The “Tabernacle” of the Feminine

The “Tabernacle” of the Feminine
Paola Fereoli*

«Only when we manage to overcome the diaphragm of their appearances, entering into profound resonance with their reality, only then will living forms speak their true language: they will emit that fascinating sound which helps to create that mysterious, ideal total harmony, the Unus Mundus, which pacifies man with himself and with reality». Diego Frigoli
An Orphic myth narrates that the black-winged Night was loved by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness, and that Eros, also called Phanes, was born from that egg and set the Universe in motion. Eros was a hermaphrodite with golden wings, he had four heads and from time to time he roared like a lion, bellowed like a bull, hissed like a snake or bleated like a ram. (Graves, 198 3). In the myth, the divine hermaphroditic creature contains within itself the dual nature of opposites and its four heads symbolically represent, in the four directions of space, the operational synthesis of the libido generating the worlds. (Frigoli, 1993). In the human being this generative force manifests itself as an instinctual sexual tendency and more profoundly as a desire for psychic completeness. In this perspective, the impetus of Eros-Love orients the evolving consciousness towards the end of one's life project, towards that tension towards unity that Jung (1972) defined as "the round man". Every form of life is permeated by the divine creative force, leaving an instinctual memory trace of the ancient tendency towards unity. Eros-Love, as the personification of the irresistible tendency that pushes towards unity, is concentrated in a germ of immortality, the silver egg symbol of the embryo of life, which for many human beings is represented by the planning of a concrete child. The images suggested by the myth, which by their nature respond to archetypal experiences, open up various reflections on the complexity of the ecobiopsychological elements that permeate the complex process of generativity which leads us to consider the pregnancy period as an experience articulated at different levels.
The pregnant woman is faced with a transformation in the feminine and of the feminine and needs not only to deal with the meaning that the physical child takes on, but also to open herself to a conscious reflection aimed at recovering the profound meaning that that child has for her own soul. Clinical experience has repeatedly confronted me with the reality of the difficulties that concern the transformative process in human beings; of how the nascent soul, from the womb and perhaps even before, encounters a world made up of the body (biological aspect), feelings and emotions with which the womb is imbued (psychological aspect) and a historical, familial and phylogenetic environment (ecological aspect) which helps to give it a shape; and of how, at the same time, the soul that is born and the soul that carries the unborn child in its womb, are pregnant with and reflect the Anima Mundi.
Creation and generation are the archetypal fabric and the premise that has guided me in introducing the story of the clinical history that inspired this contribution which is the result of an equally precious gestation: the clinical supervision. Analogously to the physical womb, the supervision group of the School of Supervision in ecobiopsychological Psychotherapy, becomes a vital container in which the in-formation that permeates through the Leader and the Fellow Participants, creates a field in which to revisit the therapeutic process at several levels. So it happened in retracing Alice's story from an ecobiopsychological perspective, an approach that enabled me to better grasp the importance and the impact of intrauterine life in the unfolding of the different symptoms that can occur during the person's life, not only due to any concrete traumas, but also with reference to the emotions and unconscious fantasies experienced by the maternal womb which welcomes the soul. The dimension of conception takes on important tones in which the sacredness of cum-capere, of taking together, of welcoming matter and spirit into oneself also makes its way. Only by following the archetypal traces of generativity can we understand the sacredness of gestation, a period in which the woman becomes a "tabernacle" of re-union of opposites, to bring about that process of transmutation where matter becomes spiritualized, and the spark of the spirit takes body.
We all share the unique experience of gestation, with a well-defined time and method that respond to precise laws of nature thanks to which we exist, which took place in a sacred space that welcomed us and allowed us to take shape: it is the "place” of the mother's womb. The word "womb" itself comes from the Latin gremuim which means breast, in particular from the root garbh-grabh which means to hold, contain and conceive, and from the Sanskrit garbh-as which means uterus, bed. It is that "unique place", always evoked by poets and entered into common jargon due to the symbolic value with which the term is endowed. Its concave shape has the function of welcoming and re-welcoming (r-welcoming) the matter that by will or destiny it receives and enters into a relationship with it. Carrying a child in your womb, having a project in your womb, being in the womb of a community, living in the womb of the Church or an institution, returning to the womb of mother earth: these are some of the expressions that are now so commonly used that we forget the profound generative and transformative value to which the term symbolically alludes. Therefore, the womb has always guarded that sense of mystery hidden from our eyes, of fertilizing darkness from which life unfolds. Its cup shape symbolically presents the aspects of the vase of abundance and the Grail which contains the blood of Christ (Chevalier, Gheerbrant, 1986). The cup contains blood, the principle of life, whose reference is to the heart as the center on whose rhythm the flow of life depends. During gestation the rhythm of life beats before the formation of the heart organ, confirming the sacredness attributed to the female womb.
