The Lost Analyst and the Phoenix: Image, Word, Myth, and the Journey from Dissociation to Integration

ABSTRACT

The Phoenix myth is commonly thought of as a simple Egyptian parable of re-incarnation. In contrast, this analytic dyad found that the visual images evoked by its elaborated mythemes (sub-plots) related to the various existential moods and affects characteristic of trauma identified by Stolorow (2007), suggesting a psychological purpose, that of emotional self-renewal. Mythology has most consistently been adopted for use in Jung’s analytical psychology, but this article demonstrates this myth’s usefulness with a contemporary relational psychoanalytic approach, that of intersubjective-systems theory. This was effective for an analysand whose former analysis had been abruptly terminated. It was found that the dialogic exploration of possible meaning in the mythemes brought dissociated experience into language, assisted with the emotional integration of the trauma, and restored the analysand’s diminished sense-of-being. Images bring together diverse somatic, cognitive, and verbal information, normally separated into different communication “codes” (Bucci, 1997a). This ancient myth’s longevity may be due to a useful psychological function; its images can aid the organizing of unformulated unconscious chaotic experience and assist in the process of bringing dissociated or preverbal emotions and moods into language. The utility of the Phoenix myth in a relational dialogical process that helps symbolize unsymbolized unconscious content could assist in work with other survivors of catastrophic loss.

Notes

¹ It is of interest, but beyond the scope of this article to compare these findings to Jung’s (1959) concepts in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.

² For an account of an enlivening process of change in psychoanalysis, see Starr-Karlin (2015), The analyst as muse: The expansive dimension of the transference. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 10: 33–52.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penelope S. Starr-Karlin

Penelope S. Starr-Karlin, Psy.D., LMFT, is a Supervising and Training Analyst and core faculty at The Institute of Contemporary Analysis, Los Angeles. She practices in West Los Angeles.