Lectures on Jungian Psychology given at NRPI by Paul Watsky, Ph.D. Friday Night Lecture II March 2, 2007

Jungianism Since Jung

 When I first spoke here last September I discussed the thesis of a recent book entitled Jung and the Making of Modern Psychotherapy: The Dream of a Science, namely that Jung’s grand project over the course of his career had been to formulate a comprehensive theory of mental functioning, in order to unify and integrate the discipline of psychology. According to the book’s author, the English historian Sonu Shamdasani, not only did Jung fail at his encyclopedic task, he knew by the late 1940’s, a decade and a half  before his death, that he had failed, and died embittered. Shamdasani makes several important ancillary points: among them that psychology has yet to reach a consensus on the four important questions Jung tried unsuccessfully to answer—how can science, universalizing by its very nature, address itself to individual, unique, instances; how can one develop a valid and consensually-accepted theory of dreams; how to explain the relationship between the mind and the body; and how to reconstruct the historical and cultural development of the psyche. Shamdasani also asserts that today psychology is even more balkanized than in the early 20th century—more rife with warring ideologies, competing jargons, and economic turf battles. According to Shamdasani, most of Jung’s adherents, even from the relatively early days of the 1920’s, rejected his comprehensive ambitions, preferring to apply his insights piecemeal to the practice of analysis rather than pursue his research agenda and his interest in theory building. When he tried to rename analytic psychology complex psychology—denoting the exploration and treatment of complex, i.e. complicated, mental states—hardly anyone in his professional circle followed suit.

Tonight I’ll try to cover the trajectory of Jungian psychology since Jung died, looking principally at divergences of theory, and at the potential interfaces of Jungian thought with several currents in contemporary psychoanalysis. But first, to provide a basis for comparison, I’d like to summarize one of Jung’s more surprising essays from the period when his distinctive approach was maturing.

We can see the scope of Jung’s ambition regarding treatment in Problems of Modern Psychotherapy, a piece first published in 1929, which subsequently he neither revised nor repudiated. The overall situation he addresses has changed little during the past 75 years:

If, in a text book of pathology, we find numerous remedies of the most diverse kind prescribed for a given disease, we may safely conclude that none of these remedies is particularly efficacious. So, when many different ways of approaching the psyche are recommended, we may rest assured that none of them leads with absolute certainty to the goal, least of all those advocated with fanaticism. (CW vol. 5, par 117)

Jung then outlines what he characterizes as “a broadly inclusive standpoint” (CW vol. 5, par 122), wherein he conceives of psychotherapy in terms of four modalities he calls “stages”—confession, elucidation, education, and transformation—any number or combination of which may be necessary in a given therapy.

Jung relates “confession,” a method he terms “cathartic,” to Catholic tradition, and equates neurotic guilt with a sense of having sinned. The analytic client, undermined in self esteem and isolated from others as if outcast by God, typically harbors an alienating unconscious secret. “Anything concealed is a secret. The possession of secrets acts like a psychic poison that alienates their possessor from the community”(ibid. par 124). In this mental state, repressed ideas and emotions feed destructive energy into a complex Jung calls the shadow, whose eventual conscious acknowledgment enlarges the personality: 

The inferior and even the worthless belongs to me as my shadow and gives me substance and mass. How can I  be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole; and by becoming conscious of my shadow I remember once more that I am a human being like any other.... (ibid. par 134)

Sometimes nothing more than the analyst’s empathic listening in the therapy dyad is needed to alleviate suffering, to produce a sense of social connection—a relationship with humankind.

Jung describes two drawbacks of catharsis: some clients, “for the most part complicated, highly conscious persons...so firmly anchored in consciousness that nothing can pry them loose...violently” resist acknowledging their unconscious shadow side, and therefore require “a complete technique for approaching the unconscious” (ibid. par 137); a different sort of client can become “bound to the doctor through the confession” by means of a “tie... [which] corresponds more or less to the relation between father and child.” Jung remarks that “Freud gave to this symptom the appropriate name of ‘transference,’” and notes that “if this seemingly senseless attachment is forcibly severed, there is a bad relapse” (ibid. par 139, 138). With these cases Jung would resort to “the Freudian method of elucidation,...a minute elaboration of man’s shadow-side unexampled in any previous age”(ibid. par 145). Successfully followed, transference analysis, which Jung categorizes as “reductive,” because it proceeds backward in memory to causal factors in the client’s early childhood, restores to clients their capacity for “normal adaptation and forbearance with [their] own shortcomings: these will be [their] guiding moral principles, together with freedom from sentimentality and illusion” (ibid. par 149). Liberated from unconscious incest fantasies whose projection onto the analyst inhibits emotional growth, the client will have regained the emotional capacity of an intact child.

An intact child, yes. However, years of neurotic functioning, typically modeled and reinforced by a disturbed family of origin, may have stunted the client’s socialization. According to Jung: “in many cases the most thorough elucidation leaves the client an intelligent  but still incapable child” (ibid. par 150), unfamiliar how to behave appropriately. Hence the client, according to Jung, now may require “education as a social being.” In Jung’s opinion, Freud’s method doesn’t concern itself with how clients can find their “way back to normal life”(ibid. par 162). He therefore recommends Adler’s approach, whose aim is educative: the client is “drawn out of himself onto other paths” (ibid. par 152), freed from excessive, egocentric power strivings, taught to cooperate, and to function as a member of the community.

