The therapeutic mechanism of dying: an anti-constructual act against the dominant constructs of the Other.

Liberation Through Death: The Unconscious, Archetypal Dynamics, and the Limits of the

Other.

The omnipresent Other, perceived as the world itself, is a pre-existing construct into which the embryo is introduced during its biological development in the mother’s womb. This relationship evolves at birth, where a contractual dynamic between the baby and the Other begins. The archetypal Mother nurtures and grows her baby, providing love, care, security, and a nest for

development. Meanwhile, the archetypal Father embodies authority, structure, discipline, and societal hierarchy—the Pragmatic side of life—which the baby perceives as a third element in its primary connection to the mother. In major psychoanalytic approaches, the Father represents the Other, introducing societal constructs into the triangular relationship that shapes the accepted model for the growing child (Lacan, 1977; Jung, 1959).

Within the child’s developing mental apparatus, this primary triangulation dictates its psychosexual stages, culminating in

adulthood, where the growing individual is expected to lead a self-responsible life (Freud, 1923). Herein lies the paradox: in a world composed of pre-existing constructs and definitions introjected into human consciousness, is there any facticity-free, essence-driven definition of self-responsibility, or has this too been taught, passed on, and ingrained in our minds to satisfy the world (Lacan, 1977; Freud, 1923)?

Building on this foundation, the paper explores how these symbolic and relational structures shape the unconscious dynamics that underlie human experiences of death and dying. In particular, it considers the tension between imposed societal constructs and the individual’s authentic freedom, especially as manifested in the therapeutic process and the existential confrontation with mortality. Consequently, the analysis reveals death not merely as an end but as a transformative act that challenges and potentially transcends the dominant constructs of the Other.

Archetypal Roles or Social Constructs? Parent-Fluidity in Psychoanalytic Theory and

Neuropsychology.

Would a mother still be a mother if the world did not pre-allocate such a role to her? And would a father need to embody the Other if the mother assumed a different role? Both Lacan and Jung seem to agree that the primary roles of parents operate within a robust male-female structure, reflecting instinctual behaviors naturally aligned with the needs of a growing child (Jung, 1959;

Lacan, 1977). To an extent, the process of projective transference—from the child’s

unconscious to the parents—guides the actions they are invited to take, wherein their gender expressions align with the child’s formative identifications (Freud, 1923). Both psychoanalytic schools, therefore, accept the relatedness of mother and father as symbolic roles, allowing for parent-fluidity independent of gender or sexual orientation (Fonagy & Target, 2003). Consequently, a child can safely grow up with parents of any gender, who fulfill the roles of robust or interchangeable mother and father.

Moreover, contemporary neuropsychological

findings suggest that the human brain responds to parent-seeking stimuli, activating regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior insula, periaqueductal gray, and striatum, enabling both males and females to experience maternal instincts equally (Swain, Kim, & Ho, 2011; Feldman,2015). On the opposite end of the spectrum, where traditional gender-assigned roles are awakened in parents, discordant phenomena may emerge.

Archetypal Reenactments and Intergenerational Trauma: The Helen and Paris of Troy Complex in Family Dynamics.

The primitive competitiveness between the child and the Father— as acknowledged by major psychoanalytic theorists (with a capital F to distinguish the father as a role from the Father as a construct of the big Other)— is a result of the Mother’s unconscious discard of her motherly role to encompass the Helen of Troy archetype (Jung, 1959). In this role, she loses touch with her maternal qualities, succumbing to the repressed satisfaction of being desired, conquered, and the center of attention, as dictated by feminine social constructs embedded in her as unfulfilled

desires across her life. The emotional abandonment of her child and its objectification as a catalyst for conflict stem from her deprivation of love and affection from her own Mother. As a prior Helen of Troy, her mother too claimed her partner depriving or limiting his fatherly love to his daughter, a memory that reincarnates across the new child’s development as an unconscious projection (Jung, 1959). Her registered loss in the competition against her mother is again illuminated in the presence of the repressed child, generating the need to regain access

to a “new” father figure who, alongside the role of partner, fulfills her missing paternal love. Consequently, the child enters a survival mode, vying for the mother’s attention against the Father, whose presence becomes threatening, intrusive, frustrating, and alienating.

Similarly, the Father transforms into Paris of Troy archetypally triggered as a match to the

Mother’s unconscious metamorphosis (Jung, 1959). The relational triangulation amongst

parents and child becomes a setting for his reclaiming the power from his own Father- against the powerless child he once was- as well as an opportunity to recover his missing mother’s affection. The replay of his childhood sheds light to the lost battle against his father, an unfatherly Paris of Troy figure who took away his mom to satisfy his primitive power of conquest, granting him a position of authority, as well as the prize of Helen of Troy as a lucrative endorsement of his captivating masculinity. These representations faithfully replicate

generational patterns, victimising the child within a power-abusive environment familiar to its parents (Fairbairn, 1952). The embodiment of brutality, love denial, and unmet needs begins here, causing libidinal cathexes across various psychosexual stages, depending on how childhood trauma expresses itself, i.e. overeating or food denial across the oral stage (Freud, 1923). Clinically depicted as Stockholm syndrome, this dynamic positions the powerless child as

captive to the Parents, who unconsciously reproduce their own captivity by the worldly entity of the Other, successively possessing the mother and father once their unconscious projections, desires and unmet phantasies commence to unfold in the dynamics of the new family (Namnyak

et al., 2008).

