Uroboric Omnipotence

Uroboric omnipotence is Samuels’s term — first elaborated in “Incest and omnipotence in the internal family” (Samuels 1980a) and summarised in Jung and the Post-Jungians — for a specific clinical phenomenon: the use of incestuous fantasy to collapse the interpersonal field into parts of the self, so that omnipotent control of inner and outer worlds is preserved against the threat of relationship. Samuels describes it as:

the defensive aim of infantile fantasies of omnipotence — a return to a less threatening object-less oneness. (Samuels 1985, p. 96)

The image is Neumannian. The uroboros names the pre-egoic condition of undifferentiated containment in which self and world are not yet separate; Samuels turns this developmental image into a clinical name for the adult patient’s regressive retreat from otherness. Rather than acknowledge the pain of relating to distinct others, the patient “contract[s] the available area for interpersonal experience so that others are treated as parts of the self” (Samuels 1985, p. 96).

Uroboric omnipotence stands alongside Fordham’s defences of the self (Fordham 1974a) as one of the Developmental School’s instruments for naming how the self’s archetypal energies can be pressed into defensive rather than individuating work. It is a clinical concept with archetypal depth — the precise move the Developmental School makes when it refuses to dissolve the imaginal into the merely behavioural.

Relationships

Primary sources

samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985, p. 96)