Jung and Sociological Theory

Readings and Appraisal

Gavin Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138688735
• eBook ISBN: 9781134970292
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Carl Jung has always lain at the edge of sociology's consciousness, despite the existence of a long-established Freudian tradition. Yet, over the years, a small number of sociological writers have considered Jung; one or two Jungian writers have considered sociology. The range of perspectives is quite wide: Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Levi-Strauss, feminism, mass society, postmodernism. These scattered writings, however, have had little cumulative impact and inspired little debate. The authors seem often not to have known of each other, while the sociological mainstream has remained unmoved or unaware.

This is the situation that this book seeks to change. Jung and Sociological Theory brings together a selection of articles and excerpts in a single volume, together with some writings from anthropology, and seeks to begin the task of critical evaluation. Presented in three parts, the book covers anthropology, sociology and an appraisal of Jung and sociological theory. Gavin Walker explores the relationship between Jung and sociology, asking what the writers included here wanted from Jung, how we should locate Jung on the sociological landscape, and how this might link to anthropology. In conclusion he suggests that sociology's problem with Jung is less that he is difficult to place, than that he compels sociology to face some of its own inconsistencies and evasions.

Jung and Sociological Theory will be of interest to all academics and students working in the fields of Jungian studies, analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, feminism, comparative religion and the history of ideas.

1
INTRODUCTION

Jung and the sociocultural sciences

Jung, sociology and anthropology

It is strange, this matter of sociology and Jung. Freud has an assured place in the sociological repertoire going back to the 1930s. Freudian theory is used in association with a range of sociological approaches: functionalism, Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, feminism. It is invariably a component in overarching theory, whether from the left or the right. Many sociologists are unconvinced by Freudian theory, of course. But no-one questions its legitimacy as a sociological resource – or tries to use any other psychology. And “psychoanalysis” – rather than psychodynamic theory – has come to be used as the generic term. It is treated as sui generis and unique.

Yet everyone knows that this is not true. Jung created a psychology that has the same scope and range as Freud’s and yet is structured quite differently. Sociology has made no attempt to explore this. It has neither engaged Jung directly nor considered his disagreements and differences with Freud to see what implications they might have for sociology’s use of Freudian theory. It is not a question of Jung being considered and rejected. He has not been considered. Sociology has always known about Jung, but has never done anything about him.

There are a few, however, who have done something. A scattering of articles has appeared in the journals since the 1970s. There have even been two or three books, and an unknown number of unpublished theses and dissertations. They come from a range of perspectives, but there has been little debate among the authors; often they seem not to have known of each other. Mostly it is not the major sociology journals that they have appeared in, and the sociological mainstream has either not known or taken no notice.

This book brings together a selection of these writings. It also includes some from anthropology; anthropology did at one time concern itself with Jung, especially American anthropology between the two World Wars. I have not tried to deal with more recent anthropology; that would be better undertaken by an anthropologist. However, the boundaries between the two disciplines are impossible to police or even define, and some of the authors included here have focused on Lévi-Strauss.

What do I expect this to achieve? Let me make it clear first that I would reject any ideas of overarching theory. The Freudian tradition in sociology has often taken this form, and that might be assumed to create a presumption that the introduction of Jung now would follow the same course. But I do not think so. Indeed, I would argue that sociology’s ventures with overarching theory have been a costly error: the forced closure of theory when the portfolio of primary enquiries was still incomplete has been damaging, even paralysing, for fields such as environmental sociology or gender. In any case, it is anthropology not psychodynamic theory that is the real problem for overarching theory (Parsons, 1964: 236–7; cf. Kroeber, 1952a: esp. part V, 160–4). Again, it would be premature to speak of recovering a lost Jungian tradition. There will be no “tradition” until these authors start arguing with each other. That is something I would like to bring about, of course. But perhaps the most important issue is that the whole question of the relations between psychodynamic theory and sociological theory should become more clear if we can see them from another angle. This is not just a question of the differences between Freud and Jung, but also the probability that they have different affinities and disaffinities with the different approaches and parameters in sociological theory. In the last section of this book, I try to begin the discussion of these matters.

