For Love of the Imagination

Interdisciplinary Applications of Jungian Psychoanalysis

Michael Vannoy Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415644082
• eBook ISBN: 9781135009847
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

"I have entitled this book For Love of the Imagination. Long ago, I fell in love with the imagination. It was love at first sight. I have had a lifelong love affair with the imagination. I would love for others, through this book, to fall in love, as I once did, with the imagination." Michael Vannoy Adams, from the Preface.

For Love of the Imagination is a book about the imagination – about what and how images mean. Jungian psychoanalysis is an imaginal psychology – or what Michael Vannoy Adams calls "imaginology," the study of the imagination. What is so distinctive – and so valuable – about Jungian psychoanalysis is that it emphasizes images.

For Love of the Imagination is also a book about interdisciplinary applications of Jungian psychoanalysis. What enables these applications is that all disciplines include images of which they are more or less unconscious. Jungian psychoanalysis is in an enviable position to render these images conscious, to specify what and how they mean.

On the contemporary scene, as a result of the digital revolution, there is no trendier word than "applications" – except, perhaps, the abbreviation "apps." In psychoanalysis, there is a "Freudian app" and a "Jungian app." The "Jungian app" is a technology of the imagination. This book applies Jungian psychoanalysis to images in a variety of disciplines. For Love of the Imagination also includes the 2011 Moscow lectures on Jungian psychoanalysis. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, students, and those with an interest in Jung.

Part I

IMAGINAL PSYCHOLOGY

1

FOR LOVE OF THE IMAGINATION

Why I Became a Psychotherapist

I became a psychotherapist because I so love the imagination. William Blake says: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” (1976a: 522). That is exactly how I regard the imagination. For me, psychotherapy is essentially an affair of images – of how we imagine and, more important, reimagine ourselves. This process of imagining and reimagining ourselves I call the fantasy principle (Adams 2004). I consider the fantasy principle more fundamental than either the “pleasure principle” or the “reality principle.”

Why I became a psychotherapist is inseparable from what kind of psychotherapist I became. Although I esteem all of the different schools of psychoanalysis, I have a particular interest in the Jungian school and in the “Hillmanian” school of imaginal (or archetypal) psychology that James Hillman has elaborated (Adams 2008). Jungian analysis interests me because it emphasizes the imagination more than the other schools do.

Psychoanalysis – especially Jungian analysis – has enabled me to return to the imagination. To “return” to something, one must, of course, have “left” something. In a certain sense, I left the imagination. In another sense, however, it was not I who left the imagination (nor was it the imagination that left me). Rather, the imagination was left – left behind me for several years. According to Richard Kearney, the imagination may be leaving us all, not temporarily but permanently. In the postmodern period, Kearney says, we may be witnessing the death of imagination and attending, if not the funeral, at least a wake (1988). There may be such a general trend, but it is a quite particular experience that I wish to emphasize. Mary Watkins, who has described the many varieties of imaginal techniques in use historically in European and American psychology (1984) and who has championed the importance of what she calls “imaginal dialogues” (1986), criticizes certain psychologists (among them, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and George Herbert Mead) for undervaluing or even devaluing the imagination. For such psychologists, the imagination is a developmental stage that we should grow out of as we grow into adulthood. For them, the imagination is merely a “phase” of childhood.

I grew up as a child in a small town in Texas. I was an only child until the age of nine when my father and mother – 56 and 50 years old at the time – adopted my brother and sister, two Korean-American war orphans, ages four and five. For my parents, for my family, that was a supreme example of what I call the “multicultural imagination” (Adams 1996b). Before that, however, as an only child, I had experienced nine years of what a Jungian might call introversion. I do not mean that I was oblivious to external reality in some schizoid sense or that, like Jung, I had in any radically dichotomous sense a public “No. 1” personality and a private “No. 2” personality (1963: 45). Nor do I mean that I had an imaginary companion or an imaginary world – what David Cohen and Stephen A. MacKeith call, after Robert Silvey, who collected many elaborate examples of such worlds, a “paracosm” (1991). I merely had an opportunity to develop an internal, imaginal reality in relation to external reality. Others have had the same or a similar experience. I was hardly unique. As an only child, I was sometimes a lonely child, but I also developed the capacity to be alone without feeling lonely, as well as a respect for the necessity of privacy, even secrecy, and I appreciated what Anthony Storr calls the virtues of solitude (1988), for it provided me with an occasion to imagine.

I had time and space as a child to indulge in what Gaston Bachelard calls “reverie” (1969). My father and mother had moved to a big, old house on ten acres where one of my grandfathers earlier in the century had once had a business that he advertised, true or not, as the largest nursery in northeast Texas. On either side of that land were streets with houses in 1950s suburban style, but those ten acres were, for me, a quite separate reality, which I called “the field.” Other children had yards; I had a field. In a sense, it was a field of daydreams, a field for my imagination – a field with black soil, red and yellow roses, purple irises, and white gardenias (that most fragrant flower, my father's favorite), and apple, pear, and peach trees. In that field I played for hours on end by myself, alone with my imagination.

