Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.     

Political and clinical developments in analytical psychology, 1972‐2014: subjectivity,equality and diversity—inside and outside the consulting room

Utilizing Jung's idea of theory as a ‘personal confession’, the author charts his own development as a theorist, establishing links between his personal history and his ideas. Such links include his relationship with both parents, his sexuality, his cultural heritage, and his fascination with Tricksters and with Hermes. There follows a substantial critical interrogation of what the author discerns as the two main lines of clinical theorizing in contemporary analytical psychotherapy: interpretation of transference‐countertransference, and the relational approach. His conclusion is that neither is superior to the other and neither is in fact adequate as a basis for clinical work. The focus then shifts to explore a range of political and social aspects of the clinical project of analytical psychology: economic inequality, diversity within the professional field, and Jung's controversial ideas about Jews and Africans. The author calls for an apology from the ‘Jungian community’ for remarks about Africans analogous to the apology already issued for remarks about Jews. The paper is dedicated to the author's friend Fred Plaut (1913‐2009).     

Another serious misunderstanding: Jung,Giegerich and a premature requiem

Barreto's paper, ‘Requiem for analytical psychology’ utilized Jung's dreams and visions to argue for the obsolescence of Jungian psychology. Its thesis rested upon the theoretical assumptions of Giegerich's psychology as a Discipline of Interiority, which he and Giegerich claim are themselves based in Jung's psychology. Here I argue that that claim is misplaced because it depends upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Jung's psychological project. I shall further argue that Giegerich's arguments for a Jungian basis to his psychology rely upon misreadings and decontextualisations of Jung's original texts. Finally, I shall attempt to draw attention to the weaknesses and contradictions involved in Barreto's interpretations of Jung's dreams and visions.     

Two in one or one in two? Pushing off from Jung with Wolfgang Giegerich

This paper responds to a recent paper by Wolfgang Giegerich entitled ‘Two Jungs: apropos a paper by Mark Saban’. Giegerich disputes my assertion that the ‘rigorous notion’ at the heart of his psychology ‘finds no source in Jung's psychology, implicit or explicit’. In order to do this he posits the existence of two Jungs, an exoteric Jung and an esoteric Jung. The implications of Giegerich's binary scission of Jung are explored in this paper, and show that the tendency to exalt one Jung while disparaging the other betrays a comprehensive blindness toward the contradictory complexity of Jung's psychology as a whole. It is suggested that this blindness is the consequence of Giegerich's systematic prioritization of a neo‐Hegelian agenda that is in profound conflict with the telos of Jung's psychology.     

African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the African Diaspora

Racism is defined as a psychopathology and the ground in which the covenant of whiteness is rooted and mirrored in the system of apartheid structured by American Constitutional Jurisprudence between 1857 and 1954. This historical period overshadowed Carl Jung's visit to America between 1909 and 1937. The spirit of the times and practices of racism coloured Jung's views, attitudes, and theories about African Americans, just as colonialism coloured his attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Consequently Jung failed to see the African Diaspora and the extraordinary intellectual and artistic period of the Harlem Renaissance (1919‐1929). Its introduction here foregrounds the exceptionalism of African Americans and the cultural continuity of African ancestry. This exceptionalism was not seen by Jung and there have been no attempts to redress its omission from analytical psychology and other sub‐disciplines of Western psychology. Jung's theories of personality and psychoanalysis and his negative projections about primitivism among Africans and African American ‘Negroes’ would have been mediated by knowledge of a legislated American apartheid and the Harlem Renaissance which occurred within the barriers of apartheid. In this paper I posit that culture, kinship libido, and the African principle of Ubuntu are healing modalities that play a critical role in instinct and the relational ground of human psychology and biology, from which culture as an environmental expression constellates around common goals of the human species. Cultural equivalencies and expressions within the wisdom traditions and mythologies of the Africa Diaspora are considered. Specifically, the Bantu principle of Ubuntu or ‘humanity’ is identified as the relational ground in African cultures, while the Kemetic‐Egyptian deity Maat, as an archetypal anima figure and the religio‐mythology offer a transcendent position from which to critique the inequities and constitutional jurisprudence that structured American apartheid. Maat is the personification of truth, justice, balance and weighing of the heart in orderly judicial processes. In her we find the alignment of the spirit and matter in the law and judgement. The paper concludes with reflections on pathways toward healing the psychopathology of racism and recommendations to enhance clinical training and practice.     

