Jung's psychoid concept and Bion's proto‐mental concept: a comparison

Jung and Bion both developed theoretical concepts propounding a deeply unknowable area of the psyche in which body and mind are undifferentiated and the individual has no distinct identity, from which a differentiated consciousness arises. In Jung's case, this is enshrined in his psychoid concept and the associated notion of synchronicity and, in Bion's case, in his proto‐mental concept and his ideas on group dynamics. It is by means of these two concepts that Jung and Bion approach and locate a combined body‐mind, a monism, in which body and mind are seen as different aspects of the same thing. This paper reviews the claim that although the two concepts are associated clinically with very different situations, their commonality may arise from a similar intellectual basis: both men appear to have been influenced by the same source of vitalist ideas in philosophy including Henri Bergson, and Jung's ideas also exerted a direct influence on Bion.     

Why bion? Why jung? For that matter, why freud?

Bion and Jung share both a significant disjunction from reflecting on personal experience, and a commitment to connecting with a higher truth outside of personal experience; in this they contrast with the Freudian standpoint that fully engages with reflecting on personal experience, and that considers efforts to connect to a higher truth as themselves usefully thought about in terms of their personal meaning. In these aspects of their work, Bion and Jung strongly endorse a romantic and communal approach to experience, whereas Freud essentially integrates the romantic and communal with the classical and agentic.     

Bion und C.G. Jung

This paper investigates the possible impact of C.G. Jung’s Tavistock Lectures on Bion’s concept of the living container. In the first part of the paper the author argues for clues pointing to such an essential impact, by means of text passages as well as the facts of the Bion-Beckett case, up to and including issues of Bion’s first publication The imaginary twin. The second part investigates the fate of the assumed cryptomnesia. From this point of view Bion’s concept of the container appears to be the result of growth in the container-contained mode. Finally the author deals with the question whether cryptomnesia in psychoanalytical literature can frequently be seen as the result of psychic growth.     

Group process in Jungian analytic training and institute life

Group process experience for analytic candidates is a neglected dimension of training, and receives little attention in the analytic literature. Jung observed group dynamics, but he never studied them closely, attending instead to the psychology of the individual. Unconscious currents in small groups have been studied by others, most notably by Wilfred Bion, and there are similarities between his theories of the group unconscious and Jung's theories of complexes. Experiential and didactic seminars in group process were added to the analytic curriculum at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in the early 1990s, leading to changes in the group dynamic of trainees and analysts alike. A discussion of the theories of Bion and Jung are followed by a report on our experiences of facilitating group process for analytic candidates. We give quotes from candidates and analyst members to illustrate the group process and its effects. The need for further study to develop a uniquely Jungian perspective on the unconscious structure and dynamics of the group is suggested.     

Philosophical assumptions in Freud, Jung and Bion: questions of causality

The historical development of concepts of causality in philosophy is described. Since the Enlightenment and the growth of science, exponents of the two most important concepts, determinism and teleology, have been in conflict. At the inception of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century this conflict was particularly intense. It was the cause of the first major schism in psychoanalysis between Jung and Freud. Psychoanalytic theorists have continued to disagree over this issue. Post-modernist philosophy has abolished all metaphysics and therefore called into question concepts of psychic causality. Parallel to, but uninfluenced by this development, Bion has developed a psychoanalytic conceptualization which may be seen as transcending causality. The clinical and theoretical implications of these developments are described.     

Vision, Interpretation, and the Interactive Field

Interpretation is discussed relative to ways in which an analyst sees the material in question. Michael Fordham's approach to projective identification and 'defences of the self' is criticised and contrasted with one that orientates in 'third areas' between analyst and analysand. Through clinical material, these different approaches are discussed. The works of Jung and Bion are related, and Fordham's approach to interpretation is seen as originating from a vertex K, in particular his concept of childhood, in distinction to the vertex O which is the orientating position for processes in the third area. It is argued that in Fordham's approach O is saturated, that K does not evolve from O, and, furthermore, that his examples demonstrate that, contrary to what he says, in his activity he does not eschew memory, desire, and knowledge.     

