Kyle Arnold

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin:

Toward a Theory of Prepsychotic
Perceptual Alterations

ABSTRACT

This paper articulates a psychodynamically informed phenome-

nological reading of prepsychotic perceptual alterations, which the
author calls anti-epiphanies. Several of Carl Jungs experiences of
the anti-epiphany, as described in his autobiography Memories,
Dreams, Reections (1961), are taken as exemplar cases. These
anti-epiphanies are viewed through a critical psychobiographical
lens, in an interpretationwhich tacks back and forth between Jungs
childhood, psychological theories, and later prepsychotic experi-
ence. It is claimed that Jungs anti-epiphanies are linked to his use
of schizoid-narcissistic forms of transitional selfobjects, referred
to as Jungian manikins. Such Jungian manikins, it is argued, func-
tion to defend the subject against annihilation anxieties related
to psychological engulfment, penetration, and nalization. When
these anxieties become especially pronounced, the subjects entire
perceptual world may be defensively used as a Jungian manikin,
creating an anti-epiphany. The author conjectures that similar
patterns of experience may be operative in the prepsychotic per-
ceptual alterations had by those with schizoid-narcissistic charac-
ter pathology.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 33:2

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2003
On a jagged rock above us a slim brownish-black gure stood motionless, leaning on a long
spear, looking down at the train. Beside him towered a gigantic candelabrum cactus.

I was enchanted by this sightit was a picture of something utterly alien and outside my expe-
rience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du deja vu. I had the feeling that I had
already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from
me only by distance in time. It was as if I were at this moment returning to the land of my
youth, and as if I knew that dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for ve thousand
years.

The feeling-tone of this curious experience accompanied me throughout my whole journey

through savage Africa . . . I could not guess what string within myself was plucked at the sight
of that solitary dark hunter. I only knew that his world had been mine for countless millennia.
( Jung 1961, p. 283)

With these words Carl Jung draws us into the enigmatic atmosphere of one
of the obscurely revelatory moments he experienced during an expedition to
Africa, undertaken in the autumn of 1925. The moment Jung depictswhich
both prefaces and pregures an incipient brush with psychosishangs before
us, frozen in a kind of crystalline unreality. If it were removed from its lived
context, Jungs experience might easily be mistaken for a dream or fantasy.
The objects portrayed seem to curve around him, ordering themselves not in
submission to the mundane meanings of a public world, but in deference to
the inner murmurings of Jungs psyche.

The instance described bears much resemblance to what literary scholars, fol-
lowing James Joyce, call epiphany. Literary epiphanies are generally dened
as brief yet vivid moments of intense awareness, instants marked by a pro-
found subjective sense of mystery, expansiveness, and, in some accounts,
atemporality. Often presented as experiences of revelation, epiphanies are fre-
quently narrated as catalysts for profound spiritual growth in the literary
characters who are lucky enough to experience them (Bidney, 1997).

Similar, though darker, views of epiphany-like experiences can be found in

the writings of some sufferers and students of psychopathology. While the
literary epiphany is usually thought of as an instance of quasi-religious enlight-
enment or unveilinghence the term epiphany, derived from the Greek
word epiphainesthai, meaning to appear or to come into view, the psy-
chopathological epiphany may be regarded as a sign that the subject is becom-
ing considerably occluded by madness. Sometimes, as recounted in memoirs
such as Renees Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (1970) and Philip K.

246 Kyle Arnold

Dicks Valis (1981), epiphany may even herald psychosis.1 As Peter Buckley
(1988) puts it:
The signicance of such prepsychotic epiphanies is far from clear. From
some theoretical perspectives, these experiences are merely intimations of
the madness to come. They are, one might say, prefaces to the text of psy-
chosis, and thus do not need to be studied on their own distinctive terms.
This casual dismissal should raise our suspicion.

Other theorists (Sass, 1992), to the contrary, consider these numinous moments
to play a regnant role in the genesis of psychotic states. From this point
of view, prepsychotic epiphany, over and above grosser symptoms such as
delusions and hallucinations, should be a focal point in any investigation of
psychosis.

Any attempt to study such prepsychotic quasi-revelations, however, is

hindered by a certain ambiguity. The distinction between these and more
nonpathologic epiphanies, it turns out, is ineluctably slippery and context-
dependent: that which might count as an instance of insight in Jean-Paul
Sartres philosophical novel Nausea (1969) could mark a moment of blindness
in Renees Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. The readers own theoret-
ical bias, her own favored interpretive context, is thus particularly instru-
mental here. Renee, reading Nausea, would likely view its epiphanies as
psychologically concealing, while Sartre, reading Autobiography of a Schizophrenic
Girl, might well see Renees madness as philosophically revealing.

As a consequence of this ambiguity, any interpretation of the anti-epiphany

is bound to be tendentious. The tendency of this paper is toward a psy-
chopathological understanding of epiphanies, one which emphasizes mad-
ness or occlusion over enlightenment. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1970)
might put it, my approach here is more a hermeneutics of suspicion than a
hermeneutics of faith. Epiphany, to be sure, encourages a hermeneutics of faith.
It tempts the subject with an alluring mlange of revelation and enigma, a
combination which calls for philosophic exegesis. Psychoanalysis, however,
invites us to read such seemingly sacred experiences against their grain.
It asks us toat least strategicallyconsider truth as lying (Ricoeur, 1970,
p. 32).2 In this case, doing so is both theoretically interesting and clinically
unavoidable. Theoretically, a hermeneutics of suspicion permits one to won-
der: what kinds of self-deception may lie hidden in the ultimate experience

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 247

of revelation? Clinically, it allows us to ask: what role might epiphany play
in the genesis of a psychotic state? These two questions, I want to suggest,
coincide profoundly.

Yet, partly because of the opposition between a hermeneutic of suspicion and

the experiential texture of epiphany, both questions are impeded by termi-
nological obstacles. As noted above, the word epiphany, in its very ety-
mology, implies revelation. Like the experiences which it denotes, the term
itself discourages skepticism and inspires faith. Clinically, furthermore, epi-
phany suggests a research area which may be too broad to be of specic
interest to psychopathologists. Though epiphanies may often pregure mad-
ness, they can also, it is possible to argue, give rise to heightened sanity. So
that this study may be rendered clinically specic and theoretically lucid,
then, a terminological shift is necessary. For epiphany, I wish to substitute
the term anti-epiphany. Anti-epiphany is meant to signify, clinically, pre-
psychotic epiphany, while also alluding more abstractly to the blindness
a hermeneutic of suspicion perceives in any epiphanic moment. With regard
to the clinical side of this doublet, one might say that the anti-epiphany
is an illusory epiphany, an apparent revelation that is, on a deeper psycho-
logical level, a mirage. It is a chimera that beckons one down the path of
madness.3

Jungs African narrative provides an almost ideal case example of anti-

epiphany, not only for its richness and recognizability but also because of the
presence of much related autobiographical data and theoretical elaboration
in Jungs texts. The aim of this study is the articulation of a phenomenolog-
ical,4 personalistic, and psychodynamic account of the specic class of the
anti-epiphanic to which Jungs experience belongs, by critical psychobio-
graphical interpretation of Jungs writings.

