I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will… win the battle
–C. G. Jung
I’ve been thinking about the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) for almost three decades.
Rather than trying to reconstruct his early childhood, family influences, and so on, I’m more interested to apply some of his ideas to contemporary transformational theory.
Jung was a brilliant innovator, possibly a genius. But even geniuses have limits. And life is about moving on, making new discoveries, and looking beyond the familiar.
Quite a few worthwhile biographies have already been written about Jung. But not too many writers are willing to further develop his concepts or perhaps use them in the postmodern sense of the “three C’s,” where Context and Connotation are recognized as an important part of Content.
Once a close friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud, in the early days of his remarkable career Jung found in Freud something of a kindly father figure. The elder Jew regarded the younger gentile as his star pupil among several luminaries in the emerging school of psychoanalysis. As a non-Jew, Jung was in a better position to help spread Freud’s psychoanalytic movement within a central Europe marked by anti-Semitism.
But the two intellectual titans split in 1914 over a number of personal and professional differences, most notably, Jung’s rejection of Freud’s increasingly dogmatic insistence on the primacy of the libido.
What the Critics Say
Jung, himself, has been criticized on many counts. Conservative Christians see him as a dangerous, demonic threat, citing select portions of his work which apparently support their arguments while ignoring, as extremists usually do, those aspects which would refute them.1
Despite this conservative backlash, Jungian ideas continue to be taken seriously in popular Catholic literature, just as some of Luther’s ideas are said to agree with core Catholic teaching.
Parapsychologists and spiritualists often say that Jung’s theory is limiting.2
And until quite recently, the major figures in Western cultural studies and rationalism largely ignored Jung in favor of Freud. Freud’s emphasis on sexuality, sublimation and the idea of the phallus resonated with neo-Marxist and postmodern interests.
As for those who took the time to read Jung, his work was often dismissed as a kind of fuzzy mysticism riddled with modernist stereotypes and elements of racism. Accordingly, a body of historical reconstruction emerged, claiming that Jung kowtowed to Hitler and the Nazi Party.3
Philosophers of logic tend to wince at the very thought of Jung. Most philosophers say that his arguments contain far too many assumptions to merit any kind of serious consideration. Not only philosophers, but many in religious studies say that Jung’s analogical use of mythological and religious ideas is weak because his data is removed from historical contexts.
In disconnecting religious ideas from their originally intended meanings, Jung has been heavily criticized for distorting data to make it fit his own theory.4 Moreover, feminist and women’s studies analyses suggest that his views are sexist.5
|
Alchemical Images Courtesy The Alchemy Web Site |
Another way to understand Jung’s work takes the big picture approach. By appreciating his lasting contribution to the history of ideas, value is found not so much in Jung’s theoretical particulars but rather, in his spirit of innovation and genuine concern to synthesize depth psychology, empirical observation and rationality.
Writing about Jung, Naomi Goldenberg says that Jung apparently was happy to be “Jung and not a Jungian.” As a Jungian one might slavishly follow the Grand Master without thinking for him or herself. But Jung, himself, felt free to revise his theories according to his ongoing thoughts and observations.6
Among Jung’s wide ranging interests, his work on projection, the shadow, inflation, symbols, numinosity, synchronicity and the collective unconscious seem most useful.7 Advocating self-knowledge as an essential component for personal and societal transformation, Jung believed we must master the unconscious.
Jung also believed that a failure to control the powerful impulses of the unconscious could result in a kind of Dorian Gray scenario where the unconscious gradually comes to control the individual and society as a whole.
The Collective Unconscious: Is Freud so different?
Freud and Jung’s views about the unconscious differ, but not as much as most believe. Some pop psychologists and New Age gurus quickly dismiss Freud’s ideas, unaware that his model of the unconscious contains collective elements. They prefer Jung’s notion of the archetypes, which borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and theology.
The term archetype is traceable to St. Augustine (354-430 CE). Jung describes the archetype as a component of mankind’s psychological substratum–the collective unconscious.
Freud similarly spoke of phylogenetic “schemata” and “prototypes.” And borrowing from ancient Greek and Jewish literature, Freud also devised the “Oedipus complex,” a “primal father” and likened the shadowy contents of the unconscious to archaeological ruins.
