BEYOND JUNG
AUTHOR: Paul Budding
Introduction
This essay is personal to me as it tries to take the reader through my journeythroughthe Jungian world. And when I say“through”I mean through. I believe that I have been imprisoned in the Jung Cult but am now free from it. The word‘cult’maybe a bit strong here. The point is, as this essay will demonstrate, that it is easy for the Jungian to get bogged down with the feeling thatthere is something in this work of Jung’s. But much of that feeling is just an attachment to that which sounds esoteric. Once one accepts that fact they are out of the cult and see more clearly.
In Chapter 1 we will look at the historical context of Jungian psychology. Jung attached in a self-imposed way to his contextual influences and froze them in his invented unconscious. This is Wolfgang Giegerich’s view which is outlined and supported in chapter 2 of this essay. The esoteric contents that Jung froze in the unconscious were to be looked at and psychologically felt, but not to be subjected to the critical intellect. It is in that sense that Jung protected the esoteric contents from life and froze them.
The overall conclusion of this essay isn’t anti Jungian as-such. The overall conclusion favors myth that is alive as opposed to Jung’s favoring of dead pre-modern myths. Then one approaches their myth openly, not hiding it away from the intellect and life.
Chapter 1
The historical context of Jungian analytical psychology1
Claire Douglas’ chapter titled ‘The historical context of analytical psychology’ (in ‘The Cambridge Companion toJung’2) and Sonu Shamdasani’sJung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science3are the two main sourced used in chapter one of this essay. These sources enable us to effectively sketch the historical context of Jung’s psychology.
Douglas rightly touches upon a multitude of influences on Jung. She starts off by saying that Jung himself referred to two aspects of his psyche, one that is empirical, rational, practical and so on, and another that is romantic and “at home with the unconscious, the mysterious, and the hidden whether in hermetic science and religion, in the occult, or in fantasies and dreams.”4 Already a key Jungian belief about the psyche is implied here. And that is that the human psyche has evolved (in the western world) to the point where it can think and rationalize (hence at its height it creates scientific and mathematical models, philosophies and the technology that we see around us) whilst the psyche is also fantasy prone, it dreams, is emotional and so forth. Despite Jung’s belief that this description of the psyche is true, Douglas correctly writes that “Analytical psychology still struggles to hold the tension of these opposites with different schools, or leanings, or even schisms, veering first to one side of the pole, then to the other.”5 However, Jung’s perspective is supported in this work because both rationality and fantasy are psychological realities.
Before developing on the phenomena that equates to the historical context of Jung’s psychology it would suit our purpose to merely list some of them and then to expand. The
following list is not exhaustive by any means, remember Jung was an erudite. Nevertheless, the following were amongst the major contextual influences. Romanticism was an influence, as was Positivism, Kant, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schelling, Carus, Nietzsche, Shamanism,Janet, Freud, Flournoy, parapsychology, Swedenborg, James, Eastern spirituality, Gnosticism and Alchemy. We will discuss Romanticism and Positivism first.
Romanticism and Positivism
Jung always insisted that he was scientific.6 Douglas explains that “Jung’s university teachers held an almost religious belief in the possibilities of positivistic science and faith in the scientific method. Positivism […] focused on the power of reason, experimental science, and the study of general laws and hard facts. It gave a linear, forwardly progressing, and optimistic slant to history […] Positivism gave Jung invaluable training in and respect for empirical science. Jung’s medical-psychiatric background is clearly revealed in his empirical research, his careful clinical observation and case histories, his skill in diagnosis, and his formulation of projective tests.”7 Hence, Jung was influenced by the enlightenment and scientific revolution like other great names of his day. However the rationalist scientist in Jung would often be organizingirrational datain an attempt to understand it. (e.g. fantasies, dreams, myths, and even the disorganized, dissociated ramblings of psychotics). This leads us nicely to Romanticism. The Romantics sought a unity with nature whose connection had been lost. The Romantics also focused on irrational phenomena and inner reality. Here of course, Jung and the Romantics sought meaning. For Jung, meaning was found in the inner world hence it would be most beneficial, he thought, to apply science towards this realm. Douglas writes that the Romantics had a “fascination with studies of possession, multiple personalities, seers, mediums, and trancers, as well as with shamans, exorcists, magnetizers, and hypnotic healers [… and that…] they all employed altered states of consciousness that linked one psyche to another and made use of the various ways healer and healed enter this vast, omnipresent, yet still mysterious collective world.”8
Douglas traces Romanticism “from the pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus,
and Parmenides, through Plato, to the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and its revival at the end of that century.”9 In Jung’s autobiography,Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he was “attracted to the thought of Pythagoras, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, and Plato, despite their long-windedness of Socratic argumentation.”10
It is well-known that by the end of the 19th century Romantic themes were expressed in much of the most famous literary works. Douglas points to the following as having been
inspired by Romanticism: “Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Wilde, R. L. Stevenson, George du Maurier, and Proust.”11 Douglas continues:
“As a Swiss student, Jung spoke and read German, French, and English and so had access to these writers as well as to his own nation’s popular literature.”12
It is fair to point out that Jung, whilst on the one hand declaring his work, ‘scientific’, on the other hand, declared his work as cultural: “whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment.”13 This apparent contradiction is explained as Jung viewing his work as an evolving science. Even in physics the discipline doesn’t stand still. And in psychology Jung often said that ideas require updating in order to express and be conducive with the specific time and place.14 However, as we will see, Jung’s favored myths tended to be pre-modern thus distancing him from contemporary life.
The Romantic Philosophers who influenced the ideas of analytical psychology include “Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and Nietzsche.”15 Jung wrote that “mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer.”16 For example, there is similarity between Jung’s archetypes hypothesis and Kant’s categories. Shamdasani writes that in 1918 Jung “defined the primordial images asa prioriconditions for fantasy-production, and likened the primordial image to Kantian categories. […] InPsychological Types, he refined his understanding of the relation between ideas, images and archetypes. In his use, idea had a close connection with image. Images could be personal or impersonal. These impersonal images, distinguished by their mythological quality, were the primordial images. When these lacked this mythological character and perceptible images, he referred to them as ideas. The idea was the meaning of the primordial image. Thus ideas were originally derived from primordial images.”17 Jung concurred with Kant, who for Jung, “had shown that the mind was nottabulsa rasa.”18 as “certain categories of thinking are givena priori.19 Meanwhile Marilyn Nagy points out that for both Jung and Kant “there is something inside the individual which knows what to do and how to act. Knowledge which is of crucial importance for the human individual is won at the moment when we acknowledgea prioriinner experience, experience which is not dictated by the perceptual and sensual power of the outer object. For Kant this was the experience of the categorical imperative. For Jung it was the experience of the Self.”20
Arthur Schopenhauer was another favorite of Jung’s. Jung praised “the centrality accorded to suffering by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, whom he described as the formers intellectual heir. [Moreover Jung said] To Schopenhauer I owe the dynamic view of the psyche; the ‘will’ is the libido that is back of everything.”21 Shamdasani then writes that this passage (and others by Jung) “suggest[s] that [Jung’s] initial concept of psychic energy was derived from Schopenhauer’s concept of the will.”22 The blindness of the Schopenhaurian will is clear in the following quote by the philosopher quoted in Shamdasani: “the works of animal instinct, the spiders web, the honeycomb of bees, the structure of termites, and so on, are all of them constituted as if they had originated in consequence of an intentional conception, far-reaching and rational deliberation, whereas they are obviously the work of a blind impulse, that is, of a will which is not guided by knowledge.”23 However, Shamdasani says that Jung “followed Hartmann […] adopting von Hartmann’s reformulations of Schopenhauer’s philosophy [such as that] found in his lecture “Thoughts on the nature and value of speculative inquiry” [where Jung endorses Hartmann’s view and adds] the absolutely essential element of purposeful intention”24 to the will/psychic energy.