In intrauterine life, the mutual exchange between the new life and the maternal environment takes place continuously, as if to prelude the future relationship (Mancuso, Zezza, 2010). The embryo actively "dialogues" with the mother's tissues, through a proto-archaic language consisting in the production of a vast range of chemical substances that it spreads around itself to make its presence felt. If the maternal environment is available to welcome it, the exchange is synchronic and the mother, completely unconsciously, releases substances that favor the best conditions for the embryo to implant in the uterus. The archetypal vital motion can be traced right from the embryonic phase, so much so that the human embryo in formation has been described as an active and not passive orchestrator of its implantation and of its future (Horne, White, Lalani, 2000). It thus originates that ever-evolving process of communication through a lifelong dialogue between mother and child. During gestation the exchange offers both mutual benefits such as, for example, that of the surprising, long-lasting reparative function of the stem cells which rush where required in the event of an injury. This function is proposed again in the ultraviolet dimension as holding and handling (Winnicott, 1987) in the mother-child dyad as reparative functions of those moments of disconnection that occur in caregiving situations which will allow the child to attribute a sense of continuity favoring the process of Ego integration.
During gestation, we witness an authentic symbiosis (from the Greek SYN-BIOS "living together") of significant importance for prenatal learning, it consists of that set of stresses and stimuli that the fetus receives from the external and the internal of the maternal organism and then archives in relation to the early development of its central nervous system. The sense organs are already functioning well: for example, the fetus can recognize the mother's voice, can recognize the sound of a piece of music and can perceive the emotions she feels when listening to it preserving the memory of it and has the perception of physical pain. This symbiotic exchange is the premise of what in neurophysiology has been defined as download, i.e. the discharge of information that passes from the mother's limbic system to that of the child through attachment in the first year and a half of life (Schore, 1994). Neuroscience studies on implicit memory shed light on intersubjective experiences which, up to two years of life, cannot yet be collected by the hippocampus as explicit memory and therefore cannot be narrated (Siegel, 2001). They are deposits of implicit memory initiated through experiences in the prenatal period, connected to emotions through bodily sensorimotor memory traces such as tastes, smells, sounds, contacts and so on; they always remain active, conditioning the person's emotions, thoughts and affections throughout their life or at least until they are reconnected to explicit memory through the therapeutic relationship (Mucci, 2020). Given these aspects, in working with the patient it becomes essential to focus not only on the life history and interpersonal relationships, but to keep an eye on intrauterine life to welcome and extend the analytical work to the networks of relationships that include the archetypal aspects in action at that moment (Frigoli 2013). 
Alice’s story permitted me to better refine my gaze on the aspects presented so far in theoretical terms and, in resuming the themes of our meetings, realize how the analogical and symbolic approach allowed me to keep together very complex and confused plots. Initially, Alice asked "to feel better with binges and emotions", but her request condensed a much larger world worth exploring with the tools of Ecobiopsychology. Alice, a young woman of thirty, married with a one-year-old daughter, had recently returned to work. She explained that food represented for her “a moment all for herself” and that, during the year spent at home alone with her daughter, her need had become more acute. Since adolescence the quantities of food had never been exaggerated and always associated with moments of discomfort with others, and for several years she had stopped inducing herself to vomit. Despite the obesity that had begun in late adolescence, her body maintained the harmony of the female form and the beautiful features of her face stood out in her appearance.
Although she could feel she had everything she wanted – a relationship and a daughter she had so much desired - she could not understand why she still had to resort to those mechanisms. But the tone of her voice became lower when she added how much her mother’s illness still made her suffer. Crying, she barely managed to name the Alzheimer's disease which had begun a few years before remaining initially in a mild form but degenerating right during her pregnancy. From that first meeting, I was struck by the emphasis she placed on the arrival of her little daughter as the firstborn of the entire family of origin and, at the same time, by the exaltation of her own birth as a sort of gift, as she had always been told by her mother. Her words resonated in me like an idealized story whose echo seemed to come from far away. But from where? Where exactly in her story?
