Jung's concept of the archetype: An existential phenomenological reflection

Abstract

The concept of the archetype became the central focus of Jung's analytic psychology. This paper will present some phenomenological reflections on this concept. It will first reason that the archetype is not a phenomenologically acceptable concept by drawing upon the absolutely unconscious nature of the archetypes, their independence from the individual's intentionaliry, and their separateness from Dasein. The paper will then argue that what Jung refers to as “archetypal” images, ideas, and experiences do have phenomenological value. As data pursuant to a phenomenological analysis, they may lead to a better understanding of those psychological experiences that may be common to all of humanity.     

Kane,Luck, and the significance of free will

Abstract

This paper raises a pair of objections to the novel libertarian position advanced in Robert Kane's recent book, The Significance of Free Will.The first objection's target is a central element in Kane's intriguing response to what he calls the “Intelligibility” and “Existence” questions about free will. It is argued that this response is undermined by considerations of luck.The second objection is directed at a portion of Kane's answer to what he calls “The Significance Question” about free will: “Why do we, or should we, want to possess a free will that is incompatible with determinism? Is it a kind of freedom ‘worth wanting’... and, if so, why?” A desire for “objective worth” has a featured role in his answer. However, a compatibilist can have that desire.     

Mother holle

Sometimes she appears as the beautiful White Woman, floating or hovering above the surface of her pond. At other times, however, she is invisible. Then one hears only the pealing of her bells and other dark rumblings from deep beneath the surface “Mother Holle's Pond”

Whenever it snowed in the olden days, people in Hessia used to say, “Mother Holle is making her bed” Grimms' note to “Mother Holle”     

A critical commentary on follow-up studies and “desistance” theories about transgender and gender-nonconforming children

ABSTRACT

Background: It has been widely suggested that over 80% of transgender children will come to identify as cisgender (i.e., desist) as they mature, with the assumption that for this 80%, the trans identity was a temporary “phase.” This statistic is used as the scientific rationale for discouraging social transition for pre-pubertal children. This article is a critical commentary on the limitations of this research and a caution against using these studies to develop care recommendations for gender-nonconforming children.

Methods: A critical review methodology is employed to systematically interpret four frequently-cited studies that sought to document identity outcomes for gender-nonconforming children (often referred to as “desistance” research).

Results: Methodological, theoretical, ethical, and interpretive concerns regarding four “desistance” studies are presented. The authors clarify the historical and clinical contexts within which these studies were conducted to deconstruct assumptions in interpretations of the results. The discussion makes distinctions between the specific evidence provided by these studies versus the assumptions that have shaped recommendations for care. The affirmative model is presented as a way to move away from the question of, “How should children's gender identities develop over time?” toward a more useful question: “How should children best be supported as their gender identity develops?”

Conclusion: The tethering of childhood gender diversity to the framework of “desistance” or “persistence” has stifled advancements in our understanding of children's gender in all its complexity. These follow-up studies fall short in helping us understand what children need. As work begins on the 8th version of the Standards of Care by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, we call for a more inclusive conceptual framework that takes children's voices seriously. Listening to children's experiences will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the needs of gender-nonconforming children and provide guidance to scientific and lay communities.     

Situating Martin Heidegger's claim to a “productive dialogue” with Marxism

This critical review aims to more fully situate the claim Martin Heidegger makes in “Letter on Humanism” that a “productive dialogue” between his work and that of Karl Marx is possible. The prompt for this is Paul Laurence Hemming's recently published Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism which omits to fully account for the historical situation which motivated Heidegger's seemingly positive endorsement of Marxism. This piece will show that there were significant external factors which influenced Heidegger's claim and that, when seen within his broader corpus, these particular comments in “Letter on Humanism” are evidently disingenuous, given that his general opinion of Marxism can only be described as vitriolic. Any attempt to explore how such a “productive dialogue” could be construed must fully contextualise Heidegger's claim for it. This piece will aim to do that, and more broadly explore Heidegger's general opinion of Marxism.     

Mental Health and Mental Disorder: A Sociological Approach,edited by Arnold M. Rose

This paper presents a model of group analysis based on Aristotle's causal notions. Aristotle's concept of man as a social animal provides a philosophical rationale for an interpersonal treatment forum. His causal theory supplies an encompassing atheoretical model for examining, understanding, and changing “things which have in themselves the source of their changing or staying unchanged.”

Attention to the four causal foci is suggested as the basis for a full-ranging group analysis. Material cause examines: “what” makes a thing what it is. Efficient cause investigates “how” various behaviors and emotions are set in motion. Final cause searches out “where” behavior is aimed. Formal cause traces “why” behaviors take particular forms.

