From the Prologue to Transforming Depression: A Jungian Approach Using the Creative Arts by Jungian analyst and psychiatrist David H. Rosen, M.D.
Update: Dr. Rosen was my guest in Episode 93.
The model of egocide and transformation involves four aspects: Bad News, Good News, Symbolic Death, and New Life.
“What I now call egocide [is] the letting-go of a hurt and hurting dominant ego-image or identity. The suffix -cide means kill. However, egocide is a symbolic killing of the ego that is experienced as ego death: a sacrifice of the ego to the Self, a higher principle. Egocide is the core strategy for transforming depression, and the heart and soul of this book. In my case, it was the ego-image I had of myself as a husband that was sacrificed. When I released that image, I found I could surrender to a higher power within myself—the Self.”
EXCERPT
By surviving self-chosen-death leaps, all ten of my interviewees wound up committing symbolic suicide—what I have termed egocide—instead of actual suicide. In retrospect, they each realized that they had planned their jump in a confused and demoralized state, during which they had inappropriately defined their whole being in terms of a specific failing or negative ego or self-image. Even more noteworthy, they each recommended that suicide barriers be constructed on both bridges. In every case, I interpret this plea as a projection of an inner barrier against suicide: Contrary to most survivors of very serious suicide attempts, who are at much greater risk for subsequent suicide, none of the ten survivors whom I interviewed had gone on to suicide.
What I learned from the bridge-jump survivors has become an integral part of my own healing journey and of the healing journeys I lead my patients to undertake: People can overcome depression and suicidal impulses through egocide. In part, what I have learned from these healing journeys has now evolved into this book.
In developing my egocide and transformation theory, some of my most important teachers have been these survivors. These ten individuals, who set out to commit suicide but survived, found out that they had somehow cleared the way for psychic regeneration. In surviving, they had symbolically killed their previous negative ego-identities. Each of these individuals transcended the split between inner death and life forces, between the negative ego and the Self. Through the act of surviving their depressive and suicidal states, they had transformed themselves. Their experiences became the basis of a new paradigm for me and for my patients.
A Commonsense Model of Egocide and Transformation
Expressed as simply as possible, my theory of egocide and transformation presents a Bad News/Good News scenario of psychological development. The Bad News is that we all occasionally become depressed: We fail, lose, or fall. For some individuals, depression can reach a point where they feel completely worthless. In this dark abyss, the person experiences a loss of soul and spirit: Hope’s flame is sputtering out. Suicide seems like the only solution. However, the Good News is that only a part of the ego has to die (or be killed). This Symbolic Death (or egocide) can usher in a positive psychic transformation, or New Life.
To reiterate, the model of egocide and transformation involves four aspects: Bad News, Good News, Symbolic Death, and New Life. The Bad News is a state of demoralization, a negative turn leading to despair, or depression caused by a precipitating failure, such as loss of a job. This is on an ego (I, me) level. The Bad News, which involves loss, is based on rejection and is experienced as a wounding of the ego. If we can endure and persist, the untoward is followed by Good News. The Good News is that after the fall, we are able to pick ourselves up. We may need a helping hand, support, encouragement, and therapy, but we can get back up. There is ascent after descent; there is joy after despair; there is success after failure. Based on this Good News, the ego again feels that it is in control. The person then has an enhanced self-image.
People spend most of their lives on an ego level. However, when there is a major fall, a life crisis of some kind, there is a confrontation with death. At this time, we tend to become severely depressed, if not suicidal, and experience a feeling of losing our soul. Stuck in hopelessness, we become preoccupied with ending our life. Alcoholics Anonymous maintains that a person must hit rock bottom, hardly able to function, before major change occurs. In such an instance of extreme dejection, the ego can turn on itself in its last desperate act of control. The only recourse the ego feels it has left to master the situation of ultimate failure is to commit suicide. It is a conscious ego act.
Therefore, in that fateful moment, if the person can transcend the inner struggle between death and life and gain insight and understanding, he or she can choose egocide and transformation, preserving the self and relationships with significant others. Anyone can talk and analyze a tragic situation to death, and go through a loss of that negative dominant ego-image, which has led to this confrontation with the cessation of life.
To reach the point of suicide, the negative ego colludes with the shadow—one’s darkest repressed side. The way to survive involves both egocide (killing the negative ego) and shadowcide (killing the negative shadow). In sum, this is killing the false self. This Symbolic Death leads to a further and greater fall, which actually feels like death. It is like entering an eternal void. This is a frightening transitional phase characterized by a death-rebirth struggle. When the ego is fragmented, the person feels lost. But when the individual contacts the center of the psyche, the Self (Supreme Being), it leads to a reorganization and reconstitution of the ego, which is now secondary to a higher principle. This is the emergence of the true self (genuine being).
The final phase involves New Life, based on the person surviving (suffering through) a death-rebirth experience. The individual feels reborn and morale is restored. I will now illustrate what I mean by utilizing the experiences of two well-known people, one who commits suicide and the other who commits egocide and undergoes transformation. The tragedy of the first case, as with all suicides, is that it could have been prevented.