Reflections on the Jungian nature of psychology as the discipline of interiority: a response to Saban's ‘Misunderstandings’

Psychology as the discipline of interiority is the name of the psychology that has developed from Wolfgang Giegerich's work in the field of analytical psychology. This article offers a counterview to that of Mark Saban's claim that Giegerich's psychology is ‘irrelevant’ to Jungians today and is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Jungian psychology. It will be shown that, in fact, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Giegerich's work that has led Saban to form erroneous conclusions. Links between Jung's and Giegerich's conceptions of the ‘objective psyche’ will be highlighted, along with other examples of how, contrary to Saban's conclusions, psychology as the discipline of interiority has obvious connections to, and grounding in, Jungian psychology.     

Imaginal action: towards a Jungian conception of enactment,and an extraverted counterpart to active imagination

This theoretical paper considers the fashion in which Jung's psychology radically challenges modern assumptions concerning the nature of subjectivity. With an eye for the clinical implications of Jung's late work, the author introduces the idea of imaginal action. In order to explain what is meant by this, the paper begins by exploring how Jung's thinking demonstrates an underlying bias towards introversion. It is argued that while Jung's interest in synchronicity ultimately resulted in his developing a worldview that might address the introverted biases of his psychology, the clinical implications of this shift have not been sufficiently clarified. With reference to some short examples from experience, the author outlines a conception of relational synchronicity wherein the intrapsychic emerges non‐projectively within the interpersonal field itself. Comparing and contrasting these occurrences to the more introverted practice of active imagination, it is claimed that such a notion is implicit in Jung's work and is needed as a corrective to his emphasis on interiority. The author suggests that imaginal action might be conceived as a distinctly Jungian approach to the psychoanalytic notion of enactment. It is also shown how the idea outlined might find further support from recent developments in the field of transpersonal psychology.     

Outside‐In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or ‐ Knowing me,Knowing Jung – ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one‐sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the ‘inner life’ over the ‘outer’ can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on‐going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The ‘ambiguation’ of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.     

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.     

A revolution of the mind: some implications of George Hogenson's ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ (2001)

George Hogenson's 2001 paper ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ developed the radical argument that, if archetypes are emergent, they ‘do not exist in the sense that there is no place that the archetypes can be said to be’. In this paper, I show how Hogenson's thinking has been seminal to my own: it is not just archetypes but the mind itself that has no ‘place’. The mind is a dynamic system, emergent from the cultural environment of symbolic meanings to which humans are evolutionarily adapted. Drawing on the work of philosopher John Searle, I argue that symbols constitute the realities that they bring forth, including the imaginal realities of the psyche. The implications for clinical work include a rejection of structural models of the psyche in favour of the emergence of symbolic realities in the context of psychoanalysis as a distributed system of cognition.     

Bridging worlds: participatory thinking in Jungian context

Introducing the ‘participatory’ paradigm associated with the work of transpersonalists Richard Tarnas and Jorge Ferrer, the author outlines an approach to Jung's archetypal thinking that might offer a more adequate basis in which to ground a non‐reductive approach to practice. In order to demonstrate the relevance of this outlook at the present time, the author begins by examining recent debates concerning the nature of ‘truth’ in the clinical setting. Reflecting on the difficulties analysts face in attempting to maintain professional authority without falling into an implicit authoritarianism, it is argued that any approach to therapy seeking to orient itself towards ‘the unconscious’ must posit the challenges of pluralism as a central concern for practice. With reference to the relationship between analytical psychology and the psychoanalytic mainstream, attention is drawn to the theoretical problems raised by the relational commitment to constructivist epistemologies, and a consequent tendency towards biological reductionism. Turning to the Jungian literature, similar tensions are observed at play in the present state of analytical psychology. Drawing attention to the process‐oriented qualities of Jung's work, it is suggested that the speculative nature of Jung's psychology offers a more adequate basis for contemporary practice than might be assumed.     

