passage processes by martin skála prague, czech republic i ndividual member iaap

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PASSAGE PROCESSES by Martin Skála

Prague, Czech Republic

Individual Member IAAP

Developing Group ČSAP

(Board member)

This contribution deals with archetypal process of passage or deep psychic crises. A link among several disorders occurring on the threshold of adulthood, rites of initiation and the individuation process will be suggested. I will offer a term “initiation process” which takes place on the threshold of adulthood. The initiation process is similar but different from the individuation process elaborated by Jung. A case vignette will clarify particularity of the initiation process.

Then the individuation and the initiation process will be compared to Basal Perinatal Matrices elaborated on by Grof. I will suggest a term “passage processes” as a superordinate concept for all similar archetypal processes when one´s life is completely changed in all possible meanings. In the end I will summarize my understanding of human development in four Worlds (Womb, Family, Adulthood and Transpersonal Dimension in an old age) which are connected by five passage processes (Conception, Birth, Initiation, Individuation and Death).

Martin Skála | IM IAAP, DG ČSAP | Psychopompos.cz | Prague, Czech Republic 2

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IntroductionJung extended developmental psychology to the second part of human’s life by elaborating his theory of the individuation process (Edinger, 1968). He built this theory on the base of his own experience which he called Nekyia or Katabasis - descent into the lower world (Jung, CW 05). In 1913, when he was 38 he had many anxious dreams and visions which are elaborated on in his Red Book. Jung interpreted it in terms of death and rebirth of the Solar God. (CW 05) He recommended not being involved in the unconsciousness in such a way before one reaches middle age. (Jacobi, 1973)

I took this recommendation seriously but I met the Jungian theory when I was about 20 and I was fascinated by such exploring of unconsciousness. Before that I had concentrated on my dreams and studied different religions. This was my adolescent Nekyia. My spontaneous experience seemed to correspond with initial rites. Jung approach was an inspiration for my studying psychology. Later I met my wife on a boat sailing from Skagen to Christiania. Now I have a family with two children and my private practice – The Centre for the Deep Psychology called PSYCHOPOMPOS located in Emauzy Abbey in Prague. Welcome.

Martin Skála | IM IAAP, DG ČSAP | Psychopompos.cz | Prague, Czech Republic

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The Initiation ProcessI learnt a lot of young people experience similar process which could be understood as an initiation into adulthood. Beside this also specific disorders may occur in adolescence. Perry (1986) understands the psychotic process resembling a ritual dream of renewal as a deep transformation of personality leading to appearance of the self-archetype. Zoja (2000) interprets drug abuse as stagnation in phase of death in initiation rites. Czech family therapists Chvála and Trapková (2012: 2) connect eating disorders to so called “social birth,” when the child leaves its family - “social uterus” for adulthood. Disorders occurring on the threshold of adulthood are often related to the initiation rites. Not surprising since Jung (1968) considers rites to be facilitators of nature unconscious processes. The initiation rites and rites of passage generally show many symbols of death and rebirth, which Jung observed in the individuation too.

During the initiation rites, initiates´ youth is dying. (Gennep, 1960) Initiates are usually considered to be “dead”. They spent some time in a symbolic tomb or a womb. They are examined, wounded and they should obtain an animal spirit determining their future social roles.



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Shamans disintegrate initiates´ consciousness to let their new reintegration in adulthood happen. The rites of passage are usually completed by symbolic rebirth.

It seems to me that there is similarity among these disorders, the rites of passage and the individuation process elaborated on by Jung (CW 05). I suggest using my term “initiation process” for this unconscious process taking part on the threshold of adulthood. We can illustrate the initiation process on the following case vignette describing a dream series about a journey by bus. A wild bus journey 24-year-old Sarah was a rational young woman. She grew up in a family where emotions were not expressed. Then she lived with her boyfriend Tom. Sarah came to her analysis because of “pathological jealousy.” She met Tom in a Scout Camp when she was fourteen and they would spend summers there regularly. Their partnership was full of conflicts. Her boyfriend was an emotional guy. He often argued with others and Sarah had an urge to settle things down.