It is tempting to ask why sociology has ignored Jung. But it may not be a straightforward question. For one thing, it is not only Jung. Psychodynamic theory after its long development through the nineteenth century produced four great classical theorists: Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung (Ellenberger, 1994). If Freud became the only one of these four that sociology considered, perhaps it is this rather than the neglect of Jung that needs to be explained. Then, anthropology did not do quite the same as sociology. Anthropology discovered, or at least committed itself to, psychodynamic theory a decade or more before sociology did, straight after World War I; and it did not limit itself to Freud – Totem and Taboo was off-putting to say the least. In Britain, this did not last; there was a turn away from psychology of all kinds in the 1930s. In America, however, there was rather a turn away from Jung and towards Freud at the end of the 1930s (see e.g. Stocking, ed. 1986; Mead, 1972: 216–22). These matters will be discussed again below. But if sociology missed a window of opportunity in the interwar years, even so, the directions it took at that time came under radical questioning in the 1960s and 70s. Could there not have been a rediscovery of Jung as a part of this? Indeed to an extent this seems to have happened; the scattered articles referred to above reflect it. But why was there no reappraisal in the mainstream? The more so as sociology is such a heterogeneous discipline. Of course you can say that Jung was not considered because his work was so obviously flawed – but, obvious to everyone, from whatever position, and without ever examining it? And what about Janet and Adler?

An enquiry into all this would be very interesting, and I return to it in later discussions.

One might comment, however, that the marginalization of Jung is not limited to sociology, though sociology may have taken it to the extreme. But he has also been somewhat on the margins in psychology and psychiatry. A range of reasons contribute to this:

a.Jung’s insistence that schizophrenia is a psychogenic rather than an organically caused condition, and that it is amenable to psychotherapy (Jung, 1960: esp. 256–71). The dispute between organicist and psychodynamic psychiatry is of long standing, of course, but since World War II the balance has swung very much towards medical psychiatry, and even where psychotherapy is given a role, schizophrenia is thought to be beyond its reach (Stone, 1998).

b.Psychology went through a very scientistic phase, say in the 1940s and ’50s, especially in Britain and America. Jung’s conceptions – the archetypes and the collective unconscious – then were predictably rejected as metaphysics. The theories of Lorenz and Piaget were rejected in just the same way. But things have changed since then – not least in view of Chomsky’s theories of language acquisition.

c.Jung’s attitude towards religion: positive, but not in terms the churches approve. This has left Jung identified with the occult fringe – though of course there is something to say about this (Tiryakian, 1974). One might note here that religion rather dropped off the radar both for sociology and anthropology from about the 1920s to the 1960s; so Jung was, so to speak, a man out of time.

d.The break with Freud: this still resonates now with incredible bitterness.

e.There is controversy over Jung’s activities during the Nazi era – this synergises with the previous point.

As against this, the marginalization of Jung in psychology was never total. The typology extravert/introvert has entered the canon, and some psychology textbooks at least discuss Jungian personality theory beside that of Freud (e.g. Gross, 2010: 677–9). And while an account of Freud is mandatory there, the discussions are often highly critical. On the other hand, more should probably be made in the textbooks of the relation between Jungian psychology and Lorenzian ethology (Evans, 1975: 57–9; Shamdasani, 2003: 256–8).

In this book, two “Jungian episodes” are considered. The first is centred in American anthropology in the interwar years. The second, more international, is centred in sociology since the 1970s. It might be worthwhile then to give a brief preview of some of the similarities and differences between them. What did these writers want from Jung or think they could get from him?

