This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19342039.2020.1822121.
Pages 72-85 | Published online: 08 Dec 2020
Excerpt
The body is our sensation, our felt emotion.
Janet Adler, Offering from the Conscious Body (2002, 6)
This manuscript was written during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and the powerful uprising for Black Lives Matter. Soon after the killing of George Floyd, I dreamt of the horrific scene of that killing replayed. I understood Derek Chauvin represented all of us complicit in kneeling on the neck and taking the breath of life away from life. Taking the possibility of breath away from African Americans. In my dream it is the coronavirus, one of the least among us, one of the tiniest of organisms that is bringing the entire globe to its knees, slowing us down, bringing the mad rush of our lifestyle to a halt so that we can see laid bare what it is that we are doing. In my dream the voices of fierce Black women, including activist Kimberley Jones, form a chorus that sings out the truth so that we don’t continue to act thoughtlessly, ahistorically, imploring us to wake up and take right action.
A multilayered transformative process has been set into motion by what is unfolding on our planet and, with it, a renewed attention to the profundity of breath. Our lifestyles being brought to a halt cleared the atmosphere so that all life could breathe as it hadn’t for decades. Across the globe Black people’s right to live, breathe, and thrive is being taken up in a way never before seen. Elders are being valued and protected so that their life-breath will not be taken by COVID-19. My prayer during this time is that we don’t return to life as it was; that all those lives lost will not have been lost in vain.
In Two Essays on Analytic Psychology (1943/1966, CW 7, 199), Jung reminds us that psychology is nothing if it is not experience. In my work with Sally, which I elaborate in this essay, I return again and again to breath. In inner life, trauma restricts breath, deadening one’s capacity to feel and thus to engage with others and the world (Russell 1999). Awareness of breathing brings our attention to felt experience. It slows us down. In an analysis it can be the fertile moment in which past, present, and future come together in a still point of shared knowing. As we have painfully witnessed, breath disregarded is life taken.
In these troubled times trauma is ubiquitous. As I trace the dual vectors of the analytic process as it unfolds in a relational, affectively attuned way, I draw from body-based approaches for working with trauma. I explore what I understand as the neuropsychological underpinnings of what Donald Kalsched (2013) refers to as archetypal affect that is ignited in trauma.
The Ground
Attention to the body keeps analysis grounded and relevant. Current research in trauma studies and neuroscience points to the body as the primary portal for healing when done in the context of an optimally responsive therapeutic relationship (Porges 2019). The mythopoetic reality revealed in a depth analysis weaves this into a tapestry of personal meaning, facilitating deep psychological transformation. Additionally, opening to the felt sense of the nonverbal dimensions of the numinous, that ineffable sense of the sacred, is vitalizing, expansive, and illuminating, transforming the most painful aspect of life into a process of soul-making. I trace these dual vectors in a snippet of work with my patient Sally….
In Donald Kalsched’s model of working with trauma, he likens the self-sabotaging defensive dynamic in the psyche to the fallen angel Dis, found in the depths of Hell in Dante’s Inferno (Kalsched 2013). Dis, who personifies the psyche’s archetypal dissociative defenses, devours the innocent souls ensnarled in his underworld. Aptly named, Dis, derived from the Latin, means to divide or negate. It is encountered clinically as dissociation, disavowal, dismissal, and disconnection. In his epic poem, Dante, who is in the midst of a profound inner crisis, finds himself lost in this underworld realm that is lorded over by the personification of this dismembering daimon. Ultimately, guided by his companion, Virgil, they descend through the treacherous realms of endless suffering, at the frozen bottom of which the only way out is by way of an intimate encounter with the dark monster himself. This requires the pilgrim to muster every ounce of inner courage and to climb up the leg and groin of Dis to avoid his devouring grasp. It is in this manner that the pilgrim enters the realm in which genuine suffering—experiencing feelings in the body—allows passageway up and out into the bright, breathing world.
In Kalsched’s formulation, the self-care system comes into play as an attempt to protect the innocent core of the psyche, depicted as the soul-child, from ever having to bear again the highly charged archetypal affect that overwhelmed the psyche in trauma. With its benevolent, ideal, and spiritualized manifestation in the positive pole or its devouring, negating, dismissive manifestation in the negative pole, the self-care system’s early intent to protect the innocent core of the psyche ultimately becomes entrapping. The traumatized person thus remains caught in an eternal struggle for redemption, a struggle for a sense of value and goodness. From an analytic perspective we can envision this struggle as a yearning for a sense of undivided wholeness, the self, that sacred sense of being in relation to the natural order of things, rather than shamefully cast out of the weave of belonging.