Review of the literature

Before we delve further into Jungs anti-epiphany, however, let us examine
the extant theories one might use to interpret it. Unfortunately, little work
has yet been done on the meaning of the anti-epiphany. A notable exception
is the hermeneutic research of Louis Sass (1992), who, in a massive study of
the manifold relationships between schizophrenia and modernism, suggests

248 Kyle Arnold

that a critical point in a schizophrenic breakdown may involve what he, using
the German term for mood, calls the Stimmung. This peculiar mood is
asserted to involve a hyperconscious awareness of, and thus detachment from,
the lived-world. While enveloped in this Stimmung, Sass says, the schizo-
phrenics lived-world is illuminated by a brilliant aurora of clarity. Yet, as a
consequence of this hyperconsciousness, the schizophrenic loses touch with
the felt meanings of perceived objects. She is blinded by her own light.

The consequent texture of the schizophrenics perceptual world is character-

ized, according to Sass, by the feelings that this world is unreal, fragmented,
and merely there while devoid of all meaning. At the same time or just
after, however, the world is somehow also felt to be profoundly yet enig-
matically meaningful. As in the literary epiphany, a sense of expansiveness
and atemporality may also be present. Sass claims that the Stimmung may
function as a matrix out of which the grosser schizophrenic symptoms emerge,
as the sufferer struggles to make sense of the inexplicable changes in her
world. The schizophrenic mind, Sass says, responds to the initial fragmenta-
tion of the lived-world by weaving it back together with a web of delusions.

In a signicantly related area lies Freuds (1919) paper The Uncanny. In

this famous essay, Freud attempts to discern the meaning of feelings of uncan-
niness, which he views through the lens of the German word unheimlich,
meaning un-home-like or un-homely. Seizing on the manner in which this
word is sometimes used interchangeably with its counterpart, heimlich, or
homely, Freud argues that the uncanny involves a re-experiencing of some-
thing once familiar that has been repressed or surmountedthat has, in other
words, been made unfamiliar. An infantile Oedipal wish, an archaic sense of
primal fusion between self and world, an intimation of mortality, and other
discarded elements of ones past psychical life may all, upon their return,
trigger the paradoxical sense of the Uncanny.

Both of the above theories may appear to provide promising beginnings for
an interpretation of Jungs anti-epiphanic experience, as well as for a more
general comprehension of the anti-epiphanic. A Sassian might point to Jungs
schizoid traits (Winnicott, 1964), emphasizing his self-consciousness and social
alienation. These features of Jungs personality might tempt one to equate
his moment of rapture with the schizophrenic Stimmung, or, at least, with
certain aspects of it.

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 249

From a Freudian point of view, the strange coincidence of mystery and famil-
iarity that colors Jungs narrative could be seen as indicative of the uncanny
return of unfamiliar fragments of childhood. This interpretation ts fairly
well with Freuds (1924) theory of psychosis, which glosses it as involving,
among other things, inundation by forces originating in the id. To a Freudian,
the uncanny appearance of Jungs discarded childhood wishes could signify
an imminent irruption of id-derivatives. A broad subset of prepsychotic anti-
epiphanies could be similarly interpreted as instances of the emergence of
the uncanny.

Both interpretations, however, are in this case unsatisfying. Sasss work on

the anti-epiphany is intricate, subtle, and frequently brilliant. However, it is
almost exclusively focused on isolating the inner structure of the anti-epiphany
itself. In his work so far, Sass has been mostly unconcerned with the possi-
ble relevance of specic biographical issues to the anti-epiphany, and, there-
fore, does not provide the sort of psychodynamically sophisticated theory for
which I am searching. Equally importantly, Sasss schizophrenic Stimmung,
though akin to Jungs experience in several ways, does not quite t with it.
The phenomenological characteristics of fragmentation and mere being
that he enumerates cannot be seen in Jungs narrative without interpretive
eyestrain, and the overall feel of this sort of anti-epiphany lacks the ten-
sion suffusing those Sass depicts. Diagnostically, the type of anti-epiphany
Jung experienced may have as much to do with narcissism as with schizoid
phenomena, as will become evident later.

But a Freudian conceptualization is also not quite sufcient here. Although

Freud, unlike Sass, puts some hermeneutic emphasis on the biographical and
relational contexts of that which he describes, he ultimately places his explana-
tory locus on the invariant internal workings of the mind (Greenberg &
Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988). Specic interpersonal and biographical con-
texts of particular experiences are as a result barely touched on, at least on
an explicit theoretical level. More concretely, Freuds account of the uncanny
stresses the role of fear and anxiety, neither of which is clearly perceptible in
Jungs anti-epiphany. Nevertheless, Freuds paper offers a nely textured and
subtle reading of the uncanny, one that, as we will see, should be given some
room in conceptualizing the anti-epiphanic.

250 Kyle Arnold

Another promising model is the popular theory (rst formulated by Tausk,
1933) that psychosis involves what some call loss of ego boundaries. This
theory, which more properly refers to loss of self boundaries, suggests that
the psychotic is prone to conating processes occurring in the external world
with those taking place in her mind. With regard to the anti-epiphany, the
most relevant articulation of the loss of ego boundaries theory is to be
found in the writings of Harold Searles. In Searles intriguing work The
Nonhuman Environment in Schizophrenia (Searles, 1960), he argues that the
psychotic feels the self and the nonhuman world to be fused. Accordingly,
changes in the psychotics experience of self, Searles says, are reected in
alterations of her perceived world. A psychotic bout of disintegration anxi-
ety, for instance, may be expressed in a fear that ones residence is in danger
of falling apart.

At rst blush, this theory seems well able to capture the anti-epiphany. For,
the anti-epiphany itself could probably be interpreted as an experience of self
reected in the lived-world. And since a psychotic state always, from Searles
point of view, entails fusion with the nonhuman surround, then it is no sur-
prise if prepsychotic experience likewise involves a collapse of boundaries
between self and world. Yet, though there may be much truth in this theory,
(pace Searles) its undifferentiated character limits its usefulness. The concept
of ego boundaries, even if generously read as a synonym for self-bound-
aries, encompasses a quite large group of phenomena whose commonalities
are often obscure. One may, for instance, refer to experiences as heteroge-
neous as painting, driving a car, meditating, becoming intimate with a loved
one, and hallucinating as involving loss of ego boundaries. Despite this
theorys apparent clinical aptness, then, it has a suspicious tendency to blur
distinctions between phenomena. It dissolves too many boundaries. The loss
of ego boundaries theorys lack of a nely differentiated grasp of its subject
matter makes this account appear, on close inspection, somewhat empty.
Although it may be a given that no investigation of psychosis can avoid con-
fronting the issues falling under the rubric of loss of ego boundaries, such
an investigation requires a more subtle way of thematizing these issues than
that provided by Searles theory.5

Unlike Freud (1919), Tausk (1933), and Searles (1960), I do not plan to build
my model primarily from traditional psychoanalytic theory, though selected

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 251

psychodynamic concepts will be taken up here. A highly sophisticated account
of anti-epiphany can be developed, I shall demonstrate, through critical psy-
chobiographical readings of Jungian theory itself. To be sure, Jungian theory,
given its emphasis on the archetypal and intrapsychic, will not willingly
offer us a personalistic and contextually sensitive model of the anti-epiphany.
Yet, by reading Jung against Jung, by bringing to his texts a Freudian suspi-
ciousness coupled with a contemporary psychodynamic sensitivity, we may
be able to begin to develop the kind of theory for which we are looking.

