Contents

"beginnings"

 

• Editors's Notes                                                                          Maureen O'Donnell                Announcements: Graduation at the Institute                                                                        

• Poetry:
  For a New Beginning (O'Donahue)

                                                                                         volume  1 .   summer  2014
 

Cover picture is used with the permission of the Bildarchiv .  Copyright by C. G. Jung Institute Zürich  

 

   

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The Alumni are looking forward to welcoming the new graduates as fellow Diplomates of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich, Küsnacht.  It is expected that there will be several new analysts swelling our ranks.  Each one has much to be proud of, and each has worked very hard towards the moment of graduation.  We wish them the very best.

 

 

Nancy Robinson-Kime

 

The grouping of pictures according to themes amplified specific images and concepts but, in removing pictures from their original series, did not convey the progression of the therapeutic process. To address this issue, Rudolf Michel re-grouped images according to case numbers but did so using an index card system that with the advent of computers would eventually be replaced. By the early 1980’s, under curator Michael Edwards, the additional problem of preserving the original images became pressing. During his tenure, the entire collection was properly stored.  The 4,000 image collection was placed on 35mm slides (in triplicate) to create a reference, lending, and reserve library of images, and a Xerox print catalogue was compiled. By 1989, under curator Cecilia Rost, preparatory work began on creating a “definitive” computer database of images according to various parameters such as case code, date, title and number of picture, age and gender of patient, comments written by and information about the patient, as well as information of the publication or use of images where available. With advances in technology, however, this original data-base became increasingly obsolete, the data accessible only with difficulty, the computer unreliable. From 1997 onwards, various efforts made toward digitizing the images and updating the computer database were subject to funding difficulties alongside increasingly expensive and complicated technology.
 
In November 2013 the combined efforts of current curator Vicente de Moura, Robert Hinshaw (for many years overseeing the Bildarchiv—succeeded in 2014 by  Ruth Ammann), and the Curatorium led to the purchase of a new computer and scanner to digitize the 4,000 images at a high resolution for both book and slide format. The obsolete data-base, revised and updated by Philip Kime, now has a user friendly format that will include thumb nail pictures of each image and allow for fast, easy access to the archive using multiple classifications. We look forward to an anticipated completion date of Spring 2015 in this current step toward digitizing a resource toward which so many individuals have lent their energies over so many years.
 

recognized the One Soon To Be
in the swan, and she knew:
what he asked for was something
which, confused in her defending,
she could no longer keep from him…
Leda   .   Rilke
 
Individuation becomes an actuality
by being imaged in a particular…
Defense & Telos in Dreams  .   Berry *
 
Nancy Robinson-Kime

    
These two books examine and expound on Wolff’s work, Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1956).  Antonia "Toni" Wolff is best known for her lifelong relationship with Carl and Emma Jung.  Carl and Toni never discussed their personal relationship with others and destroyed all correspondence there was between them.  The relationship between Emma and Toni was grounded in their shared experience of the cultural bounds for women in the early 20th C. Both were  impassioned by the complexities of the psyche and the feminine soul, in particular. 

Both women navigated the intricacies of the relationship with grace and intelligence while individually developing their interests and scholarly works. It was a complex triangular relationship in which the principles of Jungian psychology emerged.
    
Wolff significantly contributed to Jung’s conception of the inner life and worked closely with him on his Psychological Types, and his insights into the individuation process.  Toni Wolff was an analyst, writer, teacher and one of the progenitors of feminine psychology. 
    
In Structural Forms, Wolff describes four archetypes present in the female psyche:  Mother, Amazon, Hetaira, and Medial Woman. Wolff’s main thesis is that woman, as the feminine principle, is the principle of relatedness, and therefore relationships are the container in which her individual growth develops (an English version of Structural Forms can be found on-line at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA0000582/00001/1j).

In Four Eternal Women, each form is broadly examined characterizing both the persona and shadow aspects. An emphasis is placed on finding the forms in popular cultural figures and fictional characters in film and books. The breadth in which the material is presented is outstanding.  There are stories of Aphrodite to Heloise to Eleanor Roosevelt to Barbie! The portrayal of the ways the feminine forms look in relationship to each other,  men, children, and careers is also extensive.
    
While Four Eternal Women is expansive and serves as a good introduction and popular perusal of the material for the general reader, it is not an in-depth study of Wolff's schema and the relevance these archetypal structures have for women today. For example, included in the section on the Medial Woman is the text of a phone interview with a psychic reader.  But the Medial Woman is more complex than her ability to “channel”.  Wolff says in Structural Forms about the Medial Woman,  “...one must not think of parapsychology, although the common medium represents its lowest, i.e. most unconscious level” (p. 11).   In Structural Forms, Wolff emphasizes that the feminine archetypes do not necessarily coincide with one’s outer life, but with the inner forms that lie in the psyche.         

In Toni Wolff’s Forms, Fitzgerald recognizes that the forms are ways of knowing.  One is not just Mother or has motherly qualities, but has a “Matrilineal knowing”.   Fitzgerald also gives the material a more therapeutic understanding by creating clinical vignettes where the pains and sorrows of women’s lives are reflected upon.  She writes, “Wolff believed that resolving the suffering which brings women into therapy depends upon understanding relationships” (p. 13).  It is in the relationship that wounding occurs and understanding the schema of kinship for each feminine form leads to healing.

Fitzgerald created six fictional therapists who explore the feminine forms in hypothetical session with patients. This exploration of the four different archetypal forms requires a circling around the connections and longings in the patient’s life with a mutual reverie for consciousness and integration. Fitzgerald writes about this process with an esteemed devotion. She brings her eco-feminist and multi-cultural understanding to the archetypes and acknowledges that the relational matrix of the feminine reaches beyond personal relationships to the connectivity of all life forms.

Fitzgerald uses dreams and active imagination to create a work that penetrates the psyche. While reading her book I had a dream where some women I have known in my life embodied the various archetypes outlined by Wolff.  The dream transformed my consciousness regarding these women and my inner relationships to the feminine archetypal forms.

Both books emphasize that a woman must not restrict herself to experiencing just one archetypal form.  Much like Jung’s writings on his Types, to fully individuate one must experience and broaden one’s access to the inner forms.  Wolff believed that Jung’s Types were more a masculine/cognitive schema of typology, while hers is more feminine/relational. However, because both men and women can heal through relationship, Wolff’s forms are useful to men as well as women, and can be used to understand a man’s anima.

In Wolff’s time, it was more likely that a woman’s outer life was restricted to personifying one of the inner forms.  Today, a modern woman has more choices and therefore these structural forms can manifest in a variety of ways.  As we help our patients to individuate we can conceptualize these feminine archetypes and discern where growth can occur so life is filled with vitality and connection.

Note: The publisher of Wolff’s Studien za C. G. Jungs Psychologie, Daimon Verlag, is working on an English translation due out in the next year or two.

 

For a New Beginning
by John O'Donahue

FoIn out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
 

 

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