Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity

Raya Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134181339
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity explores points of confluence and, more often, contradictions between Jungian and postmodern ideas.

Throughout the book Raya Jones examines how personal meaning emerges in human activity. Jung addressed this in terms of symbol formation, with particular attention to dreams, myths, art and other fantasy productions. Postmodern psychologists tend to address issues of meaning in terms of peoples self-understanding and identity construction, with a focus on self-positioning in actual conversation or on autobiographical narratives. Jones draws a line of critical comparison between postmodern psychology and Jung's descriptions of the symbolic dimension, myth, and the structure of the psyche. The book culminates with an evaluation of Jung's psychic energy concept, for which there is no direct counterpart in postmodern psychology.

Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity is an original critique of two key moments in the history of psychology. It will be welcomed by Jungians, as well as psychotherapists, and students of psychology.

Chapter 1

---

The relevance of Jung

---

Whenever, with our human understanding, we want to make a statement about something which in the last analysis we have not grasped and cannot grasp, then we must, if we are honest, be willing to contradict ourselves, we must pull this something into its antithetical parts in order to be able to deal with it at all.

(Jung, 1931a, CW 8: para. 680)

The conclusion to be drawn here is that an understanding of the nature of discourse as constituted by deadlocks of perspective means that it is the failure of agreement that needs to be displayed rather than an attempt to cover that disagreement over.

(Parker, 2005: 176)

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, engaged with matters that were central to the formation of psychology as a modern science in the early twentieth century (Shamdasani, 2003). In the long run, that science did not engage with Jung. A recent textbook by Harré (2005), Key Thinkers in Psychology, does not mention Jung. Rom Harré, himself a key thinker in postmodern psychology, has his own agenda in how he tells the history of psychology. In the traditional mainstream, Jung may be accredited with the distinction between introversion and extroversion, but his understanding of the typology was almost immediately overwritten. The distinction became a criterion for describing individual differences, understood as biologically based. To Jung, it signified different attitudes or stances underpinning human understanding (1921, CW 6). Jung’s major contribution as a twentieth-century thinker is arguably not the personality types but his slant on the emergence of meaning in human activities. With the notable exception of Piaget (1962), who contends with Jung’s account of symbol formation in his La Formation du symbole chez l’enfant (first published in 1946), the Jungian account was not picked up by psychologists as something worth bothering even to criticize. His effort to understand the meaning of meaning is best examined against the historical Project of Psychology, rather than evaluating its role in the history of the discipline as such. Several histories can be (and have been) told about how psychology became a modern science. But its project as a whole is best viewed as a culturally and historically specific expression of a quest for knowledge that transcends cultures and historical eras.

In eighth-century China, a Taoist passed by a Zen monastery, where a monk, Tsung Ching, kept a record of dialogues with the master Hui Hai (trans. Blofeld, 1962: 95). ‘Is there anything in the world more marvellous than the forces of Nature?’ asked the Taoist. Hui Hai replied, ‘There is.’ ‘And what is that?’ asked the Taoist. Hui Hai: ‘The power of comprehending those natural forces.’ Modern psychology, with its roots in eighteenth-century European philosophy, is more ambitious. It seeks to comprehend our own power of comprehending those natural forces. In 1781, Immanuel Kant contended,

But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge … supplies from itself.

(Kant, 1933[1781]: 41–2)

In late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, experimental psychology emerged out of philosophy departments as an attempt to describe the workings of the cognitive faculty (Kusch, 1995). Although Jung’s professional milieu, medical psychology, had a different history and (especially in the Germanic world) was instituted separately from the psychology that emerged out of philosophy departments, the same general project reverberates in his work. His theory of the collective unconscious and its archetypes attributes what the faculty of knowledge supplies from itself to biology and evolution. The same ‘Kantian’ project survived in various guises and permutations throughout the twentieth century. In the 1970s, cognitive psychology – the direct descendant of experimental psychology – was invigorated by the computer metaphor, likening the mind to an information-processing machine. Within a decade, critics within the academia, especially in social and developmental psychology, began to argue that all our knowledge, even our empirical knowledge, is made up of what language supplies from itself. This was the beginning of postmodern psychology.