The Symbol and the Symbolic Attitude

Scattered throughout Jungs writings are discussions of several key concepts
which may be used to cast light on the structure of his anti-epiphany expe-
rience. Though they have their primary origin in Jungs studies of the mys-
tical and the oneiric, his theories of the symbol and the symbolic attitude can
also be applied, with some caution, to the domain of the epiphanic. Both of
these concepts appear simple at rst, and, like many of Jungs theories, are
rather easily mistaken for what they are not. Jung seems to have been aware
of this, and takes care to distinguish the symbol from its near relatives:

The concept of a symbol should in my view be strictly distinguished from

that of a sign. Symbolic and semiotic meanings are entirely different things . . .

Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an

abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which inter-
prets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively
unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or accurately
represented, is symbolic . . .

An interpretation of the cross is symbolic when it puts the cross beyond all
conceivable explanation, regarding it as expressing an as yet unknown and
incomprehensible fact of a mystical or transcendent, i.e., psychological,
nature, which simply nds itself most appropriately represented in the
cross . . . a symbol expresses the inexpressible in unsurpassable form . . . ( Jung,
1921, pp. 474-5)

What distinguishes symbol from sign is, according to Jung, the symbols
capacity to point towards the unknown. While in a signsuch as a word,
signier and signied are both fairly visible, in a symbol, the signier does

252 Kyle Arnold

not indicate a known fact, but a deep abyss of mystery. Read as part of an
abstract semiological theory, this distinction may seem a bit wrongheaded:
as Derridians would be quick to remind us, even the signied of a word is
never fully graspable and known, and is always beckoning us onward to
ever-expanding contexts of enigmatic meaning (Derrida, 1968). However, read
as an account of two different possible modes by which referentiality or
signication may be ontically experienced by the subject, Jungs dichotomy
makes good sense.

A semiotic experience of referentiality, from this point of view, is character-

ized by a sense that the meaning of a sign is known and thus transparent.
During a symbolic experience of referentiality, on the other hand, the signier
is felt to be numinous and cryptic, overwhelming one with its inscrutability.
It is this experience of referentiality to which Jung refers when he writes that
a symbol expresses the inexpressible. A symbol is an expression insofar as
it appears to represent something other than itself, yet because its signied,
though represented, is not revealed but hidden, that which the symbol expresses
is the inexpressible.

Supporting this experience-near reading of the concept of the symbol is Jungs

account of the shift from semiotic to symbolic and vice versa. According to
Jung, what gives a specic content of experience its symbolic character is, for
the most part, nothing inhering in that content, but rather the conscious atti-
tude of the subject who is apprehending it. It is how I relate to a specic
image that determines whether or not it is symbolic. Although Jung does say
that some images are more easily taken up as symbols than others, he places
the symbols locus on the experiencing subject:

Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiey on the attitude of the

observing consciousness; for instance, on whether it regards a given fact
not merely as such but also as an expression for something unknown. (Jung,
1921, p. 475)

Yet, even when read in the above manner, Jungs theory still seems counter-
intuitive in at least one sense, for, if a symbol is truly expressing something,
then how can one claim that what is expressed is inexpressible? And if, like-
wise, what is expressed is truly inexpressible, then how can it be said that it
is expressed? Jungs own wording encourages us to dwell with this paradox,

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 253

which we shall attempt to interpret laterthough not in the philosophical
manner he probably intended.6

For now, it is necessary to understand more fully the theoretical impact of

Jungs emphasis on the subject. It is that emphasis which leads Jung to his
notion of the symbolic attitude.

The attitude that takes a given phenomenon as symbolic may be called,

for short, the symbolic attitude. It is only partially justied by the actual
behavior of things; for the rest, it is the outcome of a denite view of the
world which assigns meaning to events whether great or small, and attaches
to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts. (Jung, 1921, p. 476)

To take up Jungs symbolic attitude is to evoke an extraordinary kind of

lived-world, in which ones surroundings are pregnant with hidden, numi-
nous meaning. Every item within the world, great or small, is experienced
symbolically, as an expression of the inexpressible.

We may begin to perceive here the germ of a possible interpretation of Jungs

experience in Africa. Much of his anti-epiphany, it appears, is captured by
the Jungian portrayal of symbolism outlined above. Like symbols, the images
Jung witnesses are lled with numinous signicance, yet this signicance
remains vague. Jung is sure that the gigantic candelabrum cactus and the
brown-skinned gure mean something important, but he is not quite able
to spell out what that something isonly that it has much to do with his
own presence.

By following the thread of Jungs theory through this lived-world, one is led
from the symbolic alterations in that world back to the subject, Jung himself.
It would seem to follow, from both Jungian theory and the structure of
the symbolic experience itself, that the subjects own personalistic back-
ground could be intimately implicated in the emergence of such an experi-
ence. Let us, then, trace this red thread of symbolism further, into the depths
of Jungs past.

The Meaning of the Secret in Carl Jungs Personal History

In a revealing psychobiographical study of Jung, Atwood and Stolorow (1993)
suggest that in his childhood, Jung was, as they put it, driven to secrecy

254 Kyle Arnold

and concealment without knowing the precise content of that which he was
protecting (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993, p. 90). They argue persuasively that
this impulse sprang from Jungs sense that he was fragile and vulnerable, a
feeling that crystallized out of a series of childhood traumata involving threats
of self-dissolution through merger with others. Jung writes, for example,
regarding his schooling between ages seven and nine:

I found that [my schoolmates] alienated me from myself. When I was with
them I became different from the way I was at home. I joined in their pranks,
or invented ones which at home would never have occurred to me, so it
seemed; although, as I knew only too well, I could hatch up all sorts of
things when I was alone. It seemed to me that the change in myself was
due to the inuence of my schoolfellows, who sometimes misled me or com-
pelled me to be different from what I thought I was. The inuence of this wider
world, this world which contained others besides my parents, seemed to
me dubious if not altogether suspect and, in some obscure way, hostile . . . I
had a premonition of an inescapable world of shadows lled with fright-
ening, unanswerable questions which had me at their mercy. My nightly
prayer did, of course, grant me a ritual protection . . . But the new peril
lurked by day. It was as if I sensed a splitting of myself, and feared it. My
inner security was threatened. (Jung, 1961, p. 19)

As a defensive measure against this and other psychic threats, Jung, in a

Winnicottian (1960) fashion, fabricated a rigid psychic barrier between a hid-
den inner self and a threatening outer world. To evade one sort of disunion,
Jung created another. This defense is not only recorded within Jungs auto-
biography, but also shapes its overall form. As Jung puts it:

(emphases mine)

. . . in the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the
imperishable world irrupted into the transitory one. That is why I speak chiey
of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions . . . All
other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside
these interior happenings. . . . Recollection of the outward events of my life
has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the other reality,
my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly ingraved upon my memory.
In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else
has lost importance by comparison. (Jung, 1961, pp. 4-5)

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 255

This passage traces, in mystied form, the path of Jungs preferred defense.
He ees from the public world into an enclosed, imperishable inner realm of
fantasy, dream and vision, granting this inner world a grandiose importance.
Thus, Jungs interpersonal surroundings fade as he withdraws to an other
reality located deep within his psyche. There he nds, or imagines, wealth
in abundance, and everything else loses importance by comparison.

