The landscapes of minus. Hatred,adolescence and the paradoxes of growth

This paper explores Bion’s theory of links, L, H, K (Love, Hate and Knowledge) and their minus counterparts, -L, -H, -K, which are not conceivable as simply opposite to or as a lack of L, H, K. Rather, they correspond to a way of experiencing Love, Hatred and Knowledge in terms of absoluteness, and in terms of a radical impossibility of acknowledging loss, relativeness and absence. The theory of links is also examined in its evolution towards the conceptualization of three types of container/contained configurations (commensal, symbiotic and parasitic). These Bionian models are compared and referred to the way Jung articulates the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the paradoxical nature of mental functioning in relation to the individuation process. The images taken from the Rosarium Philosophorum, particularly the Fons Mercurialis, examined by Jung in ‘The psychology of the transference’ (1946), are explored in the paper. Theory is examined with a particular focus on the adolescent mind and its dramatic phenomenology. Two excerpts taken from the analytic work with a mid-adolescent female patient and a late-adolescent male patient are presented to describe minus-Hate as a form of absolute love, and minus-Love as a form of absolute hatred.     

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.     

Winnicott's invitation to ‘further games of Jung‐analysis’

Winnicott signs off his celebrated review of Jung's (1963) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the warning that translation of ‘erreichten’ as ‘attained’ (implying assimilation) rather than as ‘reached to’, could ‘queer the pitch for further games of Jung‐analysis’. This subtly underscores his view that Jung—who he described earlier as ‘mentally split’ and lacking ‘a self with which to know’—remained essentially dissociated. However, Winnicott, whilst immersed in this work on Jung, wrote a letter to Michael Fordham describing himself as suffering ‘a lifelong malady’ of ‘dissociation’. But this he now reported repaired through a ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction, dreamt ‘for Jung, and for some of my patients, as well as for myself’ (Winnicott 1989, p. 228). Winnicott's recurrent concern during his last decade was with ‘reaching to’—that quintessential Winnicottian term—some reparative experience that could address such difficulties in constellating a ‘unit self’. This is correlated with his engagement with Jung and tracked through his contemporaneous clinical work, particularly ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1963). Themes first introduced by Sedgwick (2008) and developed by the author's earlier ‘Winnicott on Jung; destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious’ (2011) are given further consideration.     

Sabina Spielrein: out from the shadow of Jung and Freud

Abstract: Since the 1982 publication of Aldo Carotenuto's book, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud, there has been renewed interest in the life and work of Sabina Spielrein. She was Jung's first psychoanalytic case at the Burghölzli Hospital in 1904, and was referred to several times in The Freud/Jung Letters. Spielrein recovered, enrolled in medical school, and went on to become a Freudian analyst. Her most famous paper, published in 1912, ‘Destruction as a cause of coming into being’, was referred to by Freud in 1920 in relation to his Death Instinct theory. In the few Freudian publications on this controversial theory since 1920, Spielrein's contribution is consistently omitted. Jung also neglected to refer to her ‘Destruction’ paper in his early 1912 version of ‘Symbols of transformation’, even though he had edited her paper and had promised to acknowledge her contribution. He did refer extensively to Spielrein's first paper, her medical thesis, ‘On the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia’, published in 1911, as yet unpublished in English. In her paper Spielrein sought to understand the psychotic delusions of Frau M, a patient at the Burghölzli, much in the style of Jung's ‘Psychology of dementia praecox’ (1907). The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent Spielrein's Frau M paper, and its companion ‘Destruction’ paper, make an original contribution to both Jung and Freud's emerging theories on the possible creative versus destructive outcomes of neurotic or psychotic introversion, culminating in Jung's concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ (1916) and Freud's concept of a ‘Death instinct’ (1920).     