The Unstructured Unconscious: Neuroanatomical Foundations and the Emergence of Existential Freedom.

Early family dynamics shape the mechanisms through which the unconscious mind experiences life, imprinting foundational patterns (Fairbairn, 1952; Jung, 1959). As the individual engages with the external world, these initial experiences are enriched by the ongoing exchange between self and environment. Repressed memories, encoded through the protective functions of the

hippocampus and stored within the prefrontal cortex, influence unconscious behavior patterns that replay throughout life. These patterns provide opportunities for the conscious self to process experiences, make informed decisions, and achieve catharsis, gradually addressing unwanted behavioral registrations. The brain’s default mode network, instrumental in free association, and the right hemisphere’s amygdala and insula, facilitating projection, reinforce the presence of the unconscious mind as an active, dynamic entity rather than a purely theoretical construct (Andrews-Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng, 2014).

As the unconscious mind lacks a defined structure, its neurotic tendencies compel it to seek external objects onto which it can project its qualities, identifying itself in relation to these objects as an act of self-discovery, or “know thyself” (Freud, 1923; Jung, 1959). Consequently, the external structure of the environment— and arguably life itself— serves as a platform for self-exploration. While the roles of the Other may appear to hold power, it is essential to

recognise that this power is merely a self-projection, reflecting whatever qualities of the self imbue it with such authority (Lacan, 1977; Freud, 1923). Ultimately, the true power resides within the very nature of the unconscious mind, which possesses the freedom to associate, decode, and translate the world in a self-reflective manner. The unstructured nature of the unconscious mind, where primary exchanges with the environment are stored, plays a vital

need in forming the mental apparatus of the superego, ego, and id as ontogenetic constructs (Freud, 1923).

Within its essence, the unconscious mind needs to house structure-untouched aspects of itself, untainted by the trauma and repressed memories that already possess a structure within the mental apparatus. In a Jungian perspective, the unformulated part of the unconscious serves as a reservoir of resilience and creativity, as an extension of the collective unconscious, yielding

the potential of transcendence and relation to the world in spontaneous, adaptive ways beyond the psychodynamic replication of trauma and repression (Jung, 1959). Across the lifespan, this connection offers a space within the psyche that perceives trauma as an experience, not as an overpowering force dictating the life of an individual. As a result, the existential given of freedom becomes present as a native life force that fuels the unconscious mind to experience itself

beyond the constructs of the Other (Frankl, 1959).

Adaptive Plasticity and Renewal: Fairbairn, Jung, and the Transformative Power of the

Unconscious.

The unconscious mind’s authenticity, rooted in its undefinable and unstructured nature, alsofinds theoretical support in Fairbairn’s structural framework. Fairbairn’s conception of the unconscious reveals a dynamic void—a generative space where traumatic relational disruptions lead to the creation of libidinal and antilibidinal selves and their associated part-objects (Fairbairn, 1952). This process underscores the unconscious mind’s remarkable plasticity, as it transforms adversity into structured yet adaptive mechanisms to preserve psychological

survival. Fairbairn’s model illustrates the self-resourcefulness of the unconscious, its ability to craft internal realities that maintain connection to objects even amidst external neglect or rejection. Such structuring does not diminish the unconscious mind’s capacity for potentiality but rather reinforces its ability to engage life with resilience and creativity. Combined with its interplay with the collective unconscious, as envisioned in Jungian theory, this framework elevates the unconscious mind as a profound force of renewal and transcendence, capable of

reshaping experiences and preserving its authentic capacity for the new (Jung, 1959). This theoretical synthesis validates the concept of the unconscious as an autonomous and adaptive entity, rich with untapped possibilities.

Therapeutic Neutrality, Free Association, and the Ethics of Self-Responsibility in

Psychoanalysis.

In Lacanian therapy, the analysand is held in an agenda-free space, where neutrality and

non-judgment prevail (Lacan, 1977). An alternative to the mainstream Lacanian description of therapeutic mechanism is recommended as follow, which attempts the unity of several psychoanalytic traditions in the common purpose of therapy. The neutrality of the analyst encourages a free association of the untainted part of the unconscious mind with its stored, in

the Freudian mental apparatus, introjected objects, as the analyst enables the recognition of such structures (Freud, 1923; Lacan, 1977). The process of self-discovery begins when the analysand works through and transcends the constructs of Good and Bad, committing instead to informed choices that interrupt the replication of unwanted patterns and enable space for new, constructive, meaningful relational associations. This process harnesses the creative potential within the individual unconscious held as a reservoir of power that can formulate new structures, yet still retaining its self-resourceful unstructured nature (Jung, 1959). At the core of this transformative process is self-responsibility, which must be differentiated from the

manipulative sense of responsibility imposed by the big Other during the development of the self (Lacan, 1977; Freud, 1923). This imposed responsibility, both nurtured and shaped through external influences, operates subtly and persistently within the dimensions of the superego, exerting control over the individual’s psyche (Freud, 1923).

