uncertainty. By leading
whatever is known from off its solid footing, she carries every question into
deeper waters, which is also a way of soul-making.
Anima consciousness clings to unconsciousness, as the nymphs adhere
to their dense wooden trees and the echoes cannot leave their caves (Hillman,
1989, pp. 88-89).
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
As Jung expressed it, “Anima is bipolar, one moment
negative, then positive . . . now young, now old, now mother,
now maiden, now a good fairy, now a witch, now a saint, now a
whore” (Jung, 1940, p. 356).
The anima is Eros, she is life-giving darkness, an
intermediary affording access to the unconscious – while at the
same time herself constituting the collective unconscious. She is
equally a mysterious lover, a great female magician, the mystical
flower of the soul, and a deceiver who entangles people in chaos
and must be obeyed (von Raffay, 2000).
If a man wishes to escape the dominion of the anima, he
must integrate her; he must, according to Jung, take back the
projections onto her. To integrate the anima, to remove the
projections, according to James Hillman, it must first be seen as
an independent ‘person’ (Hillman 1985, p. 121).
The anima “withdraws toward meditative isolation – the
retreat of the soul” (Hillman, 1985, p. 21). The anima force
expresses in soulful reverie, and so is always in indirect relation
to another. Anima reflects the object of its reverie, as the moon
reflects the active light of the sun. It is found in relationship with
another, “in the mother-daughter mystery, in the masculinefeminine pairings, or in compensation with the persona, in
collusion with the shadow, or as guide to the self. . . . the
fascination plus danger, the awe plus desire, the submission to
her as fate plus suspicion, the intense awareness that this way lie
both my life and my death” (Hillman, 1985, p. 23). And the
anima is the reflective partner, echoing the other, yet inseparable
from it.
The animus actively explores the liminal threshold between
underworld and dayworld. Animus is light-seeking, yearning for
rationality and expression. The animus force expresses in
dreams, dreams full of pathos, significance, big dreams,
archetypal and prophetic dreams, dreams populated by
characters.
Anima and animus can collaborate to a positive end: “when
animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power
and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The
outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally
likely to fall in love” (Jung, 1940, para. 30). And “Just as the
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animus projection of a woman can often pick on a man of real
significance who is not recognized by the mass, and can actually
help him to achieve his true destiny with her moral support, so a
man can create for himself a femme inspiratrice by his anima
projection” (Jung, 1954, para. 340).
Jung’s mythopoetic perspective on the human psyche is that
the animus is Father, the anima is Mother, and the ego is Child.
Needless to say, the ego must progress significantly on the
journey of individuation, or transformation, to get to the humility
of acknowledging its own relative inconsequentiality compared
to the other archetypal inhabitants that make up one’s Self.
“To ultimately conquer the Father (and to assume his Godqualities) is to conquer reason. To conquer the Mother is to
transcend the collective unconscious and the illusion of an Ego
or of a self which is immortal” (Wang, 2001, p. 73).
As long as the projection of my unconscious unclaimed inner
aspects remains identified as belonging out there in some object,
I remain in a helpless victim relationship to those aspects of
myself. They are free to become more bold, more demanding in
their irrational appearance, more self-destructive, and more
autonomous. I will not accept my tendency to arrogance, for
example, and so I see arrogance in more and more of the people I
encounter in the world. My reaction to those people, the carriers
of my projections, is the venue in which I develop selfdestructive behaviors. In my indignation at the rampant
arrogance around me, I may refuse to accept genuine
opportunities to advance, or I may sabotage a promising joint
effort with one such arrogant colleague. This is me “shadow
boxing” with my projected shadow, and I can only lose. The
people in my life, the objects of my projection, can only lose as
well, as long as they experience me “boxing” with them. This
discussion is specifically regarding one’s projection of his/her
personal shadow aspects, those unconscious unclaimed patterns
that developed in reaction to early childhood traumas. The
shadow is linked to this personal unconscious, which contains
lost memories, painful repressed ideas and experiences,
subliminal perceptions, contents as yet too immature to access
consciousness, and the complexes (Jung, 1943).
People also reject (and project outwardly) certain aspects
within whose source is a deeper layer of the unconscious where
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
collective cultural shadows lurk. It is to this collective shadow
that demagogue’s cater, e.g., racism and xenophobia (to the
extreme of ethnic cleansing). Twentieth century American social
critic and humorist H. L. Mencken defined a demagogue as “one
who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he
knows to be idiots.” What those who follow the demagogue are
actually ignorant of is the extent of primal emotion, fear and
prejudice lying dormant deep in their collective unconscious.
According to Jung, the “mob mentality” that can instigate people
to behave so irrationally is a form of possession or mass
intoxication (1953, p. 125). Other examples he gave for this
phenomenon include idealizing the loss of ego boundaries such
that a person abandons him/herself in martyrdom to the will of
others, calling it “selflessness” for children, for women, for
soldiers, or for spiritual followers.
What not to re-collect
The benefits of re-collecting one’s projections has limits.
Once we become aware of the source of those projections, we
are in a good position to make a conscious choice of whether,
and how, to re-collect them or not. “There are certain dark
powers in the inner world that one really can only run away from
or keep at a distance in some other way” (von Franz, 1980, p.
98).
For example, some negative introjects or other parts of the
personality are so toxic to the child that he/she splits them off in
order to survive, defensively encapsulating those parts deep in
the unconscious. Those split-off parts may be instinctively
rejected and projected outward, or they may become an
autonomous complex within. Those are projections that one
might choose to keep at a distance rather than to re-collect.
