Countertransference as Mystical Experience

    
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In these times, many of our clients suffer from deep anxieties.  Frequently, these anxieties reach into the psychic territory of unsymbolized experience: thoughts that cannot be thought, and feelings that cannot be felt. Use of countertransference as a clinical tool was developed so that psychotherapy could reach a broader range of people, to include the unsymbolized aspects of experience common for those who have suffered early relational trauma.

Even so, in the world of countertransference the therapist is always a beginner. The meaning of countertransference is not truly, definitively knowable. It is ephemeral—a momentary flicker from implicit realms. We can only seek to put fluid symbolic meaning onto the somatic or emotional points of light.

In doing so, we may come to think of countertransference as a form of mystical experience.  Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels explores the similarities between mystical experience and countertransference:

"First, mystical states are ineffable; that is, they cannot be fully described to one who has not experienced something similar.  Second, mystical states lead to knowledge and insight, often delivered with a tremendous sense of authority.  Third, mystical states are transient.  Fourth, mystical states happen to a person; even if he or she prepared him/herself, he or she is gripped by a power that feels quite foreign.  Fifth, there is a sense that everything is connected to everything else, an intimation of purpose.  Sixth, the mystical experience is timeless.  Finally, the familiar ego is sensed not to be the real ‘I.’"  (1989, p. 166)

Even “mundane,” ordinary countertransference  may be experienced as mystical as it delivers understanding in an ineffable, timeless way.

Samuels, A. (1989). The plural psyche: Personality, morality and the father. London: Routledge.

    
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The Four Archetypal Relational Fields: Field Two

   

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Field Two: The Field of Twoness/ Rupture

When we find ourselves in Field Two: The Field of Twoness/Rupture, also a field of relational trauma and presymbolic experiencing, our subjective experience is that of intense affective turmoil and discontinuity. In this field we feel “held captive” in relational conflict. We find ourselves embroiled in a struggle with disturbing unconscious contents, intense affect, and mutually activated complexes. It is a field of discomfort, conflict, and difficulty, and often entails a visceral, extremely disturbing experience. A therapist may feel taken over by feelings of anxiety, terror, shame, dread, or physical illness. “Rupture” refers to the ambient anxiety in this field that empathic rupture is imminent. We fear that no matter how hard we try, we will somehow fail to provide holding in a way that avoids this rupture. Yet the sheer dynamic aliveness of this field lends itself to profound transformation. Therapeutic work in this field often requires that the therapist look to her own complexes’ involvement in the field in order to move from, a “feeling against” to a “feeling with.” (The terms “feeling with” and “feeling against” were coined by Kay Bradway (1991; 1997), but she used them in a different context.) The goal is to find within ourselves our own resistance, and to surrender into deep empathy for the primitive, traumatized places we may share with the client.

In the diagram below, the Field Two area is the second ring from the center of the Self In Relationship circle. This represents the emotional core of the Self. The therapeutic goal is to gradually move into embodied, emotionally connected self-reflection, and to establish fluid oscillation between all four fields.

Image by Eric Cheng

   

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Relational Sandplay Therapy and Preverbal Trauma

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Relational Sandplay Therapy is an advanced, post-Kalffian[1] theory for working with preverbal trauma. This kind of trauma is usually due to early maternal deprivation, and is also called early relational trauma.

Kalsched (1996, p. 1) defines this kind of trauma as

"any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. Trauma of this magnitude varies from the acute, shattering experiences of child abuse to the more ‘cumulative traumas’ of unmet dependency needs that mount up to devastating effect in some children’s development (Khan, 1963), including the more acute deprivations of infancy described by Winnicott as ‘primitive agonies,’ the experience of which is ‘unthinkable’ (1963:90). The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut (1977: 104) called ‘disintegration anxiety,’ an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self."

Early relational trauma may be the result of abuse, neglect or a consistent lack of attunement between infant and early caregiver.

Many believe that preverbal trauma may make itself known most immediately through  emotional and bodily resonance with another person (Dahlenberg, 2000). In other words, the therapist may actually have difficult countertransference experiences that indicate the unconscious communication of preverbal trauma. These kinds of experience, to be discussed further, are likely to happen in what I refer to as Field One or Field Two.

References

Dalenberg, C. (2000).  Countertransference and the treatment of trauma.  Washington, DC:  American Psychological Association.

Kalsched, D. (1996). The inner world of trauma: Archetypal defenses of the personal spirit. London: Routledge.

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[1] “Kalffian” refers to “sandplay” as created by Dora Kalff, as opposed to the more generic term “sandtray,” which includes a variety of other approaches and techniques.

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