These first three stages of analysis are all borrowed—from the Catholic church, from Freud, and from Adler. Jung, seeming genuinely inclined to play the role of a uniter rather than a divider (a skeptic might say “imperialist”), muses about why differing therapy approaches such as these have stimulated bitter rivalries:

[A] curious sense of finality...attends each of the stages [and] accounts for the fact that there are people using cathartic methods today who have apparently never heard of dream interpretation, Freudians who do not understand a word of Adler, and Adlerians who do not wish to know anything about the unconscious. (ibid. par 154)

He then makes an important point. Each of these methods rather than being erroneous represents an essential aspect of analysis, sufficient for it to be the main healing factor for a given client: “Each stage does in fact rest on a final truth, and...consequently there are always cases which demonstrate this particular truth in the most startling way. In our delusion-ridden world a truth is so precious that nobody wants to let it slip merely for the sake of a few so-called exceptions which refuse to toe the line”(ibid. par 156). Jung argues against the procrustean bed approach to analysis, where everyone must be subject to a single theory or methodology, where to be deemed successful—even should the patient die—a metaphorical operation need only be performed with the proper technique. Analysis must be tailored, Jung asserts, to the client’s needs, and the analyst must be pragmatic, able to deploy an array of theories, even those that may proclaim themselves mutually exclusive. Not only have Jung’s opponents rejected these recommendations, Jungians, too, pay them little mind, because they destabilize comforting routines and certainties.

Jung’s fourth and final therapy stage, transformation, has become identified as Jungian analysis proper. It consists of furthering the individuation process by welcoming, reacting to, deciphering, and interacting with symbolic manifestations of the client’s unconscious. In order to support that process Jung recommends the analyst grow disquietingly permeable and self-reflective: ”The fourth stage of analytical psychology requires the counter-application to the doctor himself of whatever system is believed in—and moreover with the same relentlessness, consistency, and perseverance with which the doctor applies it to the patient” (ibid. par. 168). The analyst, in other words, changes during the analysis due to the influence of the patient. Jung doesn’t specify the sort of change he expects, perhaps only that the therapist struggle to recognize what is being mutually created in the analytic work, or perhaps to assimilate the same values he or she endorses—in contemporary terms, to monitor countertransference and adjust accordingly.  A daunting agenda: to cope with those four stages.

The enormity of Jung’s project was still evident twenty years later when, in 1948, he spoke at the founding of the Zurich Institute, listing the issues he believed complex psychology—“a vast interdisciplinary enterprise” (Shamdasani, p. 347)—should pursue:

He thought that further work needed to be done from the experimental aspect of complex psychology, and especially concerning the associations experiment. In particular, he highlighted the topics of the periodical renewal of the emotional stress of complex-stimulators, the problem of family patterns of  associations, and the investigation of the physiological  concomitants of the complexes. In the medico-clinical field, he  stated that there was a dearth of fully elaborated case histories. In psychiatry, he thought that the analysis of paranoid patients with research into comparative symbolism needed to be undertaken.

For psychotherapy, he held that casuistic dream research in connection with comparative symbolism would be of great practical value. In addition, he recommended the collection and evaluation of dreams in early childhood and those before catastrophes, such as dreams before accidents and death, as well as during illness and under narcotics. He suggested the investigation of pre and post-mortem psychic phenomena. He held this to be particularly important, given the accompanying relativization of time and space. He thought that a difficult but interesting task would  be the research into the process of compensation in psychotics and criminals and into the goal of compensation in general. In normal psychology, he urged the study of the psychic structure of the family in relation to heredity, as well as the compensatory character of marriage and emotional relationships. He also considered the behavior of the individual in the mass and its unconscious compensation to be a very timely problem[—](Shamdasani, p 346)

and so on. Some of these areas actually have been explored, but usually by scholars from other disciplines, whereas Jung’s closest followers preferred to research mythology and folklore. In 1978, Michael Fordham took his Jungian colleagues to task for “having squandered their birthright,” by neglecting various of  “Jung’s ideas that have been developed by psychoanalysts:

1. The concept of analysis as a dialectic procedure. This is the equivalent of the interactional hypothesis.

2. That the analysis is as much in the analyst as the patient....

3. That for changes to take place in a patient an analyst may need to change also.... This proposition has been identified as the need for a willingness to change on the analyst’s part, and it has been added that a patient will facilitate the change and bring about awareness in the analyst as to what is going on.

4. That resistances in the patient can be created  by the analyst....

5. The analyst introjects the patient’s psychopathology....

6. It is the personal influence of the analyst which is the essential element in his producing a therapeutic    effect. Psychoanalysts have investigated this at length using the concepts of introjection, identification, and projective identification. (Fordham, pp. 209-210)

All the topics on Fordham’s list pertain to transference and countertransference, a subject of intense significance to Fordham himself, which because of its reductive implications, most of the first and second generation Jungians avoided as territory Jung had ceded to Freud.

Once death removed Jung’s direct personal influence from the scene, the familiar, seemingly inevitable and still ongoing dynastic struggles over intellectual sovereignty, power, and market share arose. Jungian analysis has expanded the number, size, and global distribution of its institutes, but also fragmented along doctrinaire lines, to such an extent that, for example, the original institute in Great Britain, the Society of Analytical Psychology, established in London in 1945, split into four separate institutes in the same city. If Jung was correct that every widely-espoused analytic dogma rests on “a final truth,” we more than ever need a comprehensive, integrative theory to serve our diverse client population.