A key principle of Jungian thought is that the Mother, or at
least, aspects of the Mother must be overcome. It is the Mother
going backwards that must be overcome; the Mother going
forwards is to be assimilated. “At this stage the Mother symbol
no longer connects back to the beginnings, but points towards
the unconscious as the creative matrix of the future. Entry into
the ‘Mother’ then means establishing a relationship between the
ego and the unconscious” (Jung, 1912, p. 459). Who is the
‘Mother going backwards’ to be overcome, and how might we
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recognize a projection of her? She is the enchantress of
regression to the primitive, to the stillborn womb and death.
Jung has identified a split in human nature: one part wants to grow outward
and onward and the other wants to return to origins for strengthening. One
part seeks to assimilate new experiences ‘out there’, the other searches for a
new and regenerative meeting with elemental psychological forces. This split
is the essential premise of any concept of Life and Death instincts. Though the
Death instinct finds external manifestation in aggression and destructiveness,
we have seen that its true object is to reduce the known world to a
preconceived state that, from the standpoint of psychology, would be
inorganic. This is why man’s unconscious seeking for regression is also
dangerous. (Samuels, 1985, p. 149)
We could name the part of us seeking to assimilate new
experiences ‘out there’ as Father, and the part searching for new
and regenerative contacts with elemental psychological forces as
Mother. But each one has an aspect going backwards that must
be overcome, and an aspect going forward to be assimilated.
“The path to Self is through the Father; the path to No Self is
through the Mother” (Wang, 2001, p. 58). And herein lies the
challenge, because “the dangers come from both parents: from
the Father because he apparently makes regression impossible,
and from the Mother because she absorbs the regressing libido
and keeps it to herself so that he who sought rebirth finds only
death” (Jung, 1912, p. 511). “This means that the waking
consciousness, the ego, gives itself up to the unconscious in an
act that is the most terrible sacrifice of which a human being is
capable. It is the sacrifice of the perception of individuality”
(Wang, 2001, p. 173).
The intellect and strength of the Father, who represents security in this
material condition, helps to prepare each person for the frightening insecurity
of the journey toward what has been described as ‘No Self.’ To express this in
another way, it may be said that one of the roles of the Father is to lead the
Child gently to the edge of the unknown, to the borders of the often wonderful
and often terrifying Kingdom of the Mother. The principle here is that
although the parents protect and guide, they force the Child into danger and
trial which, when overcome, brings absolute independence (Wang, 2001, p.
74).
Jung uses the term enantiodromia to mean “being torn
asunder into pairs of opposites, which are the attributes of ‘the
god’ and hence also of the godlike man, who owes his
godlikeness to overcoming his gods.” (1953, p. 113).
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
“The only person who escapes the grim law of
enantiodromia is the man who knows how to separate himself
from the unconscious, not by repressing it – for then it simply
attacks him from the rear – but by putting it clearly before him as
that which he is not” (Jung, 1912, p. 112).
. . . the autonomy of certain complexes is unusually strong, so that they
‘possess’ the ego, so to speak, like completely independent beings – a
psychological fact that found expression in the belief in demons among all
peoples in all ages from time immemorial. On the primitive level it is
therefore self-evident that ‘demons’, or in our language ‘complexes’, have to
be removed from the realm of the subject; integration – that is, a responsible
acceptance into the total personality – is attempted only exceptionally,
namely, by certain shamans or medicine men who kept a few conquered
‘demons’ near them as ‘spirit helpers’ (von Franz, 1980, p. 96).
Complexes
Jung defined complexes as “psychological parts split off
from the personality, groups of psychic contents isolated from
consciousness, functioning arbitrarily and autonomously, leading
thus a life of their own in the dark sphere of the unconscious,
where they can at any moment hinder or further conscious acts”
(1933, p. 90). For Jung, the complex was the “via regia to the
unconscious”, “architect of dreams and of symptoms”. Actually,
Jung said, it is not a very royal road, more like a “rough and
uncommonly devious footpath” (1969, para. 210).
Jung’s notion is that “each phase of early development
becomes and continues to be an autonomous content of the
psyche in adult life . . . At any one moment, earlier phases of
development, or rather of experience, have the possibility of
becoming operative within a person. We can say that personal
experiences of infancy and childhood that have evolved in this
way function in the adult as complexes, cores around which
adult events cluster, and which dictate the emotions and feelings
such events engender” (Samuels, 1985, p. 145).
Complexes have a mythical, archetypal core with personal
memories clustered around it: one’s Mother Complex or Father
Complex or Commitment Complex is thus part mythology and
part history. When a complex is triggered, the ego descends into
a passive seizure as the ascending complex brings up an
unforeseen foreign personality or personality traits; we become
just as unconscious as it is. When we are in the grip of an
unconscious force such as a complex, it compels us to act out
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unwanted, unmanageable, highly patterned and stylized actions
and compulsive behaviors (Pascal, 1992, p. 66).
The best analogy of the way in which a demon tends to compel one-sidedness
is the way in which the rabies virus works. If this virus touches a peripheral
nerve of a person who has been bitten by a rabid dog, it travels, as we know,
to precisely that place in the victim’s brain from which it can control the
whole person. . . . Autonomous complexes behave in exactly the same way . . .
(von Franz, 1980, p. 103).
The troublesome aspects of the complex are, in reality,
unassimilated or immature parts of our personality. We are most
successful in dealing with them when we can dis-identify from
them and speak to them as if with a hurt, scared and sensitive
child. For Jung a troublesome complex “only means that
something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists –
perhaps as an obstacle, but also as a stimulus to greater effort,
and so, perhaps, as an opening to new possibilities of
achievement. . . . When a person interrelates with a particular
complex through dialogue with it, the clusters of repressed
personal historical associations eventually will fall away, laying
bare the timeless, impersonal archetypal core. The individual can
then see the core of the conflict as a perennial human problem
and not solely as a personal problem” (Pascal, 1992, p. 73-74).
