Finding the Soul again: between synchronicity and ecobiopsychological imagery through the flames of Ishmael

Finding the Soul again: between synchronicity and ecobiopsychological imagery through the flames of Ishmael

Naike Michelon*

«The tree is nothing but a flowering flame»
Novalis

«The research of the relationship between infrared and ultraviolet, is not only a methodology that can lead the observed phenomena back to the archetypal dimension, but also an openness to a transformative dimension of the individual psyche»
Diego Frigoli

It was the end of winter, I was walking down the cobblestone street of a small Umbrian village, whose name I cannot remember, with houses leaning against each other and a succession of small stores selling jewellery and local products, when a small door with a wooden sign attracted me. I entered that cosy, intimate bookstore, where an elderly gentleman greeted me from behind his glasses. I asked to look at the books and one, which appeared to be a storybook, caught my eye - it was Leonardo da Vinci. The Wonders of the Universe.
Leafling through the book, I came across the drawn image of a bright candle and, a few pages later, I paused to read the dialogue entitled Life and Death of the Flame (Atl. 270 r.a.): «Master» Salaì said, «I cannot understand why the candle goes out if you blow on it while if you blow under the wood, it lights up again». «It does not depend on blowing on or under it» Leonardo replied, «but only on the fact that too much wind kills the flame while a fair current of air nourishes it. When the air hits the flame too violently, it is as if it takes away its breath: but if it joins it in moderation, it revives it. Have you ever heard how the flame resounds when it is pulled up the chimney hood? The same for fire: first it disposes the matter that is to feed it, and then, feeding on it, it consumes and destroys it».
The Master's words and the image of the candle immediately amplified through space and time, taking me back to the therapeutic interview of the day before. The patient had brought a sort of summary of the three years of therapy we had experienced together: a series of five drawings in which images and words appeared to express emotions and moods, wounds and achievements.
What struck me was that three of the five drawings had fire as an explicit theme, and that the candle depicted in the book coincided exactly with the one drawn by the patient.
I was facing a synchronic event, which I experienced as a sense of emotional amazement: my mind seemed to remain suspended in space and time, as if my consciousness could only contemplate the moment in which the Unity of the Whole could express itself. I had the impression that I could grasp something broader, which did not only concern the patient, which did not even concern myself, but also included aspects that brought back to the sense of unity and connection with Nature. I felt it had to do with the deepest aspects of the ecobiopsychological approach that had been constellating over the course of the treatment and were manifesting through the experience of synchronicity.
Synchronicity is one of the pivotal concepts of analytical psychology that Carl Gustav Jung used to denote the phenomenology of interesting and singular events that occur simultaneously and that, although their occurrence is not due to a common cause, are perceived as connected to each other indicating the presence of the harmonia praestabilita, a concept that Leibniz had already grasped as early as the eighteenth century. Through his relationship with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, Jung would then make explicit that what clearly relates and binds these events together is Meaning. While through his fruitful analytical relationship with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, committed to «giving a soul back to nature», he would enrich his reflections on the origin of the synchronic event (Widman, 2016).
With the term synchronicity Jung came to designate the a-causal connection of events linked to each other by grouping certain types of events that appeared to have no correlation with time and space, to establish the importance of investigating such phenomena, and to postulate the hypothesis that they were the implementation of the archetype.
Today, through the ecobiopsychological studies that go beyond the Jungian view referring to the paradigm of complexity, reconnecting to the Self not only the aspects of archetypal images as Jung claimed, but also recovering the body dimension analogous and coherent to the subtlest parts (infrared-ultraviolet relation), we have come to postulate the existence of the psychosomatic Self that determines and in-forms everything that exists. In the face of this change, also the experience of synchronicity is further clarified by highlighting how «with the concept of synchronicity of events, a glimpse of a-causal time is filtered right into the experience of our consciousness, proposing to us the vision of an "implied" reality in all its components such as to constitute the experience of the whole» (Frigoli, 2016, p. 93).
So what was the "implied" reality, present but concealed until that moment, that was revealing to my eyes through this event? What should I have grasped and explored more in the field that had manifested in relation to that patient? And what amplifications of consciousness were happening in me?