Jungs split between inner and outer worlds was so radical that it eventually
led to a deep ssure in his self-experience, between two personied self-
images he called Personality No. 1 and Personality No. 2. Personality No. 1
was the outer self (roughly equivalent to Winnicotts (1960) false self), which
was seen by his parents and other acquaintances. Its primary concerns were
social and practical. Personality No. 2, (an equivalent of what Winnicott (1965)
called the true self) conversely, was a secret, numinous gure of tremen-
dous power. Within the ambience of Personality No. 2, Jung found comfort-
ing peace and solitude (Jung, 1961, p. 45).

Striking early manifestations of this division of self, Atwood and Stolorow

(1993) tell us, are to be found in an intricate defensive structure of games and
fantasies which Jungs dread of self-loss led him to elaborate. Designed to
armor his identity against annihilation, each of these games and fantasies
included a kind of grand secret which was entrusted to Jungs care. In one
game, for instance, Jung carefully tended a re he kept hidden away in a
cave. Jung imagined that the re possessed an aura of sanctity (Jung, 1961,
p. 20), a sacred specialness which he was pledged to protect. This re, Atwood
and Stolorow (1993) argue, was a symbol of Jungs self, and an attempt to
infuse that self with a sense of singularity, stability, and power, by identify-
ing it with a sacred re.

The secretive quality of the re ritual, I would add, allowed Jung to feel
unpenetrated by and thus independent of the gaze of the other. Unaware of
Jungs secret re-self, the other was epistemologically differentiated from that
self and, consequently, Jung felt, could not threaten him with a merger expe-
rience. If the other does not know who I really am, this logic goes, then
the other cannot psychologically engulf or capture who I really am. I am
ever elusive, opaque, and unnalized. As Jung tells us, I could not and
would not let myself be classied (Jung, 1961, p. 111). Later, he elaborates
further:

256 Kyle Arnold

 (emphases mine)

. . . the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various rea-
sons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation
of his individual aims. A great many individuals cannot bear this isolation.
They are the neurotics, who necessarily play hide-and-seek with others as
well as with themselves . . . As a rule they end by surrendering their indi-
vidual goal to their craving for collective conformitya procedure which
all the opinions, beliefs, and ideals of their environment encourage. . . . Only
a secret which the individual cannot betrayone which he fears to give away,
or which he cannot formulate in wordscan prevent the otherwise inevitable
retrogression. (Jung, 1961, p. 344)

It is critical to note that secrecy is not portrayed here as a screen used to hide
culpability, as it would be in Freudian theory. Although Jungs obscurantism
may have worked to efface certain shameful experiences, this was not its
most regnant function. For Jung, concealment was not primarily employed to hide
anything. Atwood and Stolorow (1993) come close to this idea when they sug-
gest that Jungs own hidden self was his deepest secret (p. 90). In this read-
ing, Jungs fear of exposure was not so much a dread of the emergence of
some disgraceful content of experience as it was a terror of being rendered
determinate in the light of the other s gaze. Jungs motive, Atwood and
Stolorows analysis suggests, is an interpersonal requirement for the posses-
sion of a secret as such, for hiddenness as such.
Another childhood game of Jungs allows one to take this line of thinking
further. This game, one similar in many respects to the re ritual, is referred
to by Jung as the climax and conclusion of [his] childhood (1961, p. 22).
He tells us directly that the game was precipitated by his disunion with
[himself] and uncertainty in the world at large (Jung, 1961, p. 21). The game
involved a tiny wooden manikin that Jung had carved and painted. Jung
placed the manikin in a pencil case, which he hid in his attic.
Atwood and Stolorow (1993) situate the manikin in the context of several
traumatic experiences Jung had suffered. As a child, Jung, a son of a pastor,
had been deathly afraid of several elements of Christianity to which he was
exposed, such as the ominous gures of pallbearers and a Catholic priest.
Atwood and Stolorow argue that the construction of the manikin, which was
clothed in a frock coat, top hat, and shiny black boots, represents Jungs

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 257

attempt to concretize and symbolically encapsulate the forces which he felt
endangered him. By containing and solidifying the frightening images of pall-
bearers and the Catholic priest, Jung gained a sense of mastery over these
threats, and thus safety from them.
It is also argued, though, that Jung:

. . . identied with the manikin and its immortal stone, and thereby appro-
priated a share of their aggrandized powers for himself. In this context the
ritual [of the manikin] emerges as a symbol of a profound withdrawal from
external ties into a sealed-off world of self-sufciency and omnipotent splen-
dor. (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993, p. 91)

Like the re, the manikin functioned as a space within which Jung could
shelter his fragile self-experience from the worlds threats. As Jung puts it,
the manikin ritual gave him a feeling of newly won security . . . It was an
inviolable secret which must never be betrayed, for the safety of my life
depended on it (Jung, 1961, p. 22). Temporally, the manikins inviolability
necessarily entailed a quality of eternity (Jung, 1961, p. 21) that it, in com-
parison with Jungs impinging and unstable social world, seemed to possess.
Just as annihilation is temporally synonymous with change, indestructabil-
ity, here, is equivalent to eternity.

It is in this context that Jungs description of the manikin ritual must be

interpreted:

In the case [with the manikin] I also placed a smooth oblong blackish stone
from the Rhine, which I had painted with water colors to look as if it were
divided into an upper and lower half . . . This was his stone. All this was a
great secret. Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the top of the
house . . . and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the
rooffor no one else must ever see it! . . . No one could discover my secret
and destroy it. I felt myself was gone. In all difcult situations, whenever I
had done something wrong or my feelings had been hurt, or when my
fathers irritability or my mother s invalidism oppressed me, I thought of
my carefully bedded down and wrapped up manikin and his smooth, pret-
tily colored stone. (Jung, 1961, p. 21)

Not only did Jungs encapsulation of his self-experience within the manikin
serve to protect him from the dangers of his intersubjective milieu, but, as

258 Kyle Arnold

Atwood and Stolorow note, it also unied him with the threatening spiritual
forces hidden in the manikin.

Thus, Jungs manikin, according to Atwood and Stolorow, falls within the
category of what they call transitional selfobjects. The concept of the transi-
tional selfobject, a synthesis of Winnicotts, (1951) notion of pathological vari-
ants of the transitional object and Kohuts (1971) theory of the selfobject,
denotes a class of nonhuman objects with which the subjects identity is
merged. Such objects function to maintain a cohesive, positively valued self-
experience even in the midst of interpersonal chaos. Certainly, Jungs manikin
possessed these characteristics. However, the phenomenology of the manikin
is also marked by several more specic features.