“Possession can be formulated as identity of the egopersonality with a complex” (Jung, 1940, para. 220). One
identity, which Jung called a complex, hijacks the whole
confederation of identities for a moment or two before another
takes over. “Everyone knows that people have complexes,” Jung
wrote, but “what is not so well known … is that complexes can
have us” (Jung, 1964, p. 161). So we find ourselves one day in a
job we don’t like in order to pay the mortgage on a home we
resent. Who made the choice twenty years ago to live this way?
Which complex hijacked you?
“Complexes express themselves in powerful moods and repetitive behaviors.
They resist our most heroic efforts at consciousness, and they tend to collect
experience that confirms their pre-existing view of the world. Complexes are
the psychological analogue of the vegetative biological systems, such as those
that carry out digestion or maintain blood pressure. An activated personal
complex can have its own body language and tone of voice. It can operate
beneath the level of consciousness; we do not have to think about complexes
for them to carry out their autonomous processes of structuring and filtering
our experience of ourselves and others. A further characteristic of complexes,
elegantly elaborated by John Perry, is that they tend to be bipolar or consist of
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
two parts (Perry, 1970). Most often, when a complex is activated, one part of
the bipolar complex attaches itself to the ego and the other part gets projected
onto a suitable other. For instance, in a typical negative father complex, a
rebellious son inevitably finds the authoritarian father in every teacher, coach
or boss who provides a suitable hook for the negative projection. This
bipolarity of the complex leads to an endless round of repetitive skirmishes
with the illusory other — who may or may not fit the bill perfectly. Finally,
complexes can be recognized by the simplistic certainty of a world view and
one’s place in it that they offer us, in the face of the otherwise very difficult
task of holding the tension of conflicting and not easily reconcilable
opposites.” (Singer, 2002)
In the Jungian perspective, not all complexes are
pathological; only when complexes remain unconscious and
operate autonomously do they create difficulties in daily life.
Complexes become autonomous when they “dissociate” (split
off), accumulating enough psychical energy and content to usurp
the executive function of the ego and work against the overall
good of the individual. Autonomous complexes are usually the
result of unconscious response to traumatic childhood
experiences, or unconscious ingrained patterns left over from
interrupted and unfinished developmental milestones (premature
weaning or toilet training, for example, or the imposition of an
age-inappropriate gender stereotype). Traumatic experiences
typically cause negative fixations or blind-spots, whereas
interrupted developmental milestones cause fixation on the
satisfiers of unmet needs and compulsive behavior (Washburn,
1995). The hallmark of these patterns, or autonomous
complexes, is that they operate unconsciously; that is, the person
is chronically dissociated. Only when the dissociation is broken
and the complex is brought to consciousness can the emotional
charge be assimilated and the autonomous nature of the complex
be dissolved. The split-off parts, having taken some of the ego’s
energy and become shadow aspects of the ego, need to be reassimilated.
Transcendence and immanence
We have spoken of transcendence (beyond-the-horizon) as
an ascending path toward wholeness, acknowledging that true
wholeness is possible only through following both that path and
the descending path of immanence (immersion, or under-theground). What are some of the limitations that one might
transcend? Here is a partial list.
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Transcending polarities
Examples of the powerful sets of polarities at work in our
lives are: autonomy and relationship, rights and responsibilities,
agency and communion, wisdom and compassion, justice and
mercy, masculine and feminine, centripetal and centrifugal
forces, or entropy and negentropy.
“God unfolds himself in the world in the form of syzygies
[paired opposites], such as Heaven/Earth, day/night,
male/female. The last term of the first series is the Adam/Eve
syzygy. At the end of this fragmentation process there follows
the return to the beginning, the consummation of the universe
through purification and annihilation” (Carl Jung, 1968, p. 400).
No person is a homogeneous entity. Complexes and shadows abound in
all of us, and these ‘work’ to create wholeness. It is important to bring
psychological opposites into conscious awareness for the sake of psychic
health and vitality. Without holding the tension of opposites in awareness
there is little chance for resolution of impasses and losses. . . . [The
transcendent function] is the psyche’s capacity to create symbols that express
resolution of seemingly insoluble opposites. When it is exercised this function
transcends both ordinary ego awareness and unconscious complexes to arrive
at a ‘third’ position different from the initial polarity. The creative holding of
the tension of opposites and the consequent activation of the transcendent
function are the mature work of psychotherapy. . . . I would call this
realization of wisdom the marriage between rational thought and the
mythopoetic non-rational images of unconscious perception. As in any
dynamic marriage, sometimes one partner ‘knows better’ and sometimes the
other, but usually they both work toward the resolution of problems and
conflicts in the service of mutual growth (Salman, 2000, pp. 84-85).
Gisela Labouvie-Vief (2000, p. 109-111) discusses the way
in which the Self transcends yet blends these “opposites”,
honoring both:
Confronting the dialectical tension between these two systems—ones I refer to
as logos and mythos in Psyche and Eros (1994)—the individual can
eventually form a new structure—the Self—that transcends either system, yet
blends both within higher-order forms of experience. This transcendent way
of relating, according to Jung, reconceptualizes the world from an ordinary
sense of objective reality to one in which the opposites of reason and emotion,
self and other, or masculine and feminine, are blended into a new experience
of reality. . . . This ability to bridge the tensions between the universal and the
contextual, the theoretical and the pragmatic, and the rational and emotional is
often referred to as wisdom (Baltes and Staudinger, 1993; Clayton and Birren,
1980; Labouvie-Vief, 1990).
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
The question arises how does one achieve that transcending
yet blending of the opposites? Two vital keys are clear: one is to
recognize that opposites contain the seed of each other within,
and the second is to withstand the tension of the opposites
without surrendering to one or the other. Jung said that “to
confront a person with his Shadow is to show him his own Light.
. . . Anyone who perceives his Shadow and his Light
simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the
middle” (Jung,1978b, p. 814).