The story that emerged was full of difficult and sometimes traumatic events that had constellated Alice's family history. She had been conceived by parents over forty who already had two teenage children: she had not been looked for. In the early stages of pregnancy, her father had lost his job and the only source of support for the entire family had disappeared. In fact, Alice's mother, now a housewife, had had to stop working a few months after the birth of her second child following the sudden death of her own mother who supported her full time in caring for her children; from that moment she was left alone since she was an only child and had lost her father in adolescence.
The patient, for some time, continued to place such emphasis on the period of her gestation, she seemed to hear the echo of her mother's stories: the courageous mother who had wanted to keep her at all costs despite not having looked for her and despite the precarious family economic conditions; the father's family of origin had come to financial aid by providing for the maintenance of the household for a certain period; she was awaited by all the inhabitants of the small mountain town in which they lived as a child had not been born for several years. The idealized stories around the ordeals of her conception and her wait soon condensed in me into a precise image: the adoration of the Baby Jesus. It reminded me of a painting by Reni "Adoration of the Shepherds" in which one can savor full of the rarefied atmosphere of the nativity, which enhances the satisfaction of waiting and the adoration of the divine spark that has taken shape in a new life.
The complexity of this representation has guided me from the beginning to very carefully recover the texture of the transgenerational history, in the clarity that the idealization of the family framework within which it was generated, had the function of compensating for unbearable primary contents, so precocious as to be dissociated in the patient's implicit memory. Through these stories I was able to hypothesize the possible unconscious fantasies connected to the fetus, which would have revealed many elements about the way in which parents had prepared themselves to deeply represent the relationship with the new conceived life. Various authors have expressed their opinion on the impact of the emotions that accompany the arrival of the unborn child, including Bowlby (1973) who highlighted how the child who does not encounter the mother's desire and love can later feel unworthy of being loved by anyone other, similarly to Ferenczi (1929) who spoke of a "badly welcomed child", the repository of a sense of rejection embodied intergenerationally and transferred through relationships.
In contemplating the emergence of the history of the person's soul, it becomes necessary to also contemplate the other aspect, the one which, among the traumatic vicissitudes also allows us to glimpse the web of a broader network of support, in favor of life, which in  Alice's case came from the relatives who intervened financially, and through the warm wait of the fellow villagers: a sort of symbolic "Grail", a large container womb at work to allow that spark of soul to incarnate and complete its journey.
Recently Diego Frigoli (2017), attentive to the recovery of aspects of the Ego and, at the same time, attentive to the prospective dimension of the psychosomatic Self and therefore to the subtle voice of the Soul, has underlined a further element that contributes to giving meaning to the vicissitudes of existence, highlighting how «traumatic events still give rise in the soul to the sense of having been incarnated as an always vulnerable experience open to infinite transformation» (Frigoli, 2017, p. 299).
In paying attention to these aspects and tolerating the internal tension that the dialogue between opposites exerts, I also began to question myself about the infrared aspect of the body, in particular asking myself: «Will there be, in the life of Alice and her mother, symptoms or symptomatic elements that allude to possible emotions and fantasies that have remained unconscious?». The reconstruction and reconnection of her early life required time and delicacy since her mother, having lost her memory due to Alzheimer's, could not enrich the information on their story with those hidden truths that only in particular emotional moments mothers manage to reveal. Thus various contents were gradually recovered through her sister, who considered her like a second mother, while the knots of their own relationship were untied. Over time, Alice was able to reveal, with a feeling of shame, that her mother was a heavy smoker and that she had continued to smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day during all her pregnancies and in the postnatal period. It is known that smoking during pregnancy reduces the amount of oxygen available to the fetus with related consequences on the respiratory tract and blood circulation, significantly increasing the risk of premature births and sudden infant death syndrome. Furthermore, none of the children had been breastfed for fear that the severe myopia from which her mother suffered could further worsen. Consistently with what had "entered into circulation" since the period of gestation, a vulnerability to the airways had subsequently manifested itself in the patient's infrared and had resulted in adolescence, in asthmatic bronchitis and allergies involving the airways.
