" I translated my childhood forests into my new homeland's rocky soil and acacia trees."
German Israeli poet Yehuda Ami-Chai 1955
In my work as a therapist, I have noted that the archetype of the Stranger shows up among patients in two principal situations. Either during the first half of life, when the psyche’s synchronistic encounter with a stranger arouses feelings of ego-self alienation (as Edinger terms this in Ego and Archetype), the dissociation of the ego from the archetype and the ego-self axis. In such a state, the psyche seeks to escape from a sense of isolation and loneliness, loss of identity and relationship, even uncanniness (Unheimlich), and estrangement from the milieu in which the personality has matured and developed. At this stage, a therapist or any stranger coming from elsewhere is experienced as complementary, and under his/her strangeness, as sharing a common destiny. The therapist-stranger is the receiver who releases the patient from the loneliness and estrangement he/she experiences with growing frustration among those who are ostensibly near and dear and likeminded.
Or else, perhaps in the second half of life, the patient may arrive at a stable self-definition, having undergone important phases of individuation and reached a new and more personal sense of belonging. A patient stranger will appear when the therapist’s psyche is receptive and he is open to themes that may appear to be remote beyond the confines of the shadow. That is when the therapist may be ready to meet the challenge of cultural and social complexes, now understood to be vital, which carry contradictions or missing links and may even return the therapist to him or herself and selfhood. The patient stranger may provide the key to a hitherto unrecognized complex and a connection between our self and the world's soul's
Alienation or unheimlich is one of the deep distresses of the human soul! My presentation today about the therapeutic encounter will
Alienation and remoteness touch all those. That is why I want you to think about those feelings as part of yourselves; it is helpful to experience my presentation better.
Those feeling People will find a way to avoid, to bypass. When they are young, mixing with strangers or strange cultures or different countries or choosing a strange partner often solves it through her/him.
In the second half of life, intimately meeting with the stranger at the right time and place can touch or even heal those complexes which were sometimes hidden, and those encounters enhance the individuation process.
Choosing a strange therapist or getting a strange patient will always touch that feeling and complexity; the healing process will have to dill with it and work it through.
In Israel, the land where I was born, a sense of loneliness, alienation, abandonment, and the need to adapt oneself to new surroundings has always prevailed. Immigrants arrived in an unfamiliar setting, plucked from their place of birth, and planted in a foreign environment. Therefore, I have always been sensitive to outsiders and strangers, those who came to their ancestral homeland from elsewhere and tried to fit in with all their might. My grandfather, for example, grew up in Vienna and served as a soldier during the First World War, and yet Austria turned its back on him and turned him into an alien. My parents felt like strangers in their land of birth and circumstances forced them to leave and settle in a strange land and adapt to a new culture and language.
These factors generated complexes both in them and in me, the native-born Israeli son, complexes I call the Sabra and the Wandering Jew, which eventually led me to Jungian psychology. Jung had always intrigued me but had seemed at first too far out.
This seemingly strange psychology eventually helped me find myself and my spirituality,[1] something which might have been harder to achieve if I had pursued Freudian psychology which was, in fact, more in my vein.
For us, as therapists, the interpersonal encounter, dialogue, and reciprocal impact of patient and therapist are central to individuation, healing, and development, whether we identify with the patient or not.
However, in this presentation, we shall endeavor to understand the role of the stranger in the context of transformation and healing. Moreover, we will explore how a sense of strangeness and difference benefit patients and therapists when they overcome those problems.
In ordinary encounters, not necessarily between therapist and patient, the dialogue with the stranger may interest and even intrigue us, produce infatuation and attraction, liberation, and intimacy with ourselves where we are less prone to conflict and complexes related to our culture,
Society or families. Likewise, such an encounter with a stranger can expand new psychic space in us or from us, which may be unfamiliar, strange, and even frightening. It can produce shadow aspects and areas of dissociative identity. This may initially perplex or repel us, along with our infatuation and attraction to the exotic.
However, given the therapeutic process, what are the benefits of strangeness? How does strangeness in patients act as a catalyst in ways that familiarity with those who resemble us does not?
A stranger will bring psychic content to the encounter, which is less familiar, and cause us to open ourselves up, change our cognitive-emotional stance, cope with our sense of alienation, revise our cultural ideas on an individual and collective level, and consider the psyche from a new higher point.