One such element of the manikin ritual, unmentioned by Atwood and Stolorow
(1993), is the radical split it seems to create in Jungs reective experience of
himself. When viewing the manikin, Jung is torn in two. As observing sub-
ject, he stands outside the manikin, while as observed object, he resides some-
where within its wooden innards. Ordinarily, when we observe ourselves,
we see ourselves, in some sense, as embedded in our own bodies. During
Jungs manikin ritual, on the other hand, the observed self is located outside
the body in an external object, while the observing self remains embodied.
This psychological structure could be said to be a self-to-self relation that is
at the same time a relation between self and world. For in viewing the manikin
from the perspective of his inner self, Jung is seeing that same inner self,
externalized and reied as a numinous object.7

An element of the world is at this moment experienced as self-as-observed,

looked upon by the inner self removed from that world. Yet even in the world,
Jungs inner self retains its secretive inwardness. Rather than being with-
drawn from the potentially threatening gaze of the other, it is now rendered
opaque to its own stare. While looking at his inner self objectied in the world,
Jung is now in the position of the other who views him, and who, hopefully,
sees him as a mystery. In this way, Jungs manikin ritual, while located in
the realm of the secret self, also internally enacts the very relationship between
secret self and other which Jung desired. Here, the dangerous possibility that
another could know, and thus penetrate Jung, coincides with the possibility
that Jung could know, and thus penetrate his own innermost self. How might
one account for this coincidence?

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 259

Perhaps the most obvious answer emerges from a traditional Freudian sen-
sibility. Jung, we might hear a condent Freudian voice assert, possessed a
sordid secret whose content he was unwilling to expose to himself or to
others. Accordingly, this line of thinking suggests, he was compelled to pre-
vent such exposure by surrounding himself with an aura of mystery. Indeed,
Jungs autobiography sometimes appears to encourage such an interpreta-
tion. Often, a kind of taboo is said to attach to self-knowledge. Recounting a
dream, Jung writes:

Now I knew that [Personality] No. 1 was the bearer of the light, and that
[Personality] No. 2 followed him like a shadow. My task was to shield the
light and not look back at [No. 2]; this was evidently a forbidden realm of
light of a different sort. (Jung, 1961, p. 88)

An elaborate childhood fantasy Jung mentions, one involving an imaginary

castle containing a laboratory, is organized around a similar theme:

(emphases mine)

The nerve center and raison detre of this whole arrangement was the secret
of the keep, which I alone knew . . . Here I had an . . . inconceivable appa-
ratus, a kind of laboratory in which I made gold out of the mysterious sub-
stance which the copper roots drew from the air. This was really an arcanum,
of whose nature I neither had nor wished to form any conception. Nor did
my imagination concern itself with the nature of the transformation process.
Tactfully and with a certain nervousness it skirted around what actually
went on in this laboratory. There was a kind of inner prohibition: one was
not supposed to look at it too closely, nor ask what kind of substance was
extracted from the air. (Jung, 1961, pp. 81-2)

Reading the above passages, one might easily convince oneself that Jungs
past contained some unbearably painful experience which his fantasies ner-
vously skirted around. And there are, to be sure, certain indications that
this may have been so. Jungs No. 2 personality, the psychic realm of the
secret, is often associated in his autobiography with ominous themes such as
fear and death. Equally striking is this partial personalitys possible rela-
tionship to an early dream of an underground phallus not to be named
(Jung, 1961, p. 13). This underground phallus, which Jung calls a subter-
ranean God, (Jung, 1961, p. 13) is the rst in the series of mysteries and

260 Kyle Arnold

secrets Jung recounts, and thus, possibly, a psychic cyst around which Person-
ality No. 2 later crystallized. If this were so, Freudian and quasi-Freudian
themes regarding childhood sexuality, death anxiety (Meyer, 1973), and their
occlusion could explain why Jung wanted to keep the nucleus of Personality
No. 2 as hidden from himself as from others.

Such an interpretation could allow us to use something like Freuds (1919)

notion of The Uncanny after all. Jungs anti-epiphany, then, would be under-
stood as the return, in the guise of a candelabrum cactus and spear, of repressed
fantasies and anxieties of youth. From this point of view, when Jung says,
It was as if I were at this moment returning to the land of my youth, and
as if I knew that dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for ve
thousand years (Jung, 1961, p. 283), he is dimly perceiving the biographi-
cally primeval origins of the uncanny experience that, during the anti-epiphany,
surged forth. And there is, perhaps, more than a grain of truth in this inter-
pretation. Even though, as Atwood and Stolorow (1993) demonstrate, Jungs
secret worked to shield him from engulfment by others, it also seems as if it
would be quite well suited to hide painful psychic material.

Yet, whether or not traditional dynamic reasons encouraged Jung to hide his
secret from himself, his more interesting and important motivations, I am
suggesting, are linked to the narcissistic functions of the fantasies his rituals
enact. As indicated previously, Jungs anxiety was less a fear of the exposure
of some particular feature of himself than a terror of exposure as such.
Accordingly, his aim is more secrecy as such than the concealment of a specic
secret. In viewing his arcane self from the fantasized position of another, Jung
found a simulated conrmation or validation of its mystery and power. Even
if others did not, in fact, see Jung as a forbidding enigma, he knew he was
because he witnessed it himself. An uncomprehending relation between self
and self substitutes foror buttressesan uncomprehending relation between
self and other. This substitutive function implies that the more the simulated
relation between self and other is concretely distinct and visiblethe more
it is like an embodied interpersonal relationthe more effective the ritual.
Hence, Jungs preference for the use of physical games, like the ritual of the
manikin, in performing this simulation.

Within the defensive structure instantiated in his fantasies and rituals,

then, for Jung to protect himself from merging with the other was also for him to

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 261

protect himself from merging with himself. In concealing himself from the gaze
of the other, Jung had to hide himself from his own eyes as well. On the other
hand, this defense also required that Jung remain visible to himself so that
he could achieve the necessary self-recognition. It is this paradox which is,
on the characterological level, mainly responsible for the uncomprehending
self-reection found in the manikin ritual.

Symbol as Manikin
Jungs theory of the symbol echoes the manikin ritual described above. Like
the manikin, the symbol hides cosmic, numinous forces. Moreover, the sym-
bols manner of expressing the inexpressible replicates the contradictions
inherent in the self-reective structure of the manikin ritual. Like the sym-
bol, Jungs manikin embodies a deep ambivalence between transparency and
opacity. Jung wishes to see his own self ensconced within the mysterious
manikin, sheltered from the dangers of the world. However, by seeing that
self as something outside him, Jung is viewing it through the eyes of another,
and thus threatening it with absorption by that other in the immolating light
of total understanding.

For the manikin ritual to work, then, Jung must simultaneously express him-
self to himself and conceal himself from himself. This paradoxical stance is
identical to what we have encountered as the symbolic attitudea mode
of experiencing an image in which it is felt to be an expression of the inex-
pressible. The meaning of a symbol is kept in ambiguity; we sort of see it,
but see it as mysterious and unknown.