The five functions of psychological type

From the mid‐1930s to the end of his life, Jung complained that most readers misunderstood the main point of his book Psychological Types. He viewed being a type as one‐sided and problematic for a variety of reasons. His symbol‐based solution to the ‘type problem’ involved developing a transcendent function to become the new dominant function of consciousness. However, this function has not featured in the popular use of his typology and Isabel Briggs Myers believed that the one‐sidedness of Jung's eight types could be balanced by the auxiliary function. This has led to the transcendent function being widely ignored, and to a developmental philosophy that encourages a degree of one‐sidedness. This divergence of popular type theory and analytical psychology is the result of various factors, such as Jung describing typology as containing four functions, and a letter in 1950 where Jung apparently supported Myers’ version of type theory. This hinders the application of analytical psychology to normal psychology, and particularly individual and cultural development. If we refer to Jung's typology as containing five functions not four, this more accurately represents both the content of the book Psychological Types and the primary value Jung saw in typology.     

Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room

This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS?D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.     

C. G. Jung and the Shaman''s Vision

Implications for Modern Analysis and Psychotherapy. After this rather wide-ranging journey reviewing the shamanic archetype with Jung as its centre, we come back to the question of what all this means for the present age. We are now into the second generation as followers of Jung in terms of the movement that has developed bearing his name. It is clear that the original founder, himself, performed the functions of a primitive shaman by the influence he has exerted on a culture and its power to deal with the elements of healing and curing. He has fused science and religion, or the rational and the irrational or mystical, in a remarkable synthesis. However, there is now much questioning in Jungian circles, as the initial light and power emanating from his personality are on the wane and as those who knew him are beginning to pass on, as to what is the meaning of the movement he represented. What we see emerging are the development of different approaches to treatment and to the healing process. At present, it could be said that there are eclectic or modern Jungians who function basically through dreams, treat relationship in a symbolic way and practise the paradigm of teacher and pupil. There are the priestly Jungians who might be considered 'classical' Jungians who have almost ritualistically tried to recreate what he represented, even bringing in the Swiss cultural background. They evoke the numinous and archetypal in the healing process much as priests do. There are the medical Jungians who have fused psychoanalysis with other traditions, such as Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Langs, Kohut and others, who express Jung and the healing process in technical, scientific terms. There are, finally, those few who might be called the 'true Jungians', who differ from other Jungians inasmuch as they, like Jung, function as shamans in the therapeutic process dealing directly with the patient's illness in order to produce a transformational healing experience. The great difficulty is that there are few analysts who can be shamans and work as Jung did. Shamanism, as the literature reveals, is a dangerous occupation and few can survive it for a long period of time, hence the natural tendency is to function in one of the other three larger categories and cross integrations.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

C. G. Jung and intuition: from the mindscape of the paranormal to the heart of psychology

Intuition is central in the work, practice, and philosophical legacy of C. G. Jung. In this paper, I will first discuss the importance of intuition for Jung in the paradigm usually designated the ‘paranormal’. Jung was attracted to intuition as an extra‐ordinary gift or function in the traditional sense, and this is considered here in relation to his 1896‐1899 Zofingia Lectures and 1902 On the Psychology and Pathology of So‐called Occult Phenomena: A Psychiatric Study. A significant development then occurred in 1913, when esotericist intuitions were turned toward psychological use with Jung's Red Book. There, his personal and private use of intuition – and we know how extraordinarily intuitive he was – led Jung to fully incorporate intuition at the core of his psychology. Not only in his practice, in the crucial intuitive form of empathy, but as we will see, also at the very heart of his theory. In 1921, Jung wrote Psychological Types, where intuition became one – the first – of the four fundamental functions and types of the psyche next to thinking, feeling, and sensation. In 1921, Jung proved to the world in rational argument that intuition was no longer a psychologist's hobby for table turning, but the most significant function of the psyche.     

Symmetric frenzy and catastrophic change: A consideration of primitive mental states in the wake of Bion and Matte Blanco

The author explores the connections between Matte Blanco's notion of symmetric frenzy, i.e. the turbulence characteristic of the deepest levels of mental functioning, and Bion's concept of catastrophic change. For Bion, mental links are retrieved from the formless darkness of infinity. With catastrophic change, emotional violence and the confining nature of representation come into conflict, leaving the subject prey to an explosiveness that paralyses mental resources. Matte Blanco identifies indivisibility as the abyss in which all differentiation ceases; he bases his model on the conflict between symmetry and asymmetry. Infinity, he maintains, is where the first forms of mentalization develop. Both Bion and Matte Blanco emphasize the contrast between the immensity of mental space and the spatio-temporal order introduced by the activation of thinking functions. The author presents clinical material from the analysis of a psychotic patient, stressing the need to encourage both working through the defect of thinking (Bion) and 'unfolding' manifestations of symmetry (Matte Blanco) so as to foster the activation of the resources of thought, meanwhile postponing transference interpretation. He concludes with two later sessions, in which recognition of the analyst in the transference allows the analysand to develop his capacity for containment and asymmetric differentiation.     