Analysts disposed to transgress sectarian boundaries often are very circumspect, fearing reprisals for apparent disloyalty. Facts can be hard to come by. In 1991 I visited London to interview the 90-year-old Freudian analyst Marion Milner, having sensed from her writings she might be a missing link between analytic communities. She had been closely associated with Winnicott and many of the other early object relations theorists, but had begun her career in industrial psychology. She told me that while in New Haven, Connecticut, assisting Eldon Mayo on his famous Hawthorne Experiments, she briefly underwent analysis with a Jungian, whose name, unfortunately, she couldn’t recollect. After returning to England, Milner was employed by the school system and gravitated toward the therapy approach of Hannah Segal. When World War II broke out and most British psychiatrists joined the military, the London Psychoanalytic Society began training people it previously considered unsuitable. Mrs. Milner was supervised sequentially by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and, ever diplomatic, kept on remarkably good terms with them both. Having found value in Freud’s and Jung’s systems, during the 1930’s she was uncertain which to adopt, but, disappointed that Jung lacked serious interest in the transference, and a well-articulated theory of child development, she opted for Freud. Nevertheless, her subsequent intellectual contributions show an admixture of Jungian ideas, notably that the unconscious plays a collaborative, generative role in the process of artistic creativity.

The missing link hypothesis probably was overdramatic, but Milner’s work does suggest psychology can benefit from cross-pollination. Over the past fifty years perhaps the most vigorous Jungian advances occurred in those very areas Milner perceived Jung to under-emphasize—the transference and early childhood. Object relations theory has been an important bridge. Arguably, Jung laid the foundation for the concept of internal objects when he introduced the notion of complexes, which he conceived of as “a collection of images and ideas, clustered round a core derived from one or more archetypes, and characterized by a common emotional tone”(Samuels et al, p. 34). A phrase such as “autonomous entities within the psyche...[that] behave like independent beings” (Samuels et al, pp 33-4), certainly could be applied to internal objects, but actually it’s part of the definition of complex in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. Within both frameworks the ego plays a crucial role—regulating and mitigating the effects of unconscious forces. Freudian and  Jungian perspectives markedly diverge, however, as to source, with Freudians assuming internal objects are primarily internalized, i.e. acquired through early childhood environmental influence, whereas Jungians consider complexes to be inherent patterns, predetermined potentials for organizing experience.

Milner’s counterpart in the Jungian world, and another Londoner, is Michael Fordham, who both advances Jungian thought and attempts to synthesize Jungian and Freudian theory. The first editor of Jung’s Collected Works, and a founding editor of the most respected English language Jungian periodical, The Journal of Analytical Psychology, he became a highly influential schismatic.  Although Fordham spent his entire career within the Jungian fold, his personal relationship with Jung was in some respects severely frustrating, and he was less than fully satisfied by his personal analysis.  He points out quite correctly that although Jung’s later writings concentrate on the archetypes of the unconscious, Jung consistently places enormous emphasis on the ego—that to perform its essential role in adaptation it must hold power and influence equal to the unconscious, especially during individuation. Fordham accepts those premises, but contradicts Jung’s assertion that infants, and children before the age of four, have no individual personalities or meaningful consciousness, emphatically disagreeing with Jung that since their ego functioning simply is borrowed from and reflective of their parents’ unconscious conflicts, if a child is troubled one analyzes the mother or father.

Early in his career, during the mid-1930’s, Fordham became interested in conducting child analysis. Finding no help in Jung’s writings, he turned to Melanie Klein, who had arrived in London during 1926: “I was looking for an instrument to use in communicating with unconscious processes in small children.... It was...Klein who first listened to small children and developed a method of elucidating their communications. She took play as the equivalent of free association and made ‘deep’ interpretations right at the start of her psychoanalyses” (Fordham, pp. 46-7).

Fordham says he perceives Klein

to approach the psychoses with more adequate instruments than Freud [and to have] developed a theory of the unconscious perceptibly closer to Jung’s, since the inner objects have been given a quite new emphasis as part of a complex inner world; the Kleinian trend has thus been to lay emphasis on the introverted aspects of psychology which Jung was the first to open up, though in a different way (Fordham, p. 178).

Anything but a passive devotee of either Jung or Klein, he rejects Klein’s advocacy of a death instinct, which Fordham characterizes as “fascinating yet improbable,” despite its compatibility with Jung’s principle of the eternally-conflicting “opposites.” But he does accept Klein’s good breast/ bad breast dramatization of early object relations, finding it consistent with Jung’s principle of the dual nature of archetypes.

Klein’s perspective on child development led Fordham to modify one of Jung’s most important concepts, the self. Although Fordham, too, considers the self an archetype of wholeness, autonomy and integration, he disagrees with Jung’s conviction the self only manifests in midlife or later, and instead posits that children are born with a functional self in the Jungian sense, i.e. already as individuals, and with an archetypal propensity for psychic integration. He considers an infant to be organized instinctually from birth for initiating relatedness with its mother, in order to elicit essential caregiving and emotional supplies.

