Religion and Clinical Strategy

C.G. Jung Institute Zürich

Fall Semester 2021

Instructor: Douglas Whitcher, Ph.D. Training Analyst

“Religion is like a cow; it gives milk, but it kicks too”

Buddhist saying

Course description:

Practitioners depend on clinical strategies to explain mental disease to their patients. When a shaman explains his patient’s psychosis as the result of having been abducted by the land-otters, his instrument is myth. When a neurologist explains depression as the result of depletion of serotonin, his instrument is myth. Clinical strategies need to be informed by the evidence-based science available, but they also have to draw on the cultural background of their patients, that is, belief-systems. We have to understand how religion, explicitly or implicitly, influences the course of illness. Analytical psychology distinguishes itself from other clinical strategies by its emphasis on the use of religion to plan treatment. 

If you try to define religion, you will find it hard to avoid

The following is a case-vignette from Jung:

Jung’s Exorcism of a crab

(Jung CW 1946, V11:123-165)

Jung’s patient had a midlife crisis. Her father died when she was a child, and her mother passed when she was a young adult. After her father’s death, her mother lived out her previously repressed bohemian tendencies, which she had repressed while her husband was still alive.  Surviving the premature death of both parents, she didn’t approve of her mother’s frivolous behavior, confining herself to the adventures she could vicariously live, rather than venturing her own. Jung was of the clinical opinion that she was avoiding “the demands of life.”

As a “Freudian,” Jung challenged her repression of her sexuality, especially the denial of her love for a female friend.  Jung based this interpretation on his take on transference needs, for a father, a mother, and a male lover.  The Freundian approach didn’t seem to help him help her take the necessary developmental leap.

A dream of a crab allowed Jung to move to a more “Jungian” approach. She dreamed she was walking on a path that she could continue only by walking through a puddle, the main problem of which was that there was a crab in the puddle. And there was no way around the crab.  She had to face the crab.

The crab inspired Jung to find another way to pose the challenge he thought she needed to face. Until now she had been playing it “safe” by blaming her mother, by staying in the comfort of a relationship with a girlfriend. This friendship was innocent; it didn’t force her to confront her fear of death, or the anxiety associated with the risk of trying to meet more intense romantic and and possibly heterosexual needs, needs that might not conform to the protected life she thought she wanted to live. That was the crab in her way. The crab wasn’t going to let her continue without being considered, to be “re-ligared” (re-considered in greater depth, Cicero’s definition of Religion).

With the help of the crab-dream, Jung created an emotional drama out of the kind of case that goes from session to session without stirring much emotion. The crescendo of this narrative peaks when she feels threatened by something as dangerous as her mother's cancer (in German, Krebs means both crab and cancer), "a violent, sentimental demand for love, so impassioned that she feels herself overwhelmed...an overpowering infantile craving...blind...an undisciplined, undifferentiated, and not yet humanized part of the libido which still possesses the compulsive character of an instinct, a part still untamed by domestication" (133). 

Jung questioned his patient about how she saw him "outside of analysis." He was trying to create a safe way for her to communicate a fantasy that he could not directly access. She admitted that she sometimes saw him as "idealized" and sometimes as "different...dangerous, sinister, like an evil magician or a demon" (143). 

This is when he realized: "But then I myself am the obstacle, the crab that prevents her from getting across" (144)

 

 I am suddenly faced by the possibility of a painful misunderstanding.  What is it?  Disappointed love?  Does she feel offended, deprecated?  In her glance there lurks something of the beast of prey, something really demoniacal.  Is she a demon after all?  Or am I the beast of prey, the demon, and is there sitting before me a terrified victim, trying to defend herself against my evil spirits with the brute strength of despair? (145)

By acknowledging "I am myself the crab," Jung allowed himself to be the object of his analysand's "passionate craving" as well as "the obstacle to her progress,"  which went beyond her mother-transference. Jung now accepted the challenge of wrestling with a "primitive god image," that embodied both good and evil, capable of healing--"the germ of a future sound personality" (134)--as well as causing  disease (cancer).     

"Love," wrote Jung, "may summon forth unsuspected powers in the soul for which we had better be prepared (164)."  A religious perspective helped to convince Jung that he must "take on" this primitive god-demon, in which "a sufferer can transmit [uebertragen: transfer] his disease to a healthy person whose powers then subdue the demon--but not without impairing the well-being of the subduer" (16:163). 

We might try to protect ourselves against psychic infections, which cause us real suffering, but if we avoid all such influences, we isolate ourselves from an important "organ of information" (16:163). 

If we "take over" emotional suffering 16:364), we open ourselves collusion and manipulation.  We find ourselves "in a relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness" (16:364).  But the transfer of the illness to the analyst also provides a "therapeutic possibility not to be underestimated" (16:365) due to the principle of the wounded healer. 

The term "mystical participation," was adopted from Levi-Bruhl. This is a moment in which something "'touches' the unconscious and establishes the unconscious identity of doctor and patient" (16:376. This moment might not be recognized consciously; we might be tipped off by a dream that announces the onset of a transference, but it might not be recognized until much later.  In this mutual identification, the therapist becomes infected by the patient’s suffering, “….and has as much difficulty in distinguishing between the patient and what has taken possession of him as has the patient himself.   This leads both of them to a direct confrontation with the daemonic forces lurking in the darkness" (16:375).  

"Unconscious infection" is most apt to be healing, Jung's found, if the analyst “submits” to the suffering caused by this entanglement, for by means of this irrational bond ensues, an archaic contract, by means of which the therapeutic process takes on the form of a sacred healing ritual. 

The centerpoint of the entire transaction was the image of a crab from the patient’s dream. The crab provided a mediating point of reference necessary to reconcile several dyads. These dyads created a series of projections, between the patient and her girlfriend, between Mrs X (patient’s mother) and her mother’s lover (an artist) and finally, of course, between Jung and his patient.  

The crab was able to subsume the following emotional contents: a feeling of being criticized by her analyst, unrequited love, quarrelling, insult, a lack of human decency, and most particularly the fear of illness and death.

 The crab as a demonic figure held the same position in the analytic narrative as the werewolf and the witch in the nightmares described by Jones.  In order to be able to negotiate with the demonic figures that arise in the context of analysis, the doctor has to become in this sense a “witch-doctor” who is familiar with the languages of the demonic depths, an “evil magician” who is prepared to deal with the dread of the “contents of the collective unconscious.”

 

The vignette is the best illustration I am aware of in Jung’s writings of the religious function in action.  The patient’s problem, in the final analysis, was that she was lacking in “piety”; she was trying to avoid the grasp of the crab, rather than taking it on directly. She needed Jung to model this behaviour for her, by entering into the demon, taking on its emotional energy, and wrestling himself free from it again in an act of interpretation that removed the pathogen from its festering confinement, liberating the energy contained within. She needed to learn a religious perspective, in the Jungian sense of a scrupulous observation of the numinous, a reconsidering her fears at a deeper level