David England, an established psychosynthesis practitioner for over 20 years, presents this new paper relating The Circle of Mirrors and Shamanic Psychology to The Maintaining Cycle and Psychosynthesis Psychology, in regard to the development of a stable self.
Introduction
Psychotherapists are accustomed to clients who are caught in a maintaining cycle. This article describes an approach aimed at helping clients to release themselves from such maintaining cycles.
The psychological model The Circle of Mirrors is all about mirroring. An infant gains a sense of themselves according to the quality of mirroring provided by the caregiver. Sustained empathic and authentic mirroring affords the infant a stable sense of their own being, existing and continuing in time. However, with inconsistent, unempathic and inauthentic mirroring, “the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity of being.” (Winnicott, 1987) Again, for the infant, “When I look I am seen, so I exist (Winnicott, 1988).” The corollary is, in the absence of authentic mirroring: When I look I am not seen, so I do not exist. To avoid the terror of annihilation, the infant identifies with those parts of themselves which reflect relative acceptance by the unempathic parent and around which a relatively stable ‘survival personality’ can therefore cohere.
The Circle of Mirrors model reveals the influence of a core belief, whose origin is in the quality of mirroring, on the personality as a whole. Working in therapy round the Circle of Mirrors can give a client a cognitive understanding of their maintaining cycle. But, much more than this, it can give a client an effective experience of their maintaining cycle, each direction of the wheel being an occasion of deep reflection and emotional illumination.
Read the full article: The Maintaining Cycle – the Circle of Mirrors
Read more by David England in an accompanying article on this subject, Sex : Sexuality : Self.