The Plural Psyche

Personality, Morality and the Father

Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317498049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapie

Pluralism can bridge the gaps that have opened up between personal experience, psychotherapy, and cultural criticism. In The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father, a provocative, much praised and widely discussed book, Andrew Samuels lays bare the political implications of the personal struggle everyone has to hold their many inner divisions together. He also shows how pluralism can inspire new thinking in many areas including moral process, the construction of gender, and the role of the father in the development of sons and daughters. In addition, there are innovative chapters on clinical work, focusing on imagery and on countertransference. These themes come to life in a way that makes a significant contribution to debates about psychotherapy, gender, parenting and difference.

This Classic Edition of The Plural Psyche includes a new introduction by the author.

Chapter 1
The plural psyche

This opening chapter is intended as a resource for the rest of the book, capturing and expressing the spirit in which it has been written. Pluralism is an attitude to conflict that tries to reconcile differences without imposing a false resolution on them or losing sight of the unique value of each position. As an ideology, pluralism seeks to hold unity and diversity in balance – humanity’s age-old struggle, in religion, philosophy, and politics, to hold the tension between the one and the many. My use of the term ‘pluralism’ is intended to show differences from ‘eclecticism’, ‘synthesis’, ‘parallelism’, and ‘perspectivalism’. As the chapter unfolds, the distinctions should become clearer.

We learn from political experience that, though societies may aim at harmony and mutual respect, the opposite often takes place. Political pluralism suggests that a fostering of competitive bargaining between conflicting interests produces creative rather than destructive results. However, I am not trying merely to advance pluralism as a desirable state or goal for psychology. My suggestion is that we begin to use the idea of pluralism as a tool or instrument to make sure that diversity need not be a basis for schismatic conflict. This instrument would also tell us when a split has become inevitable or even desirable. Pluralism could function as an instrument to monitor the mosaic of the psyche, or that of depth psychology, and help us to carry out repairs when necessary. Not only a goal, also a yardstick.

In our personal lives, we experience conflict; we have to live through it every day. Thus the notion of psychic conflict is central to dynamic conceptions of the psyche. As far as depth psychology as a whole is concerned, the divisions and congeries, organized into schools and studied, or perceived as chaotic and ridiculed, provide the institutional variation on this theme.

On the personal level, we are faced with the pluralistic task of reconciling our many internal voices and images of ourselves with our wish and need to feel integrated and speak with one voice. It is an issue of intense feeling, this intrapsychic process. It has now become an issue of thinking, for psychological theory also seeks to see how the various conflicts, complexes, attitudes, functions, self-objects, part-selves, sub-personalities, deintegrates, psychic dramatis personae, internal objects, areas of the mind, subphases, gods – how all of these relate to the psyche as a whole. And what happens when a single part out of many begins to act as if it had the force and weight of the whole? The extent of the list demonstrates the variety of descriptive or explanatory methods, the universality of the problem, and its inherent fascination.

When I use the word ‘psyche’, I am concerned with a perspective on psychological processes and phenomena as well as referring to their totality. This perspective is characterized by an attention to depth and intensity and, hence, the difference between a mere event and an experience is highlighted. Psyche brings with it its own plurality, fluidity, and the existence of relatively autonomous entities therein. Finally, psyche as a perspective hints at meaning and pattern that may be discernible by the individual, but not to the extent of a fixed predestination. The reader will note a tendency to anthropomorphize psyche – for instance, the psyche ‘wants’ something, or ‘yearns’ for something, and so forth. This is more than a rhetorical device. Psychological jargon does have living entities locked up in it – sometimes people, but often daimons, animals, or gods. Even the most scientistic classical Freudian will talk of the ego being strong or weak and of the relations between ego, id, and superego as if they were three personages. The reason for this is that psychology theory-making doesn’t seem possible without that kind of implicit personification. Jung was the arch exponent of this; his whole psychology takes the form of an animation of inner personages.

A political metaphor, such as pluralism, helps in an evaluation of tensions and oscillations (Zoja 1987) within the psyche. Parts of the psyche are in a state of competition between themselves. Personality, at any one moment, is the outcome of such competition. The questions that then arise are: what kind of access do the various parts of the psyche, the inner interest groups, have to the rest of the psyche? What status and rights does each have? Is there an elite with special privileges? For instance, there is a dynamic between the puer aeternus (eternal youth) and senex (old man) aspects of a person. The Latin tags refer to differing emotional outlooks and are not intended to be restricted to males. It is not necessary fully to accept these terms from analytical psychology to be able to see how pluralism can be used instrumentally to track senex–puer competition in the psyche.