Moreover, the images that had declined the event were the flame of the candle and fire, which I knew to be one of the four archetypal elements along with earth, air, and water. How could I explore and reconnect the archetypal element of fire to the relational reality about which the event seemed to be speaking to me? And what possible openness to the Self could I have approached?
Jung dedicated more than two decades to the study of synchronicity, as did his closest collaborators who passed the baton to the exponents of analytical psychology still committed to weaving an exploratory web on this vast topic. If Ecobiopsychology has collected the fruitful thinking of psychoanalytic history, what about its influence with respect to the topic of synchronicity? And what impact on the therapist’s way of working?
The telling of this clinical story became a kind of freeze-frame and allowed me, as an ecobiopsychological therapist, to make explicit the way in which I am led to confront with synchronicity and how synchronic events are not exceptional in therapy. The ecobiopsychologist is constantly confronted with these coincidences because they are the concrete manifestation of the operation of the method itself. During the ecobiopsychological therapy «the synchronic event can, within certain levels, be evoked using analogy and symbol. Analogy and symbol represent an amplified reading of the world which ordinary consciousness cannot grasp because it is structured on three-dimensional space and on time as a dimension separate from space. In this perspective, the "circular" aspect emphasizes the dimension of the method, the "synchronic" aspect the dimension of the subject when using the method» (Frigoli, 2016, p. 151).
Through the conscious exploration of the different elements: the personal moment I was living (because the synchronic event had happened to me), Ishmael's life (the patient I was taking care of who had brought the drawings), and fire (as a fragment of the archetype), all read in an ecobiopsychological key, I felt I had activated a web of meaning that, through the continuous search for concordances between infrared and ultraviolet, I had to make as clear as possible. 
The use of imagery as a «tool for “dreaming” the reality of the phenomenal world» (Frigoli, 2022, p. 194), would permit me to begin to explore the emotions, the feelings, the images, the memories, the dreams and all that had emerged, to connect them to each other as far as possible and try to grasp and highlight the sense of unity between myself, the patient and Nature, in order to reflect on the purpose of the psychosomatic Self that was beginning to take shape.
In ecobiopsychological therapy the constant search for the infrared-ultraviolet relationship aimed at the exploration of the patient's life history is both oriented towards the healing of the Ego and attentive to the deeper projectuality of the subject's Self. This leads to the manifestation of an intense synchronic experience that involves the therapist-patient dyad and accelerates the healing process through the possibility of placing at the service of consciousness new in-formative contents consistent with the unfolding field. The possibility of being able to integrate these contents during the therapeutic process through analogy and symbol, which are the language through which the soul expresses itself, opens the possibility of accessing the forces of the Self to repair deeply and at several levels, the wounds of the Soul itself that are reflected in the Ego.
In the early evening, in front of the book I had purchased, I found myself jotting down what had happened, my feelings, my emotions, and I returned to the root of Ishmael's story through the notes on my tablet that evoked the synthesis between the results of the therapy and the memories of the biography that would become a novel. Most of the time, in fact, the reflective and circular reading on the synchronic events takes a dilated time, unfolding over successive days, sometimes months or years, becoming at once compass, map, territory and traveller.
The first meeting dating back of three years earlier. I remember a very tall, obese woman dressed as if at a gala dinner: dizzying heels, a knee-length skirt and a sweater completely covered in silver sequins, flashy costume, neck and ear jewellery, straight hair, straw-blond in colour with minimal regrowth. At seeing her and welcoming her by pointing her to my office, I felt a sense of tenderness towards her. 
Behind her, Ishmael a young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in black from head to toe, wavy brown hair indefinitely cut, over a diaphanous skin that looked as if it had never seen the light, and pronounced dark circles under his eyes. He moved as if on alert examining me closely but responding to my welcome with the same gentle cadence of his mother. They would be the only words spontaneously said during the session. 
On the contrary, his mother seemed like a river in flood. Tears accompanied her in visible concern for her son, and a state of anxiety was evident in the insistent movement of her hands and in the contraction of her face at each question I cautiously asked her. I could grasp in her mode of expression a kind of childlike naiveté and I wonder if it might be a defensive form or rather a real poverty of experience, daughters of a deeper discomfort.
