Thursday, October 27, 2011

Commemorating Mel Marshak: 1926-2010

This post commemorates the life of Dr. Mel Marshak who died in her home in Thousand Palms, California on October 23rd, 2010.  Marshak grew up in California, completing her undergraduate studies in psychology at San Francisco State University in 1951. Shortly thereafter she moved to London where she completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1956 and medical school in 1965, both at London University. She completed her analytic training with the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in 1960 and residency training in neurology in 1966. Mel was active in the SAP as a training analyst and instructor from 1961 to 1981 as well as professional activities with the British Association of Psychotherapists from 1979 to 1981. During this time she also held consulting positions with a number of London hospitals and clinics, including the Hounslow Child Guidance Center, Woodberry Down Child Guidance Center, Hampstead Child Guidance Center (The Anna Freud Centre), and the Tavistock Clinic. She was a founding member of the Jung/Freud Clinical Group in London and later, in the USA, formed the Independent Society of Analytical Psychology, a non-affiliated inter-disciplinary psychoanalytic study group.

Upon returning to California in 1982 she became active in a number of Jungian and psychoanalytic programs in the USA, including the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, the C.G. Jung Institutes of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the C.G. Jung Institute of Pittsburgh, and was on the faculty of the Memphis Jungian Seminar (a training affiliate of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts) for over a decade.

Mel possessed a keen sense of humor, an ability to play within the analytic material, and she often provided an embodied sense of how the analyst’s love could impact the analytic situation. Although Dr. Marshak published over thirty articles during the course of her career, her greatest strength was in her role as a supportive, challenging, and stimulating instructor and supervisor. She was extremely devoted to the analytic process and effectively transmitted that passion to her students. Dr. Marshak continued tosupervise until the last weeks of her life. Mel also had strong, diverse interests in art, poetry, music and literature, and during one period of her life was a professional jazz drummer. She was endowed with a great intellect, arigorous analytic attitude,and a richness of spirit rivaled by few.  She is deeply missed by those whose lives she influenced.


"Psychoanalysis might now be seen as a combination of two perspectives, intrapsychic and intersubjective. The term 'intrapsychic' needs very little comment in that it is all we mean by internal objects and part objects. Intersubjective does not mean interpersonal, or is it interactive or interaction. Intersubjective means that two subjects relate, keeping in mind that there is a subject only for another subject. In this formulation the significance of intersubjectivity lies in intentionality. . . .'What do you want from me?' The question cannot be posed unless each of us considers our own intrapsychic world, our previous history, the organisation of our individual thoughts, desires, deeds, volitions, etc. And while each addresses the individual intrapsychic world in order to relate intersubjectively, each individual response will have an indirect and unknown effect, not only on the other's subjectivity, but also - though in a manner totally unknown - on their own intrapsychic world, inducing other intersubjective effects. . . .Intersubjectivity postulates that the other must be recognised as another subject in order for the self to experience fully his or her own subjectivity in the other's presence. The intersubjective theory constrasts with the logic of subject and object which has been predominant in philosophy and science in the western world. The intersubjective dimension of the analytic relationship aims to change the subject-object to: 'where objects were, subjects must be'."

Mel Marshak (1998) The Intersubjective Nature of Analysis, in Ian Alister and Christopher Hauke (Eds.) Contemporary Jungian Analysis: Post-Jungian Perspectives from the Society of Analytical Psychology, Routledge: London.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Grotstein on the Death Instinct and Nothingness

"To this notion I seek to introduce its dialectic the experience of the awesome force of powerlessness, of defect, of nothingness, of "zero-ness"expressed, not just as a static emptiness but as an implosive, centripetal pull into the void. I should like to link and to contrast meaninglessness with nothingness, its inexorable "Siamese-twin", where the former comprises content without meaning or deprived of meaning, i.e., those "ghosts of abandoned meaning" which Bion (1962) termed the "beta prime elements" of "nameless dread"and the latter constitutes the empty matrix and "container" of meaninglessness.

