Case Response I

Case Response IIn order to respond to the case of Simon it feels important to make my position explicit.My entrance into Jungian psychology was via archetypal psychology.This approach, its closeness with mythology, and its understanding of imagination, has heavily informed my professional identity for more than two decades.During my analytic training, however, a counterpoint emerged in my professional self; this complementary force came in the form of what Cwik (2011) calls "associative dreaming", an approach that also values imagination, but situates it within the transference/countertransference dynamic.These two theoretical stances are constantly present in my work as an analyst, one more imaginal, one more relational.I thus engage Simon's case from two avenues simultaneously: meeting it as an image, in the archetypal sense, while also remaining open to the affects and fantasies that emerge when such an image intersects with my own subjective sphere.I now wish to honour the generosity and openness of both Simon and his analyst by sharing, as authentically as I can, my initial reaction when I read the first paragraph of the text.As I began, something within me reacted almost immediately.His self-description as an "Oedipal winner" generated a visceral response that underwent many transformations but never completely faded.It is not strange for me to have an embodied response to a text, but I was slightly alarmed at how disproportionate my reaction felt given the context.It almost felt as if I were in the room with Simon and his analyst.I had barely read one sentence and something about the case had already pulled me in.Disconcerting as it was, my inner reaction became even more disorienting as I continued reading that first paragraph where Simon's analyst describes her experience of their encounter as "meditative, intimate, and charged with a sense of mutual recognition".My perplexity was pushed even further when, towards the end of that first paragraph, the analyst described the transference as "erotic and playful".My confusion was derived from the dissonance between my initially emotional and embodied response to the text and the feeling-tone of this first encounter as described by the analyst.Where she experienced intimacy, mutual recognition, and playfulness, I felt provocation and aggression.Importantly, my feelings were not at this point formulating anything specific.All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies.