Lectures on Jungian Psychology given at NRPI by Paul Watsky, Ph.D. Saturday Lecture September 21, 2006

  Concerning Jung’s Terminology

I thought it might be useful to begin this day for the study of Jung’s psychotherapeutic ideas with a look at his theory of neurosis, which has  much in common with Freud’s, except in so far as Jung considered neurotic symptomatology as not exclusively derived from psychological conflicts related to sexuality, and to be purposive:

Neurotic symptoms...occur only when we cannot see the other side of our nature and the urgency of its problems. Only under these conditions does the symptom appear, and it helps to give expression to the unrecognized side of the  psyche.... This shadow-side of the psyche, being withdrawn from conscious scrutiny, cannot be dealt with by the patient. He cannot correct it, cannot come to terms with it, nor yet disregard it; for in reality he does not  “possess” the unconscious impulses at all. Thrust out from the hierarchy of the conscious psyche, they have become autonomous complexes which it is the task of analysis, not without great resistances, to bring under control again. (CW vol. 7, p. 25)

Not only does Jung perceive a constructive dimension to neurosis, he also describes it as a byproduct of civilized collective life, thereby rendering ambiguous the theoretical boundary between normality and the psychopathological:

We...know today that it is by no means the animal natural one that is at odds with civilized constraints; very often it is new ideas which are thrusting upwards from the unconscious and are just as much out of harmony with the dominating culture as the instincts. For instance, we could easily construct a political theory of neurosis, in so far as the man of today is chiefly excited by political passions to which the “sexual question” was only an insignificant prelude. It may turn out that politics are but the forerunner of a far deeper religious convulsion. Without being aware of it, the neurotic participates in the dominant currents of his age and reflects them in his own conflict. Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt  on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. Neurosis is self-division. In most people the cause of the division is that the conscious mind wants to hang on to its moral ideal, while the unconscious strives after its—in the contemporary sense—unmoral ideal which the conscious mind tries to deny. (ibid. p. 20)

At the beginning of his article “Individuation: Inner Work,” Murray Stein remarks: “Many people have shared with me their gratitude to Jung for offering a  non-pathological account of psychological  life.”(Stein, p.1) I confess to sharing that gratitude. During the year between my licensure as a psychologist and the beginning of my analytic training I augmented my small therapy practice income with a half-time job doing diagnostic workups of low income people arbitrarily dropped from the federal S.S.I. rolls. I saw lots of pathology and wrote numerous psychological evaluations. It left me with considerable respect for a sound diagnosis. Yet then and now I’ve been uncomfortable with the tendency of psychoanalytic nomenclature to employ the same terms for normal and pathological states, e.g. narcissism, paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions, hysteria, compulsions. I find it a bit demoralizing when healthy processes receive the same labels created to categorize disturbed functioning.

Jung tried  to counteract the tendency, as can be seen in his 1929 essay “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy:”

All that now passes under the layman’s idea of “psychoanalysis” has its origin in medical practice; consequently most of it is medical psychology. This psychology bears the unmistakable stamp of the doctor’s consulting room, as can be seen...in its terminology. (CW vol. 5,p. 54)

Later in that same article he asserts, in relation to the analyst’s role in working with the individuation process:

As soon as psychotherapy takes the doctor himself for its subject, it transcends its medical origins and ceases to be merely a method of treating the sick. It now treats the healthy or such as have a moral right to mental health, whose sickness is at most the suffering that torments us all. (ibid. p. 75)

Later in his career he adopts a similar perspective in the 1943 edition of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:

There are in a neurosis two tendencies standing in strict opposition to one another, one of which is unconscious. This proposition is formulated in very general terms on purpose, because I want to stress that although the pathogenic conflict is a personal matter it is also a broadly human conflict manifesting itself in the individual, for disunity with oneself is the hall-mark of civilized man. The neurotic is only a special instance of the disunited man who ought to harmonize nature and culture within himself. (CW vol. 7, p. 19)

In the lexicon appended to Psychological Types, Jung, aside from the word “complex,” carries over little of the then-prevalent pathologizing nomenclature. Complex, still, in the vernacular, even among Jungians, denotes a maladaptive stereotypical pattern either experienced intrapsychically by the subject, or acted out. Jung himself characteristically treats the word as value-neutral—a term for an autonomous unconscious psychic structure, an energized sub-personality compounded of image and affect. The affect can have a positive or negative valence, and variable intensity. Complexes behave like internalized objects, and hence can play either a normal or pathological role in the psyche. Jung designates the ego as a complex, likewise the shadow, anima, and animus. 

He increases the potential for confusion when, in the 1930’s, he renames his system of thought “Complex Psychology,” attempting to indicate that it concerns itself with elaborate, complicated mental processes. But the name didn’t catch on with his adherents, who clung to his earlier neologism, analytical psychology.