In introducing the dialectic of nothingness/meaninglessness, I also wish to refer to the paradoxical dialectic of the instinctual drives. They have always been considered to be a powerful, peremptory biological force which impose themselves upon the mental apparatus for satisfaction. It has rarely been considered, except by Lacan and those whom he has influenced, that the drives are semiotic signifiers, i.e., messengers of a state of distressful emptiness, hunger, a nothingness waiting to become filled with something. Stated another way, what is the worst fear a human being can experience, the total irruption of the drives into the ego or disintegration of the self and objects, disappearance, dissolution the advent of meaninglessness and nothingness? Further, I shall link meaninglessness with the experience of randomness and correlate them with the phenomenon of chaos.

Although I affirm Klein's (1935) belief in the inherent origins of primal destructiveness and her conception of the death instinct, as originally formulated by Freud (1920), I shall argue that the death instinct is also a passive vehicle of expression (signifier) of the anticipation and realization of the apocalyptic experience of the "black hole" phenomenon (the signified). The death instinct is our preparedness to anticipate and therefore to adapt to (regulate) this ultimate horror. The death instinct, in other words, constitutes our reminder that we all inwardly cringe on the "event horizon" of "annihilation's waste"with entropy (meaninglessness) and nothingness as our companions. Thus, the operation of the death instinct can be thought of as a dialectic, one aspect conveying the inherent preconception and apocalyptic pre-perception of the "black hole" as an experience-"released" anticipation and the other aspect including the pre-adaptive aggression, assertiveness, and self-and-species protectiveness to cope with prey-predator danger.
(pp. 258-259)

James Grotstein (1990). Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Chaos, and the "Black Hole" I: The Importance of Nothingness, Meaninglessness, and Chaos in Psychoanalysis, Contemporary. Psychoanalysis, Vol. 26, pp. 257-290.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Bisagni - Some Conceptual Parallels Between Bion and Jung

"Apart from the notion of archetype as unsaturated expectation of the encounter—which can help us in assuming a potential for an outgrowth even in autistic children—Jung’s concept of symbolic attitude is crucial. Jung says: ‘the symbolic attitude . . . is the outcome of a definite view of the world which assigns meaning to events, whether great or small, and attaches to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts’ (Jung 1937, para. 899). This is in my opinion very close to what Bion calls the psychoanalytic mind, as a primary quality of the mother to give meaning and build sense in her baby, with regards to the human disposition to search for sense. Such a quality, that may look obvious when we work with more evolved analysands, is terribly hard to keep alive in the analyst when working with the absolute non-mental states of autistic children, and it is even harder again to assume it to be a potential in them.

The notions of pre-conception (Bion) and of archetype (Jung) are very helpful in working with autistic children and, in general, with those analysands who suffer severe impairments in their capacity for symbolization. These notions actually help the analyst in assuming that some proto-trace of representational potential is always present in the individual, and may be appropriately developed if the object is able to provide its fundamental action as a complex and multidetermined subject, deeply involved as a reclaiming object in the analytic relationship. Such a role is essentially played in the function of transforming adhesive bi-dimensional identifications—that trace back to a flattened nonmental world—into projective tri-dimensional identifications, which result in a move from the use of reality in terms of autistic shapes and autistic objects, towards a more evolved and live symbolic use. Such a transformative action can be defined as the prototypical work of the transcendent function."
(pp. 269-270)

 

Francesco Bisagni (2010) Out of nothingness: rhythm and the making of words, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 55, pp. 254–272

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Richardo Bernardi on the Need for Controversy in the Development of Psychoanalysis


"Scientific controversies are necessary, despite their difficulties. Some of the difficulties mentioned above probably crop up in all fields of knowledge. Other problems, which I will concentrate on here, are typical of debates between theories that, though they belong to a single discipline, diverge in their way of comprehending the particular discipline's methodological and epistemological criteria. This is frequently the case with psychoanalysis and with the social sciences. The possibility of true debates between members of different psychoanalytical cultures challenges psychoanalysis on two fronts. From the epistemological side, it tests the discipline's capacity to create a unitary field for argumentation when there are differences in premises. But, as the same time, this invites us to work on the psychoanalytic understanding of whatever unconscious factors encumber the dialogue.

When controversies erupt between psychoanalytic approaches differing in their premises, it becomes so difficult to circumscribe the discussion to particular theoretical or technical problems. Though not always explicitly, examining argumentative discourses reveals that what is being discussed, too, is each party's way of conceiving the rationality and scientific nature of psychoanalysis, that is, the type of scientific reasoning each party uses to substantiate its theoretical and technical postulates. For their part, the points where the discussion founders indicate problems the discipline cannot resolve because it has not been able to establish pertinent procedures acceptable to all parties.