Jung used the Mother archetype to symbolize the union of
opposites, because there the mother is always present: “it is the
Mother who creates the separation of the individual from the
collective, and it is she who brings about the ultimate return; she
activates both birth and death” (Wang, 2001, p. 237). Remember
Jung’s warning that the Mother can potentially absorb the
regressing libido and keep it to herself so that he who sought
rebirth finds only death. That warns of a potential failure in the
seeker’s journey into the unconscious, an obstacle to be aware
of, but success is also possible. “The treasure which the Hero
fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from
the dark maternal cave of the unconscious” (Jung, 1912, p. 580).
The downside risk of immanence, immersion, the path of the
Mother, is of losing the forest for the trees when one’s life
energy is captivated in the quicksand of going ever deeper. The
theme song for this extreme might be “A Day in the Life” (The
Beatles): “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my
head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup, and looking up
I noticed it was late. Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made
the bus in seconds flat. Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.” Of course, the
downside risk of transcendence, abstraction, the path of the
Father, is of losing the trees for the forest when depth is
sacrificed in favor of elevation. The theme song here might be
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz):
“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, There’s a land that
I’ve heard of once in a lullaby. Somewhere over the rainbow,
skies are blue, And the dreams that you dare dream, really do
come true.” Remember that finding synthesis from these two
forces requires withstanding the tension of the opposites without
surrendering to one or the other.
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The path of the Mother and the path of the Father have great
strengths to offer, of course. Women, the feminine, have great
strength in the area of personal truth and connectedness, while
men, the masculine, are strong in a different, complementary
area: the ability to take and hold an impersonal perspective. A
woman’s thinking and feeling work closely together, giving her
special aptitudes not only for intuition and empathy, but also for
expressing what she feels, right on the spot. Men have a much
harder time with this. Their strength lies more in detaching their
awareness from their immediate feelings. A man’s spiritual
power lies in his ability to transcend all phenomena, to detach
himself from purely personal concerns in order to explore a
greater impersonal truth that lies beyond him. In contrast to male
spiritual power, which has to do with transcending phenomena,
the great spiritual power of woman involves wearing all
phenomena as ornaments, celebrating the play of life’s energies
as intrinsically sacred (Welwood, 1990).
The higher in ego development one grows, and the further
along in one’s individuation work, the more balanced his/her
polarities (such as masculine and feminine) become, and the
more nuanced are their expression. In the same way that some
people are ambidextrous, i.e., equally capable of using either
right or left hand, the highly evolved may become androgynous.
“The description bland is sometimes associated with
‘androgyny.’ In the highest stages of development, androgyny
would seem anything but bland, as it is characterized by an
ability to inhabit and express any trait, energy, or characteristic
associated with either gender” (Bailin, 2009, p. 97).
At the 7th chakra…masculine and feminine meet and unite at the crown —
they literally become one. And that is what Gilligan found with her stage-4
moral development: the two voices in each person become integrated, so that
there is a paradoxical union of autonomy and relationship, rights and
responsibilities, agency and communion, wisdom and compassion, justice and
mercy, masculine and feminine (Wilber, 2006, p. 14).
A fully embodied spirituality, I suggest, emerges from the creative interplay
of both immanent and transcendent spiritual energies in complete individuals
who embrace the fullness of human experience while remaining firmly
grounded in body and earth (Ferrer, 2008, p. 2).
A more embodied spiritual life can emerge today from our participatory
engagement with both the energy of consciousness and the sensuous energies
of the body. Ultimately, embodied spirituality seeks to catalyze the emergence
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
of complete human beings — beings who, while remaining rooted in their
bodies, earth, and immanent spiritual life, have made all their attributes
permeable to transcendent spiritual energies, and who cooperate in solidarity
with others in the spiritual transformation of self, community, and world. In
short, a complete human being is firmly grounded in Spirit-Within, fully open
to Spirit-Beyond, and in transformative communion with Spirit In-Between. . .
. Who knows, perhaps as human beings gradually embody both transcendent
and immanent spiritual energies — a twofold incarnation, so to speak — they
can then realize that it is here, in this plane of concrete physical reality, that
the cutting edge of spiritual transformation and evolution is taking place
(Ferrer, 2008, pp. 8-9).
Another example of the coalescing of polarities that occurs
at higher stages of development is the human central nervous
system itself. Eugene D’Aquilla and Andrew Newberg (1999)
researched the physiological underpinnings of mystical
experiences, a field they call neurotheology. The single common
factor that they found across cultures and among varieties of
spiritual practice was a profound sense of unity, or dissolution of
the sense of separateness from the “outside” world. They divided
all methods for achieving unitive (mystical) experiences into two
categories: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down methods (overthe-horizon), e.g., meditation, contemplation or prayer, realize
transcendence through relaxing the body and calming and
focusing the mind. This is accomplished through the quiescent
component of the nervous system (parasympathetic branch),
which limits the body’s output of energy and maintains its
equilibrium. Bottom-up methods (under-the-ground), e.g., trance
dancing, chanting, activated breathing, or vigorous yoga, realize
transcendence through exciting the body and bypassing the
mind. This is accomplished through the arousal component of
the nervous system (sympathetic branch), which activates the
flow of energy throughout the body and disrupts equilibrium.
If either the quiescent or the arousal component of the
nervous system is pushed far enough, the one resonates with the
other, activating it in a “spillover effect” so that both become
fully engaged simultaneously (normally when either system is
“on” the other is dormant). This “synthesis” produces a
paradoxical state of ecstatic serenity (Horgan, 2003, p. 74-75).