It is suggested that a “cause for pause,” in the ongoing group process, is the emergence of a powerful and specifiable trend, whether a transference, poignant interaction, or groupwide conflict. The “pause to cause” is examined in detail, as each causal foci is elaborated. A sequential analysis moving from “what > how > where > why” is suggested at three levels of possible intervention: individual, interpersonal, and group as a whole. In conclusion, the timing, advantages, and restrictions of such a causal approach are considered.     

Slavoj Žižek and the Real Subject of Politics

Slavoj ?i?ek's refusal to sketch an alternative to the global liberal-capitalist order, combined with his claim that there is an urgent need for a repolitization of, most of all, the economy, raises the question of the possibility of radical political thought and action. Considering fundamentalisms and politically correct multiculturalism not as oppositional, but as correlative to the “depolitization” of post-modern societies, ?i?ek invokes the emancipatory legacy of Europe in an attempt to reinvent Marxism in a way similar to what Lenin, thrown into an open situation, had to do in 1917 between the revolutions. A single question confronts political philosophy today: is liberal-capitalist democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is it possible to open up the space for another political articulation? The key to a repolitization is to identify with the “symptom” of the existing global order's false claim to Universality, with the excluded “part of no part” who politicizes it's predicament by claiming to stand for the real universal. In order not to discard political struggle as “unrealistic”, today's cynical “realist” consensus must be broken. Taking things as they “really are” has become the dominant ideological mode that keeps people from thinking about alternatives. The remedy is to show that things never are “really” as they are.

     

Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics

Having lived through both World Wars, Jung was aware of the dangers of what he termed “psychic epidemics.” He discussed the spontaneous manifestation of an archetype within collective life as indicative of a critical time during which there is a serious risk of a destructive psychic epidemic.

?Currently, we appear to be experiencing a significant psychic epidemic that is manifesting as children and young people coming to believe that they are the opposite sex, and in some cases taking drastic measures to change their bodies. Of particular concern to the author is the number of teens and tweens suddenly coming out as transgender without a prior history of discomfort with their sex.

“Rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a new presentation of a condition that has not been well studied. Reports online indicate that a young person's coming out as transgender is often preceded by increased social media use and/or having one or more peers also come out as transgender. These factors suggest that social contagion may be contributing to the significant rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.

Current psychotherapeutic practice involves immediate affirmation of a young person's self-diagnosis, which often leads to support for social and even medical transition. Although this practice will likely help small numbers of children, there may also be many false positives.     

Maslow's Puzzle: A Reconfiguration

Abstract

A.H. Maslow (1963, 1993) characterized the “creative attitude” in ways such as giving up the past and future, loss of ego or self-forgetfulness, Taoistic receptivity, and innocence. He suggested that underlying these and related characteristics may be “certain prerequisites,” which he offered to us as a “puzzle.”

“Maslow's puzzle” may be considered in relation to what he regarded as a sine qua non of creativeness: “fusion of person and world.” The greater intimacy of such a relationship means that the individual has more fully extended self into that which lies beyond self, that is, into transpersonal realms or fields. A study of such fields, based on representations of fields in general, may provide a different insight into “Maslow's puzzle” and the enhanced creativity with which it is associated.     

The paradox of evolution

In the second (and expanded) version of Origin of the Species, Darwin introduces the term “advanced progressive development” in an attempt to describe the development of the more complex species from the simpler ones. More than 100 years have passed since Darwin tried to qualify and conceptualize the directional question of evolution, and very little progress has been made regarding the subject. The appearance of the species, from the simple to the more complex, is today an empirical fact, one which is no longer dependent upon any theory, including that of Darwin. This work examines the subject of advanced development in evolution by attempting to answer a few basic questions: What parameters may be used to evaluate complexity? Can any rules or order be identified as to the development of the species? Is the mechanism of “natural selection” sufficient to explain the direction or ‘purpose’ of evolution? Can the human race be included within the “rules” of Darwin's evolutionary theory?

The purpose of this essay is to develop and represent a new conceptual framework. Through this, it will be possible to offer a principle answer to all four questions.     

The uses of humor in life,neurosis and in psychotherapy: Part 1

Abstract

Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that “A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure” introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder.     

The Impossible Ideal: A Patient-Oriented Therapy

Abstract

Langan R. Proteus Reprised. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:45-49. Stockholm, ISSN 0803-706X.