Polyvagal Theory
I have struggled to understand what Kalsched means when he uses the term archetypal affect in the context of trauma. I have come to understand it by weaving Jung’s description of archetype, as a psychic instinct, with neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory of emotion (Porges 2001). In brief overview, the vagus is a major nerve of the parasympathetic system, which functionally connects our brain to our body. It is a cranial nerve responsible for the regulation of internal organ functions, such as digestion, heart rate, and respiratory rate, as well as vasomotor activity and certain reflex actions, such as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, and vomiting. What is most important in thinking about the vagus is that it is not only a top-down, but also a bottom-up nerve. Eighty percent of the fibers on the vagus are sensory. The vagus is really our primary portal to brain-body and mind-body relationships (Porges, 2019).
We have two types of vagi that evolved at different points. This becomes extremely important because the roles they play are quite distinct. The vagal pathways each come from two different areas of the brainstem. The evolutionarily newer one, unique to mammals, is linked with the regulation of all the facial muscles—muscles of ingestion, muscles of listening, the heart—muscles involved with engaging others. “Our social nervous system is intimately related with this newer vagus—and so is our breath” (Porges 2019, 4, italics added). Mammals “need other mammals to regulate their bodily states and to survive … . Trauma disrupts the ability to relate to others and to use social behavior to literally regulate vagal function—to calm us down” (4, italics added).
The second vagus goes below our diaphragm regulating our viscera. We share this with many current vertebrates like reptiles, even fish. These systems work in harmony enabling refined biological processes, “but they also react to the world—we use them as defenses or responses to social challenges” (Porges 2019, 5; italics added). According to Porges, experiences of trauma overwhelm an individual’s emotional coping capacity, activating a very primitive part of our organism, such that traumatic events are experienced as highly charged neurological arousal or what I will call “instinctual arousal” because, according to Porges, the neurological system responds in a way that actually precludes felt emotion or cognition.
Porges distinguishes three basic neural subsystems that comprise the vagal nerve. With the help of Peter Levine’s analysis of Porges, I describe how these kinds of vagal response are based on the way an event is experienced:
If an event is perceived as physically life threatening or psychologically threatening to one’s very sense of self—with no potential for escape—a state of parasympathetic, hypo-arousal is activated, exerting the powerful effect of shutting down feeling and sensation and the capacity for thought, essentially a deadening or numbing. From an evolutionary perspective this vagal subsystem stems from its origin in early fish species and reptiles. The function of it is immobilization. Its target of action are the viscera. The immobilization of these leads to feigning death, shutdown, and dissociation (Levine 2010).
If a threat is experienced with a sense that there is a chance to fight or flee, the sympathetic subsystem, which is next in evolutionary development and associated with the reptilian brain, is activated, stimulating a release of adrenalin that increases heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate, inducing a state of highly charged hyperarousal activating the limbs.
Both of these types of highly charged neural responses happen more quickly than cognition or emotional process. Porges refers to this unconscious evaluative process as “neuroception.” There is no conceptualization, emotion, or narrative unfolding. Porges makes a point of saying, “Neuroception is well below the range of consciousness … It is extremely important to understand this—the biological reaction occurs first, and then we develop what I call personal narrative” (Porges 2019, 9; italics added). In states of hypoarousal we shut down, play dead, or dissociate. In hyperarousal we become highly activated, charged to fight or flee. Often there is a mixture of states.
The third and phylogenetically most recent subsystem is activated when some potential for relational engagement is present. “This subsystem exists only in mammals and mediates attachment behaviors … ” (Levine 2010, 99). Mammals are unique, in that they need other mammals to regulate their emotional and bodily states to survive. This is so evident to us in our work as clinicians. Yet when trauma occurs and these more primitive systems take over the very possibility of relating to others, using social interaction to regulate vagal functioning—to calm us down—is disrupted, thus sabotaging us from getting that which we most need.
Levine describes a neurological hierarchy of default:
If one perceives the environment to be safe, one’s social engagement system inhibits structures that control fight and flight … However, when pro-social behaviors do not resolve the threatening situation, a less evolved system is engaged. We mobilize our fight-or-flight response. Finally, in this hierarchy of default—when neither of these more recently acquired systems (social engagement or fight/flight) resolve the situation, or when death appears imminent … the last-ditch system is engaged. This most primitive system, which governs immobility, shutdown and dissociation, takes over and hijacks all survival efforts. (2010, 99–100)
These three states are pre-affective and pre-cognitive. Yet we are story-making creatures. Because we need a way to understand and make meaning of our experience, these inner states give rise to stories. However, this move into story or meaning often overrides the more instinctual dimensions, bypassing experiencing sensations and feelings that remain in the body thus furthering a dissociative process. In my work with Sally, these three kinds of vagal responses served as a valuable guide in sorting through her story as we navigated the flow and counterflow of movement toward genuine embodied feeling.
Access the article in full on Academia.edu