Finally it should be noted that whilst Jung approved of Schopenhauer’s attention given to suffering in life, Jung (of course) regarded suffering as only one important area of life and also gave a great deal of attention to the meaning of life. As we shall see in chapter 2 Jung’s commitment to ancient myth, alchemy, religion and so forth was all about pre modern meaning.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was admired greatly by Jung. Jung often referred to Goethe’s masterpiece ‘Faust’ whereby Faust struggles with inner conflict.25
Further inspirations were F. W. von Schelling and Carl Gustav Carus. The latter should strike the reader as havingremarkablysimilar ideas to Jung. “Carus depicted the creative, autonomous, and healing function present in the unconscious. He saw the life of the psyche as a dynamic process in which consciousness and the unconscious are mutually
compensatory and where dreams play a restorative role in psychic equilibrium. Carus
also outlined a tripartite model of the unconscious – the general absolute, the partial absolute, and the relative – that prefigured Jung’s concepts of archetypal, collective, and personal unconscious.”26 Why then is Carus notgiven more credit in analytical psychology? One Jungian thinker says that it is simply because Carus didn’t offer treatment.27 Nevertheless Jung himself valued Carus’ work. Shamdasani writes “Jung stated that his own conceptions were “much more like Carus than Freud…”28 On the other hand Jung writes (inMemories, Dreams, Reflections) that Carus (and Hartmann) both failed to empirically ground their theories of the unconscious. Hence they remained philosophically speculative. Jung writes that it was Freud who first “demonstrated empirically the presence of an unconscious psyche.”29 Shamdasani writes that Jung regarded the unconscious as an idea “introduced into philosophy by Lebinz, and that Kant and Schelling had expressed views on it. It had subsequently been elaborated into a system by Carus, and then by von Hartmann, who had been significantly influenced by Carus 30 In 1940 he [i.e. Jung] wrote that though philosophers such as Lebinz, Kant, and
Schelling had drawn attention to the “problem of the dark soul”, it was Carus, a physician who had been impelled “to point to the unconscious as the essential ground of the soul.”31 In 1945, he went so far as to say of Carus that if he had been living today, he would have been a psychotherapist. Indeed, the psychology of the unconscious began with Carus, who did not realize that he had built the “philosophical bridge to a future empirical psychology.”32 However, Carus and Hartmann’s philosophical conceptions of the unconscious “had gone down under the overwhelming wave of materialism and empiricism.” It was only after this that the concept of the unconscious reappeared “in the scientifically orientated medical psychology.”33
Jung lectured on Nietzsche34 observing various affinities with his own psychology especially the going beyond black and white good and evil. Douglas also rightly points especially to “the way negativity and resentment shadowed behavior.”35 Shamdasani notes that “For Jung, Nietzsche had correctly recognized the general significance of the drives.”36Shamdasani continues, “In 1917 inThe Psychology of the Unconscious Processes,posing the question of whether anyone knew what it meant to affirm the drives, Jung noted that this was what Nietzsche desired and taught. This made the ‘case’ of Nietzsche especially critical, as “he who thus taught saying yes to the life drive, must have his own life looked at critically in order to discover the effects of this teaching upon him who gave the teaching.”37Hence Jung was especially interested in studying Nietzsche.