Proteus was the mythical Greek sea-god able to change his shape at will. In the Odyssey, King Menelaos manages not to release his wrestler's hold on the mercurial trickster, and theory can, at last, return home. The myth has sundry and changing applications to the living experience of what goes on between patient and psychoanalyst. In one sense, the analyst's job is to be like Proteus, escaping the transferential grip whereby the patient tries to pin the analyst into characterological shapes of the past. In another sense, the patient is Proteus, and the analyst's job is to hold firmly to the process of future change, refusing to settle for one fixed version of selfhood. In yet another sense, both patient and analyst become Proteus, experiencing fluidly present senses of self as an inner subjective “I,” as an intimately relational “Thou” with “Thee,” and objectively, as one Other among others. Additionally, the myth insinuates within the psychoanalytic situation a potential transcendence of time.     

D. Z. Phillips and Wittgenstein's On Certainty

I start from Phillips' discussion of Rhees's dissatisfaction with the idea of a language‐game. Then, from a rereading of Moore, I go on to exemplify interconnected uses of the expressions “language‐game,”“recurrent procedure,”“world‐picture,”“formal procedure,”“agreement in judgment,”“genre picture” and “form of life.” The discussion is related to sense perception, our knowledge of time and space, and the picture‐theory. These topics connect with Wittgenstein's earlier treatment of the will – which changed markedly later. The subtext (in footnotes) confronts (i) the sceptical methods of Descartes and Hume with the grammatical methods of Leibniz, Kant and Wittgenstein, and (ii) the realism of Leibniz and the Tractatus with the transcendental idealism of Kant. My conclusion is that, although the method of Wittgenstein's later work remains in a sense grammatical, (i) in its new form it can free us from the conviction that the intellect can and must resolve one way or the other the conflicts that arise in the course of the latter confrontation, and that (ii), although release from such a conviction is to be seen as the aim of philosophical discourse in general, it allows philosophy to retain its overriding significance. A positive element in that lies in the respect the method demands for that in a human life which is transcendental to the activity of scientific theorising: respect, therefore, for the unique perspective of the individual historical agent.     

Review Essay: Constructivism with a Human Face

Irwin Hoffman's book Ritual and Spontaneity includes, but goes well beyond, his series of seminal papers—written over the past several decades—developing a psychoanalytic, constructivist perspective. A new, existential framework depicts what Hoffman calls the “psychobiological bedrock” at the core of the human process of constructing meaning—the lifelong effort to create a livable, subjective world in face of our ever present sense of loss, suffering, and, ultimately, mortality.

This review describes Hoffman's encompassing, existential perspective and discusses how, within this framework, he uses his dialectical sensibility to frame our understanding of both parenting and analysis as “semisacred” activities. The “dialectic of ritual and spontaneity”—the vital clash between disciplined adherence to the analytic frame and personally expressive deviations from it—represents the creative tension between the “magical” dimension of analytic authority and the healing influence of a genuinely expressive human relationship. Hoffman's perspective on the self-interested, “dark side” of the analytic relationship is compared with Winnicott's views on the vital, therapeutic role of “hate” and the paradoxical process by which the patient comes to “use” the analyst.

Unlike most postmodernist “constructivists,” Hoffman openly reveals his underlying belief in certain “transcultural, transhistorical universals”—his “psychobiological bedrock.” In acknowledging these “essentials” (assumptions about human nature) that in some form are integral, yet often hidden, elements of any system of thought, Hoffman saves his own dialectical constructivism from falling into dichotomous (constructivist vs. essentialist) thinking.     

Biomatrix: The web of life

Abstract

The interrelationship between all things on earth has long been accepted. It is known that we are part of a great, complex network of processes, sections of which extend to the small building blocks of our bodies. But how are the parts of this network connected together? Is there perhaps a simple overall pattern? We believe that there exists such a pattern which incorporates all living as well as lifeless matter on earth. We refer to this network as the “biomatrix” and define it as the “living network of all things on earth.”

There are units or elements composing the matrix. We call these doublets, within and around which essentially two types of processes, viz., endodynamic and exodynamic processes, take place. Endodynamic processes are those which are directed in purpose toward the components of the doublet in question. Exodynamic processes, on the other hand, are those which have purposes directed toward the greater doublets of which the doublet in question forms a part. All things, lifeless as well as living and organizational entities, from atoms to societies and the total ecosystem, can be thought of as doublets of the biomatrix.

The matrix is not a simple net, such as the fisherman's, in which all knots are the same and are placed alongside one another. The web of life on earth is complex. The connecting strands are processes, endodynamic or exodynamic, and the knots are the doublets. Although many doublets occur alongside one another, they also occur within one another in a “Chinese‐box hierarchy” fashion, viz., those of greater complexity generally enclosing the simpler ones.

A general scheme pertaining to the biomatrix is discussed and it is shown that for an optimally functioning system there must be a balance between the endodynamic and exodynamic processes relating to all doublets within the system.

It is hoped that our efforts will contribute to the evolution of a generally accepted systems framework for life on earth. It is important that such a framework be applicable to practical problems which confront us in everyday affairs.     

