ABSTRACT
An elderly British analyst who had come to Florence for a seminar on the Self told us that during his training he had been urged not to risk talking about the Self before he had attained the wisdom of old age. In fact the Self was considered beyond the grasp of a young man, and even of one who was not really old. The dream explained what had happened at the beginning of the session: as a result of that influx of energy, the man had regained his true height, and no longer needed to feel he was a worthless presence, at least in the analyst’s consulting room. As magic circles they bind and subdue the lawless powers belonging to the world of darkness, and depict or create an order that transforms the chaos into a cosmos. A conceptual reduction of the reality of the soul, which in the schizoid state in particular, is wrongly celebrated as an achievement.