Through the continuous weaving of those subtle connections relating to contents that were initially not mentalizable, the mother's unconscious fantasies relating to pregnancy took shape and implicitly declared a profound ambivalence towards the new life that was growing in her and in an extended sense, towards the generativity of which she was the carrier as a woman.
In the reconstruction of the neonatal period, the image of little Alice being bottle-fed by her mother who, in the meantime, was smoking cigarettes came to light. It was also the image of a mother in difficulty who was making a gesture of love for her baby even though she was unable to break away from her addiction to smoking. Probably for her mother smoking represented the unsatisfied need for orality so profound as to touch on the affective precariousness at the roots of her own history and which with the download she was pouring onto little Alice through attachment (Schore, 1994).
I remember that one day, during one of my trips to Milan, I came across the exhibition The World of Banksy, The Immersive Experience by Banksy (work available at https://www.deodato.com/deodato_arte_italy/banksy-toxic -mary.html), an artist with a still mysterious identity who appears to be one of the greatest exponents of street art. I remained absorbed for a long time contemplating the work which was completely unexpected for me especially regarding his artistic style: Toxic Mary, a mother who breastfeeds her baby with a bottle whose contents are toxic. This work, which draws on religious iconography, had a strong impact on me. I observed the disharmony of the looks in the dyad while mine bounced from the mother to the black of the bottle and, in the play of lights and shadows that was reflected on the glass of the painting, I continued to look for something in the image that could actually be seen in the set of opposites: the content is toxic and the mother's expression is one of love despite everything. I reflected on the street artist who was able to represent, among the various possible ones, a naked and raw truth of the human and collective generative dimension relating to the ambivalence of maternal love which in the insecurity of the relationship transmits painful and traumatic contents in a completely unconscious way. I asked myself: «What if it also concerned the experience of the artist who has always been committed to representing the human condition?». If this were the case, would his art be an expression of that daimon that was able to express itself precisely because incarnated in that particular condition of life?
I will not have an answer, and it does not matter because it is the questions themselves that have activated a field of reflection on the therapy with Alice and on attachment in general. Some studies have found, in fact, a strong correlation between the attachment of the parent and that of the children, demonstrating how attachment is the first form of intergenerational transmission of trauma (Fonagy, Steele, Steele, 1991). When the caregiver has unresolved personal traumas, she is unable to maintain that harmony, between the child's developing right hemisphere and the mother's right hemisphere, which is necessary to promote affective regulation and emotional development which are established in the first two years of the child's life and are underlying future representations of oneself and others (Schore, 1994). Mucci (2014) uses the concept of connectedness to define the dynamics of the intergenerational network of relational experiences epigenetically inherited and inscribed in the bodily matrix which implicitly regulate our personal, social and family interactions and the ability to think for ourselves.
The Ecobiopsychology extends the concept of connection to the understanding of the subtle relationships that bind Man to the Universe, understood as the invisible one that connects all forms and which can make itself manifest through the use of the symbol and the search for vital analogy (Frigoli, 2017). Through this active research, consciousness understood as in-formation, extends beyond the representations derived from the relational experience with the caregiver, reaching the point of grasping the field of reflection of the collective unconscious to potentially amplify it «until understanding the "voice" of the universe itself [...opening up to dialogue with the unconscious which] from this perspective [becomes] ecobiopsychological unconscious" (Frigoli, 2022, p. 254).
The therapy process with Alice, which still continues, has been oriented, as far as I was able, in this direction. Right from the start, I could perceive a subtle feeling linked to the “feeling” function which, together with the typical thinking of observation, favored the emergence of a vivid imagination as expression of the transference and countertransference aspects. Initially I imagined our relationship as a "therapeutic womb", flexible and open to new forms of generativity, in which we could implement that exchange function necessary to reconstruct the plot of Alice's story and be able to rediscover her original uniqueness.
The main field of work was that of the stepfamily, in which the relationship with the little daughter was the reflection of her insecure relationship with the internalized mother while the husband was reverberated as the parental figure, sometimes maternal and sometimes paternal, on which to depend ambivalently and demand voraciously since the other could not yet be mentalized as other than oneself. Alice has always discussed her maternal role and has always asked to be a good mother; I knew that the help would depend on my ability to keep the field open, to know how to connect to her right hemisphere like a confident mother does and at the same time process with the left hemisphere to enrich the relationship with the right.