Elvis Presley and Betty Ford
Elvis Presley, the individual in the first case, embodied the Icarus syndrome. He was flying high and got too close to the sun; after his wax wings melted, he crashed into the sea and drowned. He had become inflated (emotionally and physically) and remained stuck in the king state. Elvis was a creative but self-destructive king. The Bad News was that his drug abuse increased and he became severely addicted. After his divorce, he spiraled down. Occasionally he had an ascent based on uppers and his natural talent. However, he could not get out of the quagmire and kept spiraling down further into an abyss of no return. The Bad News got worse and he eventually committed suicide by a multiple drug overdose. His negative ego colluded with his negative shadow, and drug taking became an acute form of self-destruction. If Elvis had gone through a Symbolic Death experience (committed egocide) and transformed himself, eliminating the drugs and his suicidal complex, he could have rejuvenated himself and been alive today, possibly with an intact family.
I want to mention another similar human predicament, but one whose outcome was survival. The individual is Betty Ford, a person admired by many. Ironically, the Betty Ford Clinic could have been the very place where Elvis Presley went for help. Betty, unlike Elvis, was able to admit that she was depressed and self-destructive. She was able to let her suicidal complex die; rather than it killing her, she killed it. The Bad News was that she was addicted to alcohol, which could have taken her down an ever-increasing Bad News path to death. The Good News, on an ego level, was that she was able to transcend and gain insight into her situation and to make a choice to go through Symbolic Death, or egocide, and transformation. Based on contact with a higher power, the Self, her New Life involved a humble secondary ego position, in which she knew that she was not ultimately in control; she surrendered to this higher force. With restored morale, Betty Ford continued to pursue her own healing and the healing of others (altruistic service), which is characteristic of individuation (the process toward wholeness).
The Jungian Humanistic Perspective
Throughout the book, my psychological perspective is Jungian. Carl Jung focuses on major aspects of the psyche, which are repressed or unconscious during the time an individual is establishing his or her ego-identity (ego being the center of consciousness). Jung defines these aspects as: the anima (contrasexual female principle) in a man or the animus (contrasexual male principle) in a woman; the persona (the masks one wears, which are tied to social roles); the shadow (the dark, unknown, unconscious aspects of one’s psyche); and the Self (the center and totality of one’s being). In the Jungian paradigm, these aspects must be brought into the light of consciousness in the second half of a person’s life, if that person is to become individuated. Basically, individuation is a process toward achieving psychic wholeness that involves the Symbolic Death of the previous, dominating ego-identity and the emergence of a newly reconstructed ego-Self identity.
It is Jung’s dynamic theory of psychological death and rebirth that most directly informs my concept of egocide. Implicit in Jung’s theory is a strong spiritual element similar to the one I detected in the psychological death-and-rebirth histories of the bridge-jump survivors. Unlike Freud, who thought that the spiritual dimension of life was neurotic or an illusion, Jung believed that the spirit was integrally related to healing and to becoming fully human.
According to Jung, the means by which a person spiritually transcends and transforms a limiting ego-identity is by delving deeper into the psyche and going beyond one’s own personal unconscious into the collective unconscious. Jung postulated that just as each individual human embryo replicates the physical and biological evolution of the species as it unfolds, so each individual human psyche reflects the entire mental and psychological experience of the species. He found evidence of this collective unconscious in the pervasiveness of the same symbols, myths, and motifs in widely separated human cultures throughout history. Jung called these symbols, myths, and motifs manifestations of archetypes, and he considered it critically important to take the archetypal dimension into account during the course of any therapy aimed at restoring the health of the individual psyche.
In working with people’s depressed or suicidal feelings, I have found that a patient’s recognition and recasting of archetypes through creative expression (by specific acts or artistic productions) is an essential part of the transformation process. For example, if a patient is psychologically disturbed by an internal conflict with his or her father, that conflict can never be completely resolved by focusing attention exclusively on the personal father. To effect an engagement of the healing process, the patient must come to terms with the patriarchal archetype in his or her psyche, the collective unconscious record of images associated with all fathers that is influencing his or her reactions to the personal father in all sorts of potentially self-destructive ways.
Jung encouraged his patients to confront these images through a technique he called active imagination, a kind of free-flowing, non-goal-oriented creative meditation. The patients I discuss in Chapters 6–9 have confronted these images in a similar fashion through drawing, painting, writing (poetry and prose), ceramics, and dance.
This book has a natural affinity with Jungian psychology because death and rebirth themes are central to its healing philosophy and analytical therapy. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, out of the forces of destruction emerge creative powers that contribute to the fulfillment of one's personal myth in conjunction with self-healing.
Egocide represents the creative process by which an individual symbolically confronts and destroys a negative, life-threatening identity, in order for a more positive, life-affirming identity to emerge. Transforming Depression recounts how this process has worked successfully in the context of analytical psychotherapy, even for people suffering so severely from depression that they were repeatedly in danger of committing suicide.
~David H. Rosen, M.D., Jungian analyst, Prologue, Transforming Depression: A Jungian Approach Using the Creative Arts
Read more about Dr. Rosen’s take on Elvis Presley in his book, The Tao of Elvis.
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