Hyperquiescence may produce a feeling of oceanic
tranquility, while hyperarousal creates a sense of “flow” with
high alertness. The spillover of hyperquiescence, creating
arousal, may produce a sense of absorption into an object or
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symbol. The spillover of hyperarousal, creating quiescence, may
produce an ecstatic or orgasmic rush. The furthest excitation of
both systems, hyperquiescence/ hyperarousal, creates a mystical
experience described by d’Aquili and Newberg (1999) as
Absolute Unitary Being. Examples of these five unusual states,
created through nervous system activation and spillover, are:
• hyperarousal – a sense of “flow” with high alertness, e.g.,
the kinesthetic immersion in high-risk challenges like
firewalking, bungie-jumping, or parachuting, or in
survival of a dangerous or threatening traumatic
encounter
• hyperquiescence – a feeling of oceanic tranquility, e.g.,
inner silence or stillness, allowing the suspension of
everyday thought. A state of reverie can sometimes
create a magical moment in time, bringing sudden
intuitive insight, reversal in perspective, the “eureka” or
“aha” experience
• hyperquiescence/ arousal through spillover – a sense of
absorption into an object or symbol, e.g., the awe of
beholding breathtaking beauty or experiencing profound
lovingkindness
• hyperarousal/ quiescence through spillover – an ecstatic or
orgasmic rush, e.g., the psycho-somatic immersion in
rhythmic drumming or kirtan chanting or ecstatic
dancing
• hyperquiescence/ hyperarousal – a mystical experience of
oneness, e.g., a meditative state that ignites soaring
ecstatic inspiration such as Kundalini shaktipat.
Transcending everyday reality
The current focus on environmental psychology and green
spirituality leads to a conception of transcendence as horizontal
rather than vertical; that is, we transcend the mundane through
even deeper connection with and responsibility for the life of the
earth (Kalton, 2000, p. 190):
Naturally, this approach to transcendence and contingency is clearly historical
and the product of a particular sort of culture and worldview. But minds
nurtured in this tradition find it an almost irresistible way of understanding
how meaning becomes Meaning as the deeds of daily life are subsumed under
some sort of transcendence. Eliade brilliantly adapted this structure to
elucidate the religious meaning of myth and ritual in The Sacred and the
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
Profane. In planting his yams or repairing his canoe in the manner the gods
originally performed these tasks, the tribesman is able to live in a space of
Ultimate Meaning as he goes through motions that otherwise would fall into
the realm of mere contingency and only evanescent meaningfulness (Eliade,
1957, p. 87).
This is the profound simplicity of the Zen statement: “Before
enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment,
chop wood and carry water.”
It is also reference to a startling idea put forth by Jung; that
we dream day and night, but are unaware of our experience
during the daytime’s constant mental chatter. “. . . it is on the
whole probable that we continually dream, but consciousness
makes while waking such a noise that we do not hear it”
(Seminar on Children’s Dreams, quoted in Jacobi, 1943, pp. 9495).
Accessing that daytime dream vision in a psychedelic
reverie, Alan Watts sees his companions as no longer the
“harassed little personalities with names... the mortals we are all
pretending to be, ... but rather as immortal archetypes of
themselves” (Watts, 1962, p. 44).
Transcending ‘ego’
Abraham Maslow (1994) distinguished transcending selfactualizing individuals, described as exhibiting “unitive
perception,” or the “fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the
sacred with the profane” (p. 79), from what he called
nontranscending self-actualizers (1971). He described such
people as “more essentially practical, realistic, mundane,
capable, and secular people, living more in the here and now
world . . . ‘doers’ rather than meditators or contemplators,
effective and pragmatic rather than aesthetic, reality-testing and
cognitive rather than emotional and experiencing” (p. 281). Due
to this observation, in his unpublished critique of selfactualization theory (1996), Maslow thought that “selfactualization is not enough” (p. 31) for a full picture of the
optimally functioning human being.
Paradoxically, Maslow began to recognize that peak
experiences often led the self-actualizing individual to transcend
the personal concerns of the very self that was being actualized.
“The goal of identity (self-actualization . . .) seems to be
simultaneously an end-goal in itself, and also a transitional goal,
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454
a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of
identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself. Put the
other way around, if our goal is the Eastern one of egotranscendence and obliteration, of leaving behind selfconsciousness and self-observation, . . . then it looks as if the
best path to this goal for most people is via achieving identity, a
strong real self, and via basic-need-gratification” (Maslow, 1999,
p. 125).
Maslow had pioneered humanistic psychology as a distinct
approach within the field of psychology, and now during the
final three years of his life he recognized a newly defined
transpersonal psychology as a separate force, differing from the
humanistic approach as self-transcendence differs from selfactualization. He variously conceptualized self-transcendence as
seeking a benefit beyond the purely personal; seeking
communion with the transcendent, perhaps through mystical or
transpersonal experiences; identifying with something greater
than the purely individual self, often engaging in service to
others. Maslow modified his motivational model, the hierarchy
of needs, to reflect this additional level of development. “The
earlier model positions the highest form of motivational
development at the level of the well-adjusted, differentiated, and
fulfilled individual self or ego. The later model places the
highest form of human development at a transpersonal level,
where the self/ego and its needs are transcended” (KoltkoRivera, 2006, p. 306).
Finally, Maslow (1971, pp. 273-285) compiled a set of
qualities that distinguish transcending self-actualizers from
nontranscending self-actualizers. We present here a summary of
these characteristics of transcending self-actualizers, or
transcenders.
1.
2.
3.
4.
For the transcenders, peak experiences and plateau experiences become the
most important things in their lives, the most precious aspect of life.
They speak naturally and unconsciously the language of Being (B-language),
the language of poets, of mystics, of seers, of profoundly religious men, of
men who live under the aspect of eternity, the language of parable and
paradox.
They perceive unitively the sacred within the secular, i.e., the sacredness in all
things at the same time that they also see them at the practical, everyday level.
This ability is in addition to — not mutually exclusive with — good reality
testing.