When we, as therapists, are receptive to an encounter with a stranger, it can be a source of healing, change, and conflict resolution. In effect, strangers appear in our lives or our work as therapists through a synchronistic situation that makes them necessary for our psychic development. This may occur or be because of a need to escape the familiar, be it a place or person, connect with something entirely new, or grow in a different direction.
In my experience, the emotional openness of the therapist and the appearance on the scene of a stranger patient (for instance, a patient from a foreign country, a new immigrant, or an ultra-Orthodox Jew, or an Israeli -Arab) will occur synchronously. Conversely, suppose the psyche is not ready. In that case, we may encounter the same stranger with a reluctance to open ourselves up to someone different from ourselves and attempt to draw him or her into our court and our direction.
In this presentation, we shall examine several examples of healing made possible by an encounter with a stranger. We shall see how we can benefit each other in the search for identity. How we find a way to cope with feelings of estrangement or of belonging overmuch by eliminating blockages to our humanity, which may arise from an overdeveloped sense of kinship and loyalty, religious or ideological rigidity, unconscious racism, prejudice and fear, and the entanglement of our energies in personal and cultural complexes.
Erich Neumann extended this Jungian concept to include the idea of a greater self [2], which develops along the Ego-self axis in parallel with the formation of parental, familial, and social relations. This insight is particularly helpful in understanding the personal and psychological growth that occurs through a progressive revelation of the self in a sequence of archetypes, each time with a different variation, as in the stranger archetype.
According to Neumann, the new archetype in the development process manifests at first as a numinous figure, a stranger, one who is either enchanting or frightening, drawing us towards something we need to relinquish or release, not always without a struggle. Through an interpersonal encounter, an archetype will always emerge in the psyche and take on a human form, giving rise to various images and experiences.
Three discrete manifestations may accompany the strangeness experienced with every archetype in the development process. Also, eventually through individuation, the ego alienation from the ego-self axis [3] in the absence of a benevolent human mediator. Secondly, and as a result, a search for something wholly different from the painfully familiar sense of alienation that will bring about relatedness and acceptance; and thirdly, unconscious of alienation, the stage of psychic development when the archetype of the stranger becomes important, attractive, and an object of interest and significance in the process of individuation.
What is more, a time comes when a stranger appears on the scene, an alien from a different planet, a different race, even an imaginary one like E.T., for example, an enthralling friend from a different world who heralds a new phase of life.
In his letters to Jung, Neumann writes of an African anima revealed to him in a dream around his arrival in oriental Palestine, a period of forging a new identity in a new land and his connection to Judaism. The experience might appear in the guise of a wild man [4], like “Iron John” in the Grimm fairy tale, a stranger who helps a boy mature into manhood, or like the old
Woman with the spinning wheel in “Sleeping Beauty,” or the wicked dwarf in “Snow White and Rose Red,” etc. The sudden appearance of a stranger prefigures a later development in the hero.
Neumann’s approach will help us elucidate the influence of the stranger archetype as an accelerant to the forging of identity and a sense of inclusion as well as the development of the Self and even of healing.
The development of the Self in the deepest sense of the word, along with the consciousness of an Ego-self axis, is dependent on our openness to the psyche, to its dark defects. It depends on the unconscious and extra-conscious qualities, oddities, and weaknesses; it's human suffering and complexities and an awareness of our psychological functioning at different levels in the external world.[5]
We may, of course, encounter the stranger archetype at various times and stages. But let us limit our discussion here to the Jungian sense of development throughout life, first at the stage of Ego development, particularly during adolescence with the search for identity and inclusion, and sometimes also through encountering the Other in couple relationships the greater Self in later life.
That is why we shall also observe the place of the stranger patient and ourselves as therapists in the second half of life. The process of individuation and our connection to our greater Self in all its aspects is paramount.
Also, sometimes the spiritual stranger exerts a special influence like the stranger in the first half of life who participates in the development of the Self. The spirituality inspired by a stranger who is different from us connects us in a non-conflictual manner to our religious beliefs.