Two situations of this kind deserve special notice. First, there is the difficulty of discerning the particular nature of each issue that could be included in the debate. Absent this, there is no way of identifying the most appropriate methodology for approaching each issue. For example, in the above-mentioned discussion on structuralism and Brentano's philosophy, for the debate to advance it would have been necessary first to specify the different levels of the problem, and then separate the purely philosophical debate from the consequences for psychoanalytical practice of particular philosophical ideas. This distinction would have also made it possible to take the discussion on to a terrain accessible to analytical experience. Let us mention a second example: if the discussion had considered the consequences of the two ways of conducting an analysis, it would then have been pertinent to debate the different methodologies that could be used to ascertain the results of analysis, thus broadening the scope of the discussion. Emphasising methodological problems imparts a particular direction to the debate, for it implies debating not so much what is known as how we get to know (Tuckett, 1998, p. ).

A second obstacle jeopardising progress in the controversies was how difficult it was for each party to include their premises and suppositions in the discussion. When each position locks itself into its suppositions, the situations of seeming incommensurability that I have analysed here are created. In this case, divergences at the epistemological level made it difficult to find common criteria for evaluating the quality of the argumentation. Even so—as we have seen—it is possible to create a shared argumentative field if people accept comparing the different positions on the basis of what each of them contributes in terms of theoretical intelligibility or clinical efficacy. More than a comparative confrontation of theoretical or clinical arguments piecemeal, what proves useful in these cases is a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the way each position interweaves theoretical ideas with clinical practice.

At this juncture, we can see that reaching consensus is not the sole aim of controversies. Rather, we must manage them so that the different hypotheses interact and in so doing acquire better foundations. This is the way to further the development of the discipline. We might also expect that the effort of looking at the problem from different perspectives should lead to personal development. Debate can materialise only if there is the willingness to engage in it, that is, if desire and hope predominate, so that in the course of the discussion we find something we had not thought about previously, or at least not thought about in that way. If as analysts we lose the desire and hope of finding something new, perhaps—to avoid the consequences of professional burnout (Cooper, 1986)—the time for reanalysis has arrived.

Controversies demand a particular intellectual and emotional effort, connected to the acceptance of the other as different. The reward we can expect from such effort does not reside exclusively in a reduction of disagreements; indeed, controversies are also good for developing better substantiated theories, encouraging more careful examination of our clinical evidence and reminding us that there always are alternate hypotheses, whose careful consideration can both lead us to strengthen our previous convictions or see the need to revise and modify them, in both cases carrying us forward in the search for new ideas."
(pp. 869 - 870).
 

Ricardo Bernardi (2002). The Need for True Controversies in Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 83, pp. 851-873

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Schwartz-Salant - Abandonment Depression

"To begin with I should like to focus upon two qualities of consciousness that inform our work as Jungian analysts. One quality allows us to experience events within a space-time matrix. Another allows us to experience the nature of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Within the transference-countertransference process we can move back and forth between these different modes of consciousness. As has often been stressed, personal and archetypal dimensions cannot be separated but they can be experienced as related aspects of an indivisible process (Williams, 19, Eigen 2). To use Jung's metaphor, the sea is the carrier of the individual wave (Jung 9, para. 354).

Jung describes the soul as ‘the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life’ (Jung 10, para. 56). There are, however, deeply alienated areas of the soul, which, as a result of the experience of abandonment, appear to be lifeless. The process of integration of these split-off ardeas highlights the importance of seeing the organic linking of personal and archetypal dimensions within the transference-countertransference process.

Abandonment is a catastrophic experience, different, as Michael Fordham emphasizes, ‘From other forms of separation in which sadness, pining, and grief are experienced’ (Fordham 4). On the one hand, the abandoned one suffers a consummate betrayal, the loss of a loved and needed person. On the other hand, persecution by that same person is experienced. As a result, one's sense of reality is totally threatened: the good has become the bad, the nurturing has become persecutory. From a seeming state of well-being a chaotic state of panic becomes imminent because the entire fabric of one's perception of reality has come into question.

A frantic search for a good object immediately takes over, but the persecutory despair remains so intense that the search is doomed to failure, undone by the chaos and pain which defies the attempt at restitution. The individual's makeshift reality is threatened with each additional possibility of abandonment, and a deep-seated depression, the abandonment depression, dominates the inner world.