Therapy is undeniably an act of self-responsibility, yet different therapeutic practices yield varying outcomes. Therapists who operate within a framework shaped by social constructs of good and bad may unconsciously impose their perceptions onto the client’s narrative, particularly when the client transfers significant parental figures into the therapeutic space (Heimann, 1950). Consequently, such therapists risk reigniting the client’s internal conflicts within a restricted environment—one that lacks the freedom for authentic free association and is

constrained by the therapist’s personal agendas and predefined notions. However, if the countertransference role is employed as a deliberate therapeutic intervention, it can facilitate genuine free association between the unconscious mind and the internalised objects replayed in therapy (Heimann, 1950). Without this conscious approach, the client may encounter insurmountable dead-ends exacerbating their sense of despair, potentially leading them to view therapy as ineffective. Furthermore, the absence of jouissance—a crucial unconsciousmechanism that draws satisfaction from adversity and repression—can render the therapeutic

attempt an empty endeavor (Lacan, 1977). For those whose lives have been marked by deeply painful, conflictual, and discordant experiences, such outcome can solidify feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, leaving them with limited strategies for resolution which may involve a conscious ending of life.

Liberation Through Death: The Sanctuary of the Collective Unconscious and the Psychoanalytic Quest for Meaning.

The unconscious fantasy involving the vulnerable client and the notion of freedom emerges from the untainted nature of the unconscious mind, which operates in free association with life itself (Freud, 1920; Jung, 1959). When life is internalised as cruel and painful, the unconscious mind

initiates a process of reorientation and retrieval to preserve its ultimate goal: protecting the self from the harm provoked by its symbiotic relationship with life. This sense of life’s dead-end and inherent meaninglessness triggers a profound connection to the collective unconscious, where the psyche transcends personal trauma and discovers meaning and coherence amidst adversity (Jung, 1959; Frankl, 1959). Through this engagement, the psyche finds a protective sanctuary,

untouched by the turmoil of individual experiences. As Jung described, this sanctuary becomes the new ultimate goal, initiating a journey back to the psyche’s essence. It is not uncommon for individuals who have decided to end their lives to feel a sense of relief or happiness in their final days. This may stem from the unconscious retrieval of the self into the sanctuary of the collective, offering a transcendental sense of freedom (Jung, 1959; Frankl, 1959). In this state, life is no longer experienced as a dominant figure dictating their existence but rather as an experience. Nonetheless, there is still a conscious realisation that remaining in

life means perpetuating and exacerbating the same unwanted patterns they seek an exit from.

Traditionally, the world has been condemning acts of self-inflicted death, characterising them as immoral, irresponsible, and acts of weakness (Freud, 1920; Frankl, 1959). As discussed, there are two forms of self-responsibility: the humble one, signified by the lowercase “s,” and the

contractual one, signified by the capital “S. The capital “S,” closely tied to the capitalised

notions of “Mother” “Father,” and “Parents” represents a worldly construct that has occasionally failed to fulfill human connection and love since the onset of an individual’s life (Lacan, 1977; Freud, 1923). The act of conscious death, then, becomes a reflection of the world’s failure—an opportunity for the system to project and take responsibility for its betrayal of the relational qualities signified by those lowercase, intimate connections. How would the world survive if all decided to disengage from it? How would the historical dominance of worldly systems persist if

individuals consciously stepped away? These profound questions offer a lens for psychoanalysis, where the analyst often embodies the “object of death”. Exploring this space can reveal the unconscious mechanisms of despair and freedom, providing deeper insights into the dynamics of life, death, and the psyche’s resilience.

In conclusion, this paper reveals the profound journey of the unconscious mind—a force of

resilience, transcendence, and renewal. From its early interplay with societal constructs to itsretrieval into Jung’s sanctuary, the unconscious emerges as an untamed, authentic space capable of redefining meaning even in adversity. Central to this journey is the exploration of freedom, including the right of death—a concept woven throughout the paper. This act, often

condemned by the world’s moral fabric, is reexamined here as a profound reflection of systemic failures and an ultimate assertion of self-responsibility (Frankl, 1959). It is not merely an end but a reclaiming of agency, where the psyche transcends imposed patterns and constructs, stepping into a space of unshackled liberation. The unconscious mind thus becomes a testament to the courage and authenticity of choosing one’s own path—whether in life’s renewal or in conscious disengagement from its demands.

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