Late in his career Freud revised his libido theory to include the general ideas of eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct). Because Freud maintained that the fundamental aspects of the unconscious are universal, aspects of his theory of the self, like Jung’s, point to a collective unconscious.8
Archetypes and the Unconscious
But there’s a difference between Jung and Freud in that Jung’s archetypal theory differentiates the unconscious to a greater degree than Freud’s rather basic schema of id, ego and superego.10
Jung’s archetypes, however, have themselves been criticized as ambiguous, simplistic constructs.
On the charge of ambiguity, Jungians reply that archetypes are necessarily mysterious since they consist of matter/energy and a wide range of numinous potentials.
Grounded in human experience, the archetypes transcend our conventional understanding of space and time. They are categories which to some extent explode contemporary assumptions about categories.
The archetypes point to underlying mysteries or, in Jung’s way of speaking, they invite and sometimes demand an extraordinary encounter with the numinous. As for the apparent simplicity of the archetypes, Jungians reply that the archetypes proper are relatively few but their cultural expression as archetypal images are limitless.
Psychologist James Hillman notes that the archetypes are just another construct and should not be taken as realities in themselves. This may surprise some but Jung, himself, knew full well that his apparently ’scientific’ work was just another myth which he believed was more appropriate for moderns times.
The pseudoscientific nature of his work did not deter Jung. He believed his new myth was necessary. And his growing popularity seems to confirm that belief.
Along these lines, Jung said the master archetype is that of the self, which directly or indirectly involves all lesser archetypes.
As we journey through certain stages in life, the self strives to unify apparent contradictions. For Jung this process of becoming whole, called individuation, involves a multidimensional union of opposites and by implication, the experience of synchronicity and numinosity.
These two ideas of synchronicity and numinosity raised Western psychology to a new plateau only hinted at by researchers such as Abraham Maslow, Alfred Alder and William James.
More recently, Stanislav Grof and a handful of others have followed suit with the holotropic model of the self.
Like his former mentor Freud, Jung sought to devise a fresh, meaningful map of the psyche. He made a sincere attempt to integrate the personal, social and spiritual dimensions of the self. As a pioneering investigator, Jung anticipated the inevitable limitations which would creep into in his model. Despite these limitations his ideas continue to reverberate some 46 years after his death.
Notes
1. Conservative Christian attacks against Jung seem to abstractly echo a frightening past of Inquisitions and the torture of so-called witches, a kind of mindset where it’s easier to demonize people on the basis of incomplete data instead of carefully assessing what they have to say. See, for instance, Marsha West’s: Carl Jung: Psychologist or Sorcerer?. Jung himself says that as a practicing psychiatrist he never tried to change his clients’ religious beliefs, providing they were happy with them. He did critique Christian churches, but his critique was intended to help those receiving no spiritual comfort from within those traditions. And his critiques were not one-sided diatribes. For instance, Jung commended the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary as declared by Pope Pius XII in 1950 because he felt that it solidified an important feminine element within Christian belief and practice. And because Catholicism now highlights the importance of freedom of religious belief, Catholic pogroms against those interested in Jung’s model arguably come from those Catholics unable to appreciate the fullness of Catholic thought. See, for instance: Jungian Psychology as Catholic Theology: What is Carl Gustav Jung doing in the Church? and Jungian Nun Promotes the “God-Within”: Sr. Pat Brockman & Dream Analysis.
2. Ram Dass, for instance, said in The Only Dance There Is that Jung is afraid to go beyond identifying with the role of the famous psychologist. Dass says Jung fears taking the next step into mysticism, as mentioned here.
3. The best example being Maidenbaum and Martin’s Lingering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and anti-Semitism.
4. See my papers Integration and the Orient and Ego, Archetype and Self.
5. Naomi Goldenberg, “Looking at Jung Looking at Himself,” Soundings, 73/2-3 (Summer/Fall 1990).
7. These concepts are accurately defined in Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon.
10. Some of Jung’s archetypes are listed here.
Links
- The Alchemy Web Site
- Jung Home Page
- The Jung Lexicon
- Jung Quotes-1
- Jung Quotes-2
- Zodiac.com
- Essays on Jung
- More!
“Some reflections on Carl Gustav Jung” Copyright © Michael W. Clark, 2008. All rights reserved.