Constructing the collective unconscious

Abstract: Innovative attempts at collating Jungian analytical psychology with a range of ‘post‐modern’ theories have yielded significant results. This paper adopts an alternative strategy: a Lacanian vantage point on Jungian theory that eschews an attempt at reconciling Jung with post‐structuralism. A focused Lacanian gaze on Jung will establish an irreducible tension between Jung's view of archetypes as factors immanent to the psyche and a Lacanian critique that lays bare the contingent structures and mechanisms of their constitution, unveiling the supposed archetypes’a posteriori production through the efficacy of a discursive field. Theories of ideology developed in the wake of Lacan provide a powerful methodological tool allowing to bring this distinction into focus. An assembly of Lacan's fragmentary accounts of Jung will be supplemented with an approach to Jungian theory via ?i?ek's Lacan‐oriented theory of the signifying mechanism underpinning ‘ideology’. Accordingly, the Jungian archetype of the self, which is considered in some depth, can begin to be seen in a new light, namely as a ‘master signifier’, not only of Jung's academic edifice, but also —and initially—of the discursive strategies that establish his own subjectivity. A discussion of Jung's approach to mythology reveals how the ‘quilting point’ of his discourse comes to be coupled with a correlate in the Real, a non‐discursive ‘sublime object’ conferring upon archetypes their fascinating aura.     

Freedom and the psychoanalytic ontology of quantum physics

Jung's paper ‘Synchronicity – an acausal connecting principle’, defining the phenomenon as a ‘meaningful’ coincidence depending on archetypal activation, was published in 1952, together with a conceptually related piece by physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli entitled, ‘The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler’. Slavoj ?i?ek, in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, suggests that, in contrast to any notion of a ‘pre‐modern Jungian harmony’, the main lesson of quantum physics was that not only was the psychoanalytic, empty subject of the signifier constitutively out‐of‐joint with respect to the world, but that the Real in itself was already incomplete, out‐of‐joint, ‘not‐all’. Yet while ?i?ek frequently tries to separate Jung from his own ontology, this paper shows that his ontology is not as different as he suggests. Consistent with our earlier publications on Jung and Zizek, a closer investigation reveals an underlying congruence of both of their approaches. In this paper we show that this affinity lies in the rejection by both Jung and ?i?ek of the ideology of reductive materialism, a rejection that demonstrably draws on quantum physics in similar ways. While Jung posits an inherently meaningful universe, ?i?ek attempts to salvage the freedom of human subjectivity by opposing his Lacanian ‘dialectical materialism’ to reductive materialism.     

A serious misunderstanding: synchronicity and the generation of meaning

Abstract: This paper points to the problem caused by the fact that numerous academic ‘Jung studies’ are conducted on the basis of the English translation of Jung's works without any knowledge of his original texts and illustrates it with the misconstrual that Jung's concept of synchronicity suffered in the studies of many recent authors, as exemplified by two articles in the September 2011 issue of the JAP. The translation of ‘sinngemäße Koinzidenz’ as ‘meaningful coincidence’ seduced those writers to take synchronistic ‘meaning’ as meaning the meaningfulness of life or even as ‘transcendent meaning’, which is incompatible with Jung's synchronicity concept, and to replace Jung's strictly intellectual project of establishing an explanatory principle for synchronistic events (in addition to the principle of causality for all other events) by the fundamentally different project of focusing on the impact that such events may have for the experiencing subjective mind, on ‘human meaning‐making’, and, with a decidedly anti‐intellectual bias, of hoping for ‘shifts into non‐rational states of mind’.     

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.     

From Freudian narcissism to the Buddhist notion of anatman,via Jung's idea of identity

Starting from the question the youthful Carl Gustav pondered as he sat on ‘his’ stone – ‘Am I he who sits on the stone, or am I the stone on which he sits?’ – the author has attempted to show that, for Jung, the idea of identity is founded on a wilful non‐determination. This stance results in ethical and methodological repercussions that differentiate it both from the Freudian project and from Hindu and Buddhist thought, while at the same time having much in common with them. The paper refers to the notions of emergence and (Varela et al. 1992) enaction 2 2 According to the Wikipedia entry, the introduction of the term ‘enaction’ is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1992), who proposed the name to ‘emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre‐given world by a pre‐given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’.
and argues that the concept of the archetype, especially in relation to the self, merits a re‐evaluation in light of the new scientific paradigm.     