They are much more consciously and deliberately metamotivated by the
values of perfection, truth, beauty, goodness, unity, dichotomy-transcendence.
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
They seem somehow to recognize each other, and to come to almost instant
intimacy and mutual understanding even upon first meeting.
They are more responsive to beauty, or rather they tend to beautify all things.
They are more holistic about the world than are the “healthy” or practical selfactualizers (who are also holistic in this same sense). Mankind is one, and
such limiting concepts as the “national interest” or “the religion of my fathers”
or “different grades of people or of IQ” either cease to exist or are easily
transcended.
Overlapping this statement of holistic perceiving is a strengthening of the selfactualizer’s natural tendency to synergy — intrapsychic, interpersonal,
intracultural.
They transcend the ego (the Self, the identity) more often and more easily.
Not only are such people lovable, but they are also more awe-inspiring, more
“unearthly, more easily revered.” They more often produced in Maslow the
thought, “This is a great man.”
Transcenders are far more apt to be innovators, discovers of the new, of what
actually could be, what exists in potential.
They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous than the happy and healthy ones,
yet maybe more prone to a kind of cosmic-sadness over the stupidity of
people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to each other, their
shortsightedness.
Transcenders can more easily live in both the D- and B-realms simultaneously
than can the merely healthy self-actualizers because they can sacralize
everybody so much more easily. The way of phrasing this paradox that
Maslow found useful is this: The factually “superior” transcending selfactualizer acts always to the factually “inferior” person as to a brother, a
member of the family who must be loved and cared for no matter what he
does because he is after all a member of the family.
Peak-experiencers and transcenders in particular, as well as self-actualizers in
general, find mystery is attractive and challenging rather than frightening. In
contrast, most people pursue knowledge to lessen mystery and thereby reduce
anxiety. The self-actualizer is apt to be bored by what is well known, however
useful this knowledge may be, and encountering new knowledge to be awed
before the tremendousness of the universe. At the highest levels of
development of humanness, knowledge leads to a sense of mystery, awe,
humility, ultimate ignorance, and reverence.
Transcenders are less afraid of “nuts” and “kooks” than are other selfactualizers, and are also more able to screen out the apparent nuts and kooks
who are not creative contributors.
Transcenders tend to be more “reconciled with evil” in the sense of
understanding its occasional inevitability and necessity in the larger holistic
sense. Since this implies a better understanding of apparent evil, it generates
both a greater compassion with it and a less ambivalent and more decisive,
more unyielding fight against it.
Transcenders are more apt to regard themselves as carriers of talent,
instruments of the transpersonal, temporary custodians so to speak of a greater
intelligence or skill or leadership or efficiency. This means a certain particular
kind of objectivity or detachment toward themselves that to nontranscenders
might sound like arrogance, grandiosity, or even paranoia. Transcendence
brings with it the “transpersonal” loss of ego.
Transcenders are more apt to be profoundly “religious” or “spiritual” in either
the theistic or nontheistic sense, excluding their historical, conventional,
superstitious, institutional meanings.
Transcenders find it easier to transcend the ego, the self, the identity, to go
beyond self-actualization. Nontranscending self-actualizers are primarily
strong identities, people who know who they are, where they are going, what
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they want, what they are good for, using themselves well and authentically
and in accordance with their own true nature. Transcenders are certainly this;
but they are also more than this.
20. Transcenders, because of their easier perception of the B-realm, have more
end experiences than their more practical brothers do, more of the fascinations
that we see in children who get hypnotized by the colors in a puddle, or by
raindrops dripping down a windowpane, or by the smoothness of skin, or the
movements of a caterpillar.
21. Transcenders are somewhat more Taoistic; the merely healthy somewhat more
pragmatic. B-cognition makes everything look more miraculous, more perfect,
just as it should be. It therefore breeds less impulse to do anything to the
object that is fine just as it is, less needing improvement, or intruding upon.
22. “Postambivalence” tends to be more characteristic of all self-actualizers and
perhaps a little more so in transcenders. This concept from Freudian theory
means total wholehearted and unconflicted love, acceptance, expressiveness,
rather than the more usual mixture of love and hate that passes for “love” or
friendship or authority.
23. With increasing maturity of character, higher forms of reward and metareward
other than money steadily increase in importance, while money is recognized
as a symbol for status, success, self-esteem with which to win love,
admiration, and respect.
Erik Erikson (1986) called the final and highest stage of
human living transcendent, when generativity is coupled with
ego integrity and built upon the primary foundation of hope and
trust. Ego integrity is best described in this way: “healthy
children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not
to fear death.” And the previous stage built generativity,
described as “establishing and guiding the next generation . . . is
meant to include productivity and creativity.”
Transcending ego separateness
Intersubjectivity is a developmental process in which
increasing knowledge of others exists in tandem and in tension
with knowledge of the self (Josselson, 2000, p. 93). The more we
know about ourselves, the more we learn about others; to
understand them, to appreciate them, to recognize them as
independently entitled to be who they are. And likewise, through
such honest and intimate relationships we learn to understand
and appreciate ourselves, and to discover who we are and
recognize our entitlement to be just that. Separateness is
transcended even as individual distinctiveness is confirmed
(Erikson, et al., 1986). The examination of the self in
relationship can serve as a path to transcendence (Stevens-Long,
2000, pp. 170-171):
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
The feminist theologians like Ruether and Heywood, and peace activists like
Macy along with some Jungian theorists (Welwood 1992) have argued that
relationship, particularly intimate relationship, can serve as a crucible for
transcendence. This path requires the observation and acknowledgment of the
Self in the Other. Kegan (1994) also speaks about the exploration of the self in
the service of diversity. If I can experience within me both the oppressor and
the oppressed, the angry and the hurt, the rational and the irrational, and so on,
I begin to see all the Others in Myself. This perception may move me beyond
the illusions of separation and duality to an experience of the Absolute, of
connection to others, even eventually to all living beings (Young-Eisendrath,
1997).
