Introducing the Aion Institute, a psychotherapy training institute years in the coming, designed for psychodynamically inclined psychotherapists who miss the rigorous and gravitas of graduate school but not the orthodoxy of psychoanalytic or Jungian training institutes.
aioninstitute.com.
Histrionic personalities often remind me of an angry but small animal protecting its young against a powerful predator with a kind of desperate anger. Histrionic people are the bravest of the personalities.
-Integrated Analytical Psychology, Chapter 15
The histrionic tendency to approach a feared object recapitulates early attachment trauma with powerful objects, which demand navigation of love and fear, setting up a characteristic approach/avoidance conflict with which reaches its apogee in splitting.
The psychoanalytic literature describes counterphobic defenses which take on basic anxieties by approaching them head head-on (Fenichel, 1945), and these appear to be common and highly characteristic qualities of the histrionic personality (McWilliams, 20202011).
From Integrated Analytical Psychology, Chapter 16
The narcissist discovered the self as center of power, manifestly potent but subjectively incomplete; the depressive discovers self as instrument and agency, a manifestation of consciousness that can be used like to affect one’s duty but lacking in the expansive powers of the narcissistic self.
Both narcissistic and depressive dynamics are concerned with the elaboration of the self, the narcissistic dynamic representing the development of the self in a power-centered, coercive way, and the depressive dynamic in a melancholy, lonely, and quietly despairing way.
In a real sense, the depressive solution invokes the same challenges and themes of the narcissistic arc, which is not surprising because the depressive node and the narcissistic node represent the two poles of the axis of introjective self, also representing Logos (thought).
whether as a result of defenses (radical discontinuities within the system), Lacan’s "glissement" (the ultimate impossibility of successful signification), or mental illness, which represents patternistic ways in which representation and intentionality break down.
-Integrated Analytical Psychology
The attractors of the system are primordial symmetrical models of desired end states (and therefore instinctive), and the dissipators of the system represent the array of reasons the symmetry breaks down, or fails to be successfully represented…(...)
Complex Adaptive Systems evolve through the breakdown of symmetry. Breakdown of symmetry actually reflects the attempts of the psyche to represent crucial inner truths (and desires and goals related to those truths) while also making inferences about how successfully those goals are being met.
It leads one up and out of the depressive core by replacing it with insouciance, gumption, bravado, or elemental thrill. Manic defenses counter the depressive core by disappearing guilt, and the psychological space from which it emerges.
Manic defenses, viewed through the lens of the Kleinian model, are designed to counter depressive guilt and shame through flight into compensatory action and omnipotence. Manic energy is therefore shimmering and effervescent, distracting and intoxicating.
Any therapist whose idea of "therapy" is a manualized ABC checklist can and will be replaced with AI. Psychotherapists who provide relational psychodynamic, humanistic, and existential psychotherapy will continue to flourish, because they base the work on their own humanity.
Psychotherapy is a way of saying: I do not need to simplify you to love you.
This is a word so important that it doesn't exist. It refers to the restoration of inner morale, meaning, and moral imagination of a person or people, through love, truth, and reverent remembering rather than through command or correction, so that the psyche turns again toward the good.
One of the higher, but usually unspoken, goals of psychotherapy is to remoralize.
Maybe the highest art of the psychotherapist is to stay, even when the staying doesn't soothe.
Maybe the worst mistake of the psychotherapist is to promise fulfillment when only presence is possible.
One of the primary challenges in psychotherapy with borderline states is to distinguish ordinary, forgivable human empathic failures from actual sadistic, cruel, exploitative, or abusive behavior.
From the depressive point of view....
Love is a loss that hasn't happened yet.
Depressive people have trouble loving themselves, so they rely upon others to do it for them.
Loss must be loved to be named grief.
Curiosity is emotionally and cognitively dangerous, and it is the sign of a psyche in motion.
— Integrated Analytical Psychology: Return to Freedom and Dignity, Chapter 17
Attachment isn not simply about feeding or comfort; it is the art of building a sanctuary within where others can dwell. When this sanctuary is empty, we are haunted by absence. When it is filled with warmth, we call it love.
Integrated Analytical Psychology: Return to Freedom and Dignity, Ch 4.
While academic psychology debates whether archetypes exist or not, despots cheerfully harness them to fuel massive social movements, justify war, and strangle democracy.
-Integrated Analytical Psychology, Chapter 14.
They are not afraid of life; they are aware of what it costs. And for those that nevertheless continue to abide the world, that is their courage.
The schizoid personality is best understood not as fragile, but as mythic. Like ancient initiates passing through the Sidpa Bardo, they emerge into this life with thin skin and wide eyes, startled by incarnation itself. To pathologize this response is to misunderstand it.
The depressive personality carries grandiose responsibility without the reward of omnipotence. They go on, not for salvation, but out of a strange fidelity to the world.
From Integrated Analytical Psychology: Return to Freedom and Dignity.
As a psychologist, it seems to me that the bottom is falling out of the Anerican psyche right now. Private practice has never been this challenging.
Psychoanalytic resistance to mysticism recapitulates an unconscious cultural tendency to relegate the symbolic function to the feminine and therefore to dismiss it.
Integrated Analytical Psychology, p. 39
