Personal Spirituality and the Holy.2

In the previous blog, I talked about what the "numinosum" or the "holy is, how it may manifest itself in the human psyche, how it may help overcome certain emotional or psychological blockages and free those whom it may visit for further development. In this second part of the article, I shall continue to discuss Corbett's view on how the holy may work in the psycho-therapeutic context, its relation with what has been called "self-objects" , and how it may in fact be used to defend a subject against further psychological development , and how the holy's dark side may manifest itself, how it may damage the fragile self and how its appearance in the psyche may actually become a source of anxiety and how the holy may impact a narcissistic personality.

 

Some psychotherapists believe that the most crucial part of the psychotherapeutic relationship is the kind of trust which the subject has in the psycho-therapist and how the latter's sensitivity, honesty and the dynamics of the latter's personality affect the therapeutic relationship e.g Carl Rogers. Usually, this relationship of transference and counter-transference of childhood material is understood at the purely personal level but transpersonal or archetypal materials may also be involved. Here Jung's central concept is the alchemist concept of coniunto (joining together of opposites): the connection happens not only between the therapist and his subject but both of them may be immersed in a more global psychological field constituted by the transpersonal Self. The transpersonal Self itself may also help the patient to integrate previously unmanageable material and the consolidation of poorly formed structures within the patient's personality. The transpersonal Self is unitary, unlike the personal self and has no boundaries and a supraordinate archetypal constellation may unfold itself autonomously in the inter-subjective field between the therapist and his patient and powerfully affect its outcome. Some think that there may be mutual support, complementarity, subtle incremental gradations of change within the psyche and the consummation consists not only of opposites but of whatever is missing in either party to the relationship to make him feel whole e.g more masculinity, more femininity, more fathering or mothering, ie. a "self-object" need.( some person which the patient needs to maintain cohesion, vitality or integrity of his self and his sense of well-being). To Jung, elements of the Self (the archetypal basis of personality or self) incarnate itself into a person's self as individuation proceeds: self-object needs and relationship start at infancy and remain needed throughout life: we are linked to each other by relationshjps which act as kind of "glue" to bind people together. The Self is the ultimate source of this glue.

 

According to Corbett, we have 6 self-object needs eg. mirror needs (the need for affirmation, confiramtion of our value, emotional attunement and resonance, to be approved of, seen, wanted, appreciated and accepted and as we develop, we need to transform healthy infantile grandiosity and exhibitionism into mature adult self-esteem, normal levels of ambition, pride in performance and an inner sense of one's worth).idealization needs (the need to be merged with or at least linked or intimately connected to a figure of high status, importance who is respected, admired, wise, protective and strong to soothe, calm and inspire us when we are faced with uncertainty, risk in our search for meaning and goals so that we may have an inner sense of direction based on our own ideals and goals) twinship, kinship or alter ego needs (the need to be same as others, sharing the same kind of beliefs, attitudes and values as the other member of that kind of group and of being understood by them) need for creativity self-object ( the need to briefly merge with another person in a period of taxing creativity) need for an adverserial self-object (the need for a benign adversary acting as an opposing force to stimulate our own activity so as to confirm our sense of autonomy and in that sense be supportive) efficiency need (the need to feel that we have an effect on others and that we are able to evoke what we need from him). No man is an island. We always live in relationships and need to have affectively important relationship with various self-objects who fulfil our different needs. Often we need others unconsciously to act as a part of our self and to carry out functions our own self cannot provide for itself and in this way act as extension of our self. They are thus like cement for the developing self. The child's structural integrity and vitality are determined by the qualities of his self-object relationships which are used as building blocks of his own sense of self.  To the extent that there are deficits, when the needed self-objects are unresponsive to the child's unfolding needs, the self will develop various structural deficits and proneness to fragmentation and when he grows up, he will continue to seek the same. The mirror hungry or the idealization hungry will lack the internal glue which makes him/her feel whole and will constantly search for cohesion externally through relationships or situation which will provide what is missing. In the therapeutic situation, such needs will surface and if responded to adequately, the deficit within the self will be healed because the self-object experience is internalized in the context of the relationship with the therapist and if so, the patient will feel integrated and alive but when such relationship is disrupted because of a separation or the therapist's traumatic behavior, the patient will feel devitalized and fragmented. In a good therapeutic relationship, a therapist who is sensitive to the spiritual needs of the patient will meet the patient's need for the Self to incarnate.