The primary state of the self...has no features that can be experienced; but like DNA it unfolds when brought into relation with a suitable environment, producing matter which can be perceived and experienced emotionally and mentally.... I conceived it to be a psychosomatic entity self-contained in the same sense that a fertilized ovum is contained, but that in response to environmental conditions it responds in predetermined ways. This idea is derived from Jung, who laid emphasis on the self as an integrate. (Fordham, pp. 69-70)

The baby’s immediate entry into the necessary connection with mother causes the infant self to “deintegrate,” to lose its monadic completeness. The manifold archetypal potentials carried by the self now seek “correspondences in the outer world” (Samuels et al, p. 136). Deintegration both causes and results from the child psyche’s experience of object relations, whereby “the resultant ‘mating’ of an active infant’s archetypal potential and the mother’s reactive responses is then reintegrated to become an internalized object” (ibid, p. 136).  Henceforth the child’s psychological life entails alternating integrated and deintegrated self states, the former characterized by an introversion of libidinal energy, a turning inward, which if extreme tends towards autistic isolation; the latter, the deintegrated state, purchases relatedness at the expense of self-sufficiency.

Even in the analysis of adults, especially their transference states, Fordham considers it necessary to access early childhood experience, and emphasizes “elucidation,” the Freudian component of Jungian analysis. While he adhered to a primarily Jungian theoretical base, Fordham’s practice style appeared Kleinian. He recommended providing a couch to facilitate regression, and increasing the number of sessions a week from one or two to four or five, so as to create adequate containment for intense emotion.

Winnicott also influenced Fordham, who writes:

The traditional account of mothering made a mother  omnipotent: she virtually created her infant’s emotional and mental life—everything depended upon her.... In the light of modern research, a mother can no longer be expected to be the sole cause of her infant’s distress; she just has to be a ‘good enough mother’ for the baby to thrive. And further, ‘a good enough mother’ is no longer considered in isolation with a passive baby, but what she does depends significantly on her baby as well. She can be seen as one who facilitates growth and in this, containment is important. (op. cit. Fordham, p. 144)

The interest in pre-oedipal development that marked the concerns of Klein and Winnicott dovetails with the strand of Jung’s thought that revalorizes the feminine. Just as Jung argued that Mary, the missing fourth, needed to be restored to the Trinity to make a whole, a quaternion, so Klein revalorized the feminine within the Freudian cosmos. Fordham was so situated as to benefit from both sources.

Fordham also respected the Freudian analyst Wilfred Bion, having been especially impressed by Bion’s contribution to the understanding of thought in small children: “As to the nature of early object relations, I cannot improve on Bion’s beta elements transformed into alpha elements by alpha function” (ibid. p. 71). Bion’s ideas greatly interest those members of the San Francisco Jung Institute who work with children, and also a smaller number who are interested in group process. The numerous splits among Jungian institutes have led a growing number to believe that Bion’s Tavistock group approach can help hold together our organizations.

Bion, an unorthodox second-generation Kleinian to whom, like Jung, the term mystic has been applied, posits the pursuit of truth, rather than the dictates of the pleasure principle, as the psyche’s cardinal objective. He coined the term O (presumably standing for omega, the final letter of the Greek alphabet) to represent a transcendent, evanescent, abstract truth. According to Joan and Neville Symington:

There are three axes which intersect and penetrate in Bion’s thinking. They are ultimate reality, the difference between sensuous and psychic reality, and the way an individual comes to knowledge.... Many analysts shy away from Bion’s concept of O, which he defines as being equivalent to ultimate reality, godhead, the truth, the infinite or the thing-in-itself. We believe that Bion did not start off with such a concept, but instead came to it through reflecting on his clinical experience.” (Symington, p. 174)

Bion encountered Jungian ideas through attending Jung’s 1935 lectures at the Tavistock Clinic. Jung strongly emphasizes a person’s need to acknowledge and, regardless of cost, live out the truth of his or her own psyche. That would be what Jung called the honest attempt of man, to which I referred in September. The following passage, dating from May, 1930, is extracted from his seminar on Dream Analysis:

There was a French soldier who was a very fine man,...and his principle was that he always followed his fear; wherever he was afraid, there he would go because he felt it to be his duty.... Travelling on leave in the south of France, he visited a Trappist monastery. He knew nothing about that order, nothing about the rules of the monks, he only knew that they did not speak, that they only lived in order to die. Suddenly it struck him as a most fearful thing to do, it got him, and he said to himself:These fellows do it, go and be a Trappist. So he went; and as a Trappist he again had an experience. He heard of certain Trappist monks who had gone alone to  Morocco to do missionary work among those tribes, and that some of them had been cruelly murdered. Again he felt fear, so he became a missionary and went to Morocco, and he was murdered.

That was the end of it. There was a man who obviously had found out that, for him, following the fear was the honest attempt. I don’t know how to value such a life, I have no means of knowing if it was wonderful or beautiful.... I suppose if I had seen that man, if he had come for analysis, it is just possible that that might have turned out to be his life. (Dream Seminar, pp. 617, 619)

Bion himself was a tank commander of extraordinary bravery in World War I, but assuming his fear natural, was more inclined to study than overcome it. Proposed for a Victoria Cross, he was asked by his general “whether he wanted the honour and said, ‘Oh yes, Sir, very much...well, not really, Sir’” (op. cit. Symington, p. 20), and so wound up with a lesser decoration.

For him, and in many respects Jung, too, truthfulness was the honest attempt. The Symingtons assert:

Bion is committed to the view that there is an absolute truth which can never be known directly.—You cannot know psychic reality; you become it.—He says, ‘The religious mystics have probably approximated most closely to [the] expression of the experience of it.’ This  ultimate reality is the psychoanalytic object par excellence of which others are only derivatives. This lies at the heart of Bion’s thinking. The mystics, as he says, have probably approximated most closely to an experience of this ultimate reality. His approach then is to approximate as closely as possible to the mystics. He focuses attention on those defenses we put up against entering such an experience. (ibid. pp. 176-177)

There is a passage from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which many Jungians consider to have embodied Jung’s rationale for the honest attempt, and for analysis: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” We could take this dictum as the fundamental justification for analysis.

