Journal of Analytical Psychology 1993, 38, 57-64 BOUNDARIES, PSYCHIC STRUCTURE, AND TIME VERNON YORKE, London I will start with a few very general remarks about boundaries: they are often agreed, not necessarily physical, flexible not fixed, in short negotiable; symbolic. They are distinct from barriers, which are impermeable and to do with the psychology of exclusion: envy and jealousy; power and dominance; ideals; intrusiveness and defensive- ness; splitting. Boundaries are about the psychology of inclusion and communications: meaning and concern; dependence and ambivalence, which maintain them as boundaries and not barriers. There are many ways of approaching the topic of boundaries: most commonly they are associated with establishing and maintaining a setting within which analysis can take place. This usually means holding the arrangements firmly, but there are wider issues of flexi- bility in boundary issues, and the maintenance of the setting also includes dealing with intense emotional states that might threaten it. My main point is that in this flexibility the patient experiences the analyst as a thinking deciding being, a mind in process, rather than there being fixed rules. Goodheart describes problems with the setting that we would all recognize. He says: Common examples of ‘leaks’ or ‘breaches’ are: frequent and random vacations, missed or overstayed sessions, occasional or regular visits by the patient's spouse or other family member, simultaneous couple therapy or group therapy with the therapist, social or professional contact outside of the therapy, sharing of personal or reading materials, including gifts to one or the other, personal revelations by the therapist, and occasional or even frequent physical contact such as hugging, hand holding or even massage or ‘body work’. These behaviours develop out of the most earnest and caring intentions, often to ‘enhance the sense of personal connection’ or ‘the real relationship’, ‘to deal with some reality issues’, or ‘to speak to the patient's feeling (or thinking or sensation) function’, or to get ‘in touch with the body and get out of the head’. (Goodheart 1983, p. 69) He is talking about the importance of what he describes as a fairly intact therapeutic workspace. Whether it must it be intact at all costs at all times is an important question, because I think it is not the ‘0021-8774/93/3801/057/83.00/1 © 1993 The Society of Analytical Psychology38 V. Yorke fixedness of the setting at all but the patient’s experience of the analyst’s attitude to the setting. In passing, I find it an unfortunate shot in the foot that, in his paper on countertransference, Goodheart describes himself as the creator of the spellbinding circle (Goodheart 1984). I think that the use of such magical and mysterious imagery has impenetrable connotations which are counterproductive in thinking about boundaries. Perhaps Jungians cannot have it both ways and have to be more careful about this sort of thing. The setting, as many writers have pointed out, not only refers to a quiet room and its contents, regular times of consistent duration but, to pick out the implications from my excerpt from Goodheart above, also boundaries around the members of the analytical relation- ship (bringing in others) with implications for personal, social, and family privacy. There are also the personal bodies of patient and analyst, their personal minds and their emotional lives. Respect for and maintenance of all these aspects of the setting are potentially structure-building. Goodheart begins his catalogue above with reference to time boundaries in analysis. In the primary processes of the unconscious there is no sense of time: the dynamics are condensation, displace- ment, and symmetry (Freud 1976; Matte-Blanco 1975). The sense of time is an ego function and the handling of the time-boundary issues is therefore potentially ego-promoting. Some would argue that time is purely an ego function but I do not want to go into those aspects here. Boundary is a term borrowed from geography. Meltzer sees the sorting out of what he calls ‘geographical confusions’ as an essential part of the psychoanalytical process. I think he is referring to projec tive and introjective processes, the geography of relationships. He also writes about the sorting of ‘zonal confusions’ as equally essential, which I think refers to intra-psychic geographical confusions, a geography of structures in the mind (Meltzer 1967). For Meltzer, what belongs where and to whom is essential to individuation, though he might not use that term. At first this sounds like analysis taking place within the setting, but much of it may be conducted about the setting; the setting and the analysis are part and parcel of cach other. This model is a psychic geography of space, though time is implicit in Bion’s ideas, like the thinking breast, alpha functioning, etc., with which I imagine Meltzer would accord. With Winnicott the notion of time is clearer in ideas such as conti- nuity-of-being, going-on-being, and, implicitly, how impingements create discontinuity-of-being, feelings of endlessness, lack of sequence, process, progress, all of which are inseparable from timeBoundaries, psychic structure, and time 59 (Winnicott 1976, pp. 60-1). He writes about the experience of the duration of time and how the time is managed by the holding and containing functions of the mother (Winnicott 1976, pp. 76-7). The child internalizes these processes as the experience of time and acquires the capacity to be alone; prior to this, being abandoned is a terrifying aloneness. Kenneth Lambert links the sense of time to the nursing experience, pointing out that the infant has no experience of space and time, and that for a child a few minutes can seem an eternity (Lambert 1981, pp. 112-13). There, he is more focused on how ‘the present can become a good enough experience’ with ‘pleasant enough memories of the past, coupled with sanguine enough anticipations of the future’. He links time with pathology, describing how ‘in deep depression . . . a minute lasts almost an eternity, while in manic states duration is experienced as if lightning’. The way in which the mother structures or mediates the satisfaction/frustration dimensions are not only related to quality then, but also to duration. In frustration or maternal failure it is the time factor that is crucial in the formation of pathological developments. The more the time factor intrudes, the