Jungian Analysts and African Diviners: An Exploration of the Archetype of the Self

This paper compares Jungian psychology and African indigenous healing practices through a theoretical review. It argues that while both practices express the shamanic archetype and facilitate the universal instinct towards wholeness, the expression of this differs. In Jungian psychology the archetype of the Self is projected onto the individual and the goal is a dialogue along the ego-Self axis, the patient ultimately coming to locate the shamanic archetype within his or her individual psyche. The working of the Self brings together the opposites of the psyche into individual consciousness. In indigenous healing practices, in keeping with the African worldview, the Self is projected onto the collective body, the ancestors as an extension of the living group, and the goal of healing is the restoration of wholeness through reintegration with the collective body. The implication is that good and evil are not brought together in the ancestors as a symbol of the Self, and evil is thus located outside the collective consciousness.     

Transforming and Redescribing Critical Thinking: Constructive Thinking

The author describes a published symposium which debated “Is Critical Thinking Biased?” The symposium meant to address concerns about critical thinking that are being expressed by feminist and postmodern scholars. However, through the author's critique, and the symposium respondent's, we learn the participants ended up begging the question of bias. The author maintains that the belief that critical thinking is “unbiased” is based on an assumption that knowers can be separated from what is known. She argues that critical thinking is a tool which has no life of its own, it only has meaning and purpose when fallible, biased people use it (weak sense bias). She challenges the idea of a transcendental epistemological perspective, thus all knowledge is provisional and perspectival (strong sense bias). The author begins to redescribe a transformed critical thinking as constructive thinking.     

A personal commentary on J.W. Perry,M.D., and introduction to ‘Reconstitutive process in the psychopathology of the Self’

John Weir Perry’s influence on the understanding of the psychotic process through his research in San Francisco between 1950 and 1981 was groundbreaking, because it both verified and expanded upon C.G. Jung’s research at the Burghölzli Hospital in Switzerland in the early 1900’s. The author explores both the brilliance of Perry’s contribution as a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst and also shows the flawed human, who, with his rare sensitivity to the psychotic process, devoted his life work to the schizophrenic population and their often ill-fated search for meaning. She tells how his creative engagement with the analytic processes of Self discovery eventually led to analytic boundary violations, which ultimately resulted in his indefinite suspension from membership in his local Jungian community. Further, this paper describes her reflections on the innovative work that influenced both the treatment of this population, as well as educating candidates in analytical training to be receptive to and cognizant of psychotic affects and imagery. The archetypal field of the psychotic process, its influence on the development of analytical psychology relative to the psychotic process, and one man’s impact on the analytic community are considered.     

The self in analysis

This paper develops a theoretical and clinical approach to the self which is non-essentialist and post-modem. Briefly, it offers a framework for theorizing Self based on hermeneutics and psychological constructivism. It then develops a critique of the essentialist Jungian theory of Self in which the Self is frequently described as a human subject with views, intentions and desires of its own. With this is background, a post-modern Jungian framework for Self is advanced, with a brief clinical account of the self in analysis.     

A Strange Fire: an exploration of psycho‐spiritual development aided by Jungian analysis and Vedanta

This paper explores the process of psychological and spiritual development through a series of active imaginations arising from the author's ‘psycho‐spiritual quest’, a process of transformation in which the individual progressively frees themselves from the ego's identifications and may be afforded a vision of the ‘self as consciousness’, as described by Vedanta. The author describes how this quest was facilitated by the disciplines of Transcendental Meditation, Jungian analysis and Vedanta, and how these three disciplines can work together to foster psycho‐spiritual development. The paper aims to de‐mystify the actual experiences that can accompany these practices. The records of these active imaginations, tracing some key stages in this process, are then presented, with a commentary by Marcus West, linking them to Jung's concepts of ego and Self and recent understandings of consciousness and ego development. There is a discussion of Jung's conceptualizations of the ego and the Self and his rejection of the Vedantic understanding of the Self as consciousness. These views are then explored and a reconciliation is suggested through the understanding of the process of disidentification where the difference between Jung's view of the Self and that of Vedanta is understood to be due to the extent of disidentification from the contents of consciousness.     

The Role of the Ego in Jungian Individuation and Yogacara Buddhism’s Enlightenment

This article explores the Buddhist and Jungian approaches to the role of the ego in overcoming the limited (for Jung) or illusive (for Buddhists) sense of self rooted in ego-consciousness. Even though both Buddhists and Jung turn to the unconscious (for Jung) or the subliminal consciousness (for Buddhists) to overcome the limitations of the ego, their approaches are radically different. The Jungian ego seems to work diligently in order to transcend itself, whereas Buddhists believe that we can bypass the ego’s participation, namely, its rational analysis and interpretation, and can directly access the subliminal consciousness, alaya. In other words, Buddhists see the ego itself as the problem, or obstacle, in the path to Enlightenment whereas Jung ends up relying upon the active ego’s intervention to become the full Self via individuation. Understanding this substantial difference will lead us to reappraise the reciprocal relationship between the ego and the subliminal mind in both the Jungian theory of individuation and Buddhist enlightenment.     