The feeling of connection is sometimes referred to as transpersonal
experience: while remaining oneself, one feels ‘inside’ the other, lives in and
inhabits the other through empathy or a wiser vision of life (Levin, 1993).
Welwood (1992) compares the practice of mindful relationship to the practice
of meditation. ‘Just as meditation practice helps us wake up from the war
between good and bad, pleasure and pain, self and other inside ourselves,
relationships can help us see how we enact these same struggles outside
ourselves’ (p. 307).
The sense of separation may dissolve to the extent of
depersonalization or derealization, which may be pathological
for the unprepared, yet liberating for a person who has become
relatively free of persona and anima/animus identifications and is
prepared for an expanded identity with Self.
By permitting awareness to encompass consciousness in the body and
consciousness expanding beyond the body, a more unified state is invited in
which the experience of a transcendental reality is accompanied by a feeling
of connectedness to it. Thus, association involving depersonalization or
derealization can become a transitional phase yielding to higher levels of
association — higher because the sense of separation has dissolved. As
awareness expands, so does the human capacity to feel at home in, and be
informed by, a multidimensional universe. Such expanded states of awareness,
or experiences of association, are the ultimate goal of life-enhancing
dissociative processes. In rare cases, as saints and sages have evidenced, a
sublime state of enduring association can be attained that is so inclusive as to
be characterized by the teaching “I am all that is.” (Edge, 2001, p. 61).
An interesting concept related to transcendence of
experiencing ego separateness is reciprocal individuation, an
experience of personal healing and development within the
context of a group’s like-minded experience. A deep and
genuinely loving encounter generates development for all
concerned. “Each person gathers around him his own ‘soul
family’, a group of people not created by accident or by mere
egoistic motivation but rather through a deeper, more essential
spiritual interest or concern: reciprocal individuation” (von
Franz, 1980, p. 177).
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Self-transcendence
Developing detachment from external definitions of the self,
and the dissolving of rigid boundaries between self and other,
brings about self-transcendence (Levenson, et al., 2005).
Cloninger and colleagues (1993) describe self-transcendence
as referring to an experience of identification with the whole of
existence, the feeling of being an integral part of all of nature,
the universe, and cosmos. It involves a tendency to lose a sense
of space and time in one’s fascination with something, and to
construe all things as part of one totality, where any sense of
one’s individual self is lost and no distinction exists between the
self and others.
One’s identity of self expands: “When such [mystical]
experiences are integrated into one’s identity and one’s
relationship with the environment, they cannot be considered
dissociative. Instead, they represent the incorporation of an
aspect of our humanity that was dissociated prior to the
experience; the self has expanded its capacity” (Edge, 2001, p.
61).
There is some evidence that introverted and extraverted
people experience self-transcendence differently. Introverts
describe self-transcendent experiences in which primarily one’s
ego is affected, e.g., being absorbed into something greater, or
losing the ability to place things in space and time, or having
experiences which one cannot communicate. Extraverts describe
self-transcendent experiences of the world outside oneself as
unified, or alive or aware or never dead (Hood, 1975; Hood, et
al., 1993; Hood et al., 2001).
Transcending the past
To the extent that one experiences being helplessly fated by
the past to live with constrained choices and limited options, that
individual is incapable of assuming mastery over his own
destiny. The purpose of devoting energy to one’s past, in the
pursuit of emotional healing and ego development, is precisely to
extricate oneself from those constraints. We turn to the
unconscious and its many denizens as much for guidance in
moving forward as for clarity on how we got to this time and
place: “unconscious material moves forward toward something,
as much as it emerges from the past. This material expresses
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
numerous potentials and probabilities in what the ancients
considered
‘prophetic’
language.
The
problem for
psychotherapists has always been how to understand these
expressions. First off, this understanding involves an
appreciation of our psychological self-regulating mechanisms,
foremost among which are regression and symbolization”
(Salman, 2000, p. 83).
More importantly, gaining freedom from the past and living more fully
in the present allows one to pay attention to the unconscious in a different
way. Jung’s key insight about the relation of the unconscious to consciousness
was that it not only represents the haunting presence of the past as Freud had
taught — in the form of complexes, perseverating family dynamics and
traumas, repressed infantile sexuality, etc. — but that it also manifests the
active presence of a living spirit in the “here and now.” The unconscious is
forward looking and anticipates possible futures. What comes into view as one
begins to pay attention to the unconscious as an actor in the present moment
becomes critically useful for orienting oneself to the future. This is especially
true if a person is relatively free of persona and anima/animus identifications
and has looked long and hard at oneself in the mirror of consciousness (Stein,
2005, pp. 9-10).
Now recall the distinction drawn at the beginning of this
article of the three levels of psychological work. First one must
work through the biographical level: complexes, perseverating
family dynamics and traumas, repressed infantile sexuality,
accumulated shame, body armoring, addictions and compulsions,
self-sabotaging anxieties, and more. Then comes the opportunity
to confront the existential issues as they come into focus as one
nears mid-life: disappointments, acknowledgement of one’s
mortality, regrets over possibilities unexplored, and more.
Transitioning from the first to the second is, indeed, gaining
freedom from the past and living more fully in the present. Now
a future orientation is possible, one that is at peace with the past,
solidly grounded in the present, and open to the vast and
unlimited possibilities that lie ahead. This is the third level of
work, transpersonal, archetypal, psychic and deeply spiritual.
The future orientation includes preparation for one’s ultimate
death and the care of the soul that it motivates.