SECOND NATURE AND SPIRIT: HEGEL ON THE ROLE OF HABIT IN THE APPEARANCE OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Hegel's discussion of the concept of “habit” appears at a crucial point in his Encyclopedia system, namely, in the transition from the topic of “nature” to the topic of “spirit” (Geist): it is through habit that the subject both distinguishes itself from its various sensory states as an absolute unity (the I) and, at the same time, preserves those sensory states as the content of sensory consciousness. By calling habit a “second nature,” Hegel highlights the fact that incipient spirit retains a “moment” of the natural that marks a limitation compared to “pure thought” but that also makes perceptual consciousness possible. This makes Hegel's account analogous in important respects to John McDowell's “naturalism of second nature.” But Hegel's account of habit can be seen as a version of a Kantian synthesis of the productive imagination—and hence presupposes a given material that can become one's own by means of habit. This does not mean that Hegel falls into the Myth of the Given, but it does suggest that an appropriate account of second nature might be committed to something McDowell wants to deny: that nonconceptual states of consciousness play a role (even if not a justificatory role) in perception.     

Epistemology and School Counseling

Because a counselor's interactions with his clients should be an out-growth of his philosophical commitments, he must grapple with certain epistemological questions: (a) Can human beings know the extramental world or merely their own ideas? (b) Is human knowledge a valid representation of the extramental world? (c) Can human beings reach agreement about the nature of extramental realities? The counselor can assume two possible stances. First, there is the “realist” position which states that there is an extramental world, we can achieve valid knowledge of it, and the knowledge of various observers can agree. Second is the “phenomenalist” position: There is an extramental world, but no one can achieve valid knowledge of it, nor can various observers easily agree regarding its nature. The realist counselor should help his client perceive his problem situation as it “really” is and as it appears to others. The phenomenalist counselor cannot do this instead, he can only try to enter the client's subjectivity and to help him deepen and enrich his unique perception of the problem situation.     

Maternal representations: A clinical and subjective phenomenological view

The relationship — as represented — is proving to be of growing value in our thinking about clinical problems such as “intergenerational transfer.” It is also an extremely positive influence in our thinking about how the interpersonal world is remembered, abstracted, and lived. Yet, the nature of a “represented relationship” remains unclear. This paper is an attempt to clarify some of the problems and areas for needed study regarding this concept. The mother's representation of her infant and of the people in her own life who have played “maternal roles” will be taken as the model. First, we will explore the richness and complexity of these representations and conclude that, for clinical purposes, different models are used to simplify this richness and render it therapeutically useful. Three models will be discussed. The first is the disfortion model which measures the distance between the mother's subjective experience of her interaction or relationship with another and some objective, observable “reality.” The model of overdeter-mining themes is a second model, largely the inspiration of psychoanalysis but inclusive of Bowlby's theory of attachment. Here psychobiological and/or psychodynamic themes organize the clinical material. Finally, a coherence model is discussed. Here the motive is goodness of the narrative construction rather than the historical “truth.” A second issue discussed is the capacity to represent dyads vs. triads and actual vs. second-hand narrated relationships. These issues are crucial for notions not only about the nature of such representations but also their limitations in understanding family interactions and relationships, i.e., where many members are concerned. A third issue concerns the nature of the subjective experience for a mother when a representation of her infant or herself in relation to the infant is “activated.” There exists here an unknown typology of experience. Finally, we will discuss what all of the above have to contribute to our further understanding of the nature of represented relationships.     

Queer Persona and the Gay Gaze in Brokeback Mountain: Story and Film

Using Jungian and queer theory, this article examines the queer personas of Ennis and Jack, whose queer archetypes fit into a context that had not generally been thought to contain those archetypes. For perhaps the first time a major motion picture appealed to and depicted what Steven Drukman calls the “gay gaze.” Ennis and Jack conform to socially constructed gender roles (as “masculine,” married men), but they are essentially gay. The queer archetype they fit is that of likes: the double of Plato's Symposium, yet both are bereft of gay icons and supportive archetypal stories. Before Brokeback Mountain, never had a mainstream motion picture with such wide appeal directed gay men's attention to the frank love, and lovemaking, of two such nonstereotypically gay and attractive young men. When they first look each other over outside Joe Aguirre's office, Ennis and Jack are unknowingly objects of each other's gay gaze. As gazers, gay men can appreciate these two young men for who they are, not for whom we'd like them to be, as is the case in other mainstream movies. For once we and our sympathetic heterosexual sisters are bearers of the look. To gaze at images that reflect our “inner selves” is a powerful and profound experience, all the more so for its rarity among gay male viewers.