further towards the psychotic end of the spectrum one is pushed and the quality of defence mechanisms follows accord- ingly. Here the boundaries of tolerance thresholds and the crossing of them are crucial in the building or failure of ego structures and consequently self-esteem. Rosemary Gordon makes clear in her book Dying and Creating that our lives are given meaning by the fact of our death — the ultimate boundary (Gordon 1978). It is our archetypal knowledge of death that gives meaning to life-time and enables an appreciation of time. The present as ‘a good enough experience’ with ‘pleasant enough memories of the past, coupled with sanguine enough anticipations of the future’ (Lambert 1981) is not being overwhelmed by death and is a sense of time being well spent. The so-called middle-age crisis is where the span of one’s life comes into sharp relief. How one has spent the time and how one will deal with the remainder is often the main issue, but particularly that there is only a remainder. It is often bereavement that provokes such life evaluations and can underwrite serious changes. In his paper ‘The hologram as a model for analytical psychology’, Louis Zinkin discusses ‘time and space in analysis’ (Zinkin 1987). The time refers to sessions, weeks, and terms, and the setting to the place and facilities where the analysis happens. He roughly boils it down to the ‘setting and session’ referring to the ‘here and now’. He com- ments on ‘the contradiction created by the seemingly arbitrary bound- aries we impose, while at the same time we try to help our patients to60 V. Yorke be less fragmented’. Explicit in this paper is that seemingly arbitrary boundaries become meaningful because we make use of them as elements for serious interaction. This is important, I think, because it rescues us from a static, book-of-rules approach to boundary issues, enabling flexibility in technique, but it also behoves us to think and make decisions about the boundaries as live issues rather than arbi- trary facts. The analyst’s mind can then be accessible to witness, although sometimes the analyst can become mindless, owing to pro- jective interference. Patients will, understandably, often want to know the rules of analysis as a defence against riskily relating to a psyche they can use, and for analysts, who may wonder about the nature and validity of what they do, clear theories, models, and techniques can be straws to clutch at. Louis Zinkin later continues: ‘We would not persist with these arrangements if we did not know that each session can be a whole and that even in one moment everything can be experienced’. This is the holographic idea that the whole is represented in each part. So the setting is the time-space venue for the analysis at the same time as being part of the analysis itself. It is like saying that it is both the centre and the circumference, the sort of paradoxical definition Jung used in defining the self. Implicit in Louis Zinkin’s paper, the session- setting then is an image of the self, the analyst’s mind in action and largely the experience of it that the patient witnesses. Experiencing the analytic relationship is mind creating because it is an experience of mind, a mind dealing with time and space, in time and space. Judith Hubback, writing about mutative factors in analysis, describes an interpretation where ‘what is happening is that the analyst is... using the self to link creatively with the self in the patient. That is the mutative factor: the psychic action of linking’, She goes on: ‘I believe that it is true to say that the possibility of change lies in the self and that it moves from the possible to the actual when two selves meet’ (Hubback 1987). It is the ‘deciding-with-analyst-experiences’ (meeting of selves) that brings new durable-flexible thinking, living boundaries to both the rigid over-boundaried (or barriered) patient and the intrusive, adhesive, over-envious, under-boundaried patient. Kenneth Lambert is explicit: ‘My function was to “remain in being” through all this, so that he could form an object relationship with me and take me in as an internal object’ (Lambert 1981, p. 103). I think that what he is implying here is internalization, which has to do with establishing the inside of processes-in-time rather than the characteristics of objects. The very notion of process describes events in a time continuum and it is process that is important in ego develop-Boundaries, psychic structure, and time 61 ment. It is this processing feature in the analytic relationship that is a very important transformative agent in analysis. It is the meaning of the setting, including boundary issues, that I think is bound up with these mind processes more than other sorts of therapeutic factors in analysis: the analysis, analyst and setting is a potentially meaningful situation, rather than’ a set of arrangements. ‘After many years of stalemate, one patient has benefited from my allowing her to go over the so-minute period. She is a person with very rigid barriers who could not be penetrated before this. She has always experienced decisions made about her by other people (mother) as ‘arbitrary’, which means that they have no live core of meaning having been decided by a live mind, but are just dead tenets, laid down by her parents or the Pope, or because they are just so. Her discovery of my flexibility over what she had ‘decided’ are fixed rules of analysis has been both helpful and frightening for her. This needed to happen before she could take it in. What she learns from the arbitrary decision is the meaninglessness of it, which I think becomes her meaninglessness. She feels that if someone doesn’t want her, then she has failed. There is no recognition of the other; she is locked into a very early way of relating where the (m)other is fantasized as being completely out of her control and the arbitrariness feels not like somebody separate from her but a bit of her self - like her appetites that seem to function autonomously, out of her control and against her. This is a direct contradiction of the action of the self which always acts in one’s best interest. So she is constantly mistrusting her self, which then cannot run free. The strength of her barriers even seemed to prevent her from making projections: I found it hard to ‘feel’ her; it was all held in. She didn’t often penetrate my boundaries, and I found this diagnostically compelling. Later, when such projective