Shortly thereafter, it would become clear to me that her mask of pompous elegance served as a cover for a precarious situation. I understood from the way she narrated her son's situation, that she was very far from understanding the severity I would then notice during the meetings with him: «Ishmael is full of anger and aggression at home as well as at school; he also hears voices». She said, adding «I just want my son to be okay». In the face of his mother's words, Ishmael remained motionless and silent, sometimes wandering with his gaze between one wall and another, as if he were absent.
During the meeting, a dramatic story emerged, one of grief from prenatal, postnatal, and transgenerational traumas that had heavily shaken Ishmael's existence.
His mother strongly desired a child despite doctors advising against pregnancy because of serious illnesses the woman had had in the past. She became pregnant around thirty and despite being bedridden right from the start, she managed to carry the pregnancy to term. Ishmael was born full term, breech, by Caesarean section and a round of umbilical cord around his neck.
At birth it was reported a severe hypospadias, a congenital malformation due to incomplete and abnormal development of the urethra and the penis, which would require two surgeries: the first one when Ishmael was one year old, turned out to be unsuccessful. The second one, when he was three, required a long period of extremely painful dressings involving the daily insertion of a cannula into the new urinary duct to promote proper healing of the area.
The gaze with which I listened to this narrative, did investigate the fragilities of the body, but it mainly focused on the soul, the very spark that enlivens existence. The soul became that middle place necessary for the encounter with the deepest meaning of life, which is the openness to spirituality. I therefore asked myself to what place Ishmael's soul had taken refuge.
From my studies and clinical experiences, I have been able to observe that where the destiny of the soul encounters trauma and severe dissociation, forces coming from the depth are activated and come to rescue the soul itself, protecting it in their own way. Jung, through his painful confrontation with the unconscious, had rediscovered the mythopoietic function that through the contents of images coming from the collective unconscious, found in myths, religions and traditions, proposed an alternative psychic reality capable of bringing together and reorganizing, with a protective intent, the vicissitudes of the human soul. According to Donald Kalsched (2013), for example, there is a system of self-care that seems to embody an all-encompassing protective wisdom that moves precisely to protect the salvation of the soul and its potential realization.
At the time of the consultation, Ishmael had no memory of the painful surgery of early childhood, but fragments of repressed memories would resurface during the therapeutic experience, through the careful exploration of the transferential elements, and the measured reference to analogical questions that gave substance to the circular thinking which included the emotions and the feelings he might have felt as a child. 
As an ecobiopsychological therapist, I treat each of these facts as a clear psychosomatic event that is analyzed, explored and reconnected, through the constant search for concordances between the infrared of the body and the ultraviolet of the subtle parts, emotions, feelings and images, to the patient's life history, through analogy and symbol, knowing that each of the events so far described, leaves in the body as well as in the soul, deep wounds. We call these wounds, traumas, and we know well that they involve a confrontation with pain that, due to intensity and immaturity of the child, activates psychosomatic survival responses that psychodynamics has captured and described for more than a century and that modern neuroscience is further confirming and clarifying.
The dialogue that is activated in the ecobiopsychological therapeutic relationship, however, places the healing in the intermediate world of the soul. This is where, through the therapist's openness to a complex vision, the reassuring knowledge of the hard sciences meets the subtle, often alienated elements that pertain to a reality aimed at understanding the deepest sense of the existence of the soul which leads to spiritual openness towards the search for the meaning of the existence of a union with the Anima Mundi.
In ecobiopsychological therapy, the openness to the most subtle aspects of the unconscious does not exclude but rather integrates inputs from the most modern contributions of trauma studies and neuroscience, from the studies that deepen the body-mind relationship by extending them to consciousness studies. Scientists such as Schore, Fonagy, Bucci, LeDoux, Panksepp, Mancia, Liotti, Farina, and Mucci, to name but a few, provide continuing fundamental contributions in the clinical setting to the understanding of the relationship among the psychosome, its development and its evolution in relation to the context in which it is immersed, and consequently a better understanding of therapeutic intervention strategies commensurate with the subject (Frigoli, 2016, 2017), in order to be able to access an adequate, where possible, repair of the Ego, whether it concerns neurotic subjects, personality disorders, or psychotic aspects (Mucci, 2020).