Therefore, we shall also speak of the stranger patient who appears synchronously during our individuation while we engage with peripheral areas of our psyche. In such a case, we may experience a fascination as a catalyst to our ability to incorporate areas of the inferior function, Anima, Animus, or a broken element of our shadow. When the time comes, these may approach us from the outside in the form of a stranger. Moreover, the stranger patient helps us repair splits in the Self, individual or collective, guilt or shame, or a wound that we cannot heal through our agency. Help may come through someone representing an aspect of the enemy, German, French, Jewish, Palestinian, black, or white, or through a Romeo and Juliet type of situation. This evokes a conflict with the father or mother, the other representing their negative. Here the stranger helps us somehow mend something broken in ourselves, embodying an unresolved urge for revenge or anger at something deriving from the world of our fathers and ancestors.
To illustrate this point are several case examples and another taken directly from my individuation process and the stranger's place in my spiritual development.
The case examples I bring here involve stranger patients and the strangeness I represent to them, the drawbacks of affiliation, and our respective ways of coping with estrangement.
A first case is a thirty-five-year-old man who grew up in a religious community of nationalistic settlers in the occupied territories. His idealistic parents of European origins had moved there when they became religious Zionists with a dream of living in Greater Israel. This resolves the issue of their identity and evolving sense of affiliation. Every member of the patient’s religious family had left the Orthodox way of life because they were unwilling to persist in the identity their parents had adopted. Since early childhood, the patient tried to protect his parents by aligning himself with their overt ideology and espousal of Orthodoxy but to no avail. Under the surface, he had always sensed his parents' confusion and defensive identity, which led to his inability to achieve intimacy and relationships. He saw himself as an imposter, a worthless, dysfunctional outsider, and had been trying to rid himself of these feelings his whole life. The strategy he chose was detachment, an artistic, impressionistic view of life, never taking a position on anything, never asserting himself or influencing his environment, a rather impotent approach in a literal sense as well.
The young man’s escapism and the concealed rebellion, even from himself, complicated his search for an identity, which he began to build in fantasy in Europe. He was compelled to create a fictional identity in an environment that seemed more serene and creative, free of the conflicts he had experienced with his parents and the community, contacting all kinds of marginal people. This by escaping to the very countries from which his Jewish grandparents had fled during the Holocaust.
As a secular Left-leaning therapist, he seemed to me at first like a stranger because of where he grew up and his parents' ideology. In time, however, I realized that he was like me to an astounding degree. My parents espoused the ethos when they arrived in Palestine: the heroic one of draining the malarial swamps and making the desert bloom, an ethos that they transmitted to me in a way I could not identify with and live with myself. Curiously, the patient arrived for therapy synchronistic when I explored the complex of the Sabra and the Wandering Jew and my spiritual path.
Now for an example of another case, twenty years ago, when for some reason, I worked with several German monks from monasteries around the country, particularly Jerusalem. During a few meaningful and highly interesting sessions, I became acquainted with the spiritual world of monasticism, which was extremely alien to me. I was, preoccupied with my Jewishness, and suddenly these German monks arrived at my door asking for therapy.
However, even during this period of accelerated individuation, my psyche was still unprepared to receive the message conveyed by a certain stranger patient, a forty-five-year-old woman from Germany, my mother’s country of birth. The woman served as a diplomat in Israel. During her posting, she kept imagining that she would settle in Israel and that by becoming an Israeli, she would overcome her feelings of alienation, despair, and disaffection with Germany. In time, she realized that she was yearning to overcome a destructive suppression of her instinctual and libidinal life displaced by the feeling of not belonging and estrangement she experienced in Israel.
It was in the strange, warm dream country of Israel of all places that, during therapy, she reconnected with her emotions and drives, as evident in her dreams and the intense feelings she transferred to me, her stranger-therapist. Her dream drawings reveal an extremely meaningful development. What accelerated the process largely were our similarities and differences. Nevertheless, it was only years later from my vantage point today, that I realized something more about the German stranger. A stranger arrived in Israel and underwent therapy with an Israeli of German descent whose parents had fled her country. I had failed to connect with her German heritage and culture and my unconscious German-Jewish heritage. Because we never spoke of it:
She preferred to speak English rather than German. She brought up personal problems visa-a-vis Germany, her parents, particularly her mother and her strict, demanding father, who made of her a brilliant success, a high-powered academic with a diplomatic career, and the pride of Germany.
