COMMENTARY BY A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Clinical Commentary

CLINICAL COMMENTARY XXXV

This section departs from the more usual BJP format in taking for consid-eration not clinical material but extracts from a Victorian novel – GeorgeEliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). As is the case with many novels, and espe-cially with Eliot’s last two great books, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda,the text is peopled with personalities whose characters, experience of theworld and self-experience may with validity be viewed thorough a psycho-analytic lens. Freud much admired Eliot’s novels drawing on Adam Bede inThe Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900) and, remarking of Middlemarch,that, in Ernest Jones’s words, ‘It greatly illuminated important aspects of hisrelations with Martha’ (Jones 1953–57). It would be fascinating to knowwhat these aspects of his marital situation might be. It is also known thatFreud gave Eliot’s novels as gifts to his friends (Ingram l988; Rotenbergl999).

At a time when the need for strict confidentiality makes it difficultto publish clinical material in the conventional form, perhaps clinician-writers in the field may feel encouraged by this BJP initiative to turn to liter-ature to explore, illuminate or exemplify analytic work for purposes ofpublication.

Commentators were asked to consider the two extracts below from thenovel. After a rapid decline in popularity following the author’s death,Middlemarch, often seen as the first truly psychological novel, has retrievedits reputation as a masterpiece and as a great exposition of the anatomy ofmarriage.

The first extract concerns the attitude of the heroine, Dorothea Brooke, tothe academic interests of the elderly cleric, Edward Casaubon. The secondpiece, after her marriage to Casaubon and during her disastrous honeymoonin Rome, focuses on Dorothea’s early interactions with Mr Casaubon’syoung cousin, Will Ladislaw, a Shelleyan or Romantic figure.

The two vignettes thus offer views before and after marriage, with thesecond piece foreshadowing the possibility of the heroine’s second marriageto Will Ladislaw; this takes place after Casaubon’s death despite his attemptto prevent it by adding a codicil to his will depriving Dorothea of her fortunein the event of her marrying Will.

The passages were chosen, not only to foreground issues of femininity andmarriage, but also to allow comment on, for example, the couple and itsdynamics and issues of egoism, jealousy and narcissism. As the reader will

© The authorsJournal compilation © 2007 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 587

see, oedipal themes, developmental issues and the deployment of archetypesalso emerges from the commentators’ work on the text.

Emma LetleyGuest Editor – Arbours Association

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References

Eliot, G. (1871–2) Middlemarch. Oxford: World’s Classics, 1947; reprinted 1967.Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4, 5. London: Hogarth Press.Ingram, I. (1998) Of stories, analytic therapy and George Eliot. Journal of American

Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 26(2): 183–93.Jones, E. (1953–57) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, eds L. Trilling and

S. Marcus. London: Hogarth, 1962, p. 166.Rotenberg, C.T. (1999) George Eliot – proto-psychoanalyst. American Journal of

Psychoanalysis 59(3): 257–70.

CLINICAL MATERIAL:TWO EXTRACTS FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH

Extract One

For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to youngladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr Casaubon’s talkabout his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, thissurprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people whohad ideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usualeagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrineinto strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sourcesof knowledge some bearing on her actions. That more complete teachingwould come – Mr Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forwardto higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, andblending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake tosuppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr Casaubon’slearning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighbourhoodof Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that epithet would nothave described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary clevernessimplies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character. All hereagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motivein which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. She did notwant to deck herself with knowledge – to wear it loose from the nerves andblood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have doneit as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained

588 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2007) 23(4)

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her conscience. But something she yearned for by which her life might befilled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone byfor guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearningbut not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learnedmen kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr Casaubon?

Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation wasunbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of flat-ness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate interest.

Extract Two

There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in Dorothea’s lastwords. The question how she had come to accept Mr Casaubon – which hehad dismissed when he first saw her by saying that she must be disagreeablein spite of appearances – was not now to be answered on any such short andeasy method. Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She wasnot coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full offeeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait andwatch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth sodirectly and ingenuously. The Æolian harp again came into his mind.

She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.And if Mr Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his lairwith his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been anunavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet. But he wassomething more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a benefactor withcollective society at his back, and he was at that moment entering the roomin all the unimpeachable correctness of his demeanour, while Dorothea waslooking animated with a newly-roused alarm and regret, and Will waslooking animated with his admiring speculation about her feelings.