Although the Definitions section of Psychological Types is dry, it’s worth study, since it highlights the elements of Jung’s emerging theory, and the format pulls for clarity and concision. Consider Jung’s presentation of the word abstraction. The first sentences hardly are novel: Abstraction is

the drawing out or singling out of a content (a meaning, a general characteristic, etc.) from a context made up of other elements whose combination into a whole is something unique or individual and therefore cannot be compared to anything else. (CW vol. 6, p. 409)

Then his two-page discussion leads away from the vernacular in a direction clearly applicable to psychology:

I...associate abstraction with the awareness of the psychoenergetic process it involves. When I take an abstract attitude to an object, I do not allow the object to affect me in its totality; I focus my attention on one part of it by excluding all the irrelevant parts.... My interest does not flow into the whole, but draws back from it, pulling the abstracted portion into myself, into my conceptual world, which is already prepared or constellated for the purpose of abstracting a part of the object. (ibid. p. 410)

This last sentence, which dates from 1921, to my ear sounds extremely compatible with what two generations later would be known as object relations theory. Pulling the abstracted portion into myself, into my conceptual world, which is already prepared or constellated for the purpose of abstracting a part of the object. Think of introjects, or the  Kleinian good breast/bad breast. Note also Jung’s assertion that this inner world is “already prepared/constellated,” i.e. the unconscious is structured for action, pre-programmed, one could say. What then follows is dangerously revisionist when compared with classical Freudianism— characteristically Jungian in its emphasis on introverted thinking, and yet still pointing forward towards the object relations perspective:

“Interest” I conceive as the energy or libido;...which I bestow  on the object as a value, or which the object draws from me, maybe even against my will or unknown to myself. I visualize the process of abstraction as a withdrawal of libido from the object, as a backflow of value from the object into a subjective, abstract content. For me, therefore, abstraction amounts to an energetic devaluation of the object. In other words, abstraction is an introverting movement of libido. (ibid. p. 411)

Earlier on, in Chapter Ten, “General Description of the Types,” Jung puts this concept into play:

The introvert’s attitude is an abstracting one; at bottom he is always intent on withdrawing libido from the object, as though he had to prevent the object from gaining power over him. The extravert, on the contrary, has a positive relation to the object. He affirms its importance to such an extent that his subjective attitude is constantly related to and oriented by the object. The object can never have enough value for him, and its importance must always be increased. (ibid. p. 330)

Jung, you may have noticed, says nothing about libido exclusively expressing sexuality. Further along in his lexicon, Jung’s definition of libido eschews the erotic: 

By libido I mean psychic energy. Psychic energy is the intensity of a psychic process, its psychological value. This does not imply an assignment of value, whether moral, aesthetic, or intellectual; the psychological value is already implicit in its determining power, which expresses itself as definite psychic effects. (ibid. p. 453-4)

Hence libido is merely energy, without either a predetermined content or object.

Not only does Jung retool current usages to serve his developing system, he also coins language:

INFERIOR FUNCTION...the function that lags behind in the process of differentiation.... The demands of society compel a man to apply himself first and foremost to the differentiation of the function with which he is best equipped by nature, or which will secure him the greatest social success.... As a general rule, a man identifies more or less completely with the most favored and hence the most developed function.... To the degree that the greater share of libido...is taken up by the favored function, the inferior function undergoes a regressive development; it reverts to the archaic stage and becomes incompatible with the circumstances be wholly deprived of its energy. So...the energy left to it passes into the unconscious and activates it in an unnatural way, giving rise to fantasies...on a level with the archaicized  function. In order to extricate the inferior function from the unconscious by analysis, the unconscious fantasy formations that have now been activated must be brought to the surface. The

conscious realization of these fantasies brings the inferior function to consciousness and makes further development possible. (ibid. p. 450-1)

Here Jung is looking ahead towards what would become a staple of his analytic practice—treating what we now call the midlife crisis, whose commonplace onset typically features either a depressive introversion, or the eruption of seemingly  infantile energy, often directed at surprising and/or inappropriate love objects. The person’s unlived life asserts itself, and analysis often focuses on what has become the hallmark coinage of Jungian analysis—individuation, defined in Psychological Types as follows:

INDIVIDUATION...is the development of the psychological individual...as a being distinct from the general collective psychology,...therefore a process of differentiation...having for its goal the development of the individual personality.... Only a society that can preserve its internal cohesion and collective values, while at the same time granting the individual the greatest possible freedom, has any prospect of enduring vitality. As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead  to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.

Individuation is closely connected to the transcendent function,... since this function creates individual lines of development which could never be reached by keeping to the path prescribed by collective norms.

Under no circumstances can individuation be the sole aim of psychological education. Before it can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted. (ibid. p. 448-9)

Jung’s essay on the transcendent function, written in 1916, but unpublished for forty years, clarifies how that process bears upon individuation.

Other written versions of NRPI lectures by
Paul Watsky, Ph.D:

"Jung's Model of the Unconscious and its Role in Mental Health"

"Jungianism Since Jung"

References