The patient’s encounter with the east, the warmth and openness of Israel, the bright sun, and our therapeutic sessions evoked a great deal of passion, and love, mixed with jealousy. The emotions she brought up were acceptable in our less formal culture, yet we all but avoided the subject of the German background of my own family. I was not open enough, so I never mentioned it though I know it was there beneath the surface all along.
Also, apropos instincts: interesting to note she adopted two cats, a male, and a female, who became our children during the therapy with photos as they developed "childhood illnesses." Also, before she agreed to have them neutered, she insisted on letting them have a litter of their own, which she kept until she found them homes. Besides, she made a request I could not refuse before she did. She knew I had had a cat who disappeared, and since she was about to leave the country in a few months, she wanted me to adopt two of the kittens. The parent cats she had raised as her children would follow her to her new posting of course, but it would help her to know that their two little ones would remain with me.
This is the one case in my professional experience where I broke the rules, but the result was astounding. I think Israel provided her with therapy, flexibility, and a relationship. It made it possible to bring out latent cultural complexes.
The third and most recent case I want to discuss came at a stage when my psyche opened to attend to a stranger as different from myself as I was from him. The archetype of the stranger was particularly active in me at the time. It happened synchronously that I was approached by several patients from strange and different cultures, in this case, a Palestinian-Israeli Arab fifty years of age who had studied medicine in Germany and had returned to Israel in his late forties as a divorced father of four children. He sought therapy because he was in a crisis, directionless, suffering from identity loss and a deep and prolonged sense of alienation from his culture and the Arab collective in general.
He found it difficult to enter the individuation process he sought because of several unresolved childhood complexes. He had heard about analytical psychology at a spiritual workshop before he began therapy and wanted to try it with an Israeli Jungian.
In addition, through synchronicity, he had come to me, an Israeli therapist whose parents fled from Europe in 1939, who had grown up in Israel and fought in Israel’s wars, had studied psychology, and become a Jungian therapist and whose place of birth happened to be in a neighborhood built over the ruins of an Arab village. At the time, I was working out my individuation and trying to free myself from the Israeli collective consciousness.
The patient arrived with a dream: "a giant snake was moving up the railway tracks and became stuck in a tunnel. The part of him that was outside the tunnel attracted many people who approached and patted it with curiosity". Where did the snake come from, I wanted to know. Is he infinitely long? Also, why is he stuck?
The encounter was personal, cultural, and collective, giving rise to singular and powerful experiences. In time I was able to understand and experience what the patient brought to me, of all the people, and why.
It became evident to us both eventually why he had preferred seeing a therapist from the more western Israeli culture and why it was important for the therapist to be someone who did not belong to his own more patriarchal culture. Through therapy, he saw that he had always felt alienated from his own culture and had sought a different culture because he was sure no Arab could accept his strangeness. He was very excited to learn that not only did I come from a non-Israeli background, but also, I could even inject a few German words here and there.
The patient felt shame for his mother’s isolation and struggle in a patriarchal culture and had called her son a name that means struggle in Arabic. The patient served as an all-important ally to his mother in her struggle with his father and his father’s family. He had spent his first three years alone with her in the shadow of that struggle.
After a while, I understood how to begin a therapeutic relationship with him that would be mutually healing, on both the personal level that touched on personality and the various complexes we had in common. The Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as forgiveness and acceptance, also figured through a deep understanding of the healing power of the collective psyche, which Jung speaks of particularly about the experience of a relationship with the stranger archetype.
Besides, after a while too, the patient referred to himself as a native Palestinian who belonged here and whose family had belonged here for generations, even though he was highly ambivalent about his culture. Through therapy, with me of all people, his connection with his culture grew Stronger.
My love of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish came up during therapy, and the fact that I began to study Arabic myself impressed him and made him feel stronger as he tried to find the positive aspects of his culture, aspects he had never been exposed to at a spiritual level. We also spoke about the Holocaust and the building of the State of Israel by refugees and their immigration in the face of the displacement and expulsion of the Arabs. We reached the height of our differences and similarities when the siren sounded on Memorial Day, and I stood up reverently as Israelis do. At the same time, he remained seated in his chair. He was frightened, nervous, and filled with fantasies of ghosts and demons, and I was sad, not proud, and even filled with compassion for him.