Mr Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, buthe did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose andexplained his presence. Mr Casaubon was less happy than usual, and thisperhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the effect mighteasily have been produced by the contrast of his young cousin’s appearance.The first impression on seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which addedto the uncertainty of his changing expression. Surely, his very featureschanged their form; his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small;and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis. Whenhe turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and somepersons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr Casaubon,on the contrary, stood rayless.

As Dorothea’s eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she wasperhaps not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with othercauses in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf which

CLINICAL COMMENTARY 589

was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the realities of his lot andnot by her own dreams. Yet it was a source of greater freedom to her thatWill was there; his young equality was agreeable, and also perhaps hisopenness to conviction. She felt an immense need of some one to speak to,and she had never before seen any one who seemed so quick and pliable, solikely to understand everything.

Mr Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably aswell as pleasantly in Rome – had thought his intention was to remain inSouth Germany – but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when hecould converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary. Ladislawunderstood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave.

Dorothea’s eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank downwearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head andlooked on the floor. A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she seated herselfbeside him, and said,

‘Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning. I was wrong. I fearI hurt you and made the day more burdensome.’

‘I am glad that you feel that, my dear,’ said Mr Casaubon. He spokequietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy feeling in hiseyes as he looked at her.

‘But you do forgive me?’ said Dorothea, with a quick sob. In her need forsome manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault.Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck andkiss it?

‘My dear Dorothea – “who with repentance is not satisfied, is not ofheaven nor earth”: – you do not think me worthy to be banished by thatsevere sentence,’ said Mr Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strongstatement, and also to smile faintly.

Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob wouldinsist on falling.

‘You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant conse-quences of too much mental disturbance,’ said Mr Casaubon. In fact, he hadit in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have received youngLadislaw in his absence; but he abstained, partly from the sense that it wouldbe ungracious to bring a new complaint in the moment of her penitentacknowledgment, partly because he wanted to avoid further agitation ofhimself by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray thatjealousy of disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly com-peers that there was none to spare in other directions. There is a sort ofjealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bredin the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

‘I think it is time for us to dress,’ he added, looking at his watch.They bothrose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what hadpassed on this day.


But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which weall remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, orsome new motive is born. To-day she had begun to see that she had beenunder a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from MrCasaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might bea sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as onher own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder tofeed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from thatstupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devoteherself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength andwisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflec-tion but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like thesolidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence thelights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (Extractsfrom George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871–2, Ch. X, pp. 88–9, Ch. XXI, pp.222–5.)

COMMENTARY BY A MEMBER OF THE BRITISHPSYCHOANALYTICAL SOCIETY

I last read Middlemarch as a set text at school, and was pleased to be givenan incentive by the BJP to re-read it. It turned out to be much, much funnier,and more psychologically and morally even-handed, than I had remem-bered. I can see why Freud liked to read George Eliot; she is an anatomist ofthe divided self, the inner conflict between how we wish we were and how wefind ourselves behaving.

However, the two passages which we are to consider deal with DorotheaBrooke, the person in the book who seems to me to be the least psychologic-ally credible, and about whom the authorial voice is most ambiguous. Iremember a conversation with a girl in the English set in the year above meat school, warning me about the book. ‘It’s absolutely preposterous,’ shesaid. ‘It starts off with two sisters dividing their mother’s jewels betweenthem. Celia wants them; Dorothea rejects them because she thinks that sheshouldn’t want them, but makes her younger sister feel greedy, and thenfeels guilty about it.’ She found Dorothea unconvincing and unendearing.Henry James, who was critical of some aspects of Middlemarch when hereviewed it in 1873, thought Dorothea ‘the great achievement of the book’,‘that perfect flower of conception . . . an indefinably moral elevation’.Doubtless then we were callow adolescents, but to me, even now, Dorotheaseems both less believable and less admirable than the author would seem tothink. Do other people have such a transference to Dorothea nowadays,


autre temps, autre moeurs, or did George Eliot intend us to have amore complex understanding of her literary creation than is immediatelyapparent?