Likewise, Jung must take care to maintain the self housed within the manikin
in a state of enigmatic indeterminacy. If Personality No. 1, the self observing
the manikin, fully knows Personality No. 2, then the self within the manikin,
Personality No. 2 is threatened by a merger experience. But, for Personality
No. 1 to feel that Personality No. 2 is safein fact, for Personality No. 2 to
even existPersonality No. 1 must be able to see it. The process that allows
Personality No. 2 to remain safe threatens Personality No. 2 at the same time.8

If a closer look is taken at Jungs theory of the symbol, an even tighter iso-
morphism can be perceived between it and the manikin. As previously noted,
the concept of the symbol provides the foundation for the notion of the sym-

262 Kyle Arnold

bolic life, in which all things are experienced as symbolic. Jung, borrowing
a term from the anthropologist Levi-Bruhl, further articulates the symbolic
life as involving a kind of participation mystique or mystical participation with
ones surroundings.

(emphasis mine)

Everything which belongs in me bears the stamp of mineness, that is, it

has a subtle identity with my ego . . . This is vividly expressed in certain
primitive languages, where the sufx of animation is added to an object
a canoe, for instancewhen it belongs to me, but not when it belongs to
somebody else. The afnity which all the things bearing the stamp of mine-
ness have with my personality is aptly characterized by Levi-Bruhl as par-
ticipation mystique. It is an irrational, unconscious identity, arising from
the fact that anything that comes into contact with me is not only itself, but
also a symbol. (Jung, 1969, p. 255).

A symbol is an object which has a subtle identity with my ego. Like the
manikin, any symbol, Jung says, is a container for the self. There is a sense,
then, in which the symbolic life is merely a multiplication of Jungian manikins,
in which Personality No. 2the arcane self hidden in the manikinis dis-
persed throughout the lived world, and encapsulated in the various objects
residing in that world. Thus, the defensive functioning of the Jungian manikin
is markedly improved,9 as the arcane selfs existence is conrmed not only
in one object, but in all.

This process of mystic dispersal also partially solves one of the psychologi-
cal dilemmas that Atwood and Stolorow (1993) nd in the ritual of the manikin.
This is the unbearable personal isolation the ritual both symbolizes and enacts.
The symbolic life annuls such an experience of terrible loneliness by allow-
ing one to feel deeply connected to the world by seeing ones own altered
face reected in the mirrors of its landscape.

The Manikins of Africa

Jung tells us, interpreting the patterns of the dreams he experienced during
his African voyage, that these dreams considered . . . the African journey not
as something real, but rather as a symptomatic or symbolic act (Jung, 1961,

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 263

p. 272). Whatever the true meaning of his dreams during this period, Jungs
assertion makes it clear that he himself certainly thought his African journey
to be symbolicand symptomatic. In fact, it was both.

On the symptomatic side, Jung says that near the end of his stay in Africa:

To my astonishment, the suspicion dawned on me that I had undertaken

my African adventure with the secret purpose of escaping from Europe and
its complex of problems, even at the risk of remaining in Africa . . . It became
clear to me that this study had been not so much an objective scientic pro-
ject as an intensely personal one, and that any attempt to go deeper in it
touched every possible sore spot in my own psychology. I had to admit to
myself that it was scarcely the Wembley Exhibition which had begotten my
decision to travel, but rather the fact that the atmosphere had become too
highly charged for me in Europe. (Jung, 1961, p. 273)

Jung says here that his secret purpose in travelling to Africa was to escape
the problems he faced in Europe. Why, we must ask, did he choose to ee
specically to Africa? Jung knew well from a previous, shorter trip to this
continent that for him Africa was like the paradise of childhood from which
we imagine we have emerged, a land which arouse[es] certain longings . . .
longings which relate to the unfullled desires and needs of those parts of
the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of
the adapted persona. Jung tells us further that, on this rst journey to Africa,
he wanted to nd that part of my personality which had become invisible
under the inuence and the pressure of being European (Jung, 1961, p. 244).

Psychobiographically, what Jung terms the personathe mask which, his

theory asserts, we present to others in order to function sociallycoincides
with Personality No. 1, Jungs socially adapted false self. When Jung states
that, by travelling to Africa, he wished to escape the adapted persona and
nd that part of [his] personality that had been blotted out by its pres-
ence, he is almost saying outright that his rst journey to Africa enacted a
ight to the arcane area of Personality No. 2. He also claims that the desire
to nd the part of his personality that was blotted out by the persona led
to a dream which lingered in [his] memory, along with the liveliest wish to
go to Africa again at the next opportunity (Jung, 1961, p. 246). His second
journey to Africa, during which the anti-epiphany occurred, represented the
fulllment of this wish.

264 Kyle Arnold

Jung, then, ed from the complex of problems and charged atmosphere
of Europe to the domain of Personality No. 2, concretely incarnated in Africa.
It can be said, accordingly, that his journey to Africa recapitulated his defen-
sive withdrawal into fantasy and ritual on a grander scale than previously.
Just as, while a child, Jung ed the pressures of the social world by with-
drawing to an arcane realm of fantasy and ritual, he escaped the social forces
besieging him in Europe by retreating to the putatively mythical land of
Africa. Given what we have discovered with regard to the meaning of the
secret in the microcosm of Jungs childhood rituals, we would expect that a
large-scale replication of these rituals would entail a correspondingly large-
scale experience of the manikinthat, in other words, a symbolic attitude
would be taken and an anti-epiphany would be induced. And such is pre-
cisely what occurred.
To return to the phenomenology of this anti-epiphany itself:
I was enchanted by this sight [of the African landscape]it was a picture
of something utterly alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand
a most intense sentiment du deja vu. I had the feeling that I had already
experienced this moment and had always known this world which was sep-
arated from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were at this moment
returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that dark-skinned man
who had been waiting for me for ve thousand years . . . I could not guess
what string within myself was plucked at the sight of that solitary dark
hunter. I only knew that his world had been mine for countless millennia.
(Jung, 1961, p. 283)
Here, Jungs emphasis on the alienness of the object of his perception shows
the schizoid side of the Jungian manikinthe ight from fusion with the
otherwhile the expansive feeling that this object had somehow been wait-
ing for Jung for ve thousand yearsas if his arrival were like the return
of some godlike personageexpresses the manikins narcissistic aspect. The
cryptic, mythographical tone coloring the narrative (a tone pervading the
entire autobiography, which, like many of Jungs other works, could itself be
taken to be a kind of Jungian manikin) amplies both of these features. Jungs
simultaneous identication with the objects witnessed is evident when he
writes that he knew that his [the dark-skinned mans] world had been mine
for countless millenia. The manikins inviolable, eternal quality necessarily
shapes the temporalization of the entire scene.

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 265

Jung, however, also narrates another moment of apparent revelation whose
structure might seem to contradict this interpretation of the anti-epiphany.
This second anti-epiphany, which, even to a suspicious eye, initially looks
much more epiphanic than anti-epiphanic, is described as follows:

From Nairobi we used a small Ford to visit the Athi Plains, a great game
preserve. From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnicent prospect
opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds
of animals . . . Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow
rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of
prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had
always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been pre-
sent to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions
until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely
alone. There I was now, the rst human being to recognize that this was
the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had rst really
created it.