Marion Woodman: An Embodied Life

Marion Woodman, internationally recognized author and speaker, died in July 2018 at the age of 89, leaving a rich legacy. A distinguished Jungian analyst, she was a pioneer in applying Jung’s principles to eating disorders, addictions, and the body. The author reflects on key influences affecting Woodman’s journey with the Self, as well as her extension of Jung’s thoughts on the feminine and active imagination with the body. Marion’s life can be seen to fulfill Jung’s concept of the “experiment of one’s life,” and thus is an example of a new consciousness seeking to be born—especially in the realm of the long-repressed feminine. The BodySoul Rhythms? program became the culmination of Marion’s research and application of Jung’s understanding of the basic unity of psyche and soma. These embodied practices support the integration of both into consciousness and promote a deeper relationship with the Self.     

Faint voices from Greenwich Village: Jung's impact on the first American avant-garde

In 1913 Jung made a trip to New York which was to have an important impact on the creation of modern American culture. At the invitation of Beatrice Hinkle, the first Jungian analyst in the country, he spoke to the Liberal Club, a forum for discussing progressive topics. Jung was the leading spokesman for psychoanalysis and his ideas about creative fantasy resonated with popular interest in the ideas of William James and Henri Bergson. This paper will document that visit and the influence that Hinkle had on the young people who had gravitated to Greenwich Village. She promoted Jungian psychology through her analytical practice and her translation of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido as Psychology of the Unconscious. Her influence is evident in four key neighbourhood institutions: The Masses, a socialist magazine, The Seven Arts, an avant-garde literary magazine, the Provincetown Players theatre ensemble, and the Heterodoxy Club, America's first feminist group. Her influence is also evident at The New School where several pioneering anthropologists employed the theory of psychological types as a tool for understanding social behaviour. This paper will demonstrate that a cultural moment usually seen through a Freudian lens had, in fact, a remarkably Jungian character.     

Influences on my clinical practice and identity. Jungian analysis on the couch–what and where is the truth of it?

The author considers the various influences that have shaped his clinical practice and particular identity as a Jungian analyst. It is hoped that the sharing of these observations will, like a shard of a hologram, reflect aspects of the Jungian community as a whole. The author also attempts to put Jungian analysis ‘on the couch’ by looking at the current debate in the Journal between traditional and relational psychoanalysis. This is compared to the discourse that philosophy has been struggling with for centuries concerning the nature of truth.     

Photography as unconcealment: revisiting the idea of photographic transparency

What distinguishes photography from other visual mediums? This deceptively simple but fundamental question has been at the centre of both past and current debates on the aesthetics of photography for quite some time. In this article, I will first address the premise that this question is intrinsically ontological and unfolded in pioneering debates as a sequence of implications about photographic indexicality. I will then argue that the ontological implications of photographic indexicality have been largely overlooked in subsequent research due to scholars’ concerns with how photography appears to us rather than what photography is in itself. To this end, I will specifically examine Kendall Walton's highly contested transparency thesis and some of its rebuttals, which have exerted a sprawling influence on debates on the aesthetics of photography. I will also argue that, having been exceedingly implicit in his account, what appears as indexicality to Walton and the implications thereof with respect to the transparency argument has operated on a phenomenological level; thus, the thesis itself has failed in instances in which the problem of representation and the very existence of the medium come into play. Finally, I will suggest that indexicality can be regarded as a distinctive feature of photography only when it is considered a predicate of transparency as an interstice of ‘unconcealment’ in the Heideggerian sense that would call into question the very existence of the representation and the photographic medium.     

Jung in the academy: a response to David Tacey

It is argued that responsibility for academia's disdain for Jungian psychology needs to be accepted by the Jungian community to the extent that it remains unrelated to contemporary literature, academic concerns and modes of enquiry in the social sciences. Several illustrative examples are presented. Of special concern is that the most powerful marketing of the name of Jung comes from American publishing companies that produce New Age Jungian pop, which is, even in Jungian terms, theoretically weak and further damages the academic standing of Jung. Reasons for the relatively good standing of Jungian psychology in South Africa are discussed. Special mention is made of the contributions of Vera Buhrman and several other academics. It is argued, however, that the academic criticisms of Buhrman's cross-cultural writing have merit. In the current intellectual climate in South Africa, Jung's cultural essentialism is anachronistic, and to endorse it will be to forfeit credibility in South African academic circles. In contrast to Tacey it is argued that academic excellence is not to be equated with dispassionate, liberal objectivity and balance. Instead, I argue for the cultural and epistemological importance of our complexes, and for the transformative personal and intellectual significance of falling in love with Jung. This defence of the complexity of knowing and thinking leads into a discussion of the tricksterlike strategies involved in successfully teaching Jungian psychology, for both the sceptical intellectual elite and the star-struck Jungian lovers need to be seduced into richer, more informed thought. It is concluded that the tensions between analytical psychology and related fields in the social sciences need to be more centrally integrated into the Jungian field itself.     

