ABSTRACT
Hubback’s paper is of interest because of her express intention of using both ‘archetypal structuralist concepts’ and ‘the findings of developmental researchthe former is represented in the paper by a tracking of the dynamics of the coniunctio oppositorum, the patterns within a person of integration and unintegration, harmony and dissonance, and the latter by a study of the part played in her patients’ depression by their having had a depressed mother. Where experience of parental imagos of a depressed kind has led to splitting defences, this has injured the innate capacity of the person for coniunctio. What is more, when the parental marriage is experienced as divisive, weak or non-existent, a further injury is done to the prospect of internal marriage within the patient.
This is the background for Hubback’s noting a special clinical phenomenon in relation to her group of depressed patients: the 24 necessity of analysing the patient’s ‘phantasies about his mother’s inner life’. The interactive focus naturally falls on the inner life of the analyst in general and on her countertransference in particular. Thus the analyst’s participation in the patient’s process is explicitly noticed—and compared by Hubback to the vital presence of the soror, the alchemist’s assistant, in the alchemical process—a Jungian metaphor for analysis itself.
A.S.