For me, Memorial Day is difficult, of course, but I let him express his anger, jealousy, and so forth. He told me about his dreadful fantasies. We worked in parallel on our respective complexes, and his identity problem came up in therapy from time to time. One of his central issues concerning his identity and alienation was his great-father, the family, and the societal circumstances into which he had been born.
The acrimonious family atmosphere of his childhood and the hostility between his parents led to his identification with a mother who was strong yet a victim of a patriarchal society. He filled an Attis-like role for her.
Gradually, as he began to feel less alienated, his identity as an Arab crystallized. However, cautiously, he realized that, as in childhood, he had always allowed himself to be used by others, first by his mother and later by groups in which he was the only Arab and was used as a token member through whom, against his will, the others tried to raise problems and find solutions.
His experience of transference with me as an Israeli Jewish father who regarded the subject of the patriarchal society in a way that was more agreeable to him was exceptionally intense. I was the approachable father who engaged with him in a dialogue, motivating him to change and to be a father himself. At the same time, the experience helped liberate him from the role of the son-lover who must rescue his mother from her inferiority complex. Besides, countertransference made me aware of my parallel experience as the son-lover of a mother who created and fed on the new generation.[6]
Suddenly, our work together became more open and direct, and the patient connected more consciously with the strangeness inside, as a young man in the first half of his life who had felt deprived of identity and dissociated from the collective to which he belonged as an Arab.
He understood the depth of his feelings of inferiority, his flight from them, and the philosophical quest he had embarked on long ago, yet, in returning to himself, his culture. On a personal level, he understood his need to free himself from over-identifying with his mother. However, it also pained him deeply to understand the advantages and disadvantages of this stranger within his psyche about the rest of his family.
It was a powerful experience for him to be himself with me, an Israeli, and to begin summoning his Self, identity, criticism, and pain within him. And I, the Israeli, accompany him with a growing sense of wonderment, listening to him and encouraging him, the Arab, a tremendous experience related for me as well to the collective dimension, an experience of coming closer to understanding and forgiveness.
During therapy, the strongest experience was my collaboration with him, not using him, and in the therapeutic context from which we both received so much. Besides, letting him know that I wanted to present him at the conference was not exploitative but rather therapeutic, a contribution through friendship. It also made him happy to understand the beneficial impact of the Stranger on himself.
Abstract
In my work as a therapist, I have noted that the archetype of the Stranger shows up among patients in two principal situations. Either during the first half of life, when the psyche’s synchronistic encounter with a stranger arouses feelings of ego-self alienation (as Edinger terms this in Ego and Archetype), the dissociation of the ego from the archetype and the ego-self axis. In such a state, the psyche seeks to escape from a sense of isolation and loneliness, loss of identity and relationship, even uncanniness (Unheimlich), and estrangement from the milieu in which the personality has matured and developed. At this stage, a therapist or any stranger coming from elsewhere is experienced as complementary, and under his/her strangeness, as sharing a common destiny. The therapist-stranger is the receiver who releases the patient from the loneliness and estrangement he/she experiences with growing frustration among those who are ostensibly near and dear and likeminded.
Or else, perhaps half a year later, the patient may arrive at a stable self-definition, having undergone important phases of individuation and reached a new and more personal sense of belonging. A patient stranger will appear when the therapist’s psyche is receptive and he is open to themes that may appear to be remote beyond the confines of the shadow. That is when the therapist may be ready to meet the challenge of cultural and social complexes, now understood to be vital, which carry contradictions or missing links and may even return the therapist to him or herself and selfhood. The patient stranger may provide the key to a hitherto unrecognized complex and a connection between our self and the world's soul.
Translated by Betsy Rosenberg
[1] The Sabra and the Wandering Jew, Israeli and Jewish Complexes. An article that shows how the new Israeli and the old Jew are brought problem in building identity: Baumann 2019 (Jung Israel.co.il, articles)
[2] Neumann, The Child: Structure and Dynamics of the Nascent Personality
[3] The Alienated Ego in Edinger E.F: The Ego and the Archetypes
[4] “Iron John”, fairy tale in the collection of the Brothers Grimm
[5] Neumann, The Psyche, and the Transformation of the Reality Planes (Mensch und Sin)
[6] Avi Baumann: Puer as a Second Generation to Holocaust Survivors, Zurich 199
5.