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Tom would also often go to parties to drink with various girls. Sarah hated it. Tom accused her of being “pathologically jealous.”

Sarah brought following initial dream:The bus is going dangerously. Sarah is sitting on the driver´s seat. A man beside her shouts: “How are you driving the bus?” She discovers that the steering wheel is missing. The man starts to look for the steering wheel and he finds the real driver holding the steering wheel and sitting on a back seat. The driver couldn´t see the road. The man provides a communication between Sarah who is navigating and the driver can drive.

A journey is a symbol of the Solar Hero described by Jung in his Symbols of Transformation. (CW 05) Contemporary hero can travel by bus. The bus as a public transport depends on other people and on a timetable. In Sarah´s dream series, we will see a transformation of this collective journey by bus into Sarah´s individual way. At the beginning of her analysis Sarah was not self-confident enough for her individual journey. She was easily influenced by others.


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Her therapeutic contract – the treatment of pathological jealousy – was her boyfriend´s contract in fact. She believed him more than her own frustration from his drinking with the girls and his affections.

Sarah bothered her boyfriend´s affections because she needed to keep a rational control. But according to the dream images she lost the steering wheel and she did not have a control over the wild bus trip any more. Symbolically, the hero lost his Solar-wheel. The dark way begins. The real driver was sitting on the back seat. The driver and his wild blind journey could symbolize Sarah´s shadow aspect of animus, her affections which were suppressed and projected onto her boyfriend. In Sarah´s dream the communication between Sarah´s dream ego and the bus driver was established. Consequently Sarah was losing her illusions about her partnership. Sarah brought following dream:The dangerous journey by bus continues. Sarah is siting by a window. She spots a little girl with a dog on a leash standing on the side of the road. The bus is going so close that it scrapes the little girl´s face off.


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As a young girl Sarah had a dog. This substituted her lack of closeness and emotions in her family. Typically she treated her dog very anxiously and kept it under the control (on the leash). The symbol of the dog on the leash could refer to her controlled affections.

As a girl Sarah romantically dreamt about a big love. Naturally, the partnership with Tom was different from her fantasies. In Sarah´s dream the young girl lost her face. This was her initiation wound. The face symbolizes her ego. In the initiation process a child´s ego (the little girl in this dream) is dying for its rebirth into the adult one. The dog symbolizes a guardian of boundaries too. Sarah was creating her boundaries. She used to spend all the time with her boyfriend, but once she would leave her boyfriend drinking with friends around the fire in the Scout Camp and went into her tent alone. She was not able to fall asleep. She could hear people making noise and drunken Tom flirting with another girl. Sarah was disgusted.


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She realized her suppressed rage as an opposite side of her jealousy. At that time Sarah overcame her fear of hostility and she started to express her emotions and came into conflicts with Tom. Once he almost hit her. This was the last drop and she decided to leave him.

She had the following dream:The bus is going up on a hill on a spiral road. The bus reaches the top and then it falls down. Sarah drops out of the bus and she falls down into the wood. She is lying on the ground and thinking she is dead, because old-school banners are circling around her. One of them says: “For survival, you must serve a poisoned fish.” All of sudden a big round gold face is waking her up. In this part of the dream she woke up because the sun started to shine on her face.Symbols of death and rebirth occur in this crucial dream. Beside dream's apparent storyline, the rise of “the Solar face” symbolizes rising of the self-archetype and refers to a new light of consciousness. A journey and a transformation of the Solar God is an essential subject which is associated with the Nekyia


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and the individuation process according to Jung (CW 05). But the aim of Sarah´s Nekyia was not her individuation but it was her initiation into adulthood.