Jung,Winnicott and the divided psyche

In his review of Memories Dreams Reflections, Winnicott diagnosed Jung as suffering from a psychic split, and characterized the content and the structure of analytical psychology as primarily moulded and conditioned by Jung's own defensive quest for a ‘self that he could call his own’. This pathologizing analysis continues to be endorsed by contemporary Jungian writers. In this paper I attempt to show that Winnicott's critique is fundamentally misguided because it derives from a psychoanalytic model of the psyche, a model that regards all dissociation as necessarily pathological. I argue that Jung's understanding of the psyche differs radically from this model, and further, that it conforms by and large to the kind of dissociative model that we find in the writings of Frederic Myers, William James and Theodor Flournoy. I conclude that a fruitful relationship between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology must depend upon an awareness of these important differences between the two psychic models.     

‘Who is my Jung?’ The progressive,though sometimes ambivalent,expansion of Jung's idea of the collective unconscious: from an ‘unconscious humanity’ to – in all but name – the soul of the world

This paper discusses Jung's idea of myth as a projection of the collective unconscious, suggesting that the term ‘projection’ separates human beings from nature, withdrawing nature's life into humanity. Jung's discovery of a realm independent of consciousness – in conversations with his soul in The Red Book, and in synchronicity, began a dialogue which finally brought him, through the Alchemical Mercurius, closer to the idea of a world‐soul.     

And the dish ran away with the spoon: a hodgepodge of reflections,as rigorous as they are rambling,on the true subject

In this article, the topic of ‘the true subject’ is explored in terms of a dialectical mode thinking which is in keeping with Jung's great insight concerning psychology's lack of an Archimedean vantage‐point distinct from its topics and subject matters. Evocative and expository, the emphasis is upon the performative poetics of such thinking within the sphere of our soul‐making. The interpretative mode of practice presented in the article is richly illustrated with examples from Biblical texts, literary images, and proverbial sayings, as well as from the sur‐real of nursery rhyme and the genre of the murder mystery. Essential insights of Jung's concerning the infinite and the finite as dimensions of self are revisited in terms of that contemporary trend of Jungian thought known as psychology as the discipline of interiority.     

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.     

The ethical dimension of analytical psychology

The centrality of the ethical dimension in Carl Gustav Jung's analytical psychology is demonstrated through careful reference to fundamental moments in the Jungian text. Tracking Jung's statements about the primacy of the ‘moral function’ (or ‘moral factor’) in the cure of neurosis as well as in the process of individuation, the ethical nature of the psychotherapeutic praxis proposed by Jung is highlighted. This allows us to see the ethical aspect of psychological conflicts, and thus to understand better why individuation can be seen as a ‘moral achievement’. Finally, the intelligible ethical structure of Jungian psychotherapeutic praxis is exposed.     

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.     

Revisioning Fordham's ‘Defences of the self’ in light of modern relational theory and contemporary neuroscience

This paper explores the evolution of Michael Fordham's ideas concerning ‘defences of the self’, including his application of this concept to a group of ‘difficult’ adult patients in his famous 1974 paper by the same name. After tracing the relevance of Fordham's ideas to my own discovery of a ‘self‐care system’ in the psychological material of early trauma patients (Kalsched 1996 ), I describe how Fordham's seminal notions might be revisioned in light of contemporary relational theory as well as early attachment theory and affective neuroscience. These revisionings involve an awareness that the severe woundings of early unremembered trauma are not transformable through interpretation but will inevitably be repeated in the transference, leading to mutual ‘enactments’ between the analytic partners and, hopefully, to a new outcome. A clinical example of one such mutual enactment between the author and his patient is provided. The paper concludes with reflections on the clinical implications of this difficult case and what it means to become a ‘real person’ to our patients. Finally, Jung's alchemical views on transference are shown to be useful analogies in our understanding of the necessary mutuality in the healing process with these patients.     

‘Thank God I’m not a Jungian’

This article focuses less on the content of Jung's ideas than on ways in which they act as both invitation and challenge to engage with psyche. It explores the mythic framework of Jung's approach and how this can enable individuals to live in psychological and mundane worlds in which there can be no final certainties. It elaborates three particular aspects of Jung's thinking that I have found personally valuable: his generosity of vision, his insistence that individuals engage for and with themselves rather than relying on someone else's ideas, and his ponderings on the relationship between the individual and the collective. All three aspects seem to be important elements of the work of individuation.