Abracadabra Tongue: Poetry Magic

The author has known that poetry is magic since she was a child. However when she sat down to write about it she went blank, confronted by the taboo against magic in our rationalistic culture. In the way of Jungian magic she is helped by dream figures. The Muslim Solomon takes her on a flying carpet journey which reveals the magic of poetic influence: how Hafiz influenced Goethe influenced Lorca influenced her, which is how Persian mysticism found its way into her poetry. She tells the story of her development as a poet, how she learned fermentation magic—the difficult and often painful process required by poetic vision and revision in which grapes must be crushed, favorite phrases and metaphors must be ruthlessly smashed. The Queen of Sheba, another dream figure, shows up to tell her version of the story of her relationship with Solomon. She reveals the dark, fierce, and lusty lineage of her “old black magic” and how it has made its way into the author's poetry.     

Integrity and the Value of an Integrated Self

What is integrity and why is it valuable? One account of the nature of integrity, proposed by John Cottingham amongst others, is The Integrated Self View. On this account integrity is a formal relation of coherence between various aspects of a person. One problem that has been raised against this account is that it isn’t obvious that it can account for the value of integrity. In this paper I will respond to this problem by providing an account of the value of an integrated self. I will do so by first looking closely at two examples from literature: John Sassal in John Berger’s A Fortunate Man and Tetrius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Based on my comparison of these two case studies I will argue that an integrated self is valuable as it makes people more likely to act in line with their moral judgements.     

Ambiguity and contradiction: the outlines of Jung’s dialectics

This essay explores Jung’s thinking strategies, argumentation patterns, and concept formation processes, and reveals how they distinguish his work from normal present‐day science. Jung doesn’t much appreciate the law of noncontradiction, which is a cornerstone of classical logic, and he doesn’t refrain from using openly ambiguous theoretical terms. It will be pointed out that not only specific archetypes, but the notion of archetype itself, as well as other of Jung’s theoretical notions (energy, including libidinal energy, polarity, integration, wholeness, instinct, symbol, and so on), are consciously ambiguous and thus potentially contradictory. It is shown that this kind of dialectic research strategy and related contradiction‐tolerant and ambiguity‐tolerant methods connect his work to Post‐Kantian German Idealism, Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophy in particular. However, it was Hegel who, in his Science of Logic, presented a systematic overview of such dialectic principles of reasoning, which were, in the 19^th century, widely applied by German philosophers, theologians, and other scholars. Unfortunately, Jung decided not to study Hegel, but, instead, wrote derogatorily of his work. It will be argued that a Jungian who wants to be conscious of her own argumentation strategies and methods of concept formation should study Hegel’s complex and sophisticated dialectical logic. In addition, it is suggested that Jungian depth psychology might help us to amend the phenomenological deficits of Hegel’s system by providing it with a primal experiential source. This is needed because Hegel’s Geist, due to its intellectual emphasis, is a self‐conscious conceptual totality which advances progressively from stage to stage by guiding itself with the help of dialectical reason (Vernunft). It will be shown that if enriched with a proper kind of experiential givenness, which includes the Jungian unconsciousness (with libidinal energy, instincts, and archetypes), Hegelian metaphysics would be able to embrace a seriously aconceptual or preconceptual dimension. Aconceptual experience, which is, for Jung, mainly the instinctual layer of archetypes, remains essentially inaccessible, not only for normal scientific concepts, but for the concepts of any form of dialectics as well.     

Consent's Been Framed: When Framing Effects Invalidate Consent and How to Validate It Again

In this article I will argue first that if ignorance poses a problem for valid consent in medical contexts then framing effects do too, and second that the problem posed by framing effects can be solved by eliminating those effects. My position is thus a mean between two mistaken extremes. At one mistaken extreme, framing effects are so trivial that they never impinge on the moral force of consent. This is as mistaken as thinking that ignorance is so trivial that it never impinges on the moral force of consent. At the other mistaken extreme, framing effects are so serious that their existence shows that consent has no independent moral force. This is as mistaken as the idea that ignorance is so serious that its existence shows that consent has no independent moral force. I will argue that, instead of endorsing either of these mistaken extreme views, we should instead endorse a moderate view according to which framing effects sometimes pose a serious challenge for the validity of consent, just as ignorance does, but one which we can solve by eliminating the effect, just as we can solve the problem of ignorance by eliminating it.     

