Jung and Phenomenology

Roger Brooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317661207
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung and Phenomenology is a classic text in the field of Jungian scholarship. Originally published in 1991, it continues to be essential to conversations regarding the foundations of Jungian thought. This Classic Edition of the book includes a brand new introduction by the author.

Jung described his own approach as phenomenological, particularly as it contrasted with Freud's psychoanalysis and with medical psychiatry. However, Jung's understanding of phenomenology was inconsistent, and he writes with an epistemological eclecticism which leaves him often at cross purposes with himself. In Jung and Phenomenology, Brooke systematically addresses the central ideas of Jung's thought. The major developments in the post-Jungian tradition are extensively integrated into the conversation, as are clinical issues, meaning that the book marks a synthesis of insights in the contemporary Jungian field. His reading and interpretation of Jung are guided by the question of what it is that Jung is trying to show but which tends to be obscured by his formulations.

Examining the meaning of Jung's theoretical ideas in concrete existential terms, Jung and Phenomenology is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists and students interested in the Jungian tradition and existential phenomenology.

Chapter 1 Towards a phenomenological analytical psychology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315766690-1

This book is an attempt to understand and articulate the psychological insights of C. G. Jung in the light of existential phenomenology. It is an attempt to see through Jung’s writings to the phenomena he saw, or, to use a different metaphor, to hear through his words to what he was trying to say, and to express this in a phenomenologically accurate way.

It is not a question of trying to find points of comparison or contact between Jung’s psychology and phenomenology. We need to go deeper than that, and ask what Jung sees and understands that makes any point of contact with existential phenomenology possible. Similarly it is not a question of merely ‘translating’ Jung’s language into ‘existential’ language, for it is necessary to understand clearly what it is in human existence that holds the different languages together – in other words, the psychological insights that would make translation possible. I do take the view that it is not the words themselves that speak, but the phenomena revealed therein (which is not to adopt a naїve phenomenology that is insensitive to the constitutive power of language). To read Jung hermeneutically, therefore, is to do more than merely read his writings in a different way. It is to encounter them, to hold them in a dialogue that is both respectful and critical at the same time (Sardello 1975). Out of this dialogue it is hoped, and expected, that a way will be found to read Jung with an existential depth and significance that is often lost in his struggle with words and his own metatheoretical foundations.

A complementary aim is to offer existential phenomenological psychology something of the psychological depth and richness that Jung can provide. Primarily this means making Jung’s insights phenomenologically accessible, so that some of the themes of existential phenomenology can be fleshed out psychologically. It is too easy, for example, to speak of hiddenness without ever fully recognising the structure and constitutive power that this term implies, and there is much that Jung can offer here.

It will be necessary to evaluate critically Jung’s theoretical formulations, particularly in terms of the metatheoretical assumptions on which they are based. It will be found that many of these formulations will have to be bypassed if the insights contained in them are to be revealed. Significantly, although the criteria for doing so will come from phenomenology, clues and guidelines will be found in the writings of Jung himself. Perhaps the central theme of this book is that many of Jung’s own writings lead beyond the confines of his theoretical thinking and indicate an understanding of human being that lies at the heart of existential phenomenology. But this means that Jung has been much closer to phenomenology than phenomenologists have generally recognised, and that the transition from Jung’s understanding of his own work (various as it was) to an existential phenomenological understanding of it is given within Jung’s work itself. In other words, I want to argue more than that Jung’s psychology can be reworked phenomenologically, or even merely that Jung and phenomenology are intimately compatible. I want to explore the more daring claim that Jung saw and understood as an existential phenomenologist, but that he lacked the conceptual tools to express his insights in a phenomenologically rigorous way. If this idea can be successfully sustained, then it means that our hermeneutic critique and interpretation has its ground in phenomenology, yet more centrally revolves around a kind of dialogue within Jung himself. Our intention throughout is to remain as close as possible to this inner dialogue and to what Jung was trying to say. The strength of this claim is founded on the belief that phenomenology has provided the conceptual tools necessary to understand and articulate the experience and insight which is both revealed and concealed in the movement from experience to theoretical formulation. These tools are an explicit and coherent existential anthropology, an ontology of the world as a network of meaningful relations, and a methodology that is consistent with this ontology and anthropology.

Jung’s scientific endeavours were guided primarily by inner experience and personal need (Jung 1961), and his difficulty in meeting the academic needs of the moment reflects this. At an Eranos seminar in 1940 he remarked, ‘I can formulate my thoughts only as they break out of me. It is like a geyser. Those who come after me will have to put them in order’ (quoted in Jaffe 1971, p. 8).

