C. G. Jung in the Humanities

Taking the Soul's Path

Susan Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367439279
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000763744
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book demonstrates for the first time the significance of Jung's work to the humanities, and to those areas where the humanities and sciences share borders. More radically, it shows that Jung was a writer of myth, alchemy, narrative, and poetics, as well as on them.

Jung's core concepts are introduced, their ongoing relevance is championed. The book also addresses Jung's sometimes questionable judgment on politics and gender, and previews contemporary extensions of Jungian theory.

By privileging the creative psyche and exploring the connections between individual, natural environment, and social/psychological collective, Jung anticipates the new holism, offering the promise of reconciling the sciences with the arts, humanity with nature.

1

Getting Started with Jung

All key terms used in this chapter are written in bold and additional definitions can be found in the Glossary.

Why You Should Read this Book

C. G. Jung in the Humanities: Taking the Soul’s Path offers a new way of looking at the twenty-first century. It does so in three broad directions that take Jung and the humanities into different territory.

In the first place, whereas Jung is usually considered a writer about the imagination, myth, symbolism, poetics, literature, etc., this book shows him also as a writer of the imagination, myth, symbolism, poetics, and literature. Jung is a creative writer; an artist of the soul.

The second direction concerns the question of why Jung wrote as he did. Most people came to him for therapy because nothing in their lives seemed to have meaning. On a bigger scale, in a time directly touched by two world wars, Jung believed modern warfare, characterized by barbed wire and poison gas, to be the consequence of a psychological crisis. Jung held that the modern Western world was sick because it had excluded so much that seemed “other.” So Jung as a writer tries to address the long marginalization of this psychic Other, summoning into his texts what has haunted modernity as “the feminine,” the body, nature, myth, and the unconscious. His works become spaces where the human sciences, the humanities, find a new breath of being.

Finally, to read Jung is to witness a great quest to heal modernity by re-balancing the founding myths of consciousness. Western modernity was built upon a Christian religion that privileges separation, duality, and rationality as the expression of a Sky Father myth. Here, God is male because he separates himself from his “other,” an Other who comes to represent the feminine and ultimately “Nature” (as created by him). Made first, “man” models himself upon God as transcendent and separate; woman is made from from him, and so is culturally Other.

In such a myth, consciousness is structured on a model of rationality through division and exclusion, as I shall show. This myth has dominated modernity, mainly by suppressing an older myth based upon Nature herself as sacred. The Earth Mother is a Goddess, but not exclusively female because she contains all potentialities within her fertile body. She gives birth to women and men, offering consciousness based upon eros, body, and connection. While Christianity managed to retain a few elements of the Earth Mother myth in the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, the two equally necessary founding myths became severely unbalanced. As a consequence, the planet is being depleted, and epidemics of psychological distress rage on.

The humanities are one of the few spaces where Earth Mother qualities of relating and being are able to grow. In the arts, in symbolism, in new material forms of culture like film, in the growth of ecology and more Earth-centered forms of knowledge, Jung’s efforts to wrench modern life away from one-sidedness echo loudly. C. G. Jung in the Humanities is about the rebirth of psychic life. It explores how his work renews the humanities and liberates the true nature of their creations as “creatures” inhabiting the human soul.

Jung and this Book

What is distinctive about C.G. Jung is that he took seriously the way our minds do not always make sense and our inner being is not always under our control. One way to represent this realization is to divide mental being, the psyche, into a conscious or knowable aspect, and an unconscious or unpredictable and partly unknowable realm. Jung devoted his life as therapist, writer, and cultural analyst to the consequences of accepting this mystery in ourselves.

Like Sigmund Freud, Jung developed a way of working with individual patients that he called (to distinguish it from Freudian psycho-analysis) “analytical psychology.” Yet Jung’s importance today also resides in his daring and experimental researches in culture, religion, science, and philosophy. This book will look at Jung’s thinking in the context of modern debates about the self and society. It will place Jung’s work in relation to the humanities, the arts, developing ideas of myth, changing scientific paradigms, and our connection to nature and the cosmos. For Jung’s quest into the unknown part of the human being may open up a better road into the future.