Unfortunately, in the story of Ishmael's Soul "the unrepresentable unspeakable " of primary traumas had been aggravated by the family situation that I was gradually discovering. There was in fact an abusive father with sadistic traits who acted out beatings and abuses on his son, and a dependent mother, with important aspects of disorganization incapable of grasping reality and adequately protecting her son.
The boy had suffered from obesity as well as visual and auditory hallucinations that had suggested him to burn everything, while stories of missed suicides he had experienced throughout his adolescence, came to light, I began to get a clearer and clearer picture of his situation. Ishmael had a severe borderline narcissistic personality disorder with psychotic aspects that led me to request psychiatric support for immediate pharmacological containment with the aim of starting safe therapeutic work.
While these relevant factors became prognostic for the onset of a personality disorder, my internal gaze remained vigilant to detect those manifestations that through the forces of the Self are activated to protect the survival of the soul.
The flames of hell had been burning both outside and inside him all along his life.
During the first three years of therapy, Ishmael had begun to feel the presence of what Clara Mucci called "the empathic witness" (2020), the therapist who concretely assumes the function, in the face of abuse trauma involving the body, of creating for the patient a safe situation of welcoming and listening. Sándor Ferenczi had identified the analogous Observer or Witness in the dream or fantasy world of one of his patients, and Bonnie Badenoch (2008) had highlighted the extraordinary wisdom and seemingly transcendent aspect (Kalsched, 2013). This had helped to foster the emergence of the possibility of beginning to symbolize, and thus reframe the violence he had suffered while at the same time restoring a time to the fragmented story, reconstructing an affective language that would take him out of the chill of alexithymia. Through therapy it was possible to create «that intimacy that had to do (in our case) with keeping together the objective tragedy of his childhood - not the victim story told and retold, [...]» (Kalsched, 2013, p. 67) that gives the possibility to grasp how every human life is a tragedy included in something that is bigger than any individual story, as part of a Unique Big Story.
We had thus been able to deal with the memories that had emerged in relation to the physical burning of surgery and post-surgery, which had been expressed through the voices inciting fire and implicitly encapsulating emotions of unspeakable pain and even deep anger. This led to a gradual fading of the voices until they had completely disappeared. In going through the confrontation with pain, I had also observed an unexpected element. During the first year of therapy, Ishmael spoke very little; he just responded succinctly to my questions, sometimes using nodding or facial expressions, but I noticed in him a gradually increasing attention with respect to the listening to his story: in fact, I often retold the events that emerged from his life, filling in the emotional gaps and involving him in trying to grasp his point of view with respect to my proposal as well. Until at a certain point Ishmael began to be much more active in the dialogue. What surprised me was the emergence of a capacity for language and storytelling that was neither expected from the school he had with difficulty attended for a few years and had not finished, nor even less from the family context in which he lived. The more we reconnected his story through the processing of trauma, the more the "narrative Self" described by Kohut consolidated with an almost poetic mode of telling his experiences. I would discover over time that this narrative capacity was the result of timely and spontaneous readings of works including the myths, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and fantasy texts, which Ishmael had found in the attic of his home.
It seemed almost as if Ishmael’s Soul had identified, in despair, a world of "subtle nourishment" that might have even sustained him over the years, and that had remained "implicated" in the chill of unspeakable traumas and experiences, and that could now manifest by quickly taking shape and unveiling and putting at the service of our work, a resource dictated by this uncommon symbolic and metaphorical heritage.
After three years of ecobiopsychological therapy, the psychiatrist found it possible to gradually suspend the therapy. Ishmael's story had started to become Novel within him as well: he began coming willingly to the session feeling the need for our weekly moment. There was still a lot of work to be done but his trust, commitment and perseverance and a relationship of sincere affection I felt for him had brought significant transformations so much so that, in one of our meetings, I asked him if he would have liked to narrate the path he had taken up to that moment. And we get to the session in which he gave me the drawings that were then narrated by his words.

