War in the Consulting Room: When Rage and Hatred Enter the Analytic Field

Abstract This paper presents a classic case of “enactment” between the author and his patient in which unknown, unformulated, and dissociated shame in both participants entered the analytic field, colouring it with defensive hatred and murderous wishes. Our mutual declaration of “war” on each other and the resulting destructive stalemate were eventually resolved as an imaginative process in the analyst helped open up underlying vulnerability in both participants, thereby getting “underneath” the angry defences driving the enactment. The case illustrates how a Jungian approach to the imagination and to the psyche’s dissociability can be extended beyond complex theory into the “unformulated experience” (Stern, 1997) of early attachment trauma and thus integrated with the interpersonal and relational theories that have explored that area so fruitfully in recent years.