*         *          *

Twenty years ago Andrew Samuels, another London SAP analyst, predictably enthusiastic about Fordham’s innovations, published Jung and the Post-Jungians, the first large-scale effort to organize and explain the seemingly chaotic array of theoretical positions advocated by Jung’s second and third generation followers. Samuels underscores how the evolution from Freud through Klein and Bion has enriched Jungian thought:

[The Kleinian] notion of unconscious fantasy derives from an idea of Freud. The id is in contact with the body and therefore comes closely in touch with instinctual needs, takes them over, and gives them ‘mental expression’. Unconscious fantasy is this mental expression of instinct (cf. Jung’s [formulation of an archetype as] a ‘self-portrait of the instinct’)....

The image of what would fulfill our instinctual needs not only makes our interpretation of experience subjective, but is also necessary to realize our needs in reality. Similarly, Jung wrote of unconscious fantasies as ‘fantasies which “want” to become conscious’ and which manifest in the form of images; he also refers to unconscious fantasy as ‘creative.’ The unconscious fantasy derived from instinct searches for external objects with which, in Bion’s word, to ‘mate.’ (Samuels, p. 43)

Samuels further observes that:

For those who come into contact with archetypal imagery, one element stands out. The individual really is gripped by archetypal experience and imagery; his conscious life experiences and attitudes may count for nothing as they are swept away by pre-subjective schemas.

Jung once said that ‘the archetypes are, so to speak, like many little appetites in us, and if with the passing of time, they get nothing to eat, they start rumbling and upset everything.’ (Samuels, p. 44)

In regard to the Freudian tribe Samuels downplays aggressive exogenous tendencies to split and compartmentalize. He posits a chronological progression of psychoanalytic thought on the subject of innate mental processes that begins with Freud and runs on up through Bion, with Jung situated between Freud and Klein.

Long and dense, Jung and the Post Jungians is more an endogenous polemic—a family feud—than a dispassionate survey. But thanks to its primacy and scholarship the book has been influential. Although Samuels acknowledges the distorting nature of his arbitrary categories, for convenience sake he divides Jungian analysts into three abstract groupings according to a rank-ordered three-by-three matrix of theoretical positions and technical approaches. He designates these groups schools— Developmental, Classical, and Archetypal. The Developmental, strongly influenced by British object relations, and consisting of analysts who have embraced Fordham’s ideas, are depicted as progressives. The Archetypalists, whom Samuels appeases, are represented as conservatives in a positive sense: more Jungian than Jung. They give allegiance to a theory devised by James Hillman, once the director of training at the Zurich institute, who in his approach to dream analysis, Samuels observes, uses “what amounts to the classical Freudian methodology of free association”(ibid. p. 238). The last group, the Classical, is comprised of analysts who, in Samuels’ opinion, exaggerate and dogmatically cling to Jung’s core interests from the latter third of his career. He thus paints a political picture sometimes seen in U.S. society, where radicals of the left and right provisionally cooperate to attack the moderates, the liberals, equivalent to Samuels’ Classical School.

Samuels characterizes the Archetypalists as endorsing the following principles:

Hillman suggests we suspend our habitual thinking about unity, about stages, about psychological development, a fantasy of individuation which ‘characterizes it mainly as a movement towards unity, expressed in wholeness, centering.... We should accept multiplicity of voices without insisting on unifying them into one figure. (ibid. pp. 107-8)

He observes that Hillman “is not in pursuit of any increase in consciousness,...is not trying to bridge the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness,...[that although he makes use of interpretation] his vision of ‘interpretation’ is more a deepening than a translation into ‘surface reality’ (ibid. pp. 237-8). In his description of Hillman’s approach Samuels correctly points out Hillman’s most significant contribution: a well-considered emphasis on the psyche’s images as valid and worthwhile in themselves, not merely as cues to right behavior:

Stress on the imaginal leads to focus on the image itself.... In archetypal psychology, images are not representation, signs, symbols, allegories or communications. They are simply images and part of the realm of psychic reality. The directness of this approach implies that images must be experienced, caressed, played with, reversed, responded to—in short, related to (felt) rather than solely interpreted or explained (thought). (ibid. p. 242)

The obvious questions, which Samuels refrains from asking, are, ”Why must it be all one way or the other? Why cannot we seek both an experience and meaning in images?” Logically, during the time we “caress and play with” the image, or afterward, we might also come to perceive it as meaningful. When describing Hillman’s approach, Samuels colludes with his antagonism to thought—denigrated as the realm of spirit—in favor of what he terms “soul,” and the mental process he calls “soul making.”

Samuels perceives Hillman to emphasize the “‘deepening of events into experiences’ (‘soul making’).... Soul is about depth, not the heights attainable by spirit.... To summarize: soul includes life, death, divinity, love, meaning, depth and intensity. But soul is when all is said and done, as much a way of being and perceiving as it is a datum” (ibid. pp. 244-5). Samuels’ stake in this matter apparently consists of not wanting to be left out when the goodies are distributed. He tries to demonstrate that the Developmental School, too, is about ensoulment:

Kleinian psychoanalysis lends itself to talk of internal ‘Gods’... and, in fact, the Kleinian approach is essentially a mythological one.