People seem to change their minds about Middlemarch as they age; wecome to sympathize more with the older characters in the book, with theirsense of frustration and failure to have realized what they once aspired to inlife, which is balanced by a capacity to be more-or-less happy with theirmarriages and to accept their lot. Dorothea seems the only character whomwe are to take to be wholly innocent and good, without ulterior motive orthe possession of that caretaker-self which enables us to function in and bepart of society. Perhaps because of this, it is difficult to accept her as aconvincing character. Is it that goodness, like happiness, writes white?George Eliot starts and ends by comparing her with St Theresa of Avila; butthe real St Theresa was a highly effective, humorous and practical woman, aswell as an acute recorder and analyst of her own spiritual pilgrimage. Atother times, George Eliot can be quite sharp about Dorothea’s lack of areality-sense and her blindness to her own motives. She vividly describes hermoralizing streak, her lack of humour or generosity; but we are also toadmire her attempts to transcend her narrow circumstances, and in the finalfamous passage almost to canonize her for her unobtrusive goodness.We canguess that George Eliot must have been internally divided, both identifyingwith and yet contrasting herself to her fictional child.

Middlemarch has been compared to Madame Bovary, but I found myselfthinking of another Emma, Emma Woodhouse, ‘handsome, clever, andrich’, a heroine, Jane Austen thought, whom no-one would like much exceptherself. Like Dorothea, Emma is motherless; her father, like Mr Brooke,Dorothea’s uncle and guardian, is ineffectual and self-absorbed. Bothyoung women have been left as a result with a sense of grandiloquence, aneed to rearrange the world and other peoples’ lives. They are protected intheir arrogance by their secure positions among the rural gentry, a circle offriends who love and admire them, by their charm, and by their financialsecurity. But whereas Emma thinks and acts for herself, and in the end isforced to confess that she has failed in her judgements and must accept theguidance of an older and wiser man and the solution of marriage, GeorgeEliot is subverting and moving beyond the framework of the romanticnovel. But just as Jane Austen mocked the conventions of the romanticnovel whilst adhering to them, Dorothea is a romantic heroine in an unro-mantic book.

In a romantic novel, Dorothea would in the end have married Lydgate, orWill Ladislaw would have turned out to be a weightier and more admirablecharacter. (Dorothea and Lydgate do meet early in the book; but Lydgatehas a conventional attitude to women, and she is too strenuous for him.)What George Eliot created was something different; like many of her heroesand heroines. Dorothea and Lydgate have no parents, and the book is a


Bildungsroman for them both, and for some of the minor characters likeFred Vincy. They have to work out what is worthwhile in life, and thereforehow they should live. But Middlemarch is also written under the influence ofpositivism and Spencerian social evolutionism. As Flaubert did, GeorgeEliot described how men and women are created by their histories andtrapped by their circumstances, the time and place in which they are born.She may well have identified with her heroine to some extent; but she hadescaped from a narrow provincial milieu through her own energy and indus-try. However, she had idealized and fallen unsuccessfully in love with severalolder men before she met Lewes, who believed in and fostered her as anovelist.

Whilst feminists have applauded the author’s account of Dorothea as thevictim of circumstances which gave women no outlet for their intellectual orspiritual strivings, nor occupation other than within the family, her solution isa conventional one (Blake 1976). She, without being able to find a purpose inher own life, marries an older man who is to bear the burden of her idealismand projected ambition.But even before that,George Eliot describes her lackof common sense, her ostentatious masochism, and capacity to make otherpeople feel uncomfortable and judged. As the first passage describes, she isnot a blue-stocking but a romantic enthusiast, longing for enlightenment.

In a post-Freudian age, it is difficult to believe in innocence; for us it readslike disingenuousness. Dorothea is searching for a parent, and for theapproval of a parent; she wants both to rescue Mr Casaubon, to be hishandmaiden, and to be rescued by him from a depressive sense that she canachieve nothing in life. George Eliot describes the Mr Worldly-Wisemanreactions of her family and friends to her decision to marry Mr Casaubon.There is a missing voice – that of practical wisdom, of those who can unitecommon sense and sensibility. It appears in the book in the Garth family;unlike Jane Austen, Eliot clearly knew a great deal about and valued hus-bandry, the new practical knowledge which was creating Britain’s prosperity.The times had changed between Austen and Eliot; the world of the Englishgentry had grown less secure, and she was one of the interlocutors who werebeginning to introduce the Continental Biblical scholarship which wouldmake old-fashioned amateurs like Mr Casaubon redundant.

Mr Casaubon, for his part, increasingly senses that Dorothea’s idealiza-tion of him is dangerous; she could become critical, and presume upon andinvade him. There is an interesting scene immediately before the secondpassage, where Dorothea, on her honeymoon in Rome, is beginning torecognize the difficulties of her marriage. George Eliot makes it clear thatDorothea cannot respond to the aesthetic riches of Rome;‘. . . the notions ofa girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed onmeagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girlwhose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge intoprinciples . . .’ .


