Analytical Psychology

A Modern Science

Michael Fordham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367323035
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910791
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is a book of two parts: the first focuses on theoretical concepts with special reference to the structure of the psyche, while the second includes more clinical material. Both exemplify the London Society's interest in childhood and the development of ideas about the use of reductive analysis within the Jungian framework.

Editorial introduction

The Journal of analytical psychology started publication in 1955 and so has now been in existence for eighteen years. The papers published in it came from a great variety of sources and they have been widely appreciated. But it has been recognized for some time that it would be desirable to draw together papers having a common orientation or which present some thesis with which an author is particularly identified. The idea therefore of publishing a number of volumes germinated and after a preliminary study of the possibilities it was eventually decided to do so under the title: The library of analytical psychology.

Editors were elected with wide powers and directed to start by collecting together papers from the Journal which represented a trend in analytical psychology within the London Society of Analytical Psychology. This first volume is the result of their labours.

It was with difficulty that its title, the same as Stein's first paper, was decided upon. Its meaning is explained in the paper and its controversial undertones will, it is hoped, be clarified if not dispelled thereby. Since the title is so amplified no further comment on it will be needed but some explanation of the considerations which controlled the Editors' selection of contents may be indicated. They developed round defining the main but not the only activities of analytical psychologists in London, and at the end they were very conscious of all that had of necessity to be left out if the volume was to have truly meaningful coherence.

The members of the London Society have interested themselves in three areas. The first is the study of Jung's works as a whole with a view to finding out what is essential and what parenthetic to his main thesis.

The next was childhood and reductive analysis. Jung's interest in individuation in later life had left on one side the 'first half of life' which he delegated to others especially Adler and Freud. To some members of the London Society this state of affairs did not seem satisfactory. They believed that Jung's concepts could add to what the other disciplines—especially psychoanalysis—had developed and their efforts were facilitated by a rather happy state of affairs in London. The Medical Section of the British Psychological Society provided a regular meeting ground for interdisciplinary study and in addition many members were working in clinics where they could meet and exchange notes with psychoanalysts.

The study of development in childhood and the practice of child therapy has really been more important in London than the papers in this first collection indicate. Many members of the London Society have actually come to analytical psychology from this field of practice and their experiences have been illuminated and enriched by theories derived from Jung's.

The present volume is divided into two parts. The first focuses on theoretical concepts with special reference to the structure of the psyche, while the second includes more clinical material. Both exemplify the London Society's interest in childhood and the development of ideas about the use of reductive analysis within the Jungian framework. However, no attempt at a rigid division between theory and practice has been made because the separation would be artificial. Only one article 'Maturation of ego and self in infancy' has been specially written for this volume, the others have all been previously published in the Journal of analytical psychology; some have been revised or enlarged. The date when each article was first published is given after the title, and a footnote indicates if there has been any revision. The references to Jung are made to the Collected Works, which is abbreviated Coll. Wks. followed by the volume number: for purposes of reference there follow details of volumes already published; volumes which have not yet been published are marked with an asterisk. Dates refer to the first publication in whatever language and not to the English translation.

Part I
Basic Concepts/Mainly Theoretical

Analytical psychology: a modern science*

LEOPOLD STEIN
1958

In 1926 Jung (p. 65) was anxious to prove that psychology was one of the youngest sciences and he has reiterated this claim on several subsequent occasions (e.g. 1938, pp. 1 f,), when, describing himself as an empiricist, he has stressed his scientific, exclusively phenomenological point of view in contrast to an approach based on speculative and naive idealistic preconceptions. Jung holds that medical psychology is to be placed among the natural sciences since it sees everything as a natural phenomenon. It may therefore be expected to explain psychic phenomena as properties of life and to subject them to a strictly scientific inquiry along the lines of biology, a science that 'has sharpened the eye of the psychiatrist for factual data and made possible a method of description closely approximating to reality' (1926, p. 86).