During the last century, analytical psychology became established worldwide with its own institutional structure, several schools of thought, jargon, intellectual preoccupations and debates (see Kirsch, 2000) – and had little to do with psychology as pursued in university departments. An important post-Jungian work, James Hillman’s (1975) Re-Visioning Psychology, makes no contact with the body of knowledge that I learned as a psychology student or with the re-envisioned psychology that I teach nowadays. Since the 1980s, there has been an upsurge of publications reinterpreting the old models of psychology and disseminating new ways of thinking about human nature. None that I know of acknowledges the richness of Jung’s thought, let alone shows awareness of current directions in Jungian studies. Conversely, the steady outpouring of Jung-centred publications in the past couple of decades shows little awareness of how postmodernism impacted upon psychology. Christopher Hauke’s (2000) Jung and the Postmodern does not mention a single postmodern psychologist (or any ‘academic’ psychologist, unless William James is counted as one). Like a mirror image, Steiner Kvale’s (1992) edited volume Psychology and Postmodernism contains but one passing mention of Jung. In a single sentence, Jung is sandwiched between Freud on the one side, and Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner on the other. The chapter’s author points out that the postmodern standpoint reinterprets their systems, not as precise descriptions of the actual dynamics of human nature, but ‘as models or metaphors that can serve as heuristic devices … for organizing client experiences’ (Polkinghorne, 1992: 155). Jung would probably agree.

Jung was a man of science by virtue of being a medical doctor, but he was not a scientist, and described his concerns as a psychotherapist as differing from those of academic psychology at the time. Speaking in 1924, he spelled out the differences: unlike experimental psychology, analytical psychology does not ‘isolate individual functions … and then subject them to experimental conditions for purposes of investigation’ (1946, CW 17: para. 170). Instead,

Our laboratory is the world. Our tests are concerned with the actual, day-to-day, happenings of human life, and the test-subjects are our patients, relatives, friends, and, last but not least, ourselves … it is the hopes and fears, the pains and joys, the mistakes and achievements of real life that provide us with our material.

(Ibid.: para. 171)

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the experimental practices of scientific psychology came under severe attack from within the academia. As if echoing Jung’s sentiment, though making a case for a variant of postmodern psychology, Mark Freeman (1997: 171) contended that the traditional categories of psychology leave out ‘the living, loving, suffering, dying human being … human lives, existing in culture and in time’. But here the similarity ends. Jung claimed that analytical psychology is ‘far more concerned with the total manifestation of the psyche as a natural phenomenon’ than with isolated processes (1946, CW 17: para. 170). To him, the total manifestation includes the unconscious as well as conscious. This too distanced him from academic psychology and its materialistic biases, which meant ignoring the psyche. Jung pointed out that ‘all modern “psychologies without the psyche” are psychologies of consciousness, for which an unconscious psychic life simply does not exist’ – and therefore his ‘psychology with the psyche’, centred on the unconscious, would ‘certainly not be a modern psychology’ (1931a, CW 8: para. 658). It is also not a postmodern psychology, which means locating human consciousness in the materiality of discursive practices.

Although Jung was critical of academic psychologies, he shared their conviction that psychology ought to be a natural science. Recent critics within the academia have argued that by modelling itself on the natural sciences psychology has ignored, not only the hopes, fears, etc., of real life, but also its own cultural and historical specificity. The discontent found a voice (or voices, plural) in postmodernism. Ideas that had been bandied around in the humanities since the 1960s reached the social sciences a decade or so later. In this context, postmodernism means a form of social study that prompts the evaluative – and primarily qualitative – description of the particular, historical, local and discursive aspects of human life (e.g. Ryan, 1999). All strands of postmodern psychology embody this ethos, but their specific practices are shaped by diverse philosophical positions. Postmodern psychology is an aggregate of ‘frameworks’ – discursive, critical, narrative, rhetorical, sociocultural, dialogical – each with its own key figures, set of concerns and core premises that part-overlap, part-contradict those of other ‘new’ psychologies. There are admixtures of Foucauldian, feminist, psychoanalytical and Marxist orientations. During the 1990s, social constructionism emerged as the most distinctive philosophical standpoint, although its two major exponents – Rom Harré and Kenneth Gergen – fundamentally disagree with each other. The interrelation among postmodern psychologies could be described as ‘not an agreement in opinions but in form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: §241). In his introduction, Kvale (1992: 1) points out that the ‘very concept of a unitary discipline is at odds with postmodern thought’. Multivoicedness is hardly a postmodern peculiarity, however. Six decades earlier, Jung noted that ‘there is not one modern psychology – there are dozens’, commenting that this is ‘curious enough when we remember that there is only one science of mathematics, of geology, zoology, botany and so forth’ (1931a, CW 8: para. 659). What has been relinquished in the wake of postmodernism is the inclination to include psychology in that list of sciences.