The passage goes on to hint that the sheer excess, the violent and sensuouspaintings and statues in the Vatican Museum and in St Peter’s, were toomuch for her; she is too provincial to be able to respond to them other thanwith fear and confusion. Had she married Mr Casaubon because she felt thatshe could only be his or any man’s vestal virgin? Lydgate, when he gets toknow her, instantly compares her to the Virgin Mary. She had lost herparents when she was 12, and resisted Mr Brooke’s attempts to find her asubstitute mother. So after latency she had had no experience of a successfulparental couple, nor the support and containment of a mother. George Eliotconveys very well how much she pressures people to make them into whatshe wants them to be; the anxiety and fear which she and Mr Casaubonincreasingly stir up in one another is painfully real. She repeatedly tries toget him to be intimate with her, to love her and forgive her and make her feeluseful and worthwhile; he increasingly fears that she will see his inability tocreate, to be potent, and grows defensive.

The second passage describes how both Ladislaw and Dorothea, neitherof whom have had much experience of the give-and-take of marriage, areboth forced to recognize that Mr Casaubon is not what they want him tobe. He is an unappealing, unresponsive but decent and courteous elderlyman; the younger couple are contrasted both with him and with eachother. Dorothea’s growing realization that she and her new husband aremaking each other unhappy because she had wanted him to nourish her inreturn for becoming the angel in his house, is contrasted with the seductivelability of Ladislaw who, like a true hysteric, can unconsciously discernwhat other people want in him and seem to provide it, whilst remaininguncommitted. There is a later passage shortly before Casaubon’s deathwhich suggests that, had he lived, he and Dorothea might have been ableto come to terms with one another. It describes how after they have madeeach other thoroughly miserable, Dorothea waits for him to come to bed.Having for once been able to accept their own limitations, they are at lastable to care for one another, to walk mutely along the corridor hand inhand.

As Celia observes at a late stage in the novel, Dorothea always does whatshe wants; but her moral crisis after she has observed Ladislaw apparentlymaking love to Rosamund Lydgate is because she is finally forced toacknowledge what she really wants, which is Ladislaw. The conflict betweenher natural honesty and her fear, disapproval and inhibition ends with herbeing able to acknowledge this to him when she is on the point of losing him.Readers of Middlemarch have often felt frustrated at the way in whichLadislaw looks like but is not a Byronic hero. But if he were a thoroughlymasculine or worthy character, it would have taken away from the morallesson Dorothea learns, which is that it is all right to be selfish – we can wantpeople without them having to be good for us. There is something bullyingabout requiring our objects to be worthy of our love. We wonder, too,


whether Dorothea has really learned it; is George Eliot leaving it open as towhether she will in turn begin to idealize and pressurize Ladislaw?

My continuing unease about Dorothea is made clearer to me by imaginingher as a mother. Celia, we know, is besotted with little Arthur, the Buddha inhis chariot, and Sir James is an appropriate container for them both. Weknow that little Arthur will grow up mothered and loved. But when Celialearns that Dorothea has had a son, she is full of anxiety: ‘. . . She will dowrong things with it. And they thought she would die.’ And I fear that she isright; she knows her sister’s tendency to make human relations into a moralproject. The book ends as it begins, with the bond between the two sisters;Celia, guided by love and the desire to mother her deprived sister, is the onewho this time defies convention and puts things right.

Susan BuddThe Provost’s Lodgings, Queen’s Lane, Oxford OX1 4AW

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References

Blake, K. (1976) Middlemarch and the woman question. Nineteenth-Century Fiction31(3): 285–312.

James, H. (1873) Review of Middlemarch. Galaxy magazine, March 1873.

COMMENTARY BY A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OFANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

As a Jungian analyst, I understand Dorothea’s process both in developmen-tal terms and in terms of the growth of the Self. Dorothea is said to aspire tothe acquisition of knowledge and the possession of a life goal, ‘as SaintTheresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her con-science’. One way of understanding this ‘authority’ is in terms of the Self, apsychosomatic entity which encompasses and propels the various stages ofdevelopment involved in psychological growth. Martin Schmidt (2005)refers to the relationship of the Self to the ego as ‘a parallel process of bothphase and field phenomena’, both being aspects of development involved inpsychological growth.