Chapter 1 is devoted to exploring the theories of Jung about our psychological lives. For Jung, theory is not simply a matter of abstract intellectual forms making a satisfying picture of the mind; part of what is unique and valuable in Jungian psychology is his sense of the peculiarities inherent in studying the mental realm. He realized that psychology is a special discipline in that the object of knowledge, the psyche, is also the means of knowledge. The investigating tool is turned upon itself. Hence Jung’s admission of the “personal factor” in making meaning.

Conditioning the personal are the cultural patterns that impinge both creatively and restrictively upon the individual. Jung’s decision to make the cultural aspect of modern life a significant source for his work will be considered in Chapter 2. For now we might take note of Jung accepting the personal and subjective within his practice, which is marked by his distinction of two types of unconscious: the personal, pertaining to an individual’s repressed material organized through the Oedipus complex (see below for Oedipus complex); and the collective, containing the inherited deposits of meaning-making from the history of humankind. This characteristic pivot between personal and collective is enshrined in the different metaphors used to frame the Jungian psyche: map, model, quest, myth, etc.

Before discussing these theoretical concerns, a dip into Jung’s early career will reveal something of the doctor as experimental researcher.

Early Years: Experiments in Word Association

In December 1900, C.G. Jung, newly qualified as a physician, began work at the famous Burghölzli Mental Hospital, under the direction of Dr. Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939). Jung soon became involved in the first research to earn him professional recognition: word association experiments conducted with Franz Riklin, Sr.² Starting with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “free association,” in which the investigator offered words to the patient who responded as they wished, the procedure was refined to using one hundred words pre-selected for possible reactions. The subject was instructed not to free associate. Instead, he or she was to offer only the first word that came to mind in response.

Jung and Riklin made their own modification, focusing on the disturbances that erupted in the smooth running of the test. They discovered that the “difficulties” could be grouped by their origins in something upsetting, either in the patient’s conscious life or repressed and unknown to the everyday self. Together with Riklin, Jung called these repressions “complexes,” whether resulting from known or unknown distress.

The professional research atmosphere of the Burghölzli would not, for Jung, prove a barrier to the development of personal complications. In 1904, for example, Jung began to treat a young Russian woman, Sabina Spielrein. Although she left the hospital the following year, she and the now-married Jung continued a passionate relationship until she gained her medical degree and left the area in 1911. In 1905, when Jung’s wife, Emma, became distressed by his interest in women patients, he asked her to take the word association test. Unsurprisingly, it showed the anxieties of a married woman who has become pregnant just when she wanted to be free to be more active in her husband’s life, leaving her role as Jung’s assistant to be filled by Sabina Spielrein and later by another ex-patient, Toni Wolff.

In January 1907, Jung himself took the word association test. Having turned the glass on the researcher, not only Jung’s personal life but also his unknown life became part of the terrain of Jungian psychology. Crucially, Jung revealed tensions over money and over the possibility of divorce, as well as strong sexual excitement that seemed to point to Sabina Spielrein.³ This sense of Jung as marked by an inner feminine figure who was not his wife is later inscribed in his theory as the anima, a psychic or dream character corresponding to the inner feminine soul of a man.

In his autobiography, composed with Aniela Jaffe, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,⁴ Jung describes his discovery of the unconscious, beginning with visionary experiences in childhood. Part of his unique gift was to be able to reconcile the personal, the occult, and the culture of hospital research in a way that offered coherence to the modern man. Perhaps his lapses into misogyny on gender issues (see Chapter 6) are mitigated by his revelation of the power of the feminine: “She” is a creative force so independent and willful that it defeats his rationalizing theory about her.

The Importance of the Unconscious in Jungian Psychology

Jung’s word association test as his own subject shows the conscious mind overwhelmed by an “unconscious feminine” associated with an actual woman. From such early experiments, Jung came to regard the unconscious as of defining importance to the psyche.