The Passage Processes I suggest using the term “passage processes” as a superordinate concept for these processes where Nekyia occurs and where one´s life is completely changing in all possible meanings. These major changes involve the ego and the personality and the constellation of archetypes as well as the physical body and outer world and life circumstances and social relationships etc. This happens during the transformation from one developmental stage to another. Both above mentioned processes, Sarah´s initiation process as well as Jung´s individuation process, are examples of the passage processes.


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The AbyssSarah´s initiation process can be traced also in the transformation of her dreams´ images of faces symbolizing ego. The symbol of the face occurs in some kabbalistic interpretations recognising two Faces in the Tree of Life - the Lower and the Upper Face (Halevi, 1991). The transformation from one Tree of Life into the next one happens through a non-sephira Da´at - the Abyss in the centre of the lower Tree´s Upper Face, which leads to Yesod Sephirah - Foundation in the centre of the upper Tree´s Lower Face.

Tree of Life


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The AbyssSarah´s initiation process can be traced also in the transformation of her dreams´ images of faces symbolizing ego. The symbol of the face occurs in some kabbalistic interpretations recognising two Faces in the Tree of Life - the Lower Face and the Upper face (Halevi, 1991). The transformation from one Tree of Life into the next one happens through a non-sephira Da´at - the Abyss in the centre of the lower Tree´s Upper Face, which leads to Yesod Sephirah - Foundation in the centre of the upper Tree´s Lower Face.

Lower Face


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Upper Face


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Lower Tree of life


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Upper Tree of life


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Da´at

non-sephira Da´at - the Abyss


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Yesod Yesod Sephirah - Foundation


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Through a Jungian lens the Abyss might be viewed as a dark light of a soul and entrance into Nekyia. In her last dream Sarah fell down into the forested abyss which she perceived as an underworld and she herself felt as she was dead. Then a new emanation and the new Solar round face arose as a foundation of Sarah´s adult life. A fall in an abyss is another symbol of the passage processes.

Upper

Tree of life

LowerYesod

Daát Yesod

Daát Passage through abyss in Non-Sephira Daát in the Lower world

into Sephirot Yesod foundation of the Upper world


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Death and rebirthThere are several amplifications of this process in different psychoanalytical theories. For example Freud (SE18, p. 311) recognized the death drive. Spielrein (1994:2) titled her important essay "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being." Somewhere Jung recorded a dream where his female patient fell into a pit and was trying to climb up. All of sudden Jung appeared in the dream saying: “Not up but through.” On another place Jung gives evidence of a dissociative state in analysis, when a new centralizing tendency – Self-archetype appears. Likewise, two psychoanalysts Kinston and Cohen (1988) describe a “psychic hole” in depth of every psyche. They even claim that any psychoanalysis is not completed before passing through the hole. Fordham (1988) described the developmental process of “deintegration and reintegration” in the meaning of the Self differentiation.


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It is possible to say that during the passage processes the deintegration is the deepest and similar to a psychotic state. This is experienced as death. Here we can mention the body of Osiris dismembered into several pieces. Later Osiris became a God of the Underworld and His son Horus, the Solar God became the Master of Universe (Eliade, 1978). During deintegration, new experience can enter into psyche and during the reintegration new experience can be integrated. In Sarah´s dream, the old-school banner said: “For survival, you must serve a poisoned fish.” This message could be interpreted as a “deintegrate” of Sarah´s shadow – the anger. In his Aeon, Jung (CW 9, Part 2, par. 140) deals with the symbol of fish in connection to the Zodiac symbol of Pisces – the two fish swimming in opposite directions. Jung claims that the fish is related to Jesus Christ and the second fish symbolizes Antichrist. This could be the poisoned fish from Sarah´s dream. She started to serve this fish when she began to come into conflicts with her boyfriend Tom and when she decided to leave him and the Scout Camp. She lost her vitality in that time.