Jung is, of course, aware that science does not stop short at factual data. He is, no doubt, acquainted with the idea of scientific prediction and the verification of hypotheses through experimentation. Yet he confines himself to a mere empirical verification of fact and even goes so far-as to admit that the principle of explanation employed by analytical psychology as 'pure' psychology is the ignotum per ignotius (ibid., p. 87). This means that what is unknown is explained by reducing it to what is even more unknown. The science of the mind is—paradoxically—constrained to make this necessity into a principle, since it can elucidate the process involved only in the same terms as those in which the phenomenon observed has been described. It is, moreover, a fact that the psyche is both subject and object of the science that deals with it (1938, p. 62).

At this crucial point, it is true, psychology stands outside natural science and is, to this extent, at a disadvantage. It will be shown, however, that to explain something unknown by something more unknown may be even more highly scientific. It also appears that when viewing phenomena in terms of mind and matter, both microphysics and analytical psychology are faced with the same difficulty because the processes to be observed are modified or altered by the very fact that an observer is looking at them (cf. Meier, 1935). Jung is no less aware that the scientific inquirer when observing natural macrophysical processes does not appreciably interfere with his experiment, whereas the psychological observer necessarily interferes and therefore can never verify facts. Although Jung admits that in this respect psychology cannot be strictly scientific, in the sense of classical physics, he maintains that 'the case for psychology versus natural science is not altogether hopeless, even though the issue lies beyond the scope of our present understanding'. This latter assertion will be shown to be debatable from the point of view of modern science. Jung justifies his attempt to group psychology among the natural sciences by asserting that its natural subjectmatter is not a mental product but a natural phenomenon, i.e. the psyche (1926, p. 89). Here an ambiguity has crept in, based on the double meaning of the word 'natural'. Apart from that, the question is not so much whether psychology is a natural science but whether it employs the approach worked out by science for the study of the external macrophysical world. Furthermore, does modern psychology, as one of the humane (as opposed to natural) sciences, really use a different method of approach to arrive at a theory? The answer depends on what is meant by science and by scientific inquiry. That psychology has collected a considerable number of empirical data does not make it into a science. In order to reconstruct and explain it must 'look into' the matter, which is precisely what theory does. For theoria means basically contemplation or spiritual viewing, mental vision. Its derivation from a compound of two Greek words: theaomai 'I look on' and horao 'I perceive, comprehend, consider, reflect, experience, find, hold (an opinion), become aware'—reveals it as referring to a mental activity of the highest order. Its more recent meaning of sheer cognition (as opposed to practice), conceptual elucidation of a group of facts and their derivation from a uniform principle, seems to have sprung from the union of inner and outer vision. As the child of these two it is more than their sum total.

Now, what does the theoros, 'the one who looks inward and outward', achieve? By looking in and out he seems to perceive something that just 'is', i.e. an 'entity' (from ens 'being'), that is accordingly a theoretical one. The point, then, is that a theoretical entity is essentially and necessarily something both unobserved and unobservable by the senses. According to Bernard Mayo (1954, pp. 10, 56), known for his work in the field of the philosophy of science, we ought not, therefore, even to ask whether theoretical entities exist or whether they are real. These entities are unobservable, not because of practical difficulties but because their unobservability is a logical consequence of their other properties. A theoretical entity can be defined, as Mayo says, only by reference to the job it performs in a particular scientific task. Such theoretical entities are numerous, e.g. the physicist's positron, photon, electron, the biologist's gene, Freud's id, ego and super-ego, Jung's archetypes, Fordham's deintegrates (1957, pp. 99 f.). In fact, one deliberately and intuitively 'contrives'* a theoretical entity of a kind that will provide a clue to the jigsaw pattern one can discern. If, therefore, someone asks: 'Do the archetypes, the anima, animus, shadow, really exist?', he misses the point. Whether they are real or whether they exist has nothing to do with modern science. Research workers often make statements that are not empirical or in any way descriptive of phenomena; their aim is to contrive what the statements are meant to be about. This is where theory begins. Theorizing is not the consideration of general statements; its primary concern is with the contrivance of non-empirical 'objects', the properties of which are unobserved and unobservable. The sole justification of such theoretical assertions is that from them explanatory statements regarding empirical facts can be deduced. That is to say, these theoretical entities are not inferred or deduced from the phenomena, rather are they contrived in order that the phenomena may be deduced from them. Since theoretical statements do not describe phenomena we cannot test them for truth and falsity as we can test the ordinary man's statements about, say, light failure. It is by reason of the theoretical entities known as archetypes that analytical psychology clearly differs from and surpasses empirical science as Jung sees it.

