In past presentations at the Jung Society of Washington and elsewhere, I have lectured about a sophisticated inner system of archetypal defenses, which I called the “Self-care system.” I suggested that this system forms a kind of core complex of the early-traumatized psyche. I described how psychotherapy often becomes a battle between the forces of growth and life on the one hand vs. the anti-life forces of dissociation, shaped by the “Self-care system,” on the other.
In previous lectures, I focused on the inner structure of the system and how it shows up in dreams. In this lecture, I will focus more on the therapeutic process of what this battle actually looks like in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The current term for such dramatic therapeutic “embroilments” is enactments, and two vivid enactments will be presented–one involving “love” and the other involving “hate,” erupting into the transference/counter-transference field.
