Adams’ Mythological Unconscious,
a compelling demonstration of his version of the Jungian method of
amplification, is genuinely a delight to read. The volume may serve equally
well as a casebook for seasoned practitioners as for those who seek an
introduction to the use of mythological themes in clinical practice.  The
work recommends and presents interpretations of dream and fantasy productions
by amplification, i.e., by  a comparative lifting of the manifest content
of these productions to archetypal motifs in mythology. An appreciation of
homologous structures in these mythic works is, thereafter, utilized in order
to augment the essential components of an individual’s productions. In this
manner an understanding canonically grows that combines individual and
collective (unconscious) threads. The author is careful to explain that the
essence of the archetypal is in its typicality (p. 245), though this may well
differ from culture to culture. Adams does begins to develop the interesting
notion of a cultural unconscious, as he discusses the manner in which members
of one culture may deferentially work with someone from another culture
(chapter 3). Throughout, Adams counterpoises his method against what he
considers the redactive/reductive method of Freudian psychoanalysis. I offer
the following thoughts as a neo-Freudian/relational analyst who doesn’t vision
himself or his theoretical kin as a vulture “whose wings are dull reality”
(Poe: “A Sonnet to Science”). The reader is, therefore, forewarned of a tension
that may well precipitate in this cross-theoretical report of Adams’ work and
from the reviewer’s personal bias for volumes that more openly invite the
reader into a skeptical dialogue leading towards a still-to-be discovered
theoretical terminus rather than Adam’s expository style.

I shall limit myself to several
concerns, none of which should be taken to weaken my sense that this is an
important work for the broad spectrum of clinicians and for sentient lay-folk
interested in such matters.

In 1961, a panel was convened at
the meeting of the International Psychoanalytic to discuss the curative aspects
of psychotherapeutic process (IJPA, 1962). Let it be said that neither that
group of respected analysts nor any of the many panels that have since gathered
to discuss the how of psycho therapeutics has comfortably settled on a list of
necessary and sufficient conditions of the talking cure; nor have they
agreed on how such elements commingle to produce substantive alterations in the
lives of those who occasion analysts’ offices. This is rendered all the more
complicated by the shyness demonstrated by the profession’s unwillingness to
tackle a definition for an equally illusive notion, that of health. (Perhaps,
this would be too much to expect as our notions of health may well differ as we
cross invisible cultural boundaries; in the end, the how of analysis may
remain, forever, an open question.)

This having been said, there do
appear to be two prominent explanations of the how of psychoanalysis bandied
about and a third one about which we clinicians prefer not to think. The first
views as essential the exhumation and reintegration of sequestered unconscious
material into the sectors of mind that are accessible to conscious deliberation
and change. A second view, similar to Alexander’s early model for corrective
emotional experience (Alexander, 1961), sees cure emanating from novel
relational capacities that the analysand develops within the therapeutic dyad.
The analyst and patient co-create a new relationship that removes the patient
(maybe both) from his or her (or their) role-locks that previously rendered the
acting out and formation of symptoms more gratifying than the everyday pain of
relating. A third, almost unspeakable view presents the analyst as a
charismatic whose dazzling powers of exegesis woo the patient into relinquishing symptoms
in hopes of sharing some of those analytic powers. I shall leave it to critics
of analysis to expostulate about this third possibility and shall briefly focus
on the first two.

With reference to both of the first
two models, it is posited that the therapist’s ability to be on-target with
interpretations is crucial to success in the therapeutic endeavor. In the first
instance, the homology of the interpretation with the patient’s unconscious
process is the proximal agent of change, as it renders the sequestered process
open to modification in the fresh air of conscious thought. But even according
to the second model, the failure to offer resonant interpretations is likely to
set off a repetition of a sense of being misunderstood that can only bolster
the analysand’s withdrawal into the world of symptoms. In both instances, that
is, this homology of material and corresponding interpretation is at least
necessary, if not sufficient, for the success of the process.

It behooves analysts of all
schools, therefore, to attend to demonstrations of this interpretive resonance.
Adams does present clinical anecdotes suggesting this resonance in his use of
amplification, but more of the evidence in support of his technique is by way
of the imprimatur of this or that analyst (Hillman, Jung, Lopez-Pedraza, and
others). And while Adams’ work should not be faulted on this basis (as the
propensity to cite authorities is rife in the world of theoretical metapsychology
and analysis), the work would have benefited significantly from additional data
on the manner in and by which these mythical amplifications resonated in the
material that followed its use in each reported case.

If I experienced any significant
discomfort in the reading of this work, however, it was in the manner by which
Adams takes on many of the authors that he cites. On different occasions Bion,
Fordham, Freud, Hillman and others are cited and then their conclusions are
dismissed … if not out of hand, then still and all cavalierly. This is
perhaps most obvious in his lengthy treatment of the paleontological
considerations of Adrienne Mayor (pp. 312-355). Adams took umbrage to her
suggestion that the griffin may well have been symbolically appropriated from
prehistoric sightings of the fossil-remains of protoceratops and may not be,
strictly speaking, a mythic creation of the inner mind of anthropos. Adams’ arguments against Mayor’s position — even if well
thought out — seemed irrelevant to his argument about the utility of
mythological amplification and, in that sense, gratuitous. Introducing a
hundred-plus word sentence (p. 351), Adams suggests that, had she followed the
path that he recommends, “she might have developed … more respect for the
imagination.”