Mayo illustrates how one arrives at a theoretical entity by referring to the advance in scientific thinking from Aristotle to Newton. People have known for hundreds and thousands of years that terrestrial objects, if not supported, fall to the ground. They have also known that celestial objects (planets, stars), although not supported, do not fall on the earth. Aristotle, too, knew this but he could not reconcile these two phenomena. In order to explain them he was constrained to assume that there was, in addition to the four elements known in his time (water, fire, air, earth), in the outermost sphere of the universe a fifth element, the aither (αἰθηρ), which is neither heavy nor light. Whereas the motions of terrestrial bodies are rectilinear, the natural motion of the aither is circular. Because of these attributes the stars are prevented from falling to the earth.

Centuries later Newton reconciled the fact that objects on the earth fall to the ground and that objects in the sky do not, by contriving an agency which he named gravity. Owing to its influence two bodies in the universe attract each other in proportion to the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. This is truly an invention, because no one has ever observed gravity, only that objects do or do not fall. Newton contrived one single theoretical entity, which is not deduced from what we observe and which is contrived in order to do a job. In this lies Newton's greatness. Aristotle, in contrast, was not able to reconcile two diametrically opposed facts and so had recourse to speculation. Since Newton, many other phenomena, hitherto inexplicable, have become plain.

Let us now turn to the field of medical psychology. Here it was Freud who introduced the 'scientific' approach to displace 'magic', i.e. 'the direct control by man of the forces of nature' (Encyclopaedia Britannica), mainly by rites.

Freud regards scientific psychology as one of the biological sciences and explains mental phenomena as being a result of the interplay between the observed biological needs of man and his environment. The former derive from the functions and structure of the body (an agglomeration of matter); the latter comprises social factors that unavoidably determine the individual's manner of existence. Thus, psychoanalysis explains mental phenomena in a dualistic way, using both biological and psychological frameworks. Its concepts are mainly generalizations derived from observation of the phenomena in the respective fields: penis, breast, masturbation, biting, sucking, etc., as well as father, mother, child, horde, family, war, etc. Psychoanalysis, it is true, operates with some entities (as opposed to general concepts) such as drive, id, super-ego. Yet these belong partly to the realm of biology, partly to that of psychology. In view of these two frames of reference, one cannot help seeing a similarity between Aristotle's dilemma regarding two heterogeneous classes of phenomena and that of the psychobiology of the early Freudian school, as well as that of the American psychobiology in contrast to the self-contained framework of British analysts, such as Mrs. Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Fordham, et al. (Guntrip, 1956).

The analytical psychologist as a modern scientific inquirer looks upon human behaviour patterns as phenomena that are mere pointers to entities not susceptible of direct observation. The latter are, nevertheless, real: they are theoretical entities in one, and only one, realm, Jung's approach, based on the assumption that 'psyche and body are not separate entities, but one and the same life' (1928, p, 113) is thus monistic, in Spinoza's sense, and resembles that of Newton. The analytical psychologist's approach can be likened to that of the modern physicist, as opposed to that of the scholastics with their endeavour to stipulate qualities (Jung and Kerényi, 1941, trans, pp. 127 f.). The microphysicist has a vision of theoretical entities, such as sheer wave or sheer corpuscule, wrinkles of space, etc. The analytical psychologist talks of indeterminate archetypes, of which persons such as father, mother, child, objects such as tree, and functions such as devouring, drowning, are symbols and/or formulas. Neither physicist nor analytical psychologist has perceived these entities themselves. They do not, therefore, even attempt to describe the very entities that are stated as doing a job for us.

Let us juxtapose an example in the field o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Index