ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Jung's personality and theories in the light of his early relational trauma, and discusses the defeat of the ego, and spiritual experience further. Meredith-Owen suggests that Winnicott undervalued the constructive and containing aspects of Jung's experience of the self, although few commentators have embraced Jung's transpersonal experience as fully as Kalsched. What stands out concerning Jung's early life is his early relationship with his mother and his dream of the phallus, in the context of his warm and loving relationship with his father. The phallus, having been cut off and buried, has been transformed—grown in power and to enormous proportions. Jung wrote extensively about rebirth, and the transformation that follows death and rebirth—it would be fair to say it was one of his preoccupations. The reversal of Jung's annihilatory experience is perhaps represented by his phantasy/vision of a monstrous flood covering all the low-lying lands between the Alps and the North Sea.
