Case material re-envisioned

Jung’s psychoid concept does not feature prominently in his published works, and yet there is evidence that he was already contemplating a psychoid unconscious by the time of his 1907 meeting with Freud and that he went on thinking about this subject for the rest of his life.

My forthcoming book Jung’s Psychoid Concept Contextualised, based on my PhD work here at Essex University, examines the evolution of this concept in Jung’s thinking and its relevance in post-Jungian thought today.

The latter aspect of my work involved an empirical study concerning attitudes towards embodiment in the consulting room.  The study comprised a series of dialogues with senior analysts, in which process notes were employed not as primary data but as an interview tool. The transcripts were analysed to extract the private theories of these analysts, and such private theories then furnished a comparison with Jung’s own account of his psychoid concept.

In this presentation, I propose to focus on this study and hopefully to foster discussion concerning the surprising results that came from it.