The first drawing shows a bare tree with roots and branches hanging down. «This is me, how I arrived and how I felt». He felt this way, suspended in the void, and lifeless. The emotions of anger were concentrated in a fire without containment, detached. It was the fire encapsulated in the voices, in the pain of surgery and perhaps of intrauterine emotions experienced through his mother and remained in implicit memory, and the anguish of violent memories never narrated. Ishmael's existence synthesized in a whole: the bare tree, with no soil in which to take root, and fire.
In the second drawing, figures begin to appear: names are given to things and experiences. «I could never have told what had happened and you, with therapy, have helped me to see it and understand it» The voice began to be that of anger for what he had suffered.  A scarecrow narrates the fears of loneliness and isolation of the small child. The fears never understood by adults. It is also the straw puppet, helpless and stuck in the middle of the field. A sun begins to appear, a composed warmth less burning.
In the third drawing, the marginalization of the school years, the isolation, the loneliness. «In the bottom part, I have put grass because I felt I could grow and live differently» In the lower part is represented a tender lush grass, rooted to the ground. It is evident the transformative evolution between the first and the third drawings, between the suspended roots and the tender, young grass.  

Then there it is, the fourth drawing: the flame of the candle accompanied by the word "hope" that in the root retrieves, in an informative redundancy, the theme of fire, RIP. «Therapy has illuminated so many parts of my life and given me hope for the future because now I can see how much I have changed, and I feel better.».

