ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Carl Jung’s notions of the relational ‘third’ and ‘fourth’, and how this thinking propelled him toward investigating the nature of phenomenological meaning and human existence. Jung showed the mind’s capacity for function at its broadest reaches when making some meaningful sense at the edge of perception, and of how consciousness links with unconscious thought at the roots of awareness, at its outer fringes and beyond. How these phenomena may emerge is explored when in intimate therapeutic and supervisory encounter with an ‘other’. The potential for love of an ‘other’ (or others), but also an equivalent intensity for destructive hate is discussed, particularly when a sense of personal powerlessness and poverty of meaning can drive a desperate need for purpose, where existential and spiritual angst may pivot on ‘the hinge of our own shadow that trips the trap door through which we fall … into an abyss of psychic nullity where any atrocity becomes possible’ (Ulanov, 2007, p. 595); these extremes sensed as transcending the everyday toward an ‘infinity’ of positive and/or negative potential. Links are drawn between historical and current cyclical patterns of social relating, and our interconnectedness in the struggle toward individual meaning-making. Discussion of the clinical supervision example illustrates elements of risk and opportunity when indwelling on this (l)edge with the other, how relational intimacy and insight, particularly with our own ‘shadow’, might enable a firmer, more secure, base when furthering our liminal horizons.
