ABSTRACT
This story, like the story of Fitcher's Bird, depicts a dreadful diabolical form of the Self in its role as archetypal defense or self-care system, and concerns itself with how that defense can be (1) survived, and (2) transformed by the feminine — again in this case, by the feminine appearing as the “third.” Our story has been discussed by von Franz as depicting possession by the Self “such as is found in borderline cases where the complex of the ego and the archetype of the Self have been contaminated, so that both become blurred … and there is no adequate polarization of the psyche” (von Franz, 1980b: 79, 83). While this description is true as far as it goes, there is no mention in von Franz's analysis of archetypal defenses and no developmental theory to describe how this “contamination” with the dark side of the Self happens and what its implications are for clinical practice. We hope to illuminate these issues in the pages that follow.