Finally, the fifth drawing: the face of a young woman. «I thought of this face that reminds me of the face of a classmate of mine with whom I could occasionally talk. She had an interested gaze and listened to me even when I did not say anything. I felt good with her» A reassuring female face, with large, attentive eyes, related to the words affection, feeling, love, was the evidence of the possibility of approaching an empathic, caring and restorative relationship of which he had begun to experience in therapy. It is also the two eyes that imply the inner and outer worlds that give access to the recovery of the soul trapped deep within his psyche.
In keeping together Ishmael's story, the session and the drawings he had brought me and the book with the image of the flame of the candle and the dialogue between the Master and the disciple, I began to grasp the importance in the therapeutic relationship of managing the empathic, present constant but non-burning warmth of the therapy and the possibility of transforming the fire of the drives, of the painful and burning emotions, of the events I had explored with Ishmael, into a flame of consciousness through the words, the storytelling, the metaphors, the analogies and the sincere affection I had for him, for his Soul.
But in the ecobiopsychological field that had been created, there was also another fire. A flame was always kept burning, less hot perhaps, but able to be directed with awareness, to illuminate different parts of the rooms of his life. A lamp with a solid support, as in the figure in the book, as in the drawing that had given voice to his experience and that triumphed in the center of the sheet, accompanied by the word that declined one of the subtle aspects that Ishmael had attributed to that image and that he had learned to cultivate: Hope.
All I had to do was to confront the element "fire," whose name contains within itself both the aspect derived from the Latin, focus i.e., "I heat," from which "I cook," "I toast,", and the Greek phö i.e., "I shine," from which "light", "to burn.". The quantity of studies and insights about fire is endless and lost in the mists of time. Just consider the importance of sun, which through its heat enables life to remember its importance for the evolution of man through the possibility of being able to master fire to cook food. And again, on the bodily plane, the heat determined by the excitement of sexuality and the "fire" of metabolism and the collective elements of rituals. If we move from the bodily elements to the most subtle ones, we will find the presence of the symbolic aspects of fire in the myths of Prometheus, in the flaming or luminous Heart of Christ, in the representation of the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire, in consciousness as luminosity or in the flame of the candle that orients to an intimate and deep reflection.
In the midst of my research, as I began to understand the importance of the symbolic "heat of hatching”, a mild, constant warmth, balanced on the need for relationship, that had allowed Ishmael to be reborn, I continued to keep the tension alive with respect to the intimate question: «What should I understand, me, as a therapist and for my existence through this event?» In this passionate search a red thread led me to a little-known work by Gaston Bachelard - The Flame of a Candle, through which I was able to learn how the small flame can create a mild and calm place where to let yourself go to that dreaming rêverie that gives the possibility of a concrete place where to explore consciousness and at the same time recover the relationship between body, soul and spirit, only possible through a renewal of the dialogue with the images that have arisen in the world of the dreamer of the rêverie.
«Consciousness and flame share the same destiny of verticality» wrote Bachelard (2005, p. 33) and went on to emphasize how the flame is one of the greatest operators of image, a subject that expresses life and transports the dreamer to past and future times, synthesizing them in the here and now. The flame moves, brings back to the innermost places of the soul, making the dreamer of the flame, a poet in power. The small flame is a great presence that allows man to go far, to detach himself from the world and dilate space and time.
Perhaps the invitation I needed to take was that of refining my ability to tune more and more into the intermediate world of the Soul through the ecobiopsychological imagery, exploring fire and flame and its opposites. This might be the key to draw therapeutically and subjectively on the unconscious and the spiritual soul forces with greater awareness. In the dim-light the dreamer of the flame can find the dimension of the awakening of a consciousness just as Ishmael, in the penumbra of the light of a small flame that I always kept lit, was able to begin to open his gaze, mind and heart to Life through the reconnection of a fragmented and suffering Ego in which the Self was manifesting in a rampant and undirected way. The shadow in Ishmael's life, in my life and inevitably present in Nature, had constellated its opposite that we were exploring.
The strongly symbolized images, with archetypal value such as that of fire and flame, are the visible echoes of the dialogue between the subtle bodies that had been intensifying in the therapeutic relationship with Ishmael and was showing me what was arising within me on another plane: the trust in the network of relationships of Nature and in his "veiled" words, which could be accessed through the constant experience of rêveries and connections between the images that emerged and the anamnesis understood as the story of the Soul.
Synchronicity had traced a path to be explored through an image that united heat and light, which, on the symbolic level, are the subtlest conditions of the soul just as the matter and the body are nothing but condensation of heat and light, that is, of the aggregating force and love of consciousness» (Frigoli, 2013, p. 32). The more these images are recognized in their archetypal value, the more they can tell the poetic basis of the mind and body, allowing the personal story and drama of our lives to be part of a larger experience, that of the evolution of consciousness. In this perspective, the story of an individual soul is recovered, separating it from the obfuscations to which it has been subjected in clinical history, to situate it with the archetypal meaning of its destiny. This rediscovery reflects the successful recovery from a chronic identification of the soul with the events, places and people of the external world, and when this separation takes place, one is no longer a clinical case but a person.

*Naike Michelon - Psychologist and psychotherapist, teacher responsible for teaching ecobiopsychological therapy techniques at the ANEB Institute School of Specialization in Psychotherapy. EMDR therapist.

Translated by Raffaella Restelli – Psychologist, member of the British Psychological Society (UK), Ecobiopsychological Counselor and expert in ANEB Psychosomatic Medicine. Linguist in ANEB Editorial area.

References
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