As a colleague from the Developmental School said, Klein stopped using the ‘scientific’ world view promulgated by Freud and simply started telling stories about the inner life of children. While she worked backwards from behaviour, even adult behaviour, in pursuit of the story, her conclusion was that inner stories (myths, unconscious phantasies) are the dominant powers, or Gods, in personal development. The moment that such a viewpoint is adopted is, to my way of thinking, the moment when the metaphorical-scientific dichotomy becomes less meaningful. To experience another from inside that other takes us into the imaginal and metaphorical. Shades of a Klein-Hillman hybrid? (ibid. p. 262)

Never mind that Hillman has little discernible interest in child development, object relations perspectives, or even the concept of healing, which are bedrock to Samuels and his colleagues.

Classical Jungianism comes off better in two newer, more balanced books, essay collections published in England: The Cambridge Companion to Jung, 1997, and Analytical Psychology, Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis, 2004. These books, also edited by developmentalists, not only reflect the assimilation of Samuels’ ideas but a welcome diminution of partisanship. If pressed, I would identify myself by default as a classical analyst, since I have even less in common theory-wise with the archetypalists and developmentalists. Generally I agree with the two Classical commentaries in The Cambridge Companion, especially such statements as: 

[the] ‘classical’ [approach]...sees the analytic work as one of ongoing mutual discovery, making conscious the unconscious life and progressively releasing a person from meaninglessness and compulsion.... [It] relies on a spirit of dialogue between conscious and unconscious, as well as between the two analytic partners. It therefore also regards the conscious ego as uniquely indispensable to the whole process.... (David L. Hart in Young-Eisendrath, p. 89)

I share the assumption that a person’s inborn identity presses for the fullest possible conscious actualization:

The newborn child emerges from the beginning as a distinct and unique personality with her or his own definite ways of meeting and responding to experience.... The true nature is a given, a only inherent in the human psychological make-up, but essential to psychological growth. (ibid. pp. 91, 94)

A treatment corollary of this viewpoint is that “it is classically Jungian to take patients where they are”(Rosemary Gordon, ibid. p. 193), a statement which overlaps a comment in the same volume by one of the archetypalists, who says, “I look at each session as a potential adventure, and try not to be bogged down in expectations and predictions based on diagnoses and prognoses” (Deldon McNeely, ibid. p. 208).

I share certain basic emphases (in no way subordinate, as Samuels might assume) with both the archetypal and developmental schools. With the archetypalists I agree that:

Jung...says...archetypes appear as both “images and at the same time emotions.”... This emotionality of archetypal images... endows them with dynamic effect. Thus it is an error to regard an archetype “as if it were a mere name, word, or concept,” for when it appears as an archetypal image it has not only a formal but also an emotional aspect. (Adams, ibid. p. 102)

An important treatment implication is that one must “‘stick to the image,’...[a] dictum [that] derives inspiration from Jung,...who says, ‘To understand the dream’s meaning I must stick as close as possible to the dream images.’ [This approach requires] adhering [to the details and overall nature of] the phenomenon (rather than, say, freely associating to it).” (ibid. p. 105)

The developmentalists are the most unabashedly “clinical” of the Jungian schools, and value a thorough history, preferably including detail on the childhood environment. I feel comfortable with such a focus, having studied clinical psychology in a program which provided me with internships at mental health agencies every year of my training, and emphasized psychodiagnostics (a specialty I briefly practiced half-time).  I don’t think a working diagnosis necessarily prevents the analyst from being open, “without memory and desire,” at the start of a session, but it does help estimate the client’s ego strength, and anticipate patterns of defensive behavior. The developmentalist commentator on the specimen case in the “Contemporary Perspectives” chapter seems to suggest“ Joan” has a personality disorder:

I believe that she is a depressive person with quite marked masochistic tendencies which are often enacted in a compulsive way.... I would expect crises and rages and also periods of clinging to me and anger and despair when the inevitable occasions of separation loom. I expect that Joan’s...transference... would swing wildly and frequently between hate and love, between a demand for total availability, total provisioning, and total rejection of anything I offer her, or between almost blind trust and deep distrust. (Rosemary Gordon, ibid. pp. 211, 217)

Additionally, Joan’s bulimic symptomatology, in concert with a predisposing personal history, would encourage me to prepare for borderline issues.

Although I do not share the developmentalist affinity for couch work and three or more sessions weekly, I wouldn’t treat someone suffering from a moderate to severe personality disorder less than twice. The developmentalist analyst, to my surprise, thought similarly regarding Joan:

On taking Joan into therapy I would certainly suggest a face-to-face encounter. The couch would be quite inappropriate for someone so fettered and abused by both parents.... As regards the frequency of her analytic sessions, I would, to start with, see her twice a week. One has to strike a fine balance, in making decisions: a fine balance between on the one hand containing her and making the depression bearable, and on the other hand precipitating the collapse of her defenses and the external structures she has managed to make and keep. (ibid. p. 215)

I also share with this analyst a preference, if interpretation should seem essential, for an oblique approach: “Expressing myself in the form of questions rather than in statements...is...something I tend to use with most of my patients, because questioning involves the patient in taking an active part in the analytic work rather than remain a passive recipient of whatever the therapist produces” (ibid. p. 214). The author, however, doesn’t mention the rationale, deriving from Jung, which principally motivates me—my assumption I don’t know what’s going on inside the other person’s mind, and my wish to avoid giving the false impression that I do.