First, their situations are different. American anthropology after the First World War was a small, tightly integrated intellectual community (Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001: chs 3 & 4 passim; articles in Silverman, ed. 1981; Stocking, ed. 1986, 1996). It was an empirical science, with a strong fieldwork tradition and a distrust of armchair anthropology and speculative theory – this includes Durkheim as well as Lévy-Bruhl. It was largely centred on North America and its disappearing native cultures, as well as on their diffusion within North America, as opposed to the theories of the diffusion of Old World civilization pursued in Britain and Europe. It also tended to look to a background in German philosophy and cultural science – Boas was educated in the German universities, contemporary with Simmel, many of his colleagues were of German-American background, and a reading knowledge of German was de rigeuer.

It was also methodologically confident: a sense of things opening out for them. The turn to psychodynamic theory was part of this. The emerging idea was that a given culture was not just a bundle of traits, but there was some principle of selection, emphasis or inter-relation, which gave it a specific character. There seemed to be a parallel awareness in the field of personality, and in Gestalt psychology too: the idea that we perceive wholes and then break them down into elements, rather than perceiving elements – impressions – and building them up into wholes. From this came the idea of the cultural configuration and the approach of configurationism. Incidentally, the Gestalt maxim is that the whole is different from (not more than) the sum of its parts (Pratt, 1969: 9–10).

In that situation, Freud’s Totem and Taboo was something of an affront, but Jung’s Psychological Types was well received (Freud, 1983; Jung, 1923; Kroeber, 1952b: 301–5; Sapir, 1999: 714–8; Shamdasani, 2003: 334–7). What, then, did they want with Jung? Not all were “culture and personality”, or even configurationist – it is a matter of ambience not dogma. Even so, I think we can identify six issues. Three are positive, two are negative, and one perhaps ambivalent:

a.They wanted a typology of culture, for organization and systematic comparison. These typologies would be based on the psychological types: introvert/extravert and the psychic functions of thinking, feeling, intuition, sensation. Note that the comparative method affords an escape from the rigours of functionalism. Of course it is not incompatible with functionalist analysis; they are used together in the biological sciences.

b.They wanted a non-deterministic and interactive relationship between culture and personality – something more complex and flexible than “socialization”. Note that this again could involve the personality types and functions, but this time within the same culture.

c.They wanted to use psychodynamic theory to explore psychopathology, e.g. in their fieldwork encounters with shamanism. They wanted a conceptual separation of psychopathology and deviance, and to explore the possible relations between them – including the possibility that deviant behaviour in a given culture and era might be defined by people with psychopathological conditions (e.g. the Salem witch craze).

d.They were sensitive to acculturation – the destruction of native cultures through contact with modern civilization. For example, Benedict (1935: 15) quotes a native informant: “our cup (of culture) is broken”. Even so, their profession put them in an equivocal position, as Jaime de Angulo protested to Benedict (Mead, 1959: 296–8; cf. Shamdasani, 2003: 320–1). Jung seems by contrast to have taken a position more in line with medical confidentiality than scientific enquiry.

e.They did not want a formal approach in terms of the “personal equation”. They did informally try to classify their own and each other’s personalities (e.g. Darnell, 1990: 141–3), but did not attribute systematic bias in fieldwork reports. This surely was wise; it would have created an impossible situation, given the individual nature of fieldwork and the dependence of theory upon it.

f.They did not want to go into the archetypes and the collective unconscious in the analysis of myth and ritual. Some reasons for this can be suggested (cf. Shamdasani, 2003: 334):

i.they were more interested in human plasticity and variation than in human universals. Jung’s Psychological Types would underpin this; that is what they wanted.

ii.it looked like speculative armchair theory – Jung being drawn back to Lévy-Bruhl. (But they were not positivists, and would not have raised the typical positivist objection to “metaphysics”.)

iii.they did not grasp the conception’s flexibility – Jung had not at this time developed a clear distinction between archetypal form and archetypal image.

iv.Chomsky’s theories of language acquisition still lay far in the future.

How do the sociological writings compare with this? (I exclude Progoff, [1953]: his book comes out of the Jungian community, and is much earlier.)

First, their situation is very diffe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Jung and the sociocultural sciences
• Part I Anthropology
• Part II Sociology
• Part III Appraisal
• Readings: The authors
• Index