The two vignettes have a dynamic quality. There is a significant passage oftime between them and something evolves. Through them, it is possible tocapture the effect and influence of one character upon another, either explic-itly or by implication. Michael Fordham conceptualized the essence of rela-tionship and human psychological involvement with others in his descriptionof the way in which a dimension of the infant’s interior world, the Self,



loosens and becomes open to the experience of and the interior world ofanother. He called this ‘de-integration’ and the first important experience ofit is in the feed from the breast (Fordham 1994; Urban 2006). It culminatesin an internalization of the experience – ‘re-integration’. In this way, moreprimitive identifications and projections can be brought into a creativeinteraction with another – for the infant it is with the internal world ofthe mother, which is more mature. Thus archetypal aspects of identity andexperience become modified as internal objects that have a dynamic andrelated quality.

The vignettes demonstrate the movement of Dorothea’s personality, as wemight see in material from an earlier and later analytic session.This capacityin her to de-integrate in circumstances not conducive to psychic growth, andto seek out what is there to nourish and sustain, for the ego to engage with,is a characteristic of the Self. Dorothea’s early bereavements and barrenmarriage appear likely to deprive and limit her. Still the dynamism of Self-activity operates and is the field upon which more defined psychic develop-ments such as oedipal resolution can occur. Dorothea would be limited if shedid not achieve an oedipal resolution. The implication is that she has beenlimited by the collective and its projections. Nevertheless, meaning andpurpose are realized in her through the actions of the Self, its engagementwith others via the ego, and its engagement with the ego itself.

In the first vignette, Dorothea has a certainty as to what Casaubon, hersuitor, will offer her, and it is identical with her own unrealized potential.Her knowledge of the world is constrained by the ‘toy-box history of theworld adapted to young ladies’. He will compensate and she will project herown aspirations onto him. However, in the later vignette, she grieves herinability to offer him what he expects, and so is closer to a depressive truth:neither can satisfy the other when they are projectively entwined, denyingundeveloped aspects of themselves. Dorothea wants her husband to see heras without desire, and as totally identified with his needs and wishes, but thedescription of the intensity of her suppressed feelings reveals her struggleand conflict. Although she is full of feeling at the potential for relationship,she is not able to allow herself to need and receive from another.This wouldconfront her with the apparently unbearable separateness of her husband.Then a transformation is shown. There is the first intimation of a trueempathy with her husband and a new conception is arrived at when sheperceives ‘. . . with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling– an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects– that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadowsmuch always fall with a certain difference’.

Dorothea is able to bear this loss of an idealized parent figure when she isable to truly mourn him. This is possible when he becomes to her a separateperson with different needs. Casaubon has projected a pure, loving andsacrificing mother onto his wife and she has identified with this maiden


mother archetype, producing a gridlocked form of mutual archetypal projec-tion (Morgan 1996). Casaubon evacuates the raw material from the feminineaspects of his psyche into a woman who identifies with these archaic projec-tions, as opposed to engaging creatively with them in opposition. Neither isopen to the other in a de-integrative way.The growth of Dorothea’s capacityto actively engage brings balance to her feminine receptivity.

Dorothea’s internal and external involvement with Casaubon as a patri-archal archetypal figure has inhibited resolution of her Oedipus complex.Her capacity to mourn loss, a crucial capacity in psychic movement andintegration, is impaired. The two are linked in as much as the depressivecapacity to face the reality of having to inhabit her own life drama, asopposed to being a pivotal figure in the life of a parent figure and vice versa,involves mourning. This willingness to give up an omnipotent fantasy andto embrace and formulate new desires and ambitions involves grief forDorothea. It is part of the transition from what cannot be, to what must besought after and won.

Casaubon is seen in the second vignette as unable to respond emotionally,whilst Dorothea is full of feeling. It is part of her depressive achievementthat eventually she can bear the knowledge that he cannot respond feelingly,a consequence of the projection of his feminine self onto and into her. Shefeels ‘the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousnessin his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own’. Similarly,Dorothea has projected onto Casaubon a Senex archetype – a wise, asexual,patriarchal figure – creating an impasse in their relationship, maintained byCasaubon’s own identification with that archetypal projection.