Since I root for the Classical School team, which over several decades produced few winning seasons in scholarship, I was relieved that Analytical Psychology, Contemporary Perspectives contains several articles on important new ideas that extend two important areas Jung pioneered: type theory, and the role of archetypes. Jung conceived of the types as modes of ego adaptation to both the inner and outer environment, but ceased to develop the theory after 1921, when he published Psychological Types. During the 1950’s three Jungian analysts constructed the first assessment of typology, the Gray-Wheelwright test, superceded in popularity by the Meyers-Briggs, which, though it drew on Jung’s work, was designed by non-analysts. In the 1980’s a Jungian analyst, June Singer, proposed a radical variant of Jung’s system, which failed to catch on. Thanks to the Meyers-Briggs, type theory has been widely utilized in corporate human resources, even while interest among Jungian analysts diminished almost to the vanishing point. For today’s Jungians typology is just one facet of an unsexy, presumably superficial topic—ego functioning. The Developmental School, in regard to issues of the ego, draws inspiration more from British object relations theory than Jung; the Classical School prefers Jung’s late-career interest in archetypal phenomena; whereas the Archetypalists themselves consider the ego to be an especially unappetizing complex, and marginalize it. 

John Beebe, the architect of a more differentiated model of typology, points out that by focussing on ego functioning Jung hadn’t lost interest in depth psychology, but simply was attempting to clarify the ego’s role as an essential partner in the psyche’s activity. Of necessity the ego reacts to and processes manifestations of the unconscious, and without the ego we are by definition nothing more than unconsciousness.

Type theory was a contribution to the problem of the standpoint from which the individual experiences the unconscious. That the conscious standpoint of the patient could hardly be ignored Jung had already learned from his practical experience as a psychiatrist attempting to understand dreams and symptoms, for the patient’s conscious stance turned out to be what the unconscious was responding to. (Cambray and Carter, p. 84)

Beebe elaborates on this fundamental point, which contemporary depth psychologies seem to have forgotten: “Jung had grasped that psychological consciousness was not just a knowing about or a construction or reconstruction of, but (as the etymology of the word consciousness suggests) ‘a knowing with’ unconscious reality.... Consciousness...was the indispensable investigative tool for all further work on the unconscious”(Cambray and Carter, p. 86). It has been counterproductive of depth psychology to assume a basic antagonism between the ego and the unconscious. Although frequently in opposition, they actually are reciprocal components of a dynamic system. When we gain the capacity to employ them as such in our own psyches we achieve a state representable as wholeness.

A further mistaken assumption is that except as distorted by psychopathology every ego functions identically. Jung’s original type theory argued to the contrary, but was incomplete. Beebe now fills in the blanks on what amounts to Jung’s periodic table of  the elements, which in respect to any individual has room for a total of eight attitude and function combinations. Jung only describes the operation of four. The other four possibilities, Beebe postulates, are properties of the shadow, one of the two complexes with which the ego closely interfaces.

Consisting of personality elements the ego seeks to disavow, the shadow can cause dreadful mischief. Jung gave it relatively little systematic study because he believed Freud had developed sufficient tools for analyzing the verbal and other behavioral slips associated with shadow-driven impulses, but Beebe, in order to clarify the dynamic role of the functions, integrates shadow behavior into typology. He associates each function as expressed either in the ego or the shadow, with a specific archetype, depending whether it is in the dominant position, the inferior, auxiliary or third. For example in the ego he equates the dominant function with the Hero/Heroine archetype, and the inferior with the Anima/Animus, whereas in the shadow Beebe associates these same positions with what he respectively terms the Opposing personality and the Demonic personality. He thereby not only fleshes out the original theory and renders it more operational, he also applies it to better understanding a relatively neglected area of Jungian thought.

Despite the fact that maladaptations of the persona, the ego’s other close neighbor, consume innumerable analytic hours, Jung dedicates even less attention to it than to the shadow. Perhaps he considered its behavior transparent and intellectually unchallenging—a misreading corrected, albeit under a different rubric, by Lacan. Jung offers a definition of the persona in Psychological Types: A man may put “on a mask, which he knows is in keeping with his conscious intentions, while it also meets the requirements and fits the opinions of society.... This mask...I have called the persona, which is the name for the masks worn by the actors in antiquity.”  The basic idea is elaborated as follows in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis: “Persona refers to the mask or face a person puts on to confront the world. [It] can refer to gender identity, a stage of development (such as adolescence), a social status, job or profession” (Samuels et al, p. 107). So long as the accommodation is conscious and volitional there’s no real problem. Humans are social animals, instinctually programmed to form relationships, and we need the persona in order to operate in society. But we pay a price by becoming  susceptible to external influence. Things get dicey for the psyche as a whole when we identify with the persona, as Jung was well aware:

The man who identifies with this mask I would call “personal” as opposed to “individual.”... The persona is a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptative or personal convenience, but is by no means identical with the individuality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects. (CW vol. 6, par. 799-901)

Through the reflexive, unconscious workings of identification, the world of the other establishes its hold upon us, a subject on which Jung elaborates twenty years later in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:

We have to say of the persona’s contents what we have said of the impersonal unconscious, namely that it is collective. It is only because the persona represents a more or less arbitrary and fortuitous segment of the collective psyche that we can make the mistake of regarding it in toto as something individual.... A mask that feigns individuality,... it is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks.... Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. (CW vol. 7, par. 245-6)

Self-conscious, driven by need that translates into desire, the persona orients itself by reference to the other—the gaze—defines itself by means of acquired language, and regulates itself (or not) with reference to social law. The Lacanian system allows us to explain a lot about this complex.  