The puer suggests the possibility of a new beginning, revolution, renewal, and creativity generally. The senex refers us to qualities such as balance, steadiness, generosity towards others, wisdom, farsightedness. Each of these positions can become pathological – unmitigated puer is redolent of impatience, overspiritualization, lack of realism, naive idealism, tendencies ever to start anew, being untouched by age, and given to flights of imagination. Pure senex is excessively cautious and conservative, authoritarian, obsessional, overgrounded, melancholic, and lacking imagination. By the way, these are not simply developmental concepts (though they can be used like that), for even old women and men can be seen to have puer (or puella) characteristics. Similarly, the senex can be seen even in the character of babies. Nevertheless, puer–senex interplay takes on different tones according to development phase.

Clearly, the average person will have both sets of characteristics in his or her make-up. A laissez-faire approach, involving competition and perhaps some bargaining, might seem an appropriate description of what goes on. On the other hand, at certain times maybe puer will rule in puer’s realm, and senex in senex’s. Each will monopolize, or colonize, whatever seems to fall into its natural sphere of influence. Then there is the possibility that there is some kind of ‘governmental’ regulation of all of this (for example, by the self). Perhaps the snag with that would be that regulation itself is a senex -type concept and, hence, unfair to the puer.

Do puer and senex have equal access to the political ‘power’ of the psyche as a whole? Perhaps not, if senex feels safer to be with and more socially respectable; so senex may have some special privileges. On the other hand, puer is sexy (though maybe not as sexual as he might be), and vibrant, and, hence, popular. The scenario could be prolonged – for instance, we could ask in whose language negotiations are to be conducted – but the example was intended only to show how pluralism works as a metaphor for psychological processes.

So far I have been discussing pluralism in relation to the psyche. In addition, a pluralistic approach illuminates the issues of unity and diversity as they affect the various schools of depth psychology. By ‘depth psychology’ I mean to indicate all psychological endeavours that make use of the concept of the dynamic unconscious. The somewhat old-fashioned sounding term is useful in an age when both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are deeply split into schools. We need a term that refers to the social fact of a whole field, with all its divisions, and recognizes that depth psychology is itself composed of individual analysts and therapists.

Pluralism is an attitude or ideology that can hold the tension between claims of and tendencies towards unity and claims of and tendencies towards diversity: depth psychology as a cohesive discipline in which there are right and wrong viewpoints – and depth psychology as containing a multiplicity of valid approaches. A place for ultimate reality and for a plethora of phenomena.

The fragmentation and dispute within depth psychology, as individual analysts and groups of analysts fight for the general acceptance of that particular ‘personal confession’ in which they have invested, seems on the surface to be the very opposite of pluralism. However, using the idea of unconscious compensation (CW 6: para. 693f), it is possible to see depth psychology as struggling, and as having always struggled towards pluralism. What seems like a flight from pluralism may also be a yearning for its plenitude and an acceptance at some level of a pluralistic destiny for depth psychology. For aggression, so characteristic of debates between analysts, often contains the deepest needs for contact, dialogue, playback, affirmation. (See Chapter 11 for a further account of this aspect of the phenomenology of aggression.)

Many analysts and therapists are committed to dialogue but the psychological difficulties associated with maintaining a tolerant attitude cannot be minimized. Depth psychologists, being people, will continually fail to be as tolerant as they would like to be. In part, this is because of their passionate devotion to their own psychological approach. But where is a programme to combine passion and tolerance in depth psychology? We focus on and know about opposites of tolerance – envy, denigration, power, control, and so forth. My intent is to do something positive and realistic with the incorrigible competitiveness and argumentativeness, mining the envious shit for the tension-rich gold it might contain. Competition that is open, psychologically integrated, and valued could lead to a tough-minded tolerance. Through competition with others, we may come to know ourselves and our ideas better and more deeply – a specific example of the importance of the mirroring Other, whose presence glimmers in so many psychologies – Jung’s, Winnicott’s, Neumann’s, Lacan’s, Kohut’s. This Other is a creative other and needs nurturing for it is closely linked with another other – the convenient receptacle for prejudice and projection, the subject of fantasies of superiority.

Depth psychology is a movement that, historically, has shown itself able to withstand clashes and splits and to generate new hypotheses out of them. This capacity lies alongside the far better-known tendency for the splits to become concrete (institutional) and unproductive. Depth psychology continues to be desirous of entering a plural state but lacks the necessary methodology. It is possible that we are all pluralists but that various forms of omnipotence and idealization encourage us to deny it. The tendency towards multiplicity and diversity is as strong – and creative – as the search for unity or a striving for hegemony. (A further discussion of the use of pluralism as an instrument in relation to dispute in depth psychology may be found in the final chapter.)