Jung is acknowledging here a tension between his experience and the ways in which he tries to talk about that experience. For one thing, Jung always struggled with the problems of writing. Anthony Storr has commented that he has known ‘of no creative person who was more hamstrung by the inability to write’ (1973, pp. 37–8). But the issue is more than this. In the above quotation Jung is pointing to the fact that his speaking and writing occur with an immediacy that is not transparent to itself. When Jung says ‘that the pioneer only knows afterwards what he should have known before’ (1949c, p. 521), and that even then knowledge is incomplete, he is making a personal statement that reflects for the phenomenologist an epistemological truth. That is, consciousness is embodied and lived as action before it is reflectively appropriated as ‘knowledge’, and even the ‘knowledge’ that is written continues to participate in the opacity of the lived ground. To what extent Jung’s conceptual knowledge accurately reflects the intuitive awareness that was given in his acts of perception is precisely the question that opens our study.

In Jung’s case the tension between experience and knowledge is one between profound insight and an apparent conceptual eclecticism. Jung did not write consistently from any particular perspective, which reflects his continual dissatisfaction with his own formulations. In a personal way, it reflects his own creativity, the differing needs of his Number 1 and Number 2 personalities, and his ambivalence regarding both his scientific and religious traditions (Jung 1961). But it also reflects his insistence on the perspectival and historically contingent nature of knowledge.

Jung’s eclecticism seems to gather around to two general styles, which might be called the natural scientific and the poetic. Once again, these reflect the different styles of his Number 1 and Number 2 personalities respectively.

In the first instance, when Jung speaks of projection, dissociation of the personality, complexes, schizophrenia, psychic epidemics, and so on, he is seeing and writing through the language of psychiatry and psychopathology, the language of his doctoral supervisor, Eugen Bleuler (who is best remembered for having coined the term ‘schizophrenia’). Having its roots in medicine, this language reveals some of the essential assumptions of natural science: the human being as a self-contained entity inside of which sickness can be located, health and sickness as reflections of energy distribution and availability (to the ego), and the independence of the observer. This link between psychiatry and natural science is to be found in Jung’s word-association studies, which sought to ground the budding disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis experimentally. It is found in his attempts, occasional though they were, to link psychology to biology, as in the following statement:

The separation of psychology from the basic assumptions of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body. And since these biological assumptions hold good not only for man but for the whole world of living things, the scientific foundation on which they rest obtains a validity far exceeding that of psychological judgement, which is valid only in the realm of consciousness. It is therefore no matter of surprise if the psychologist is often inclined to fall back on the security of the biological standpoint and to borrow freely from physiology and the theory of instinct.

(Jung 1937/42, p. l14)

Jung’s adherence to this tradition seems clear when he speaks of psychic energy, entropy, the law of psychic compensation in energic terms, and the possibility of the quantification of psychic energy.

It is at this point that the phenomenologists have been most concerned to distance themselves from Jung, but have been insufficiently cautious in doing so. Jung warns us not to understand his notion of psychic energy as a biological derivative, after the reductionist manner of Freud, but as autonomous to the psyche, where it is simply the measure of the intensity of psychic value, or meaning (Jung 1928a, pp. 9–10). It has the same meaning as in the statement ‘He puts more energy into his work than into his family life.’ (Even Medard Boss, for whom any reference to psychic energy is like a red flag to a bull, occasionally uses the term in this descriptive, metaphorical way.) Moreover, since Jung understands the term psychic energy as the modern equivalent of the ‘primitive’ experience of power (mana), he seems to be aware of the metaphorical and historical nature of his terminology, and this undercuts the claims to an ahistorical reality premised in natural science.

Existential phenomenologists recognise that Freud broke the bounds of the natural-scientific view of human being even as he adhered to it in his meta-psychology (e.g. Boss 1963; Izenberg 1976). But if this was true of Freud it is even clearer with Jung. However, Jung’s historical acumen is sometimes offered in the name of natural science, and this can lead him to be at cross-purposes with himself. For example, his last major theoretical paper, On the Nature of the Psyche (1947/54), opens with a defence of natural science that would clearly not be his intention if he understood the term more precisely. He tries to defend the independence of natural-scientific psychology from philosophy, which from his description of it can be identified primarily as rationalist. Then he criticises Withelm Wundt, usually regarded as the father of natural-scientific psychology, for refusing the concept of the unconscious for ‘philosophical’ reasons! Clearly, what Jung means by natural science in this context is not what is usually meant – namely, that approach developed by Wundt – but is more akin to psychoanalysis, and this needs to be borne in mind whenever it seems that he identifies himself as a natural scientist. We might also note that Jung’s view of natural science is significantly influenced by his relationships with Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Heisenberg, those natural scientists who have paved the way for a new scientific paradigm_ acausal, systemic, and with a participant and relativist epistemology.