identifications became more apparent I felt this was progress. It is arguable that there were projec- tive identifications which I was experiencing as a sort of blank which would refer to the meaninglessness; perhaps this is an argument merely about content. I felt that she needed me to decide about my conduct over a range of boundary issues and she needed to understand my conduct because her experience of arbitrary rules had not helped her in the past. She might not like what I might decide, though she could identify with the process of deciding it. This has helped her to decide about her conduct and has slightly lessened her terror, as she projects aggression and restrictive morality less, about what her family and other people will think of what she does. These experiences, I think, can become part of the patient’s psyche, forming an internal structure in the same way as my thinking analyst62 V. Yorke and supervisors become internalized in me as structures or what I tend to think of as professional internal objects. The difference between process or fixed state is clearer here: it is not that my analyst did or did not decide one thing or another but that he decided at all. Even with a wrong outcome one can still internalize a live thinking analyst-object whom one can forgive. As a trainee I got into difficulties with a patient because I was mindlessly carrying things straight out of supervision and implement- ing them in the analysis. When they went wrong again I turned to my supervisor to sort me out. Even though this dealt with the immediate situation, the main situation remained a hidden but serious problem that eventually had to be dealt with by me because it remained a pocket of my mindlessness that the patient was unable to digest. My second example is from experiences with an underboundaried patient who constantly spilled over into me. She was a patient with poor organization around separation themes, who had a family and personal history of psychotic illness. She virulently attacked the boundaries of the analyst and the analysis and her own internal struc- ture. This patient very quickly realized that 1 was not residing at my home, where I also work. (This was a temporary arrangement because of illness in my family.) Outside the sessions, she became frantic, endlessly calling my answering machine and leaving very distressed messages, while in her sessions she seemed more settled. Later one evening after my last appointment she returned extremely drunk. When I answered the door, she produced a knife and demanded that I make her coffee. However, | noticed that her other hand was in her pocket over something which momentarily glinted in the light. I thought: ‘Christ! She’s got a gun.’ I thought that the knife was to mislead me. I tried to deal with her on the doorstep in terms of calming down and getting her to leave, reminding her of her next appointment, but at this she violently tried to barge in. I panicked completely and decided to get the gun. We were struggling and wrestling on my doorstep. I had enormous difficulty in wrench- ing her hand out of her pocket, the sole object of my entire effort in this fight. Eventually I succeeded enough to see that what was in her pocket was a Sony Walkman. I then realized that she could have stabbed me many times with her free hand which was still holding the knife. I stopped and said it was silly and invited her to have some coffee. We went to our usual room, and over some coffee I was able to talk with her about her terror of losing contact with me. The sequence is as follows, I think: my going on being there enabled her to go on being, knowing I’m there, knowing she’s there.Boundaries, psychic structure, and time 63 This gives her time for other things. When she felt that I was not there, her ego collapsed and she became terrified. In the session she cut off from it by a split-and-deny mechanism. The drink was to kill her mind and the terror, which I think may become one and the same. She needed to regain control of me and her mind. On the doorstep she projected the massive amount of terror. Under the pressure of the projective identification I lost my mind. My time, like hers, collapsed into phantasy of a permanent present, where there is no past or future, merely an endless terrifying present. When events allowed me to regain my mind, time began again and we could have time to understand what had been going on. The possibility of future was re-established and became so. When I was re-instated in time, then I could process the projective identification. Many years later, when discussing this event, the thing that she remembered from it was that out of her most terrible behaviour my response was to suggest that she came to see me more and that this had made more difference than anything else she could remember. She used the phrase that I would have ‘more time for her’. She thought this was ‘brilliant’, since she had expected that I would want to see her less and if possible not at all. I did not remember this aspect at all: my most brilliant moment! SUMMARY In this paper I have discussed boundaries as decisions taken by the analyst as a model of processing time and space. This witnessing of the analyst’s mind, and interacting with it, is available to the patient for internalization and is potentially ego promoting. REFERENCES Freud, S. (1976). The Interpretation of Dreams. Harmondsworth. Pen- win. Goodheart, W. B. (1983). Correspondence. Journal of Analytical Psy- chology, 28, 1. Goodheart, W. B. (1984). ‘Successful and unsuccessful interventions in Jungian analysis: The construction and destruction of the spellbinding circle’. In Transference/Countertransference. Wilmette, Il. Chiron. Gordon, R. (1978). Dying and Creating: A Search for Meaning. London. Society of Analytical Psychology. Hubback, J. (1987). ‘Change as a process of the self: What is the mutative factor?”. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 32, 364 V. Yorke Lambert, K. (1981). Analysis, Repair and Individuation. London. Society of Analytical Psychology. Matte-Blanco, I. (1975). The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. London. Duckworth. Meltzer, D. M. (1967). The Psycho-Analytical Process. Pitlochry. Clunie Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1976). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London. Hogarth. Zinkin, L. (1987). ‘The hologram as a model for analytical psy- chology’. Journal of Analytical Psychology 32, 1.