Then the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear

to me . . . Man, I, an invisible act of creation, put the stamp of perfection on
the world by giving it objective existence. (Jung, 1961, pp. 255-6)

In fact, this second anti-epiphany cannot be interpreted in quite the same

manner as the rst, as it belongs to a somewhat different, though related,
class of experience. Clearly, what Jung stresses in this passage is not the pres-
ence of mystery, but its dissipation in the light of consciousness. As in the
previous anti-epiphany, both Jungs narcissism (in the form of solipsism) and
his identication with his surroundings are evident here. Yet, rather than
remaining at an enigmatic distance from Jung, his world seems to denude
itself before his penetrating gaze. Though there is, I would argue, a certain
kind of self-concealment on Jungs part here, this concealment does not show
up as a mysteriousness pervading the overall phenomenological texture of
his experience, and thus cannot be read as functioning, as in the previous
anti-epiphany, to draw a protective circle of obscurity around Jungs iden-
tity. Consequently, it looks as though this manifestly epiphanic experience
performs precisely an opposite function to that which is subserved by the
Jungian manikin: rather than shrouding Jungs externalized self in darkness,
it exposes that self to the radiance of all-knowing awareness.

266 Kyle Arnold

The theory developed thus far would suggest, therefore, that this moment of
clarity could represent a disturbance in the defensive workings of the Jungian
manikin. It is essential to recall in this connection the paradoxical structure
of the Jungian manikin: simultaneous participation mystique with an object
and distance from that object by means of its felt opacity. The elimination of
either of these two sides of the manikin experience, I have implied, would
necessarily lead to its failure as defensethat is, to an inability to maintain
the precarious stability of Jungs identity. If the identication with the object
were terminated, the manikin would lose its selfobject functions. If, on the
other hand, the opacity of the object were removed, Jung himselfas other
would penetrate and nalize his own identity.

It can be said that the latter disturbance in the manikin amounts to a rever-
sal and implosion of Jungs double self-structure. The most regnant function
of Personality # 2, the manikin self, is the evasion of nalization by the social
environment. Now, however, Personality No. 2 is itself pinned down in the
mythologized African scenery. Jung, elaborating on the experience above,
narrates a shift of identity that ts with this reading:

(emphases mine)

There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to

me . . . Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on
the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the
Creator alone . . . My old Pueblo friend came to my mind. He thought that
the raison detre of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross
the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief,
and had without hope been looking for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it
was, and knew even more: that man is indispensible for the completion of
creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world. (Jung,
1961, p. 256)

Jung writes as if this realization were a great step forward on his path of
personal development, a psychic ascendance toward an increased sense of
meaning and place in the world. In certain respects, this may have been
true. However, having found his myth, Jung is now pinned down, captured,
nalized by the stamp of perfection. His identity is now mythographically
xed and pigeonholedwhich is largely what, through use of the manikin,
Jung had tried so hard to avoid. If this reading is accurate, the theory I have

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 267

outlined suggests that Jungs identity would, as a result of the disturbance
in the manikins functioning, subsequently become destabilized. More
specically, the manikin theory predicts that Jung would then become highly
vulnera-ble to the threats of engulfment and absorption from which the
manikin shielded him.

Indeed, the narrative which follows Jungs description of his apparent enlight-
enment is littered with signsat rst innocuous, then alarmingof a seizure
of his identity by the African world:

We three whites already had our trade-marks. My friend, the Englishman,

was called Red-Neckto the native mind, all Englishmen had red necks.
The American, who sported an impressive wardrobe, was known as bwana
maredadi (the dapper gentleman). Because I already had grey hair at the
time (I was then fty), I was the mzee, the old man, and was regarded
as a hundred years old. Advanced age was rare in those parts; I saw very
few white-haired men. Mzee is also a title of honor . . . (Jung, 1961, p. 259)

Thousands of miles lay between me and Europe, mother of all demons. The
demons could not reach me herethere were no telegrams, no telephone
calls, no letters, no visitors. My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully
back to the primeval expansiveness. (Jung, 1961, p. 264)

It was easy for us to arrange a palaver each morning with the natives who
squatted all day long around our camp . . . My headman, Ibrahim, had ini-
tiated me into the etiquette of the palaver. All the men . . . had to sit on the
ground. Ibrahim had obtained for me a small four-legged chiefs stool of
mahogany on which I had to sit. Then I began with an address and set forth
the shauri, that is, the agenda of the palaver. (Jung, 1961, p. 264)

In another passage, Jung associates the palavers of which he speaks with the
skillfulness in mimicry that he claims Africas natives possess (1961, pp. 259-
60). They [the natives] could imitate with astounding accuracy the manner
of expression, the gestures, the gaits of people, thus, to all intents and pur-
poses, slipping into their skins, Jung (1961, p. 259) writes. Whether or not
this was veridically true of the tribesmen with whom Jung palavered, the
above passages suggest that Jungs own identity was becoming caught in the
grip of mimesis. In the rst passage cited, Jung is given the trade-mark
mzee and, in connection with this trade-mark, is mistakenly considered by

268 Kyle Arnold

the African natives to be a hundred years old. One should recall here Jungs
resistance to, as he put it, being classied. In the second quotation, Jung
stresses his withdrawal from the European world and his immersion in the
African one, dramatically expressing his identication with the African scene
through the metaphor of psychic forces pouring into its primeval expan-
siveness. By the third excerpt, this identication seems to have increased
and solidied. At this moment in the narrative, Jungs identity is nearly
absorbed in that of a tribal chieftain.

The mimetic drift portrayed above is punctuated by an even more striking

passage, which frankly depicts the enormous annihilation anxieties called
forth by Jungs encounter with Africa:

Only once during the entire expedition did I dream of a Negro. His face
appeared curiously familiar to me, but I had to reect a long time before I
could determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he had
been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American Negro. In the
dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling iron to my head, intend-
ing to make my hair kinkythat is, to give me Negro hair. I could already
feel the painful heat, and awoke with a sense of terror.

I took this dream as a warning from the unconscious; it was saying that the
primitive was a danger to me. At that time I was obviously all too close to
going black. . . . In order to represent a Negro threatening me, my uncon-
scious had invoked a twelve-year-old memory of my Negro barber in
America, just to avoid any reminder of the present. . . . Parallel to my involve-
ment with this demanding African environment, an interior line was being
successfully secured within my dreams. The dreams dealt with my personal
problems. The only thing I could conclude from this was that my European
personality must under all circumstances be preserved intact. (Jung, 1961,
pp. 272-3)

As Jungs identity became nalized or trade-marked in the African scene

with which it was identied, so too, it seems, did it become trapped within
that scene. The manikin, accordingly, was at this point working in complic-
ity with the forces nalizing Jung. It too was now nalizing him. In this
passage, that nalization and Jungs corresponding annihilation anxiety
produce a kind of psychotic racism in which blackness, captured by the

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 269

malfunctioning manikin, is perceived as both stereotypically known and psy-
chically engulng (as in the phrase going black). Africa thus ceases to feel
like a land of wonder and becomes a realm of terror. Outright psychosis is a
hairs breadth away.

Pinning it down
As theorists in the psychodynamic and hermeneutic traditions are often
reminded, a single case, however intriguing, can almost never be considered
fully representative of an entire class of clinical phenomena. Moreover, my
interpretation of Jungs narrative, though heavily reliant on close readings of
Jungs texts, is nevertheless partly made possible by strategic assumptions
and speculations about Jungs experience. Luckily for Jung, he ed Africa
soon after he became aware of the psychic dangers it held for him (Jung,
1961). Despite the fact that Jung seems to have felt on the verge of madness,
we cannot be certain that he would have had a full-edged psychotic break
if he had remained in Africa.