 

Corbett describes one such experience of the incarnation of the Self in a therapeutic situation. After a prolonged and severe depression, a woman related a dream to her therapist: "I am walking in a mountain meadow which is a blaze of color, mountain peaks and yellow and purple floweers are in the background. I come upon a large chest with a rounded top, which I open. Suddenly I am filled with golden light and lovew with pours out of the chest. Christ appears from the chest, surrounded by the light, and smiles at me. I am engulfed by the light and love, which is so powerful that I become love and light. Christ, the light and the love slowly fade away, and I am once again by myself, but now I am filled with light and love that I know will never leave me.". When the woman told the dream, the way she related it greatly moved the therapist and enormous emotional intensity filled the therapist's body whch felt as if it were filled to bursting with the sensation of a huge ball in the chest, ringing in his ears and trembling: it was a profound experience of union, of coniunctio. The Self affected both the patient and the therapist: the boundaries between the two fell away for both and the transference and counter-transference are motivated by the Self in a very specific manner, moivng both towards wholeness. . 

 

Sometimes, it is possible that the archetypal materials in the form of dreams may be used defensively to avoid dealing with the problems of the personal self. By focusing on the striking images from dreams and fantasy, some people ignore the fact that their everyday life is in a mess. Such individuals may present themselves for analysis loaded with volumes of spectacular dreams while their marriage and children are in dire trouble, thus strengthening their splitting defences. Such disavowal may occur when they involve materials too intense to be tolerated, especially when they force the subject to face materials that belong to the shadow side of their personality. In such cases , the numinosum may appear terrifying. Sometimes, a man may use his social activism to defend against the personal difficulties caused by certain childhiood deprivation which now causes him to neglect himself and his own family. He may have a dream that represent his personal shadow which may also be an experience of the dark side of the Self referring to the larger and more general social problem of suffering children. Shadow elements within the personality such as primitive rage, sadism, destructiveness, envy, hatred and terror are not normally thought of as having any primary religious significance but they may be the effects of negative complexes so painful that subjects may initially reject them until the pressure of the transpersonal psyche absolutely overwhelms his defensive structures e.g Charles Dicken's Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, a hard, mean, sharp, cold and bitter person who rejects all attempts to move his emotions, totally lacking in empathy, morose, melancholy, isolated and pathologically narcissistic. On Christmas eve, he is visited by his dead partner Marley who when alive was exactly like him. Initially, he tried to dismiss him as just an "undigested piece of mutton" but when he pointed out to Scrooge that he turned mean because of certain painful childhood experiences which made him cynical about human nature, he allowed such repressed emotions to resurface and dimly realized that  such cynical attitude was merely his defence against the deeply felt wound of rejection, depression and bitter disappointment, which he had to erect to protect his childhood self against further hurt. He cannot risk being open to love becasuse he needs it so intensely that he is terrified to risk another failure to get it.This is quite typical of people who cannot receive what is offered because he is ashamed to acknowledge his need. But the spirit of Christmas took him back to his childhood and show him the intense pathos of his childhood deprivations as a boy, how he sobbed all alone when ignored by his family. The memories of childhood soften his heart and allow him to cry again and as he does so, he develops again the capacity for empathy for the suffering of others. He hears a conversation with a loving woman who leaves him because she realizes how afraid and empty he is, and how his greed for money is related to his fear of the world. He clutches to money to fill his emotional void: he replaces his emotional emptiness with monetary abundance and substitutes the pale illusion of material security for real emotional security. He needs constant external sources of enhancement and such
self-objects as money or success to bolster his fragile sense of self
because his " inner world is populated by pathogenic introjects or
negatively toned complexes, which only cause pain without soothing  .Then a further vision shows him that the alternative to change is the
prospect of a lonely death.  These powerful experiences finally break through his defences and put him in touch with his inner emotional hurts and forces consciousness upon him. Because their childhood contact with the Self was envied, ridiculed, appropriated or attacked, some people are afraid to rely on numinous experience because it is associated with traumatogenic responses from their self-object milieu.

 

Archetypal experience is often difficult to assimilate simply because of the raw intensity of the affect it generates. Affect integration is thus often impaired by serious narcissistic difficulties. Defences are often necessary for self preservation, for the maintenence of the integrity of the self despite the lack of childhood self-object and for prventing further weakening by unbearable anxiety or shame and the against the eruption of desperate need, rage, envy and other affect which cannot be integrated because they are socially disapproved. Therefore the more narcisstically vulnerable we are, the more easily we fragment, the more rigidly we must maintain a particular set of attitudes and views about ourselves in order to hold ourselves together: we struggle to maintain a defensive self-image through power, status, money or whatever we need to protect or shore up an enfeebled self. The more the self feels endangered, the more defence predominates and the more likely we are to exhibit narcisstic rage, erotization, projection or other characterological mechanisms. Rigid defence is needed by more fragile personalities, but the problem is that the numinosum may not respect this need. If the affect generated by the experience is too intense, collapse of the self or psychosis may result.