It makes sense to speak of postmodern psychology in the singular insofar as it is a ‘form of life’ distinct from both modern psychology and from postmodernism elsewhere in the academia. It is distinguishable from both insofar as it must contend with the traditional natural-scientific model of the discipline. Whereas Jung saw in the modern academia an array of psychologies without the psyche, exponents of postmodern psychologies see in the modern lingering fallacies of psyche. The rhetoric of the new paradigm in psychology is replete with condemnations of old claims that the essence of human nature is pre-given, fixed and determines our being irrespective of history and culture. Jung held that man, like ‘every animal … possesses a preformed psyche which breeds true to his species’ and which ‘enables a child to react in a human manner’ (1954, CW 9I: para. 152). Kvale (1992: 1) described the postmodern break from traditional psychology as characterized by the ‘decentring of the self, the move from the inside of the psyche to the text of the world’ and from the ‘archaeology of the psyche to the architecture of cultural landscapes’. Far from abandoning the archaeology of the psyche, Jung excavates its depths so as to find natural and prehistoric foundations for the cultural architectures of recent historical epochs. With little contact with each other, Jungian and postmodern psychologies resist each other’s form of life. The impasse is not simply a case of schools of thought at loggerheads about some phenomena that they both observe. It is not a case of Jung saying ‘The psyche is like this’ and postmodern psychologists say, ‘No, it’s like that’. Postmodern psychology eschews the very assumption of a psyche, replacing it with views of subjectivity as an emergent property of discourse. The impasse is characterized by what Ian Parker describes as ‘deadlocks of perspective’ (apropos of Lacan and discursive psychology). I’ve made his conclusion one of the chapter’s mottoes, for it captures my strategy in this critique.

A revision of Jung in the light of postmodern psychology or vice versa would do violence to both. We should acknowledge the existence of misalignment, the failures of agreement, which renders any integration of Jungian and postmodern psychologies a dubious enterprise. And why ‘integrate’? Each psychology is thriving without apparent need for the other. That which might require some rescuing is the psychological issue of how human beings make their experiences meaningful. To paraphrase Jung (the chapter’s other motto), if we are honest we must be prepared to pull that issue into its antithetical parts, and consequently be ready to admit that neither the Jungian nor the postmodern gives the full picture. We can’t take the ‘best of each’ so as to make a whole – we don’t know which bits are best, not having the full picture. If a synthesis should emerge, it might be ‘a new content … standing in a compensatory relation to both’ (paraphrasing Jung, 1921, CW 6: para. 825). First, we should try to pinpoint the various aspects of the thesis and antithesis at play. That is the task of this book.

Seeing the problem: the case of Stan’s sister

It is customary to begin a scholarly work with a ‘statement of the problem’ – a section or chapter that exposes the failings of some established theory and in this way sets the scene for the writer’s heroic rescue of Knowledge. It is a powerful narrative formula; but there are pitfalls. When identifying theoretical contradictions – as this book sets out to do – we inevitably think in terms of mutually exclusive categories. We are thus ‘in danger of unconsciously resorting to disputation’, as Plato warned (Republic, 1993: 454b). He attributes the seduction of sophistic disputation to people’s ‘inability to conduct the enquiry by dividing the subject matter into its various aspects. Instead their goal is the contradiction of statements at the purely verbal level’ (ibid.: 454a). As a preventive measure, I would like to begin not with an argument but with a concrete ‘anecdotal’ case, through which the conceptual tensions giving rise to the arguments presented in this book become visible. It is based on child observations collected many years ago towards a vocational diploma, and was first told in Jones (2003a), where I called the child Martin; but ‘Stan’ allows the alliteration. This is the Case of Stan’s Sister.