Jung's Lament

This article has two premises. First, that depth psychology is more an art than a science, and second, that expanding imagination is the primary method of therapy. Both Jung and Freud considered themselves scientists, yet both had ambivalent relationships with artists and writers. Freud was given the Goethe award for literature and never the Nobel Prize for medicine, whereas Jung was confronted by both his anima and Herbert Read concerning his devaluation of his own artistic direction as well as of modern art generally. I am proposing through the article's fictional style, that in this age of evidenced-based medicine, we, as therapists, have much more to learn from writers and their fictional stories than from the abstract fantasies of science. I believe we have made an error in our field by turning so completely to developmental theories and object-relation theorists for our method. Jung hinted as early as 1916, in his paper “The Transcendent Function,” that there was a way of engaging the soul directly and allowing its voice and character to emerge. I am proposing that if we truly believe that the psyche is autonomous, then all therapy should be an encounter with “the other.” If this were the case, then active imagination could be developed as a wider and more inclusive method.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

―Sigmund Freud     

The White–Jung Friendship: The Untold Story

For decades Jung searched in vain for a theologian with whom he could deeply and openly converse about his new vision of Christianity. Only very late in his life did he find and form a deep friendship with Victor White, a Dominican theology professor, whose own psychic life was saved by Jung's teachings. Jung saw White as the first theologian he had met who truly understood his psychology. Jung wanted to use White's expertise in Catholic theology in his pioneering efforts to transform Christianity, through his psychology, into a living, breathing, vital faith in the divine. For his part, White wanted to resuscitate Thomistic theology by infusing its dry, cerebral character with the emotional vitality of the original Thomas Aquinas by using his newly discovered Jungian teachings combined with some of the original teachings of Aquinas. In the process of their work together, Jung and White became close, trusting friends. However, White was pushed beyond the limits of his psychological resources by political events within his order, whose superiors destroyed his career as a theologian and sent him into exile. In his scathing review of Answer to Job, White displaced his anger/rage onto Jung instead of the appropriate objects. This attack wounded their friendship deeply, and it was only toward the end of their lives that a partial reconciliation was possible. And yet, Jung's friendship with White was perhaps the closest and most trusting relationship he had with a man during his lifetime. Finally, I suggest that White's mission in this life was to resuscitate Thomism rather than help Jung achieve his purposes, and that White achieved his mission.     

The timeliness and timelessness of the 'archaic': analytical psychology, 'primordial' thought, synchronicity

In 1930 Jung gave a lecture entitled 'Archaic Man' to the Lesezirkel in Hottingen. Following recent work on this text by two commentators, this article uses their interpretations as a springboard for a complementary reading, which emphasizes the fundamental significance of this paper as bridging the earlier and later stages in the development of analytical psychology, and examines closely the opposition between 'archaic'-'modern' in Jung's paper; indeed, in his work as a whole. In contrast to Lévy-Bruhl, Jung rejects the label of 'mysticism' as applied to the 'primitive' point of view, and his anti-mystical stance can be explained in terms of his dialectical conception of the relationship between Self and World. On this account, the subject and the object--the psyche and the external world--are more closely (inter)related than conventional (modern) epistemology and ontology generally believe. This conception of the relation between the subjective and the objective foreshadows his later, and controversial, concept of synchronicity, which is, Jung insists, a way of apprehending the world in terms of its meaning. Concluding with a survey of the status of the 'primordial' in some other texts by Jung, this article aims to foster further debate on one of Jung's most complex and fascinating texts.     

Hiding in plain sight: Jung,astrology, and the psychology of the unconscious

Astrology was a lifelong interest for C.G. Jung and an important aid in his formulation of psyche and psychic process. Archetypally configured, astrology provided Jung an objective means to a fuller understanding of the analysand's true nature and unique individuation journey. Jung credits astrology with helping to unlock the mystery of alchemy and in so doing providing the symbol language necessary for deciphering the historically remote cosmology of Gnosticism. Astrology also aided Jung's work on synchronicity. Despite astrology's worth to Jung's development of analytical psychology, its fundamental role in guiding his discoveries is all but absent from historical notice. The astrological natal chart seems rarely used clinically, and many clinicians seem unaware of its value as a dynamic diagram of the personality and the potentialities within which nature and nurture foster and/or discourage for individual growth and development over the lifespan. This paper charts Jung's interest in astrology and suggests why his great regard for it and other paranormal or occult practices remains largely neglected and unknown.     