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She had following dream:The bus is going downhill. The road leads into a river and the bus sank there. Sarah, with a few others, finds a safety boat and she is trying to paddle in the river´s stream. She tries to balance her own power and the power of the river´s stream. This is the end of this bus road movie. The collective conveyance bus has sunk and Sarah´s heroic journey continues by the more individual safety boat and in connection with her natural life stream symbolised by the river. When Sarah´s transitive period of depression (Abyss) was finishing, she had the last dream of this series: Sarah is waiting for her father on a courtyard. There is also a dog on a leash. Another dog runs into the courtyard and attacks the dog on the leash that is not able to fight back. When Sarah notices it, she unleashes the dog defending the courtyard. A horse appears and Sarah leaves the courtyard riding the horse accompanied by the freed dog.


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Just after this dream Sarah finished her analysis. She wished not to be influenced by anybody. The journey of the Solar-hero is beginning. The dream heroine went away by her individual way on the horse and with the dog. Comparison of the passage processesIn this dream series, there are many symbols of the passage processes: A journey and an animal, a fall into an abyss, death and rebirth and symbols of self-archetype etc. These symbols occur both in the individuation process as well as in the initiation process. These symbols are typical for the passage processes in general. But goals of the initiation process and the individuation process are different. What the initiation process opens, that the individuation process closes. If the initiation process is searching for power, then the individuation process is searching for meaning. The initiation process allows the rebirth into adulthood and the individuation process allows the rebirth into an old age. The Solar Hero is born in the initiation process and he dies in the individuation process.

In our culture, there are many parallels of these processes. For example a novel called Demian by Hermann Hesse (1965)refers more to


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the initiation process and his novel called Steppenwolf (Hesse, 2002) refers more to the individuation process.

The BirthGrof (1992) uses the term “Basic Perinatal Matrices” for description of biological delivery experiences (experiences in the womb, when contractions begin, and when we move through the birth canal and leave the mother’s body). These experiences seem to be associated with specific symbolic images as the “Amniotic Universe and the Cosmic Engulfment - No Exit, and the Death and Rebirth Struggle etc…”

In the concern of Grof´s elaboration, we could ask: Is there any other passage process? The birth seems to be another Nekyia and another experience of death and rebirth. During the birth the transformation of foetus into new-born takes part on all levels of human being again, including outer world – the uterus turns into a family – the social uterus in Chvála and Trapková terms. The birth seems to be the next passage process, which leads from the prenatal developmental stage to the childhood.


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Developmental Steps on Jacob´s Ladder and the four Trees of Life

Let us come back to kabbalistic idea of Jacob´s Ladder and the four Trees of Life or Worlds. (Halevi, 1991) In the case vignette Sarah´s Nekyia was interpreted like an abyss or a passage between the two Faces of the two Worlds. In this way Jacob´s Ladder is built from the four Worlds whereas one always particularly overlays the next one. In developmental point of view it means that our development takes always place in the two Worlds simultaneously.


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The Worlds are called:

Atziluth “The World of Emanation” where the light is united with its source. This world is close to Adam Kadmon who is “primary of all primaries,” androgyny, and an entire human being – the archetype of self in Jungian terms.Beri´ah“The World of Creation” (however without form and shape) where angels live. This angels´ world could be interpreted as a world of archetypes.Yetzirah“The World of Formation” of shapes which is linked to souls, and emotions, and striving. This is the psychological level of being.Assiah“The World of Action” where the creation is completed on physical level (Physical Asiyah).


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In accordance to this concept of Jacob´s Ladder and the four Worlds

(Atziluth, Beri´ah, Yetzirah and Assiah)

we can differentiate four basic developmental levels and five

passage processes in human life:


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Passage process V – DeathWorld IV – Transpersonal Dimension

Passage process IV – IndividuationWorld III – Adulthood

Passage process III – Initiation World II – Family

Passage process II – Birth World I – Womb

Passage process I – Conception unity and differentiation on a physical level

(egg and spermatozoon, differentiation of germ cell, foetus)


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Passage process II – Birth Grof´s BPM I-IV, Fordham´s Primal Self

