Jung's lost contribution to the dilemma of narcissism

Winnicott's invitation to 'further games of Jung-analysis'

Winnicott signs off his celebrated review of Jung's (1963) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the warning that translation of 'erreichten' as 'attained' (implying assimilation) rather than as 'reached to', could 'queer the pitch for further games of Jung-analysis'. This subtly underscores his view that Jung--who he described earlier as 'mentally split' and lacking 'a self with which to know'--remained essentially dissociated. However, Winnicott, whilst immersed in this work on Jung, wrote a letter to Michael Fordham describing himself as suffering 'a lifelong malady' of 'dissociation'. But this he now reported repaired through a 'splitting headache' dream of destruction, dreamt 'for Jung, and for some of my patients, as well as for myself' (Winnicott 1989, p. 228). Winnicott's recurrent concern during his last decade was with 'reaching to'--that quintessential Winnicottian term--some reparative experience that could address such difficulties in constellating a 'unit self'. This is correlated with his engagement with Jung and tracked through his contemporaneous clinical work, particularly 'Fear of Breakdown' (1963). Themes first introduced by Sedgwick (2008) and developed by the author's earlier 'Winnicott on Jung; destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious' (2011) are given further consideration.

The dissociative character: a reconsideration of "multiple personality"

The author has interviewed and reviewed the cases of over 100 patients with a suspected diagnosis of multiple personality disorder (MPD). He finds it clinically useful to think of a continuum of character pathology in which dissociative and defensive altered states predominate. At one end of this continuum is MPD, which he considers a lower-level dissociative character. He redefines dissociation as a defensive altered state, due to autohypnosis, which augments repression or splitting. Depending on the degree of integration of the ego, it may result in a broad range of disturbances of alertness, awareness, memory, and identity. Four vignettes are presented which illustrate a transient hypnoid state, "characterological" dissociation in an upper-level dissociative character, and two cases of MPD, including one emerging in analysis.