The body is ‘the physical materiality of the psyche’ (Jung 1959). Yukio’s inner
transformation was paralleled by the surgical enactment of his ‘Polynesian’ dream.
The operation was long, painful, and successful. Afterwards, he brought a dream:
‘I’m a naked child standing on the shore of the Pacific, beside a Tori (a Japanese
Shinto ceremonial gate). The sea stretches away. I feel its timeless...its everything’.
We both felt awe at his numinous experience. He felt at one with himself and
completely bewildered, as if he’d died and been reborn. There was a mirroring of a
mother and a newborn in the awe present between us; he saw in my face the ‘sparkle
in mother’s eye’ he’d been born expecting, but which, because of his deformity, he’d
missed. And, with joy, he brought a dream in which he’d met a ‘girl with a face like
me’; a shy, wild anima figure, who, he dreamed, was actively seeking him out for love
making. He had undergone his rite de passage and felt able to be a man.
ConclusionAnalysis means ‘resolving a thing into its parts,’ opening and closing. For Yukio, his
face was taken apart and resolved. He no longer believed it his karma to be ugly. His
ego opened prematurely due to difficult conditions in infancy. He was too soon cut
off from Self, the oceanic source of being; from mother, who represents Self as a ‘flow
of wholeness’. Jung describes Self thus:
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese
philosophy names this interior way ‘Tao’ and likens it to a flow of water that
moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfilment, wholeness,
one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end and perfect
realisation of the meaning of existence innate in all things. Personality is Tao.
(Jung 1954b)Yukio felt this with his new persona and new face. This meant first recognizing, then
accepting his shadow, as it appeared in his sado-masochistic complex. As he did so,
its hold relaxed, leaving an ego capable of letting Self have many relationships. For,
like ‘society’, Self is a collective noun. It contains infinite possible ‘subpersonalities’,
—‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘child’, ‘hero’, ‘shadow’, ‘boy nobody wants’. As the health of
society depends on harmony between members, so, in individuals, psychological
health depends on harmony between different personae in the psyche. Active
imagination helped Yukio integrate his subpersonalities.
Jung (1960) emphasizes that integration is not individuation, nor is it simply ego
emerging into consciousness. It is the unfolding of Self...finding the face we had
before we were born...having choices about how we appear. Underlying this is a
purpose. At its simplest, it is relationship to others in order to survive (Fairbairn
1952:34–5).
Individuation is relationship. Its processes are both causal and final. They occur
simultaneously in the timeless Self and the time-bound ego (Wiener 1996). The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche 1987:xvii)
214 DALE MATHERS