According to Jung, the word or concept unconscious has no essential content. We can know nothing certain about it. Statements about the unconscious cannot be tested for truth, Jung asserts.⁵ Indeed, if the unconscious exists, it is not only unknowable in itself, it undermines all other secure forms of knowledge. For if we have this unknowable space, this mysterious energy living inside, then how can we be sure that we know anything else? After all, we cannot be sure what effect the unconscious is having on how our minds work and our criteria for truth.⁶

Of course, in order to propose that the unconscious undermines rational certainty in knowledge of all kinds, Jung had to first of all establish its influence. If the unconscious is a small dull spot in the mind then it will not possess the hypnotic powers affecting personality, ideas, and culture that Jung attributes to it. So for Jung, the unconscious is autonomous—it has agency and even designs upon the conscious part of being.⁷ Moreover, the unconscious is creative in its own right.⁸ It uses this creativity to lure consciousness into an ongoing relationship, as I shall show.

With all its inexhaustible fertility, the unconscious refuses to be limited by definitions. So it provides no “unifying principle,” no point of origin or goal like those by which other intellectual disciplines can be ranked.⁹ Unlike the Freudian unconscious, the Jungian unconscious neither privileges sexuality, nor science, nor art, nor history, nor biological evolution as the most authentic knowledge. The unconscious is always a creative challenge to what we know, not a means of reinforcing it.

Finally, the unconscious makes a demand upon writing. How is it possible to write of something that is unknowable, yet everywhere a living reality, a pulsing shaping energy behind the known world? How is it possible to evoke the quality of dreams (those visitors from the unconscious) in psychology, which is by definition psyche-logos, words of psyche? What Jung does in the face of this impossible task is to incorporate multiplicity into his writing. His work both respects boundaries and overleaps them. He invites the unconscious figures in the psyche to “in-spirit,” that is, to inspire his pen. He also looks outwards into his world, and invites ghosts of the psyche from the past to spin him a tale.

Roger Brooke, who has written expertly on Jung and phenomenology, describes his development of terminology this way:

Jung’s language—shadow, anima, soul, spirit, puer, the great mother, trickster, and hero—and his use of alchemical and mythic imagery are explicitly an attempt to speak a psychological language not yet torn from its prerenaissance experiential roots.¹⁰

I am arguing that not only in developing specialized terms (anima, shadow, etc.; see below), but in the very texture of the writing, Jung invokes and makes a home for unconscious creativity. In 1933, he published a book of essays in English, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Within the space of two pages he offers two metaphors for understanding the unconscious: it is a two-million-year-old human being; no, it is an endless sea of flowing images.¹¹ To write about the psyche as a mystery entails both a failure of language and, for Jung, an artistic departure into the subtle realm of metaphors.

Ultimately, Jung’s writing offers an attempt to enlist the ungovernable energies of the psyche to make a viable framework for healing. Healing is addressed to himself, his patients, and even society. A framework in this sense is a metaphor that impacts upon the psyche: how you approach the mixture of unconscious and conscious energies affects what you see. After all, the organ of perception is also the matter that is perceived.

Jung’s metaphors, frameworks, and conceptual terms such as anima, shadow, etc., are part of the struggle of language to represent an unrepresentable psyche, metaphors that both represent and shape psychic reality. So Jung’s language retains metaphoric status in its acknowledgement of the essential mystery. Among Jung’s favorite metaphorical frameworks are notions of map, model, quest, and the alchemical “work against nature.”

Jungian Psychology as a Map

A spatial metaphor for the inner world is common, and indeed hard to give up as my use of “inner world” indicates. The term psyche stands for the entire extent of the phenome...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Getting Started with Jung
• Chapter 2 Jung the Writer on Psychotherapy and Culture
• Chapter 3 Jung for Literature, Art, and Film
• Chapter 4 Myth and History
• Chapter 5 Jung and Science, Alchemy, and Religion
• Chapter 6 Jung and Power: Politics and Gender
• Chapter 7 Jung in the Twenty-First Century: Fishing at the Gates of Hell
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index