It is important to recognize that these unconscious images and patterns
that now emerge in the individuation process are different from those that
were unearthed in the prior analysis of identity. Those all were from the past
and were fixed in place for personal reasons having to do with early
development through introjection and identity creation (persona and
anima/animus identities). These images from active imagination arise in the
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present from the unconscious matrix, and they are archetypal, often numinous,
and definitely compensatory to the personal equation and prevailing attitudes
of the ego complex. Those earlier images constricted individuality and
narrowed psychological options; these expand individuality in the direction of
the Self, i.e., the psyche’s wholeness, and they offer totally new options for
feeling and action (Stein, 2005, p. 11).
Transformation
We might use the term individuation or transformation for
the clarity that comes, through the intervention of the
transcendent function: that the ego cannot control everything and
therefore it presents the possibility of there being some
dimension of the personality beyond the ego. The Self might be
described as immanent transcendence, or daveq u-meyuhady
(“united or connected and at the same time separate”), accepting
of and incorporating both ascent and descent, masculine and
feminine, as well as all the other polarities.
As one moves to higher levels of ego development, what was
totally taken for granted and used as a foundation for one’s very
identity (part of the frame of the window through which we
look) becomes open to observation and assessment (seen through
the pane of that window). As people grow, they begin to be able
to think about, consider, criticize and make decisions about
things that before they could not because they were completely
taken for granted before – they were initially subjective and have
since become objective. This growth moves a person from
intolerance (towards others who are different and towards one’s
own shadows) toward more tolerance and acceptance (of others
and of self). A person in transition to a higher level of ego
development must deal with grieving the loss of the ‘innocence’
left behind (a “partial ego death”), with the fear of the unknown
up ahead, and with the staunch support of those around him to
stay in status quo and not progress.
The ego has withdrawn from the throne, recognized its
rightful place as hired manager within the constellation of
psychic citizens, and lives more in peace with its intrapsychic
neighbors.
Jung found that after the personal unconscious has been investigated, and so
the ego defences sufficiently gone into, a change begins to occur. It becomes
increasingly realized that the personality is not controllable by the conscious
mind, which is only part and not even the centre of an inner psychic reality. At
first this fact is only vaguely appreciated by the ego, which yet, slowly,
abdicates from its supposedly dominant position; as this happens the
Hartman & Zimberoff: Immanent Transcendence, Projection and Re-collection
transpersonal archetypal forms, laden with affect, come more and more into
the field of consciousness as fantasy images; if the ego relates to these
adequately a development begins and progresses in a fairly regular way which
can be described in terms of a sequence of images. . . . it culminates in the
emergence of symbols of the self, around whose centre the process
‘circumambulates’ (Fordham, 1958, p. 51).
This drive toward individuation is apparently a spontaneous urge, not under
the leadership of the ego, but of the archetypal movement in the unconscious,
the non-ego, toward the fulfillment of the specific basic pattern of the
individual, striving toward wholeness (Perry, 1953, p. 45).
It has been stated by critics and sympathizers that Jung was a ‘mystic’, or a
throwback to pre-Enlightenment medievalism, who equated the self with God,
mixed up categories of transcendence and immanence, and put the psyche on
a symbolic par with Divinity. . . . Jung’s depth psychology represents a postEnlightenment, post-secular, post-humanistic vision of the human as a
material/spiritual being whose psyche links earth and heaven, the here and the
beyond, the finite and the infinite. It is a radical attempt to break out of
modernity without regressing to medievalism (Stein, 2008, p. 305).
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Index of Back Issues of the Journal
All issues are available
13(1), Spring, 2010
Literature Review: Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy Citations
12(2), Autumn, 2009
The Hero’s Journey of Self-transformation: Models of Higher
Development from Mythology
The Creation and Manifestation of Reality through the Reenactment of Subconscious Conclusions and Decisions
12(1), Spring, 2009
11(2), Autumn, 2008
11(1), Spring, 2008
Higher Stages of Human Development
Dream Journey: A New Heart-Centered Therapies Modality
10(2), Autumn, 2007
10(1), Spring, 2007
Collecting Lessons: A Fable – book by David Hartman
Traumatic Growth and Thriving with Heart-Centered Therapies
9(2), Autumn, 2006
9(1), Spring, 2006
Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies
Soul Migrations: Traumatic and Spiritual
8(2), Autumn, 2005
8(1), Spring, 2005
Healing Mind, Body, and Soul in Chronic Pain Clients
Trauma, Transitions, and Thriving
7(2), Autumn, 2004
7(1), Spring, 2004
Corrective Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Process
Existential Resistance to Life: Ambivalence, Avoidance & Control
6(2), Autumn, 2003
A Buddhist Perspective in Heart-Centered Therapies
Heart-Centered Therapies and the Christian Spiritual Path
The Existential Approach in Heart-Centered Therapies
Ego States in Heart-Centered Therapies
Gestalt Therapy and Heart-Centered Therapies
Hypnotic Trance in Heart-Centered Therapies
Transpersonal Psychology in Heart-Centered Therapies
6(1), Spring, 2003
5(2), Autumn, 2002
5(1), Spring, 2002
Memory Access to our Earliest Influences
Attachment, Detachment, Nonattachment: Achieving Synthesis
4(2), Autumn, 2001
4(1), Spring, 2001
Four Primary Existential Themes in Heart-Centered Therapies
Existential Issues in Heart-Centered therapies: A Developmental
Approach
3(2), Autumn, 2000
The Ego in Heart-Centered Therapies: Ego Strengthening and Ego
Surrender
Hypnotic Psychotherapy in the Identification of Core Emotional
Issues
3(1), Spring, 2000
2(2), Autumn, 1999
2(1), Spring, 1999
Breathwork: Exploring the Frontier of ‘Being’ and ‘Doing’
Heart-Centered Energetic Psychodrama
Personal Transformation with Heart-Centered Therapies
1(1), Autumn, 1998
The Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy Modality Defined
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