As we proceed, we shall see how these two suggestions about pluralism are the same suggestion. That is, the arguments about the One and the Many in the psyche and the arguments about the One and the Many in relation to the schools of depth psychology are really the same argument. We have tended always to keep apart the psyche and the social organization of depth psychology. However, the vicissitudes of depth psychology as a cultural movement, the splits, plots, alliances, gossip, and power struggles – all these reveal that, in their professional lives, therapists and analysts are participating in a mighty projection. For, when analysts argue, the plural psyche is speaking. Differing points of view reflect the multiplicity of the psyche itself. Jung once said that the gods have become illnesses. Nowadays, their epiphanies are to be found in our differing approaches to psychological illness as these find expression in the schools of depth psychology. In Winnicott’s words, ‘we are poor indeed if we are only sane’ (Winnicott 1945: 150n). I return to this theme in the final chapter.

A particular interest of mine is to search out how differences of opinion reflect more than differences in the psychological type of the disputants. Granted, some analysts will, constitutionally, tend to prefer, see, and search for multiplicity and diffusion; others will place integration and unity in the foreground. However, in his typology, Jung (CW 6) was careful to insist that no one type is better than another and that for an individual to become truly himself (i.e. individuated), all typological potentials would have to be realized. In this chapter (and throughout the book) we will see how both of these considerations apply to the discipline of depth psychology: no one kind of approach is a priori better, save as a matter of personal preference and loyalty. And to become truly himself or herself, the depth psychologist cannot belong to one school alone. There is an interdependence, with all possible manner of divergence and convergence. The different schools of depth psychology symbolize strands of professional being within a single analyst, so that the exploring of ideological difference becomes an expedition to the interior, a matter of individuation. What gets projected onto the ideological opponent may, in this sense, be the psychological property of the one who projects – and, hence, of great value to him or her. A pluralistic approach provides a framework within which to use projections that are discovered in theoretical dispute. Pluralism sees through schism to embrace a perspective in which various analysts, or the various schools, have to take note of each other, without having unity as a goal; a modular, conversational approach in which different world views meet but do not try to take over each other. It is an emotional challenge as much as an ideological one. As Whitehead said, ‘a clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity’.

Problems of pluralism

It is very difficult to hold to a pluralistic attitude. Pluralism may seem utopian in that the simple and reliable mechanism of right or wrong has to be suspended without being completely discarded. Further, it is very hard to feel passionate about being tolerant, to be a radical centrist in depth psychology, to go in for what the parliamentarian Walter Bagehot called ‘animated moderation’. Does pluralism condemn us to losing the excitement of breakthrough ideas, which are more likely to be held with a passionate conviction? Boredom would be as great a problem as tyranny. My view is that such a worry rests on a misunderstanding and an idealization of the cycle of creativity. New ideas emerge from a pluralistic matrix and are reabsorbed into that matrix. Ideas do not come into being outside a context; nor does the new necessarily destroy the old but often co-exists with it. Ideological conviction therefore arises from a context of pluralism.

It is well-known that patients benefit when the analyst has conviction (or faith) in his theoretical ideas and clinical practices, no matter how deviant these may seem to be. However, if the debt owed by ideological conviction to a plural mise en scène were acknowledged, these benefits might be available together with tolerance of other views, open communication, and the chance to learn from diversity. For, as Yeats said, ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

A further problem with pluralism is summed up in this quote from Francis Bacon’s Essays: ‘All things when they are looked upon piecemeal seem Greater, when also a Plurality of Parts makes shew of a Bulk considerable. Which a Plurality of Parts effects more strongly, if they be in certain Order: for it then resembles Infinity, and hinders the comprehending of them’. The danger is that a pluralist would be someone who knows less and less about more and more. A reply would be to say that a pluralist could be someone who knows he or she does not know everything and is prepared to listen to a more informed source (as well as being aware of those aspects of his or her personal psychology that hinder that). Since Bacon’s time, we may also have become more suspicious about constructing ‘Order’ out of ‘Parts’.

What would happen if we were able to allow pluralism the same charge as partisanship? To do this we have to go beyond perspectivalism, meaning an apparently detached and dispassionate attempt to explain difference by suggesting that, though the same phenomena are being examined, the perspectives from which this is being done are simply so different that differing theory is an inevitable outcome. Another possibility is parallelism; differing theories are simply different aspects of the same great theory or truth. Parallelism and perspectivalism are unexciting and the problem with them as modes of thinking is that they ignore the manner in which all the different perspectives or parallels do have something to do with each other. William James made the following statement about this in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and his attack on absolutist, monist, and idealist versions of the world is equally applicable to perspectivalism:

each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and then differences are obvious to view.

(James 1909: 40–1)

In fact, as James says, the key word is ‘some’: ‘pluralism stand[s] … for the legitimacy of the notion of some’ (1909: 41). The main theme of A Pluralistic Universe is a consideration of the One and the Many as complementary perspectives. However, the moment we say that they are complementary, we land in the camp of the Many. This may be linked to what Miller, discussing monotheism...