In general, the difficult act of engaging this depressed and persecuted quality of a patient's inner life must include establishing a heart-centered, imaginal awareness within which one can experience the dread suffered by the soul. A contact can then be made, but only when the analyst becomes astutely aware that his or her own soul suffers that which the patient suffers. Before this is possible, however, a tortuous path must be traveled, one which is dominated by interactive fields that preclude empathy or any real contact (Schwartz-Salant 18)." (pp. 143-144).

Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1990). The Abandonment Depression: Developmental and Alchemical Perspectives. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 35, pp.143-159.

 

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Robert Wallerstein - Jung and the Common Ground of Psychoanalysis

Dr. Wallerstein is the former President of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

"I look for the commonality and the common ground in the experience - near-clinical phenomena. And the divergences are there in the theoretical explanatory structures that create a particular language in which to explain the clinical phenomena, and those are still not scientific but metaphoric languages whether we're talking ego, id and superego, whether we're talking part objects and whole objects, or depressive and paranoid positions, or cohesive selfobjects and fragmenting selfobjects....I hope it [psychoanalysis] can be kept one discipline, and I think - you see, Freud felt, for reasons suitable to his time in history and all that, that he had to maintain the absolute purity of a purified theoretical structure and that anybody who deviated from it would feel that they had to leave or be pushed off starting with Adler, Jung, and Stekel back in the teens of the century, going all through his lifetime. There are people who are saying today, and I think they're right, if the Jungian viewpoint had arisen today, it would be accomodated within the body of psychoanalysis the way Kohut has been, rather than Jungians feeling they had to leave. The kind of unity that Freud tried to impose was an impossible one because it demanded real orthodoxy." (p. 333)

Robert Wallerstein as interviewed in Virginia Hunter (1994). "Psychoanalysts Talk." The Guilford Press: New York/London.

Friday, October 7, 2011

The Freud-Jung Break in Light of Contemporary Trends

"The authors' argument is that the Freud-Jung battle was in large measure a narcissistic one and that the technical arguments that were the ostensible points of contention seem to us to be much more settled issues than they were to the original protagonists. In fact, the field of depth psychology has progressed to the point that some of the things Freud and Jung argued about, such as the nature of libido, are now of minimal relevance to many analytic practitioners. Many of us no longer depend on libido theory for our clinical formulations. Other disputed areas, such as the importance of the pre-oedipal years, have been clarified and agreed upon as a result of continued clinical experience. Still other bones of contention hardly seem worth fighting over; the issue of the validity of religious belief is no longer a hotly contested one. . . .

Although there are still important areas of disagreement between the Freudian and Jungian traditions, these hardly require the ostracism and defensiveness that has characterized the camps so far. For both men, the break involved the disruption of a self-selfobject tie that resulted in serious narcissistic wounding, and as a result, the baby of their theoretical differences, which could have grown into an interesting child of mixed parentage, was thrown out with the bathwater of their personal relationship. So far, there has been rather little opportunity for their differences to be debated in the light of the evolution of the field since their deaths. But, as Andrew Samuels (1985) has pointed out, despite the rejection of Jung by mainstream psychoanalysis, much of his thought has independently found its way into modern psychotherapeutic practice.