Shamdasani highlights the importance of William James and Theodore Flournoy on Jung whilst qualifying this by admitting that he is nominating them as “but two of a plethora of other figures.”38 Shamdasani says that Jung described them “as the only two outstanding minds with whom he was able to conduct uncomplicated conversations.”39 Shamdasani continues “For Jung, as forFlournoy and James before him, a necessary condition for the possibility of a psychology was that it should consider all human phenomena.”40 The main source that Jungian researchers can attain for evidence of the influence of Flournoy and James on Jung’s thinking is from an “unpublished draft (now in the Jung Archives at the Countway Library in Boston). [There] Jung writes […] extensively of his debt to Flournoy and William James.”41
Jung’s interest in the paranormal (or parapsychological) is well-documented. A good example of this is his reading of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Jung discusses some of Swedenborg’s visions in his Collected Works. And inMemories, Dreams, ReflectionsJung writes that (in his student years) he “read seven volumes of Swedenborg.”42
Douglas rightly says on this area, “Jung’s interest in and knowledge about parapsychology adds a rich though suspect edge to analytical psychology which demands attention congruent with the extended scope of scientific knowledge today.”43
A major influence on the more clinically-minded Jung is that of the French dissociationist psychiatrist, Pierre Janet. Jung studied under Janet and the latter pioneered theories of dissociation and fixed ideas, which Jung termed ‘complexes’. Jung agreed with a great
deal of what Janet pioneered but Jung also embraced the artistic and creative side of life. Hence Jung went beyond Janet who was “clearly no Romantic.”44 The work of John R Haule is scholarly and studies the link between analytical psychology and Janet’s dissociationist psychology.45 Janet is more relevant than Freud as an influence on Jung, as Jung valued the principle of dissociation as sovereign over repression although he recognized both of those principles. And, as said, Jung recognized Freud as a pioneer of the unconscious.46
Interested thinkers often point out that Jung himself was a childhood neurotic. This may be seen as a slight digression because this establishes apersonalcontext for analytical psychology as opposed to the multitude of impersonal historical contextual influences. However, it is the other key factor in establishing a sketch of the context of analytical psychology, therefore it needs saying. Jung had a father complex. Carl Jung’s father is portrayed as an authoritarian and dogmatic Christian who had repressed doubts about his faith. And Jung is regarded as having been a childhood neurotic in both Jungian and psychoanalytical literature. For example in the latter, Winnicott readsMemories, Dreams, Reflectionsas evidence of Jung as a childhood schizophrenic, a divided-self in search of a self-identity.47 In the Jungian literature, Michael Fordham, who helped compile Jung’s Collected Works,also regards Jung as having been a childhood schizophrenic. Following reading the first draft of the childhood chapters ofMemories, Dreams, ReflectionsJung asked Fordham for his views. Fordham replied that he regarded Jung as having been “a schizophrenic child” with strong obsessional defenses, and that had he been brought to me I should have said the prognosis was good, but that I should have recommended analysis – He did not consent my blunt statement.”48 Anthony Stevens meanwhile, arguably takes up the conventional position on Jung as a childhood neurotic who creatively compensated for his lack of emotional connection to the outer social world.
Stevens writes that Jung “resembled other intellectual pioneers [… such as …] Issac Newton and Rene Descartes.”49 Like them “he did not feel at home in the [outer] world” and hence compensated by becoming pioneering and “intellectually objective about it.”50
Stevens continues by arguing that Jung’s ideas “of the collective unconscious, his theory of archetypes, his psychological typology and his description of the structure and function of the psyche were at once consequences of his emotional isolation and brilliant attempts to compensate for it. It was no accident that theprinciple of compensationbetween inner and outer realms of experience became the cornerstone of analytical psychology.”51 In chapter 2 we will see, following Giegerich, how Jung over-compensated for what he and many of his influences regarded as loss of meaning.
The same desire to compensate for childhood neurosis is, as Stevens says, evident in Issac Newton’s work, see footnote.52
Jung inevitably cast an eye on Eastern spirituality. Whilst cautious of the westerner grasping at Eastern texts, symbols and so forth, he nevertheless understood that the East tended to seek a way beyond conflicts, striving for “balance and harmony”53 through paths of “self-discipline and self-realization [and] through the withdrawal of projections and through yoga, meditation, and introspection, paths that were similar to a deep analytic process.”54 These Eastern traditions (e.g. Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism) are of course, ancient and very meaning-minded which is all most conducive, seductive even, to Jung and similar pre-modern mindsets.
