ABSTRACT
Change occurs only perilously, and as clinicians we are aware of the experience that, as much as there are positive forces that seek to move the psyche into the future, there are powerful retrograde forces that seek to prevent such movement. Jung showed that mental events could be understood as taking place along a continuum that stretched from the earliest instinctual body-based drives through to the most conscious, purposeful cultural creations of which humankind was capable. Jung's idea of psychological transformation arose from his teleological and dialectical view of change as occurring through the conflict of opposites leading to moments or stages synthesis. Jung's theory of the bipolarity of the archetype has provided us with the background principle to formulate the possible circumstances in which the self might go on surviving in the face of unconscionable pressure by opting for life lived in two dimensions.