Yet, it can be argued that when the phenomenon at issue cannot be ade-
quately accounted for by existing models, it is more crucial that a proto-
theory be rigorously provocative than rigorously certain. Rigorous provocation
allows unthought possibilities of thematization to be opened up, possibili-
ties which can later be narrowed and constrained by means of more thor-
ough research. In this light, the account of the anti-epiphany I present here
should not be seen as anything like a nal statement, but rather as a kind of
challenge to psychopathologists to imagine psychosisand Jungians to imag-
ine Jungin creative ways.

The line of pathological development I have traced could be theoretically

sketched out in the following way:

1. Early fears of merger and engulfment induce the subject to make use of a
particular class of transitional selfobjects, which I am calling Jungian
manikins. In addition to performing the usual functions of transitional
selfobjects, such as the maintenance of self-cohesion, realness, and self-
esteem, these Jungian manikins workby means of uncomprehending
self-reectionto clothe the subject in a protective shroud of mystery. The
user of the manikin is thereby defended from the threat of being pene-
trated, known, and nalized.

270 Kyle Arnold

2. As the transitional object is, in this case, relied on as both a substitute
source of the selfobject functions ordinarily performed by other people
and a conrmation of the subjects psychic independence from them, this
kind of object looms ever larger in the subjects lived world. Interpersonal
relationships, conversely, recede in felt importance.
3. During periods of heightened anxiety, the manikin necessarily becomes
relied on more desperately. In order to do the selfobject work it needs to
do, the manikin must, so to speak, ll more of the subjects lived-world
than it would during a less dangerous time. This process can culminate
in the absorption of the entire lived-world by the Jungian manikin. When
the manikin reaches this level of ubiquity in the subjects world, it is expe-
rienced in the form of an anti-epiphany.
4. The precarious self-reective structure of the manikin renders it prone to
a malfunction in which the subject penetrates his own mysterious iden-
tity as other, thus nalizing himself. The pervasiveness of the anti-epiphany
experience, I would conjecture, makes this malfunction a greater threat
than it is otherwise, as one who is completely surrounded by a mystery
will be very inclined to try and solve it. If this occurs than the manikin
becomes incapable of preserving the subjects opacity. The subject, then,
becomes profoundly vulnerable to the self-loss experiences from which
the manikin had protected her. Moreover, as the manikin itself is at this
point working to penetrate and nalize the subjects identity, the entire
anti-epiphanic landscape can be experienced as threatening an annihila-
tion of self.

The breadth of anti-epiphanic experiences to which this line of development

may obtain cannot, of course, be determined without further work. The
schizoid and narcissistic features of the structure of the manikin lead me to
suspect that the anti-epiphanies experienced by those with narcissistic-schizoid
character pathology may often be accounted for by reference to this or a sim-
ilar developmental path of transitional selfobject use. Even if so, many ques-
tions remain unanswered. It is not clear precisely what relationship exists
between the subjects dread of nalization by others and the self-reective
structure of nalization made possible by the malfunction of the manikin.
Nor is the link between the anti-epiphany and later stages of psychosis yet
apparent. Jungs manikin remains, to a great extent, an enigma.

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 271

I wish to thank George Atwood, Elizabeth Donahue, Brent Robbins, and Louis Sass
for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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Notes
1
Throughout this paper, I will not be using the term psychosis in its DSM sense
but in a psychoanalytic diagnostic sense (McWilliams, 1994) encompassing a mode
of experience suffused with annihilation anxiety (Hurvich, 1991) in which, accord-
ingly, primary subjective dangers include such threats as psychic engulfment, implo-
sion, dissolution, penetration, and disintegration (Laing, 1958; Orange, Atwood,
and Stolorow, 1997; Robbins, 2000; Atwood, Orange, and Stolorow, in press).
2
For the sake of convenience, I am oversimplifying this issue somewhat. Under
some denitions of the term epiphany, (for example, that of Beja [1971]) psy-
choanalysis itself, though manifestly suspicious of epiphanies, is also in a sense
aimed at the systematic induction of epiphanies. By attending closely to apparently
minor features of experience and perceiving in these features indications of under-
lying networks of psychopathology, psychoanalysis can be said to induce a certain
kind of epiphanic experience in one who makes use of it. Because I am using a
different conceptualization of the epiphany than that which would t here, I have
decided to disregard this issue.
3
Sass (1992) also uses the term anti-epiphany, though with what appears to be a
somewhat different meaning than I intend here.
4
I do not use the term phenomenological here to refer to the system of claims of
any specic school of philosophical phenomenology. Nor do I intend its Rogerian
meaning, as indicating a mere description of what the world looks like from a
particular persons point of view. Rather, I mean the word in a primarily method-
ological sense, as referring to a mode of research which attempts to structurally
analyze the prereectively unconscious (Stolorow & Atwood, 1994) and unthema-
tized (Heidegger, 1927) or unformulated (Stern, 1997) patterns of experience shap-
ing a lived-world. In this and other ways, my approach falls within the tradition
of eclectic phenomenological psychopathology exemplied by theorists such as
Laing (1958), Stern (1997) and Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow (1997). Though by
refusing to explicitly anchor my analysis in a specic phenomenological ontology,
I sacrice a certain amount of philosophical rigor, I believe this loss is compen-
sated for by the heightened theoretical exibility and increased focus on the specicity
of my subject matter allowed thereby.

274 Kyle Arnold

5
I do not mean to suggest here that the concept of loss of boundaries should be
completely abandoned. It certainly seems pragmatically helpful as a form of clin-
ical shorthand. For the purposes of phenomenological research, however, the con-
cept is, I am arguing, inadequate.
6
Philosophically, Jungs symbols can be read, for instance, as close relatives of the
indexes used by philosophers like Jaspers, Heidegger, and Derrida in place of
more literal denotative terms. Indexes are allusive terms whose purpose is to allow
the philosopher to hint at what cannot be said directly. If Jungian symbols are inter-
preted as something like indexes, then their paradoxical structure can be philo-
sophically explicated and justied. It is not, however, the philosophical validity of
Jungs concepts that I am concerned with here, but their implications for a patho-
graphical understanding of the anti-epiphany. A more philosophical and imper-
sonal reading of Jungs experience in Africa, grounded in the philosophies of
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, can be found in Roger Brookes richly interesting
book Jung and Phenomenology (1991).
7
This pattern somewhat resembles what Kleinians call projective identication.
In Jungs case, however, the defensive functions of the experience are quite differ-
ent than those the Kleinians posit.
8
In this and related ways, the dynamics of Jungs double self can be interestingly
compared with those operative in the self-experience of Friedrich Nietzsche. (see
Arnold & Atwood, 2000)
9
It may be important to note that my use of mechanistic terms here should not be
taken as reication, as the Jungian manikin is, quite literally, a machine. That is,
the manikin is a piece of technology, a tool used, albeit unconsciously, to organize
identity. This, of course, certainly entails a reication of identity itself, which, as
we have seen, is an integral component in the manikins workings.

Anti-epiphany and the Jungian Manikin 275