Finally, the influence of Gnosticism and especially Alchemy on Jungian psychology is (at least in the latter) obvious, as Jung writes on alchemy in three volumes of his collected works. And inMemories, Dreams, ReflectionsJung makes the connection between alchemy and his psychology, clear himself. He writes “I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and theconclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective.”55
Chapter 1 Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the historical context of Jung’s analytical psychology. Sonu Shamdasani claims that Jung favored an interdisciplinary approach and that therefore Jung never believed in going alone56, nor that his work was complete.However, in his interdisciplinary approach, Jung looked for those that would validate his invention of the collective unconscious. (I deliberately use the wordinventionfollowing Giegerich, see chapter 2). Given that Jung approached his work and other thinkers this way; I am entirely in agreement with Marilyn Nagy who writing within the context of discussing Jung’s “hero of the Mind” says that he ultimately favored “any myriad of scholars and philosophers, mystics and alchemical physicians who offered support for his point of view.”58 And as we will see in chapter 2, Jung froze much of what he took from his influences. He froze their psychological feeling in the invented unconscious container.
Chapter 2
Introduction
Let’s be clear. Jung was passionate about the contextual influences referred to in chapter 1. No-one would spend so much time and energy going over and over the texts that he did if they were not passionate about them. Jung writes inMemories, Dreams, Reflectionsthat when he realized that the alchemists were talking in symbolic language he thought to himself… “Why, this is fantastic […] I simply must learn to decipher all this.”1 And Jung describes his attitude towards these texts as one of being “completely fascinated, […] I buried myself in the texts as often as I had the time.”2 Jung immersed himself in these texts. He immersed himself in large, collective spiritual, mythic and religious collective literature such as that of the alchemists, Gnostics, and a whole range of other esoteric mystics, philosophers, thinkers, schools. As will become clearer and clearer, this was all to freeze the type of meaningful feeling that Jung believed many of the pre-modern alchemists, mystics and so forth, actually experienced. Hence for Jung, esoterics and esotericism of the pre-moderns had to become felt but not thought about in modern man and woman.
Jungencouraged and lived a life of attachment to collective esoteric dogmas. Wolfgang Giegerich points this out, again with reference to alchemy: “Jung excluded from his psychological reception of alchemy the fact that the telos of alchemy had been the overcoming of itself. He froze it, and psychology along with it, in an earlier phase.”3 “In short, for Giegerich, the task of alchemy was to deconstruct itself, or at least, to surpass itself as a movement of the historical expression of the soul.”4
Going Beyond Jung’s dead pre-modern meaning
People who are suggestible will fall for someone else’s words and thoughts besides Jung’s. But Jung is still (constructively) criticized in this chapter because as a famous psychologist he should have stuck to encouraging personal myth and personal responsibility and had nothing to do with encouraging others to immerse themselves into the vast world of the esoteric. Yet he never discouraged the latter. He encouraged it.
Now let’s say that one has approached Jung and his work because they are psychologically weak, suggestible, etc. Jung himself said that the neurotic is attracted to psychology like a moth to light.5 Then Jung grabs them because he throws a mountain of esoteric psychology at them. They are caught. Jung does not set them free.
This is because he was imprisoned himself. Hence, there is a Jung cult.6 Jung preached against a Jung-cult7 but trapped his followers in one, i.e., in a psychological prison that he too was jailed in. (self-imposed in Jung’s case)
Jung’s work on the personal unconscious is of value in the market of ideas. His pioneering work on complexes is important. But if someone is a sensitive, dissociable neurotic choc-a-block with complexes, then the important thing to do is to get them to be an individual. The last thing that one should do is immerse them in esoteric traditions. Most people have grown out of Middle Ages superstition. Jung acts as if we are still immersed in alchemy and fairy-tale, and that we still think that the forest comes alive with non-human entities at night. If someone is still at say, the late Middle Ages level of consciousness then fine. However, it is remarkably wreckless medicine to actually immerse a neurotic in the pre-modern psychological world without critical intellectual questioning of that world.
Attachment can be to anything. So I need to remind the reader that the problems are not all about the esoteric. Modern man is often too attached to other people, consumerism, and celebrity (etc) i.e. in a non-questioning way. But a medically and clinically orientated psychologist should help cure such a problem. Jung makes a significant contribution towards solution only to then contribute to the problem.