The reconstruction of the Ego took an adequate amount of time. At a young age, during her studies, Alice suffered traumatic events involving the loss of emotional family figures to whom she was very attached, and which seemed to reiterate the traumatic rhythm of the family history, until it converged in her mother's illness. Nonetheless, albeit with difficulty, she managed to complete her personal study projects which allowed her to realize her desire to work in the social sector. In this situation as in others in her life, I have always characterized her plans in positive and compensatory terms compared to the emotional void that she filled with binges, highlighting how within her there was an intuitive intelligence that continued to develop a plot respectful of her uniqueness.
Her mother's degenerative disease manifested itself during the period in which Alice was on maternity leave, which meant that she also had to take care of her. Furthermore, there is concordance between the age at which Alice became pregnant and the age at which her mother suffered the sudden loss of her own mother. Thinking back to the theme of the nativity, there is the memory of the greeting card, which accompanied the gift that Alice had given me for Christmas, the content of which had further oriented our work: «There is a part of me in this film. There is the theme of death, of family, of loved ones who leave and remain in the memory. Every time I watch it, a part of me gets so emotional. It is this part of me that I want to wrap up and give to you this Christmas». Further memories of Christmas had opened up, memories which over the years had lost their golden patina and had become overshadowed by painful anniversaries: one of all, it was Christmas Eve when they received their mother's unfortunate diagnosis. These concordances are not to be treated as simple coincidences since they declare the reiteration of an affective rhythm which, in this case, refers to a relationship void that Alice, in the infrared, attempted to compensate with food. At the appropriate moment I discussed with the patient the hypothesis that in the unconscious her pregnancy could also mean an attempt to repair the mother's deep emotional wound: together we recognized the coherence with her way of rushing into situations that she perceived as disintegrating for the family unit, placing herself in the role of the savior who tried to get everyone to agree due to the fear that the parents would argue. Alice herself recognized that these behaviors became for her the justification for her being when she came into the world, especially when she had to rely on family supports that were not commensurate with her young age.
In the transference relationship, it happened that I felt invested by her internal mother who rejected her through sensations that emerged from the shape of her body, from a look, from an attitude or from her words. That distancing rejection was the bearer of uneasiness that I welcomed into myself as a game of projections and only by understanding the profound meaning of its manifestation was I able to therapeutically nourish its emptiness of thought and emotions, so as to favor that process of integrating dissociated contents into the safety of therapy.
As the dissociated contents in the implicit memory became symbolically combined with her current existence and became words, Alice began to propose autonomous reflections bearing painful truths often revealed between the lines of the diaries that she timidly introduced into our relationship. Alice has been writing since childhood: they are writings imbued with sometimes stormy emotions, made up of stories that portray relationships with loved ones, of the fear of losing her parents, of themes in which she attempted to gain clarity on certain family situations, in which the lack of a real interlocutor to deal with was evident. The pleasure of writing as an expressive channel and the interest in reading on topics that help her to know herself better also emerged. Here are other qualities, completely intimate, which reveal the workings of that inner intelligence that guided her on her personal journey and accompanied her to the door of therapy.
Those painful truths have contributed consistently to deconstructing idealization and bringing to consciousness the extreme ambivalence rooted in fetal life between rejection and acceptance, experienced first and foremost in herself and reflected in emotional relationships. At the same time, the body began to exist first as something unwatchable, monstrous and cumbersome, then as something to be taken care of in different ways. Food is less and less a hidden pleasure to be experienced alone, the moments of binge eating are giving way to the introjection of new meanings that are allowing her to recognize herself in the deep needs and also in the personal qualities that are emerging with greater clarity.
Our relationship continues through the spirit of research of those connections among the implicit emotions, the feeling, the image and the word (Frigoli, 2017) which stimulate the generative dimension and favor the awakening of dialogue with the soul. «And as she had awakened me with her voice, now she guided me with her light shining before me. And with her voice she encouraged my fear and with her love she drew me. And I went on» (Angelino, 2005, p. 34).

Author: Paola Fereoli - Psychologist and Psychotherapist specialized at the ANEB Institute, in continuing education at the ANEB Institute School of Supervision.

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.

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