No less an authority than Paul Roazen (1975) noted that: "Few responsible figures in psychoanalysis would be disturbed today if an analyst were to present views identical to Jung's in 1913" (p. 272). To substantiate Roazen's insight, Samuels provides a list of some of the ways in which Jung's ideas have been incorporated into the mainstream of psychotherapy. These are: stress on early preoedipal experiences with mother; the vital part played by innate psychic structures; the creative, purposeful, nondestructive aspects of the unconscious; the forward-looking meaning of symptoms as distinct from their causal reductive aspects; the move away from patriarchal, male-dominated, and phallocentric approaches, with attention to the specific psychology of the feminine; stress on the clinical use of countertransference; the idea that analysis is a mutually transformative endeavor and that the analyst's personality and his or her experience of the analysis is crucial; the idea that regression is potentially useful; the stress on the self rather than the ego, in which the self is the totality of the person and not just a representation in the ego; the fact that the personality is subdivided and can potentially split, creating autonomous splinter psyches, which he calls complexes; the idea that incestuous fantasy can be symbolic and not literal; that issues of the integration and unfolding of the personality (individuation, or the realization of the self's nuclear program) are more important than a stress on genitality; the expansion of therapeutic interest into the second half of life; and the idea that the problems between parents find expression in their children. Surely future historians of the field will ask why, if all of these ideas are found in Jung and all are now more or less acceptable ideas among some psychoanalysts, it happened that Jungian theory became so ostracized and devalued in the larger psychotherapeutic world? Some of this was the result of the opprobrium and ad hominem attacks that Freud's followers heaped onto Jung himself, so that he developed a bad reputation at a time when psychoanalysis dominated American psychiatry. In addition, Jung's interest in a nonreductive approach to religion earned him the title of mystic rather than psychologist. (A similar criticism was directed at Kohut because of his interest in empathy.) Jung's rejection of the exclusively sexual etiology of neurosis in Freud's theory was enough to seal his fate among the early Freudians, but today such rejection does not mean automatic dismissal from the larger psychoanalytic community. Apparently, some of Jung's ideas have gained credence without his early contributions being formally recognized because they have been independently arrived at by other workers. This fact, together with the acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas by Jungian analysts, may mean that the split between the followers of Jung and Freud has begun to heal."(pp. 294-295)

Lionel Corbett and Anne-Lise Cohen (1998). The Freud-Jung Break: Reflections and Revisions in Light of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, Progress in Self Psychology, Vol . 14, pp. 293-328



 
 

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Jacob Arlow - Empathy, Introspection, and Intuition in Interpretation

"First, the analyst had made an identification with the patient, but, with the intrusion of the "extraneous" thought into his mind, he has ceased being the passive recipient of the patient's productions and has taken on the role of observer interpreter. Second, and perhaps most important, is that the analyst's free association, even when it seems random and remote from the theme of the patient's thoughts, represents his inner commentary and beginning perception of the patient's unconscious thought processes. An exception to this is, of course, the situation of extreme countertransference reaction. Third, the analyst's free association represents a form of inner communication to himself, a first step in the awareness of the insight which he is about to apprehend. Fourth, what the analyst has perceived through introspection is the end result of a process of intuition. Intuition consists of being able to organize silently, effortlessly, and outsde of the scope of consciousness the myriad of observations, impressions, facts, experiences, in a word, all that we have learned from the patient into a meaningful pattern without any sense of the intermediate steps involved. When we examine closely the full range of communication between analyst and analysand, such phenomena no longer suggest anything supernatural. The patient uses several modes of communication with the therapist. He expresses himself verbally and nonverbally. Mode of behavior, facial expressions, body posture, different gestures, all transmit meaning which augments, elaborates, or sometimes even contradicts what the patient articulates verbally. The timbre of the voice, the rate of speech, the metaphoric expressions, and the configuration of the material transmit meaning beyond that contained in verbal speech alone. All of these are perceived sometimes subliminally and are elaborated and conceptualized unconsciously, i.e., intuitively. There is something intensely aesthetic and cretive about this mode of functioning. Scientific discoveries and artistic innovations of enormous complexity are known to have originated in precisely the same way. (The similarities between psychoanalysis and the aesthetic process have been discussed by Freud, 1908); (Sachs, 1942); (Beres, 1957); (and Beres and Arlow, 1974.)

In addition to introspection and intuition there is a third process closely related to the way the analyst comes to understand the patient. This is the process of empathy. Empathy facilitates intuition, in fact makes intuition possible. It consists of a transitory or trial identification (Fliess, 1942) with the patient, followed by withdrawal and objective evaluation of the experience of identification. As described above, this takes place innumerable times in the course of the analyst's listening to the patient's productions. He is constantly changing his role from that of a passive recipient in identification with the patient to an active observer and interpreter of his experience, and thereby the patient's. The patient's productions impinge upon the analyst's mind in a manner corresponding to the way in which current realities, past experience, and transference determine which derivatives of the persistent unconscious fantasies will emerge into the patient's consciousess. The process may be compared to the relationship between current reality, i.e., the day residue, and the production of dreams. The shared intimacy of the psychoanalytic situation, the knowledge of secrets confided and desires exposed, intensifies the trend toward mutual identification in the analytic setting and, in the end, serves to stimulate in the mind of the analyst unconscious fantasies either identical with or corresponding to those decisive in the patient's conflicts and development. Analyst and analysand thus become a group of two sharing an unconscious fantasy in common, a feature which Sachs (1942) points out is distinctive for artistic creation.