By contrast, despite a degree of erotic idealization (and despite Will’scharacterization as a Puer Aeternus figure, a wandering troubadour, depen-dent on others for material survival, and admiring other men’s women fromafar), Dorothea allows herself to be in flux in relation to Will. He respondsto her in terms of potential and wonder rather than any fixed knowledge orexpectation. He sees ‘a new light, but still a mysterious light . . .’ in Dorothea;he has a vision of her as an ‘Aeolian harp’ – an instrument that playsspontaneously in response to the breath of the winds. He believes he must‘wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soulcame forth so directly and ingenuously’. This is a romantic vision, but none-theless one in which one individual recognizes the unique and separatedevelopment of another; the words are also replete with his erotic responseto Dorothea. Will is not such fertile ground for Dorothea’s projections.Being more alive and related, he does not project onto her as Casaubondoes. At the same time, Dorothea is becoming less narcissistic, less intro-verted and more able to let in another’s emotional reality.

Dorothea perceives knowledge as both a mental and emotional experi-ence. It is fused for her with physical and instinctual drives and shows anintrinsic readiness for relationship with another as a completion.


All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympatheticmotive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. She did notwant to deck herself with knowledge – to wear it loose from the nerves andblood that fed her action . . .

This capacity, which seems to be constantly in tension with archetypalidentifications and projections in Dorothea, allows the unfolding and medi-ating through relationship of these iconic structures within the Self. Jungthought of this process as individuation. Individuation is both congruentwith and extends further than the working through of development stages. Itinvolves the workings of a Self which predates the ego. Indeed, the move-ment of the Self, in its psychic and sensual aspects, allows external objects tobe engaged with, and is instrumental to the ego’s formation.The ego and theSelf need to interact. Ego development is formed within and to some extentis dependent upon the social and historical context. The transcendent work-ings of the Self can leap beyond that. However, the engagement of the egotethers the Self, protecting against grandiosity and consequent neglect of theself–other relationship (Huskinson 2002).

The negative working of the Self, seen in the inflation of Dorothea’s initialidentification with the Puella archetype, show a regressive or destructiveidentification of the ego with the Self-contents. It is in this area that Self-development, if it is to be constructive, requires the challenge of the ego.Dorothea develops psychologically when her powerful emotions can becontained by a depressive sense of psychological reality – of who she is andwho others really are.This involves relinquishing her hold on the archetypal,fixed quality of her objects and her fantasy of control over them. Withoutthis depressive sense, her emotions are overwhelming and she suppressesher feminine and sexual self in fear.The omnipotence involved in the fantasyof possession of the father is too terrifying. With this relinquishing, hercapacity to act is released. She has therefore become more able to engagewith the wider collective and to be better able to find her own way in theexternal world.

Dorothea’s developmental path is both facilitated and impeded by hersocial context, as by the vicissitudes in the relationship between her ego andher larger Self. Societies themselves have de-integrative and re-integrativestates, and Dorothea’s life coincides with a significant shift in societal per-ceptions of women, which mirrors her own movement. She has a linearpsychic development but it is not entirely constrained by her object relationor social context. The figure of St Theresa, who emerges in the vignettes inrelation to Dorothea, as a dream figure might appear in a patient’s work, isan interesting one in this respect. St Theresa realized her destiny through anover-identification of an immature ego with the Self’s aspirations. In doingso, she created beauty, meaning and purpose, yet she is also the epitome ofimpeded psychological growth. Some factors congenial to the growth of the


ego need to be present, if linear psychic development is to proceed. Thesefactors include the presence of objects responsive to relationship and attimes also the subsuming of the Self to the ego. However, where there is anabsence of such development, something of beauty may still emerge. Theconcept of the Self, therefore, is significant for women, when ego develop-ment is constrained by receptivity, or by being identified by the collective as‘other’. Dorothea’s life illustrates this.

Hilary Lester235 Barry Road, London SE22 OJU

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References

Fordham, M. (1994) Children As Individuals, pp. 84–5. London: Free AssociationBooks.

Huskinson, L. (2002) The Self as violent Other: the problems of defining the Self.Journal of Analytical Psychology 47: 437–58.

Morgan, M. (1996) The projective gridlock. International Journal of Psychoanalysis50: 711–16.

Schmidt, M. (2005) Finding oneself in analysis – taking risks and making sacrifices.Journal of Analytical Psychology 50, Issue 5: 595–616.

Urban, E. (2006) Unintegration, disintegration and de-integration. Journal of ChildPsychotherapy 32(2): 181–92.



COMMENTARY BY A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

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