Journal Reviews

Astor , J. (London). ‘A conversation with Dr Michael Fordham.’Journal of Child Psychotherapy Astor , J. (London). ‘Adolescent states of mind found in patients of different ages seen in analysis.’Journal of Child Psychotherapy Blomeyer , R. (Berlin) ‘Der Umgang des Analytikers mit der Analyse’ (The interrelationship between the analyst and the analysis). Analytische Psychologie Blomeyer , Rudolf (Berlin). ‘Analytische Psychologie und Ich-Psychologie’. (Analytical Psychology and Ego-Psychology). Analytical Psychology Rudolf Blomeyer . ‘Anmerkungen zur Typologie’ (Comment on typology). Analytische Psychologie Corbett , L. Kugler , P. ‘The self in Jung and Kohut’ in Progress in self Psychology Dehing , J. ‘Jung aus der Sicht der anderen: anlässlich einiger Kritiken von Seiten der Freudianer.’ (Jung as others see him: some Freudian criticisms.) Analytische Psychologie Erlenmeyer , A. ‘Das kannabalische Phantasma—eine Annäherung’ (Cannibalistic fantasy—an appraisal). Analytische Psychologie Giera -Krapp , Margitta (Berlin). ‘Constellation of the good/bad mother archetype in the treatment of early disturbances.’Analytische Psychologie Lyard , D. (Paris). ‘Le corps et la “redonne” archetypique de l'adolescence.’ (The body and archetypal rebirth in adolescence) in Cahiers jungiens de psychanalyse Noschis , K. (Geneva). ‘La maison du jour et de la nuit’ (The house by day and by night). Le Journal des Psychologues “Le langage de notre intérieur” (The language of our interior). Les Cahiers Médicosociaux Erenest L. Rossi . ‘Mind Body Therapy: methods of ideodynamic healing in hypnosis.’ Norton Professional Books. New York. Samuels , A. (London). ‘Pluralism and the post-Jungians: A reply to Peter Bishop.’ Spring. Samuels , Andrew . (London). ‘A relation called father—Part I: The father in depth psychology.’British Journal of Psychotherapy Steinberg , Warren . (New York). ‘The Fear of Success’. Quadrant Thibaudier , Vivane (Paris). ‘La notion de Grande Mère dans l'optique Jungienne’Cahiers Jungiens de Psychanalyse     

Alchemy and the erotic transference: A Jungian approach

Abstract

In The Psychology of the Transference Jung showed a series of pictures which he discovered in an ancient alchemical text, the Rosarium philosophorum. He connected these to the effects of the transference in psychotherapy. This may seem an unnecessarily obscure way of looking at the transference, yet it makes remarkable sense. Although alchemy is often considered the sole province of Jungian analysis, it can also be seen as illuminating a psychodynamic approach to counselling. Written from a post-feminist viewpoint, a critical approach is taken to certain key Jungian terms. The paper is illustrated with two clinical examples.     

The philosophy of the Yijing and Jungian analytical psychology: a comparative study

The Yijing (Book of Changes) occupied a very significant position in C.G. Jung’s mind, which was closely related to Richard Wilhelm’s active recommendation and introduction of the Yijing wisdom. Inspired by the Yijing, Jung set forth the ‘principle of synchronicity’, by which scholars tend to discuss the relationship between Yijing and Jungian psychology. In fact, Jungian analytical psychology conceives in-depth onto-cosmological connotations corresponding to the philosophy of the Yijing. The terms invented or employed by Jung such as ‘archetype’, ‘Self’, ‘individuation’, ‘mandala,’ ‘anima and animus’, ‘persona and shadow’ are interrelated with the connotations of Taiji (Supreme Ultimate) (○) and liang yi (two-mode) () in the Yijing philosophy. A comparative study of the two disciplines can help us gain a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of both, and further improve the exchanges of Eastern and Western cultures.     