Drawing upon Freud’s drive theory, and concept of the pleasure principle, in concert with structural linguistics, Lacanian theory meticulously can detail how the persona inevitably comes to rule, often destructively, an individual’s behavior, sense of identity, and emotional life. In many respects Jung’s and Lacan’s systems appear incompatible—Jung’s essentialist, Lacan’s social constructivist; Lacan an exponent of early Freud, Jung the second great schismatic; Jung advocating for the under-represented feminine, Lacan privileging the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus. But Jung neglected the very territory Lacan diligently mines, especially how language acquisition, in the service of social conformity, alienates us from ourselves. The possible degree of correspondence or compatibility between Jung’s system and Lacan’s remains largely unstudied, but at this early stage of my exposure to Lacanian thought, the contradictory metapsychologies don’t seem to foreclose all hope of cross-fertilization.

The other significant Jungian theoretical innovation to which I alluded earlier, the deceptively simple-sounding concept of emergence, surfaces in Beebe’s essay, when he observes that “consciousness, for Jung the tool with which the unconscious must be investigated, is an emergent property of the unconscious itself” (op. cit. p. 6). From a lay perspective, emergence seems to mean no more than changing an operational mode, such as switching on a light, wherein the bulb remains essentially unchanged, as if I were to say, “last night I fell asleep and went unconscious, but now, awakened, I’ve emerged from my unconsciousness.” Beebe, however, alludes to something far different: a concept of mental development that, as used by certain contemporary Jungians, notably Joseph Cambray, lends renewed plausibility to the theory of archetypes, and better explains their role in the psyche.

The intellectual lineage of  “emergence” begins with a group of late 19th century precursors of holism, the “emergentists,” who included John Stuart Mill. They disavowed “the mechanistic models of life and the universe that were derived...from positivistic scientific disciplines”(Joseph Cambray, “Synchronicity as Emergence” in Cambray and Carter, p.229). More recently, the controversial work of the physicist Ilya Prigogine on “the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of dissipative structures” (ibid. p. 230), has stimulated the elaboration and extension into the social sciences of what is called “complexity theory.”

Here, in brief, is the idea:

Complexity, as a feature of dynamic systems, occurs when interactions between component parts give rise to novel, unpredictable behaviors such as can be found in certain chemical reactions, the weather, ecosystems, socio-political events, economic trends, and so on. Emergence is postulated to be an essential organizing principle operating at every level;...this includes the way mental events supervene on the neural interactions of the brain. (ibid. p.230)

Complexity theory helps explain the behavior of unstable systems, systems subjected to stressors that bring them near the point of chaos. Under such conditions, the concept of emergence posits, they may adapt by reorganizing at a higher level of complexity, such as when the elements hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, a compound that if subjected to variations in heat and pressure alters its nature while still retaining its chemical composition. Stress it beyond a certain point, however, and it disintegrates back into its constituent elements.

Applied to the mind, this model can account for archetypes as emergent properties of the psyche, predispositions to organize mental life into progressively higher-order operations, such as the individuation process. Thus described, archetypal theory sheds its Lamarckian taint, the implication that it depends on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Water nowhere inheres in hydrogen and oxygen, but under the right, predictable conditions it metamorphoses: “Complex adaptive systems (CAS)...have ‘emergent’ properties, self-organizing features arising in response to environmental, competitive pressures.... CAS form patterns or Gestalts in which the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts”(ibid. p. 231).

In biology emergentist ideas have been used to account for the behavior of blister beetle larvae and slime molds:

Individual slime mold cells aggregate into a swarm entity during times when the forest floor is replete with decaying organic matter, i.e. when there is excess food, then spontaneously revert to single cell life during times of less bounty, all of which is done without a “leader” but rather is collective organization from below upwards. (ibid. p. 231)

Some analytical psychologists now believe that in stressful times the psyche hauls itself up to higher levels of organization and functioning through the catalytic action of archetypes.

This is a tantalizing notion, but one that even in the domain of physics remains speculative, unproven. As I mentioned in September, analytical psychology has made some regrettable choices when attempting to legitimate itself through comparisons with physical science. Rather than proceeding empirically, Jung often reasoned by analogy to shaky, poorly validated hypotheses, as when he applied to psychological development Haeckel’s now-discredited biogenic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. So it’s worrisome to me that here again, with complexity theory, the bridge from hard science to Jungianism is merely analogical. If in regard to the psyche complexity theory can be verified scientifically, we’ll indeed have a new frontier rather than another false start.

References

Cambray, Joseph, and Carter, Linda, Eds. Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis. Hove and New York, Brunner-Routledge, 2004.

 Fordham, Michael. Freud, Jung, Klein, the Fenceless Field. London and New York , Routledge, 1995.

Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. (CW) Princeton , Princeton University Press, 1961.

_________. Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930. Princeton , Princeton University Press, 1984.

Samuels, Andrew. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London and New York , Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Samuels, Andrew, Shorter, Bani, and Plaut, Fred. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. London and New York, Routledge, 1986.

Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. Cambridge , Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Stein, Murray. Individuation: inner work. Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003, pp. 1-13.

Symington, Joan and Neville. The Critical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. Hove and New York , Brunner Routledge, 1996.

Young-Eisendrath, Polly and Dawson , Terence, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jung. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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

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

"Concerning Jung's Terminology"

References