 

To Corbett, one of the reasons why Jungian psychology is unpopular in academic psychology department is that the experience of the numinous is so unpredictable: the numinous may come and go at its own pace and respects no neat theories of how things should happen. The numinous may press for change in a direction contrary to the ego's established norms, grandiose defences such as pressures for academic success are threatened and if they cannot withstand the pressure of the numinosum, they collapse, producing depression or anxiety. the spirit is resisted to prevent such dysphoria. Becuse the archetype may try to provide what is needed to restore what is missingf for the individuation of the self, true religious experience is potentially frightening and may be related to areas of great difficulties. Because the child is unable to contain or bind the level of anxiety the numinosum engenders, adult help may be needed. Hence the need for defence even for adults.

 

Some features of religious fundamentalism may also be explained by narcissism. Narcissistic difficulties may reinforce fundamentalist attitudes. Dogma about eternal verities may often be used to buttress personal fragility, either because it may be unbearably painful to have to face the numinosum, even when modified by ritual or symbol or because one has to defend against problems within the personality. Thus a fragile self-sructure may resort to pathological narcissistic grandiosity to maintain the integrity of its self. Therefore, to enhance their own integrity, religious  fundamentalists will often deprecate the religious values of other people. When self-esteem is low, this devaluation may arise simply because of envy. Sometimes, to bind specific anxieties e.g sexuality, inferiority, or fear of women, it may be necessary to cling to a particular literal, inerrant understanding of a sacred text. e.g using the anti-sexual or mysogynistic bias of some aspects of Christian dogma to avoid having to deal with one's own sexual inhibitions.

 

An intense need for twinship or for feeling the same as others may lead to religious tribalism and exclusiveness (only we are saved, not the others). Religious affiliation with God, the guru, the community or the church may enhance personality integration and reduce anxiety for precarious personal integration because the numinous may serve as powerful self-objects. But the price to be paid is dogmatism, intolerance and lack of freedom to experience God in a uniquely personal way. Fixed dogmatic assertions and literalism will help maintain a degree of narcissistic equilibrium of the fragile personality by helping to reduce uncertainty.

 

Sometimes, an individual's spiritual life may be rigid because it is needed to bind core anxieties. Thus narcissistic characters may often use religious practice to bolster grandiose defences. If so, instead of being relativized by spiritual practice, the self may become inflated as a result of identification with the Self, leading to arrogance: the experience of being idealized by followers is used to feed a hunger for affirmation and if so, it may later lead to untempered inflation and corruption by power of the religious guru, Because the leaders offer no chance for such idealization to be resolved, their followers are stuck in an addictive, transference-like relationship based on infantile needs, with the leader exploiting the true believer's hunger for authentic religious experience.Sometimes, disavowal may allow the affect that should be attached to an experience not to be felt without blocking perception itself so that the action that would naturally follow can be ignored. Thus dreams are treated as "circuit clearing" of the brain and other numinous experiences are dismissed as hallucinatory, regressive, wish fulfilling or primary process to make them manageable. Some may resort to using science to maintain their own defence against numinous experience.

 

According to Meister Eckhart, "He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing". According to him, some remain self-centred while appearing outwardly pious. But for him, spiritual poverty means letting go of one's own will in favor of the will of God and letting go of one's knowledge so that God may be free to do whatever he wills within us. If we preserve some internal place where we insist on being "me", then we preserve a distinction between myself and God. He prefers a radically non-dual position, like that of Advaita Vedanta which is that "I and God are actually one". Thinking, willing, knowing are wanting because they are derived from the ego, and are inevitably predicated on limited information, distorted further by developmental factors.They will prevent the Self from living its own life within us. Eckhart defines wisdom as full attention to what is immediately at hand, taking delight in it, and doing it wholeheartedly without asssuming that we really should be doing something "more important.". We must turn ourselves into mere messengers of God. In Jung's word, the archetype is an "organ of God" within the psyche. But the divine may manifest itself intrapsychically not only through our pathology but may also act upon a basically healthy psyche. Thus when we lay ourselves open to the Self, the personal self will become more and more relativized and will no longer be so dependent on the illusory resources of self-enhancement.

 

For the psychologist, doctrinal notions of God are usually anthropomorphisms coloured by both personal psychology and commitments to a traditional view. Hence whether we adopt the method of theology or that of psychology, the study of "God" as an experience inextricably includes the study of psychology. Since we are predisposed to project our own unconscious material onto the unknown, concepts of God are a fruitful source of information about the psyche of man, but not about that beyond the psyche, which cannot be known.