In part 1 we saw how Jung worked towards an interdisciplinary universal psychology. At the same time the universal psychology that he strove for was to be one that cemented the esoteric side of life in the psyche. Jung therefore was working both for and against the direction that knowledge was moving in. It is the attempt to freeze esoteric attachments (not allowing them to be touched with the intellect) that result in the failure of the establishment of a universal psychology instigated by Jung.
We will now turn to the work of Wolfgang Giegerich. Giegerich demonstrates in his essay titledThe End of Meaning and the Birth of Man, that Jung was pre-modern8and imprisoned in the pre-modern world due to his attachments. Giegerich agues that this was self-imposed on Jung’s part. He argues that Jung tried to cement the psychology of the pre-modern mythical world into the unconscious psyche of contemporary man. Giegerich criticizes Jung for doing this because for the pre-modern person he or she was born into such a worlda- priori9.For the contemporary person this kind of psychology belongs to the past. Thus, for Giegerich, Jung fails to free up his psyche. There is no way that he can break free from his psychological imprisonment because it is self-imposed.
On pages 3, 4 and 5 of Giegerich’s essay titledThe End of Meaning and the Birth of ManGiegerich discussesthe a-priori in-ness of the pre-modern man. Then on page 6 he approvingly quotes Jung who writes:
“So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is an expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol isdead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance. We may still go on speaking of it as a symbol, on the tacit assumption that we are speaking of it as it was before the better expression was born out of it. […] For every esoteric interpretation the symbol is dead, because esotericism has already given it (at least ostensibly) a better expression, whereupon it becomes merely a conventional sign for associations that are more completely and better known elsewhere. Only for the exoteric standpoint is the symbol a living thing.”10
Giegerich is arguing that the human mind has moved on from the mythic past that Jung was trying to put in a strait-jacket. And Giegerich is also making the point that in the above quote Jung (for once) was showing that he understood such logic as Giegerich was espousing. But normally, Giegerich points out, Jung cannot accept this logic. However, Giegerich points out that the progress outweighs the loss.
“The death of a symbol, inasmuch as it amounts to the birth of the better formulation of what it is about, is […] by no means to be viewed as an intolerable catastrophe. It is a transformation that, to be sure, goes along with a loss, but is ultimately a gain, a progress, just as in the case of the transition from biological pregnancy to birth.”11
Giegerich goes onto say that macro mythical, grand narrative, traditional religion meaning-based phenomena is now dead for a great many people.
“For the “symbol” that we are talking about now is meaningas such,Meaning with a capital M; it is myth, the symbolic life, the imaginal, religion, the grand narratives – notthismyth or religion or grand narrative northismeaning, but myth or religion pure and simple, Meaning altogether.”12
Giegerich points out that Jung, like Nietzsche before him, and like “other thinkers of the 19th century” tried to overcome the loss of the pre-modern meaning.Giegerich argues (and this work accepts Giegerich’s assessment) that Jung divided his mind in two… a No1 consciousness that was rational, empirical and scientific. (Giegerich refers to this as Jung’s Kusnacht consciousness)14 and a No 2 mind that stores the mythical images and then refuses toever question them or reflect on them… hence they equate to Jung’s unconscious which Giegerich accuses Jung of (therefore) inventing.15 Giegerich refers to Jung’s No 2 mind as his “Bollingen” mind.16
“By virtue of having been swallowed and thus deprived of the possibility to participate in the practice of the job of consciousness (reflection, rational examination, which isessentiallypublic), the swallowed consciousness is ipso factounconscious, while the swallowing mind, is, to be sure, consciousness in the narrower sense, but only an empty form, totally divorced from the contents it might entertain and on principle released from any intellectual responsibility for the unconscious images. The conscious mind isonlythe passive recipient of images from the unconscious.”17
Giegerich articulates the image of glass in a museum separating consciousness from the historical unconscious. We are not allowed to touch the treasures that lay out of our reach.18
“…the imaginal contents have already been released from religion and metaphysics; but by confining them in the unconscious, they are once and for all prevented from “growing up”: getting out and taking part in public intellectual life and being in turn affected by its transformations. Instead [Jung demands] the intellect has to take them as indisp