This was, perhaps, all the more
disturbing to this reader as it ran counter to the holistic manner of
interpretation that Adams supports in this work and that I, too, embrace. The
author artfully demonstrates throughout how, through the process of
amplification that he recommends, disavowed non-ego-images (akin to ego-dystonic
representations, in Freudian language) may be integrated into the mainstream of
the mind’s ego-images (ego-syntonic representations). When the dream-director
casts someone other than the dreamer in a given role, we are lead to wonder if
this other role does not, in fact, represent a characteristic of the dreamer
with which the dreamer feels discomfort.  Analysis, independent of the
model of healing that dominates one’s thinking, is thought to heal, at least in
part, by permitting the analysand an opportunity for making peace with these
shadow elements of the personality that have been driven out of
awareness.  I thought to myself: couldn’t Mayor’s gambit and others’
views, as well, profitably be seen by Adams as his own disavowed theoretical
self-images … residues of a Cartesian Dubito
surrounding his own metatheories.

I found myself, furthermore,
fascinating about whether it might not be profitable for  theoreticians in
the social sciences, in general, to conceptualize disavowed theories as akin to
non-ego-images in Adams’ model. One might, then, try on for size (in a primus
inter pares spirit) models that don’t necessarily comport with one’s own
views. Instead of following this tack, however, Adams seemed consistently
committed to demonstrating the correctness a singular position and this did
detract from the work … at least for this skeptical reader.

I shall move towards closing with a
discussion of an interesting detour that Adams takes, nearing the end of his
own work, into the dreams that Joseph presents to his brothers (Genesis 37). 
As an aside, Adams, who consistently argues that it is contrary to his method
to introduce new elements into what he repeatedly calls the “essential”
ingredients of a dream or fantasy, in fact does so, himself. He concludes (p.
422), contrary to the text (Genesis
37:26-28) that it was the brothers who sold Joseph. It was, textually, the
Midianites who are reported to have sold him to a band of Ishmaelites who,
thereafter, sold him to Potifar, a captain to Pharaoh (even if it is so that
the brothers had, indeed, intended sell him, themselves).  

What I had previously found so
striking about these dreams were the choreographic characteristics that are shared
by Joseph’s dreams and that may be relevant to the mode of contemporary
dialogue in the social sciences and psychoanalysis, as well:

    And he said to them: Please,
listen up to this dream which I have
    dreamt. And behold we were gathering sheaves  in the midst
of the field
    and behold my sheaf stood up and was erect and behold your
sheaves
    arose and bowed to my sheaf. (Genesis 37:6-7)

    And behold I dreamt still another dream and behold the sun and
the
    moon and eleven stars were bowing to me. (Genesis 37:9)

 

It occurred to me (Covitz, 1982, 1997)
that in both dreams, this irksome adolescent placed himself at the center of a
relational system (agrarian or cosmological), disallowing any commerce between
the dream’s more or less faceless dancers; all communication was to go on in
these fantastic images between Joseph and a single other and the others might
not engage in any joint activity that might exclude him. Secondly, it struck me
that by so doing, all others were to remain more or less indistinguishable; all
were to surround him admiringly and worship him but none were to be accorded
internal lives of their own that would appear as difference in the dreams
(object-object differentiation, in more Freudian terms).

There is, I would suggest, an
occupational hazard for the psycho-theoretician. This danger is resident in a
belief that any one of our proffered theories is beyond the fray of the ongoing
conversation in which we all partake, a conversation that centers on the
investigation of what it means to be an aware-of-itself member of this Clan Anthropos.

Michael Adams’ Mythical Unconscious contributed greatly to my own understanding of
what it means to be human. His myth-making model and use of mythical
amplification offer the reader an opportunity to witness the potential uses …
for myths about griffins, lions and flying red horses. It opened a window
through which unicorns, minotaurs and pegasus might be visioned. This reader
wishes only that it had been done more in an additive spirit in which a
commingling of the multiplicity of contemporary views of the psyche was more
prominent and in which an invitation for a dialogic playfulness took precedence
over the demonstration of the correctness of a singular viewpoint.

References:

 

Alexander, F.  (1961). The Scope of Psychoanalysis. 
New York: Basic Books.
Covitz, H. (1982). Joseph and his narcissistic dreams. The Observer,
Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis, pp. 16-20. Philadelphia.
Covitz , H. (1998).  OEdipal Paradigms in Collision. Peter Lang
Publishers, New York.

© 2002 Howard Covitz

Howard Covitz, Ph.D., was long-time Director
of and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapies (Bryn Mawr, PA). His trek to these roles encompassed interests
in Religious and Secular Education and Administration, and the teaching of
Statistics and Mathematics (Temple & Villanova Universities). He trained
psychoanalytically at the Psychoanalytic Studies Institute (Philadelphia). He
practices and lives with his wife in Melrose Park (PA) — from whence they
travel to visit their children who, with their spouses, have acted as able and
persistent collocutors in his writings.

Categories: Psychoanalysis