Alan Bore

20th Apr 20209th May 2020

Transformation – Rebirth

“One alchemical statement says that death is the conception of the Philosophers’ Stone. The death of the ego, or the ego experiencing itself as dying, is very often the prelude to the birth of awareness of the self. Jung makes the profound statement in Mysterium that “the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” That’s because an encounter with the greater thing always has a wounding and damaging effect, initially, on the lesser thing. And the experience of guilt belongs to this whole phenomenon of defeat and inadequacy and wounding.” Edinger (1994) P29/30

17th Apr 20209th May 2020

The Dead Mother

As I look back at the early consultations there was a hungry and aggressive edge to them. My thinking at this time was that J’s inner world was finally ‘being seen’ and felt in a way previously unknown to her. There was an intense hunger to J that often seemed overwhelming and suffocating, causing me to retreat into states of literal comatose and unconsciousness, redolent of her mother whom J reported as ‘emotionally dead, untouchable and unreachable’. In referring to such deadness in The Dead Mother Complex, Andre Green skilfully describes this paralysing dynamic: “an image which has been constituted in the child’s mind following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of certain patients…and weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic future..[The] dead mother … is a mother which remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care” (Green A, 1986 P142)

17th Apr 20205th May 2020

Rebirth

It is the time of year to think about how we have come out of hibernation and feel renewed due to our own internal rebirth. This is the time to explore your internal world to make new your commitments to life.