Recurrent motifs as resonant attractor states in the narrative field: a testable model of archetype

At the most basic level, archetypes represented Jung's attempt to explain the phenomenon of recurrent myths and folktale motifs (Jung 1956, 1959, para. 99). But the archetype remains controversial as an explanation of recurrent motifs, as the existence of recurrent motifs does not prove that archetypes exist. Thus, the challenge for contemporary archetype theory is not merely to demonstrate that recurrent motifs exist, since that is not disputed, but to demonstrate that archetypes exist and cause recurrent motifs. The present paper proposes a new model which is unlike others in that it postulates how the archetype creates resonant motifs. This model necessarily clarifies and adapts some of Jung's seminal ideas on archetype in order to provide a working framework grounded in contemporary practice and methodologies. For the first time, a model of archetype is proposed that can be validated on empirical, rather than theoretical grounds. This is achieved by linking the archetype to the hard data of recurrent motifs rather than academic trends in other fields.     

Jung's reflections on self-healing

Not long before his death on July 17, 1998, Edward Edinger asked me to draw together a book of quotations by Jung on religious themes. Edinger's image was that of a thin, leather-covered book containing spiritual uplift and consolation, that one might carry around in a pocket or purse: a “vademecum” or “enchiridion,” as he termed it. It was a project he had begun by collecting quotations from Jung's Answer to Job and Letters. Always fond of “giving the last word to Jung,” he then employed those quotes to conclude Transformation of the God-Image and The New God-Image, respectively. But he lacked the energy, he confessed, to complete this project

The Vademecum which, I hope, resembles what Edinger had in mind-is now nearly complete. It is tentatively entitled, Jung on Soul: Quotations on Religious Themes. The following excerpted chapter is entitled “On Self-Healing.” The other topical divisions are: First Principles; The Inner Life; Consciousness; Good and Evil; The Paradoxical God-Image; Individuation; Continuing Incarnation; Psychology and Christianity; Old Age, Death and Beyond; Community, Society, Culture; Civilization in Crisis; Love and Sex; Parents and Children; Healing; Analyst and Patient; C. G. Jung: Personal; and From Jung's Answer to Job.     

A reappraisal of classical archetype theory and its implications for theory and practice

Abstract: This paper begins with an overview of contemporary approaches to archetype theory and notes the radical nature of certain deductions. Some argue that there is no ‘archetype‐as‐such’ as a pre‐existing entity at the core of a complex driving its formation whilst the findings of current neuroscience are calling into question one very thing on which the classical theory is built – innatism. Knox's argument for image schemas raises the question as to the extent to which archetypes can be conceived in any preformationist sense. The question is then posed – to what extent can Jung's classical theory of archetypes be read in light of these current models? The case examples Jung uses to evidence the existence of archetypes, his explications of synchronicity and his own Philemon experience are then reappraised. The conclusion is drawn that it is difficult to evidence the existence of autonomous archetypes unrelated to personal affective experience. Not only would this be expected by emergent/developmental models of archetype but it can explain many of Jung's disjunctive statements about archetype constellation; the difficulties in separating personal and collective psychic content and Jung's apparent Lamarckianism. The implications of these models for theory, clinical practice and analyst training are then offered for discussion.     

From Gegenstand to Gegenstehenlassen: On the Meanings of Objectivity in Heidegger and Hegel

ABSTRACT

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of (the presence of) the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the being of beings in terms of the objectivity of the object. In this paper, I trace Heidegger’s analyses of objectivity, through which Heidegger consistently establishes objectivity as non-primordial and derivative. In order to do this, however, Heidegger had to identify a specific, narrow (spatio-temporalized) conception of objectivity (in terms of Gegenstehenlassen and Vorstellen) as the hallmark of modern philosophy. I show that it is unclear whether that conception is a justified result or rather an unjustified presupposition of his approach. I then suggest what meanings of objectivity might be lost after Heidegger, by pointing to several aspects of Hegel’s notion of objectivity that are incompatible with Heidegger’s account, to wit: the lack of ‘subject-object’-terminology in his definitions of objectivity; the special language of ‘forms of’ objectivity; Hegel’s critique of representation; his notion of Gegenstand as a content with a categorical form, and, finally, that Aristotle’s notion of hypokeimenon might provide a clue as to how Hegel’s notion of object can be understood.     

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.     

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)