World I – Womb The Physical World of Action - the egg- archetype –

physical and psychological development of foetus in mother´s womb

Passage process I – Conception


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Passage process II – Birth Grof´s BPM I-IV, Fordham´s Primal Self

World I – Womb The Physical World of Action - the egg- archetype –

physical and psychological development of foetus in mother´s womb


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Passage process III – Initiation the Birth of the Solar-Hero. The threshold of adulthood

described in this contributionWorld II – Family

“The psychological World of Formation of shapes of souls, and emotions, and striving - the child-archetype

physical and psychological and social formation and development of a child in its family, the social womb

Passage process II – BirthWorld I – Womb

Passage process I – ConceptionMartin Skála | IM IAAP, DG ČSAP | Psychopompos.cz | Prague, Czech Republic


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Passage process III – Initiation the Birth of the Solar-Hero. The threshold of adulthood

described in this contributionWorld II – Family

“The psychological World of Formation of shapes of souls, and emotions, and striving - the child-archetype – physical

and psychological and social formation and development of a child in its family, the social womb

Passage process II – BirthWorld I – Womb



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Passage process V – Death World IV – Transpersonal Dimension

Passage process IV – Individuation elaborated on by Jung. The Death of the Solar-Hero.

Middle age. Zenith of life.World III – Adulthood

“Angels´ World of Creation” - the hero-archetype and his journey, ego realization, autonomous adult active

life both in career and in newly established family, parenthood

Passage process III – InitiationWorld II – Family

Passage process II – Birth

World I – Womb



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Passage process V – Death World IV – Transpersonal Dimension

Passage process IV – Individuation elaborated on by Jung. The Death of the Solar-Hero.

Middle age. Zenith of life.World III – Adulthood

“Angels´ World of Creation” - the hero-archetypeego realization, autonomous adult active life

both in career and in newly established family, parenthood


Passage process II – Birth World I – Womb


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Passage process V – Deathelaborated in Books of Dead (Tibetan, Egyptian etc.), various

mythologies or near-death experience, entrance into afterlife (Eliade)

World IV – Transpersonal Dimension“The World of Emanation and Adam Kadmon”

- the self-archetype old age, individuality, wisdom and transpersonal

consciousness, wholeness, androgyny.




World I – Womb

Passage process I – ConceptionMartin Skála | IM IAAP, DG ČSAP |

Psychopompos.cz | Prague, Czech Republic

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Passage process V – Deathelaborated in Books of Dead (Tibetan, Egyptian etc.), various

mythologies or near-death experience, entrance into afterlife (Eliade)

World IV – Transpersonal Dimension“The World of Emanation and Adam Kadmon” - the self-archetype

old age, individuality, wisdom and transpersonalconsciousness, wholeness, androgyny.




World I – Womb



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Passage process V Death

World IV Self

Transpersonal Dimension in an old age

Passage process IVIndividuation

World IIIArchetypal level of

developmentAdulthood

Passage process IIIInitiation World II

Psychological level of development

FamilyPassage process II

Birth World I

Physical level of development

WombPassage process I

Conception

Conclusion

This is my understanding of human development

in the four Worlds (Womb, Family, Adulthood

and Transpersonal Dimension in an old age)

which are connected by the five

Passage Processes(Conception, Birth, Initiation,

Individuation and Death)

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There are several ways how the passage processes can occur:

naturally in innate passage periods in human lifewhen life circumstances are fundamentally changed - either by external (e.g. great life tragedy etc.) or by internal factors (e.g. serious disease etc.)during psychoanalysis or a deep psychotherapy A horizontal development happens in four developmental stages - four Worlds. A vertical development happens during the passage processes, when we come back to our roots (to illud tempus in Eliade´s (1949) words - for rebirth into the next World. The experience of death and rebirth is repeated and elaborated on different developmental stages. Jung (2009) says in his Red Book: “Without the depths, I do not have the heights.”


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passage processes by martin skála prague, czech republic i ndividual member iaap

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