Jung’s link with phenomenology is often explicit, even though he uses the term somewhat loosely. But Jung’s emphasis on meaning and immanence shifts psychology into a perspective that is essentially poetic. As James Hillman said of Jung:

His theory of images announced a poetic basis of mind, and active imagination put it into practice, even while Jung went on using scientific and theological language for his explanations.

(Hillman 1978, p. 162)

From this perspective he speaks the language of religion, myth, and alchemy. This is rightly the perspective for which he is best known and in which he did most of his writing. There seem to be at least three reasons for this. First, this language was the most satisfying for him personally (Jung 1961, p. 17). It was the language of his Number 2 personality, which throughout his life unfolded to become his self (Papadopoulos 1984). Second, he believed that metaphor was the most accurate way of speaking about human beings, for every statement about the psyche – every personal interpretation, or scientific ‘explanation’ – has the ‘as-if’ quality of metaphor (Jung 1940, pp. 156, 157, 160). Third, as has already been mentioned, there is Jung’s historical sense with regard to natural science.

Thus when Jung began his search for deeper, indigenous foundations for analytical psychology and for its authentic language, he turned, ‘for better or for worse’, as he put it, ‘to the teachings of our forefathers’ (Jung 1931b, pp. 344–5). Here he found concepts uncluttered by contemporary prejudice and closer to primordial experience: soul, spirit, shadow, anima, and so on. Jung preferred ‘to call things by the names under which they have always been known’ (Jung 1929c, p. 339), and was therefore right in saying that analytical psychology ‘will certainly not be a modern psychology’ (Jung 1931b, p. 344). It is a perspective in which materialism is seen to be a religious vision that resurrects God in a new form (ibid., p. 34, 1), and scientific psychology is myth-making. As Jung (1940) says of psychology: it ‘translates the archaic speech of myth into a modern mythologem – not yet, of course, recognised as such – which constitutes one element of the myth “science”’ (p. 179). The effect of this movement in Jung’s understanding of man and the psychology that speaks of him is to see through the natural-scientific language to the perspective, or vision, which forms it. Psychology becomes intrinsically metaphorical, or poetic (De Voogt 1984).

Now, while this view is central to Jung, and marks a profound contribution to contemporary thought, it raises several issues, which form a large part of the rationale for the present work.

First, in analytical psychology the natural-scientific approach – its anthropology, its reductionism, its positivist criteria for establishing truth – has tended to persist, even though it became less and less relevant as Jung matured. Although Jungian analysts tend to eschew reductionism, there does seem to be a widely held view that the ‘truths’ which emerge from analytical practice are in some sense provisional. The empirical criteria of natural science are elevated in methodological status, and the latter’s (usually) implicit assumptions are willy-nilly afforded primary ontological claim with regard to our understanding of human beings. This approach can be detected, for example, when experimental findings with regard to dream research (Gabel 1985) or cerebral-hemispheric preference (Prifitera 1981) ‘support’ or ‘modify’ Jung’s intuitions, or when his ‘theory’ of psychic energy is defended with reference to the concept of energy in physics (Mattoon 1981). Jacobi’s (1942/68) classic book introduces Jung’s theory by referring to ‘the laws of psychic processes and forces’ and ‘the principle of psychic energism’. L. Stein (1967) attempts to relate the archetypes and the self to intra-cellular activity, and his attempt is praised by Michael Fordham (1974). In the field of psychopathology, Vitale (1978) describes depression as ‘a quantitative term indicating energetic, psychic “tone” … [which] occurs when the subject spends more libido than he produces’ (p. 220). If pressed, perhaps these authors would concede the difference between their model, as analogy, and reality, but this tends to be blurred, at least, by the persistence of the model and the apparent realism of their accounts. On the other hand, if Jung broke with this tradition he did not do so clearly or consistently enough, and many of his followers, in falling back upon this natural-scientific anthropology and methodology, have failed to follow through with the vision that Jung introduced.

Second, the poetic perspective that Jung introduced was never systematically grounded in a coherent anthropology by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Classic Edition
• Foreword by Robert D. Romanyshyn
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Towards a phenomenological analytical psychology
• 2 Overview of Jung’s psychology
• 3 Jung’s method in the light of phenomenology
• 4 A critical discussion of Jung’s experience in Africa: the place of psychological life
• 5 Psyche and the structure of experience
• 6 The self and individuation
• 7 Conscious and unconscious
• 8 Archetypes
• 9 A clinical study
• 10 An integration of themes
• References
• Index