ABSTRACT
Herein, with a wealth of clinical material, Schwartz-Salant demonstrates the use of the concept of the ‘unconscious dyad’ in analysis. This leads to a sophisticated reframing of the coniunctio to suggest the multi-leveled dynamics of an interactive field. Such dynamics are specifically stated by Schwartz-Salant to go beyond the personal realm.
A further technical innovation is the idea of Imaginal sight’. This way of relating to the patient and the clinical material makes explicit what many analysts probably do—but they do so implicitly, hence at a lower level of conscious awareness.
Schwartz-Salant’s twinning of the ‘logic’ of the borderline patient with a particular mystical tradition serves to prevent any simplistic pathologizing. The borderline patient is presented, to a degree, as Everyman or Everywoman.
158 The many references to the Rosarium or the Rosarium Philosophorum refer to Jung’s commentary on an illustrated alchemical tract of the sixteenth century. The pictures of the Rosarium are numbered, and the whole work, entitled The Psychology of the Transference, is found in Volume 16 of Jung’s Collected Works. Jung thought that alchemy, looked at with a symbolic and not a scientific eye, could be regarded as one of the precursors of modern study of the unconscious and, in particular, of analytical interest in the transformation of personality.
A.S.