Desiring (With) Bion: An Experience in Reading

This article considers my experience of reading Wilfred R. Bion’s book Learning from experience (1962) and how transference operates in and around his work. I argue that Bion’s work cannot simply be read but must be felt. I highlight the importance of Learning from experience for psychoanalytic practitioners becoming more self-reflexive about our theoretical and clinical practices, but also to bring attention to the process through which many of us come to Bion’s insights “first hand” if you like, which is through his writings, in our position as readers.     

Opicinus de Canistris: some notes from Jung's unpublished Eranos Seminar on the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993

Abstract: Jung held an informal seminar for a limited number of students after the end of the Eranos Conference in August, 1943. All traces of this seminar were lost until the notes taken on it by one of the students, Alwine von Keller, were found in 2006. Jung's talk consisted of a psychological commentary on a series of images in the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, attributed to Opicinus de Canistris (1296‐c.1352), a fourteenth‐century Italian clergyman, mystic, miniaturist, and cartographer. Jung interpreted Opicinus’ images as a series of mandalas in which the Shadow, the dark principle, does not manage to be integrated into a balanced system. Opicinus tried to settle this division into opposites, which constitutes the main problem in modern times, while remaining inside the system of Christian doctrine. However, he did not succeed in his attempt to integrate the principle of the Shadow on the doctrinal level because he was not aware of the very same division in his own unconscious. Our article points out the features in the seminar where Jung seemed to show much more originality in his interpretation than other psychoanalytic studies on Opicinus or other analytical‐psychological readings of medieval Christian art.     

Jung and Gnosticism

Carl Jung interprets Gnosticism the way he interprets alchemy: as a hoary counterpart to his analytical psychology. As interpreted by Jung, Gnostic myths describe a seemingly outward, if also inward, process which is in fact an entirely inward, psychological one. The Gnostic progression from sheer bodily existence to the rediscovery of the immaterial spark trapped in the body and the reunion of that spark with the immaterial godhead symbolize the Jungian progression from sheer ego consciousness to the rediscovery of the unconscious within the mind and the integration of the ego with the unconscious to forge the self. For Jung, Gnostics are the ancient counterpart to present-day Jungian patients. Both constitute a psychological elite. Where most persons are satisfied with traditional means of connecting themselves to their unconscious, Gnostics and Jungians are sensi tive to the demise of those means and are seeking new ones. Where, alternatively, most other persons are oblivious to the existence of the unconscious altogether, Gnostics and Jungians are preoccupied with it. Gnostics project their unconscious onto the cosmos and are therefore striving to connect themselves to something external, not just, like Jungians, to something internal. Interpreting in Jungian terms the Gnostic myth Poimandres, I argue that Jungian psychology makes enormous sense of the myth, but not in the way that Jung envisions. Upon rediscovering his spark, the Gnostic seeks to reject his body altogether rather than to mesh the two. He does strive to reunite with the godhead, but the godhead is immateriality itself rather than, like the body, matter. Indeed, the godhead, taken psychologically, is only a projection of the unconscious onto the cosmos, so that the unconscious is thereby reuniting with itself. The Gnostic's uncompromising rejection of the body and, more, of the whole material world therefore symbolizes not, as Jung assumes, the Jungian ideal of wholeness but the Jungian nemesis of inflation or, worse, psychosis. I suggest that Jung misconstrues Gnosticism because he parallels it to alchemy, which does fit the Jungian ideal.     

Aristotle's ontogenesis: a theory of individuation which integrates the classical and developmental perspectives

The effects of the classical/developmental split in analytical psychology are described. No underlying issues explaining the nature of the split have been clearly enunciated. The schools can, however, be distinguished by their differing epistemologies. These are the hermeneutic and transcendental branches of phenomenology. The use of these epistemologies leads their proponents to either an immanent or transcendent concept of the divine, respectively. The theoretical break between Freud and Jung can, in part, be attributed to their espousal of determinism and teleology, respectively. This conflict has been continued in analytical psychology with the developmentalists most often advocating determinism, and the classicists usually championing teleology. The dissimilar causal theories lead to different concepts of the nature of individuation. Aristotle's fourfold theory of causality, of which determinism and teleology are two categories, can be seen to be an ontogenic theory rather than a classification of causal influences. Applying his theory to the process of individuation provides an ontogenesis that more accurately describes the process itself, and unifies the developmental and classical theories. Intimations of this formulation in Jung's work are described. More explicit conceptions of this idea in the work of two contemporary analytical psychologists and that of Wilfred Bion are also presented.