The insight that comes from introspection, intuition, and empathy constitutes only the first part of the interpretive work. This is the subjective or aesthetic phase of the analyst's response. As intriguing and dramatic as it may be, it has to give way to a second phase of the interpretive process, one that is based on cognition and the exercise of reason. In order to validate his intuitive understanding of what the patient has been saying, the analyst must now turn to the data of the analytic situation. He must put his insight to the test of objective criteria in conformity with the data at hand." (pp. 201-202)

 

Jacob Arlow (1979). The Genesis Of Interpretation. Journal of the Amererican Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 27S, pp. 193-206

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Roger Brooke - Phenomenology and Analytical Psychology

"Firstly, phenomenology is descriptive. The phenomenologist is "obsessed by the concrete" (van den Berg, 1972, p. 76), the perceptively refined articulation of our experiential world. Phenomenology does not concern itself with theoretical construction, casual explanations, or metaphysics, but with the meanings of phenomena as they directly occur. Its aim is to speak of the fundamental structures of psychological life in a way that does not violate the integrity of experience. This heart of the phenomenological approach was Jung's insofar as he consistently refused the direction of psychoanalytic or psychophysiological reductionism, and insisted that the structures of experience be taken on their own terms whether they be lived, imagined, or dreamed.

Secondly, in order to be properly descriptive the phenomenologist has to give up his or her theoretical and philosophical prejudices. This is the "phenomenological reduction," which has been described as "the return to our most original experience of our most original world" (Luijpen, 1969, p. 115). Here we can recall Jung's persistent attacks on rationalism, materialism, and the prejudices of psychoanalysis, and his reasoned return to pre-Renaissance language, which expressed more clearly the structures of our primordial experience (e. g., Jung, 1931). Moreover as Merleau-Ponty (1945) said, "The important lesson which the reduction teaches us in the impossibility of a complete reduction" (p. xiv). This reminds us of Jung's insistence that all knowledge is typologically, historically, and psychologically contextual, and there is no Archimedian point above our existential situation from which we can reflect in perfect clarity.

Thirdly, within the open stance of the reduction, the phenomenologist seeks to articulate the essences of the phenomena, that is, to allow his or her mind or perception to range over the many particular forms of a phenomenon in order to elucidate its essential structure and meaning. Significantly, phenomenologists recognize that the inherent ambiguity and opacity of human existence is such that the essences of human phenomena reveal themselves even as they recede endlessly beyond one's conceptual grasp. This recalls Jung's method of amplification of archetypal themes and his assertion that, even as archetypal images do not point to something other than themselves, their ultimate cores of meaning can never be finally grasped but only ever approached. Further, this revealed-concealed ambiguity binds phenomenology to the hermeneutic circle of understanding, for the revealed and articulated cannot state for all time the nature of the concealed. Jung too binds his method to this circle in his insistence that phenomena need to be continually reinterpreted anew.

Finally, the intentionality of consciousness-broadly and deeply defined, thus including unconscious experience and fantasy-is presupposed in any phenomenological analysis. Intentionality most simply means that consciousness is always "consciousness of something"; it is always relational. However, it is important not to think of this relationality as a sort of connecting link between two fixed and distinct poles. Consciousness does not link subject and object in the way that light links a camera and the world. Rather, intentionality refers to that irreducible occurrence of fundamental openness within which both the world and one's identity as someone come into being. It needs to be added that that openness is not a psychological vacuum but an imaginal matrix (Avens, 1982; Murray, 1986). Intentionality is thus the imaginal precondition for personal identity and the world's disclosure, it is not their derivative. Intentionality recalls Jung's analysis of psychological types, his insistence that even introversion is a way of revealing the world for the consciously introverted person is "unconsciously" extraverted, and his claim that fantasy is the irreducible participant in all psychological functions, even sensation. It is fantasy that consciously and unconsciously weaves one's attitudes and functions into the patterned fabric that is existence, and one's sense of self, others, and the world emerge out of this imaginative existential ground." (pp. 526-527)

Roger Brooke (1996). Analytical Psychology and Existential Phenomenology: An Integration and a Clinical Study. Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 83, pp. 525-545