Four-year-old Stan was a large-built, sociable, physically active and confident boy, sometimes impertinent and a bully, but also chivalrous. He took great pleasure in helping girls tie their shoelaces, showing off his competence. He would flit from activity to activity trying to impress peers and staff with his power and ‘magic’ (a favourite word of his). Much of his play and conversations involved fantasies in which he was heroic. He was Superman or a lion, and told of fights with monsters, relishing in gory detail, but which he always fought for a noble cause. When I explained that I was in college when not in the nursery, he announced that he saw me there (he never visited the college), immediately adding that he ‘saved a girl from an elephant and killed a big lion in college’. During January, Star Wars provided inspiration for much of his play. He was fond of making Lego spaceships, and talked a lot about Princess Leia, repeatedly telling people that he kissed her (‘twice!’). Against that macho demeanour, there emerged some surprising behaviour. For about a fortnight, Stan obsessively dressed up in women’s clothes from the dressing-up box. It was not role-play, he wasn’t pretending to be anyone; he just liked to wear those clothes. He took a special liking to a certain red dress, and once I saw him chase a girl who wore it and force her to hand it over to him. The nursery staff found his cross-dressing highly comical, and eventually he seemed to be doing it for laughs. By early February the cross-dressing lost its earnestness, but something of its original intensity was transferred to plain curiosity about female underwear. One day the teacher led a group talk about the colours of the children’s clothes. This prompted Stan to interrogate the girl sitting next to him about what she wore under her jumper. She showed him the shoulder strap of her vest. He insisted that it was a nightie and would not stand corrected. As the cross-dressing waned, an imaginary sister emerged (he had only an older brother). He mentioned her for the first time in my presence on 31 January. During outdoor play, the children kept running behind the building, which was forbidden. When they were called back by staff, Stan said excitedly, ‘I can see my sister there!’ Afterwards he kept drawing other children’s attention to the forbidden place, insisting, ‘I saw my sister there.’ During February, Stan still mentioned Princess Leia, but usually as a teaser; e.g. telling me, ‘You didn’t kiss Princess Leia!’ There were no more mentions of her in March. Instead, he increasingly talked about his sister. He would claim to see her from the window, where the older children could be seen walking to the nearby primary school – saying, for instance, ‘My sister goes to school, I don’t care, I got a sister now’ (15 March). He used her as a kind of trump card or one-upmanship: ‘This is my sister, I’m not telling you her name!’ he told me about a picture that he painted (21 March). A week later, he began saying that he was going to have ‘a baby sister, a girl’ (his mother was not expecting, as far as we knew). By the end of March the school term ended and so did my placement.

The same ‘raw facts’ of what Stan said and did can support contradictory theories about human nature. In one reading, it seems like a textbook case of classical Jungian theory. Jung submitted that the male personality has a feminine part, which he called anima; women have a corresponding animus (e.g. 1951, CW 9II). The anima sometimes appears as a sisterly voice in men’s dreams. Stan’s sister is like a dream projected onto his wakeful reality. At first she seems undifferentiated from his ego (it is he in female clothing), and sometimes projected externally onto a concrete icon supplied by popular culture, Princess Leia. Later she is externalized as the secret but realistic sister, who becomes even more plausible as a baby-to-be. There is a striking parallel with how Erich Neumann, following Jung, described ego development. He used the metaphor of the hero’s journey. To quote from a textbook reviewing Neumann’s theory,

First, the hero/ego is trying to separate from the mother and the maternal environment. Second, the hero is trying to identify and discriminate the masculine and feminine sides of himself, so as to integrate them. Third, he is looking for values and modes of psychological functioning to offset and balance the over-directed and exaggeratedly conscious manner he has had to develop to break out of the embrace of the Great Mother. The ego has to behave in this over-stressed and stereotypically masculine way to free itself … The one-sided ‘masculinity’ can then be seen as necessary and inevitable, and in need of its opposite, namely the princess or similar feminine figure.

(Samuels, 1985: 71)

Stan appears to be living through those precise stages in his heroic fantasies, exaggerated masculinity, imaginary girls he rescues, real girls he assists, Princess Leia and finally the Sister.

Stan was the only boy who displayed that pattern. The experiences that Jung attributed to the anima are probably ubiquitous – otherwise, his theory wouldn’t ring true to so many analysts and their patients – but ubiquity alone is not evidence for the biologically hard-wired developmental programme that Jungian theory implies in some of its interpretations. The experiences in question could be due to growing up a boy, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The relevance of Jung
• 2 Symbolic and dialogic dimensions
• 3 Myth and narrative
• 4 Two models: the dialogical self and dynamical psyche
• 5 The ebb and flow of ‘psychic energy’
• References
• Index