John Buridan on the Possibility of Defining Definition

The study of the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics has largely been oriented toward debates on dialectical argumentation. And this is surely right. Nonetheless, I wish to approach John Buridan’s commentary on the Topics from another perspective, which highlights some semantic features of the set of predicates around which the work is organized. Thus, in my paper I will first reconstruct Buridan’s account of the identification of the predicates discussed in the Topics. I will argue that, for him, they are different in that they reflect one or more features of the way in which definiens and definiendum relate. By doing this, I will shed light on the role the notion of definition plays in Buridan’s commentary, so that an interpretation of it as a work on definition becomes promising. In the second part of the paper, I will offer an analysis of Buridan’s first move in his commentary toward a theory of definition. It concerns the problem of whether there is a definition of definition. In examining Buridan’s answer, I will argue for the close connection between his treatment of definitions and his theory of supposition, so that distinctions among the different modes of supposition help him to disambiguate statements in their possible meanings, and thus to clarify the difficulty related to the definability of definition.     

“Jung Has Always Seemed Like an Old Friend”: An Encounter with Claire Dunne

This article provides an account of a visit with the author of a very popular Jungian book, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, in which the interviewer relates his conversation with Claire Dunne about her relationship with Jung and how she got involved in Jungian psychology. She also discusses the workshops she has done around the world and the fascinating dreams she has had of Jung.     

Jung and White and the God of terrible double aspect

This paper discusses theoretical, historical and personal issues in the ill-fated friendship and intellectual collaboration between C.G. Jung and the Dominican scholar Victor White, O.P., based on primary documents in their correspondence, 1945 to 1960. The collaboration of Jung and White began with high expectations but fell into painful disagreements about the nature of God, the problem of evil, and shadow aspects of the Self. They made a rapid commitment to their working alliance based on personal and professional hopes, but paying scant attention to their divergent underlying assumptions. White hoped to build theoretical and practical connections between Jungian psychology and Catholic theology for the sake of modern Catholics. Jung needed learned theological support as he explored the psychological meanings of Christian symbols, including the central symbol of Christ. At the grandest level, they both hoped to transform the Christian West, after the moral disaster of World War II. Their collaboration was risky for both men, especially for White in his career as a Dominican, and it led to considerable suffering. The Self is prominent in the relationship, symbolically present in the text of the correspondence and consciously forming their major topic of debate. From the start, the Self is an archetypal field, drawing the friends into their visionary task at the risk of unconscious inflation. Later the Self is revealed with its shadow as a burden, a puzzle, and a basis for estrangement. Finally, with the intervention of feminine wisdom, mortal suffering is transformed by an attitude of conscious sacrifice.     

Between the frontier and the network: Notes for a metapsychology of freedom2

The author examines the paradigm of the frontier and encounters the establishment of the paradigm of the network, a tendency that currently runs through diverse fields of thought. The network is not proposed as a globalising structure that would neutralise what is different, but as integration based on preservation of what is plural and its transformations. The author moves between these two paradigms in psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical practice. The concept of frontier is intrinsic to the entire theory: repression, which separates the unconscious from the preconscious, the barrier against stimuli, the delimitation of spaces and agencies. But psychoanalysis is also a precursor of the paradigm of the network, with its concepts of unconscious, free association and evenly suspended attention. She points out that it is psychoanalysis that, in the area of scientific thought, subverts the radical split between subjects and their objects of observation, through the concepts of transference and countertransference, thus inaugurating a revolutionary theory of knowledge. This perspective can later be seen as a forerunner of changes in other disciplines. This text legitimises the contribution of psychoanalysis to thinking and knowledge, as well as the potential of a therapeutic method that provides the tools for crossing frontiers, unknotting and weaving networks, operating in the face of risks of pathological consolidations, thus holding to its unavoidable commitment to freedom.     

African Dreamers and Healers

The author spent five summers in South Africa, doing a cross-cultural study of the indigenous healers among the Zulus in Natal Province, near Durban. She compared the indigenous healers, the isangomas, with a second and seemingly evolving group of healers in the Zulu culture, called prophets. The prophets are connected with a powerful, breakaway Christian movement in South Africa and other parts of Africa that is known as the African Independent Churches or AIC. In this article she shares the conclusions of her research and her comparison of the ways the Zulu healers interpret and value dreams and how Jungian analysts might interpret similar dreams. She sought to identify and understand how the Zulu god-image might be in flux as the Zulu culture is changing in response to other cultures, in particular, the more powerful Western European culture with its advanced technology. Relying on Edward Edinger's conceptualization of the consequences of the destruction of the god-image, she concludes that, in this case, instead of the “cup being broken,” it could be that the “cup is changing its shape.”