If nature was outside, art was inside. In the house, I played in a room next to my mother's studio, where she drew in charcoal and pastel and painted in oil, where she glazed clay and enameled metal and fired her creations in a kiln. There was also the farm of my other grandfather – eighty acres that a railroad and a highway divided into three parts, a house with two fireplaces (one a hearth in the kitchen, where my six-foot, four-inch grandfather would warm his back while he ate his cornbread after he had dipped it in his buttermilk), a barn (where I learned to handle the udders of cows and to squirt a stream straight into the mouths of cats at a considerable distance), horses, hogs, chickens, and dogs. Jung says that “the chthonic portion of the psyche” – the aspect “through which the psyche is attached to nature, or in which its link with the earth and the world appears at its most tangible” (1927/1931, CW 10: par. 53) – grounds life in the most transparent way in archetypal images. In my experience as a child, it was not only nature – earth, plants, and animals – but also art that “archetypalized” my imagination. My imaginal reality was a combination of the chthonic and the aesthetic dimensions – my grandfathers' and father's world and my mother's world.

For me, the imagination was not left behind abruptly. If I were to attempt to date the experience, I would say that it occurred over the years between the ages of 13 and 21. In a sense, the process seems to me to have been quite normal – it just happened. I do not believe, however, that it was inevitable, nor do I believe that it was developmentally desirable, as if the imagination was merely one of those childish things that I needed to put behind me. Someone else might simply regard those years as a period of extraversion necessary for socialization. It is difficult for me to do so, however, because I sensed that I missed something. I intuited that I had lost something, perhaps irretrievably. What exactly I had lost, what precisely I missed, I would have been hard put to say, but I now know that it was the imagination.

School and university did not, at least for me, validate the imagination. Educationally, the imagination was not of much visible value. In that context, I resorted to journalism. I edited school and university newspapers, I majored in journalism, and I worked as a summer intern reporter on the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution. I became preoccupied with the external political reality of current events, especially civil rights and the Vietnam War. Then something happened that was to transform me irreversibly. I discovered psychoanalysis, I discovered Freud – I began to rediscover the imagination. In retrospect, I realize that an interest in external political reality can also be a very serious expression of the imagination. As Andrew Samuels notes, there is not only political imagery but also a politics of imagery (1993: 14) – but at the time I did not experience it as such. The year was that year of years, 1968. As a Flower Powerist and New Leftist, I read Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959). Marcuse and Brown impressed me because they both, although in different ways, called for an end to repression.

My girlfriend at the time was majoring in psychology. She had a special interest in psychoanalysis and Freud. She was writing a senior honors essay on Freud and the scientific method, attempting to demonstrate that, methodologically, Freud had been a scientist. We engaged in intense discussions about psychoanalysis – I citing Marcuse and Brown, she citing Freud. She was extremely critical of the way that Marcuse and Brown used the word “repression” and insisted that they were not using it in the same technical sense that Freud used it. She challenged me to read Freud in the original, in the James Strachey translation, as she had already done. I began to do so. Reading Freud was a revelation. I had never before encountered a system of ideas of such vast imaginative proportions. Freud so impressed me that a year later, when my girlfriend and I flew to England to backpack across Europe, our very first stop in London was the Hogarth Press, where, with my meager undergraduate savings, I proudly ordered a set of the Standard Edition, to be shipped to America to await my return at the end of our travels. Since then, I have never been without those twenty-four volumes; they have accompanied me to England for three years and to India for a year.

At the time, I was still seriously contemplating a career in journalism. While working as a summer intern reporter on newspapers, however, I had gradually begun to feel that journalism was not the life for me. The emphasis on current events began to seem superficial – too much surface and not enough depth. I now know that it was not journalism that was superficial. It was I who was superficial. I needed more depth. My recent experience with psychoanalysis had led me to believe that ideas were deeper than events. I decided to go to graduate school – I enrolled in the American Civilization program at the University of Texas at Austin.

In my very first semester in that program, I took two courses – “Freud in America” and “Herman Melville” – that profoundly influenced me. The courses were a fortuitous combination. I had never read any of Melville's works, but as I began to do so I discovered that there was a great deal of psychoanalytic literary criticism on his works – especially on Moby-Dick and on Pierre, the novel in which Melville, like Freud, emphasizes “the two most horrible crimes … possible to civilized humanity – incest and parricide” (1971: 351). I also discovered that one of those who had written psychoanalytic literary criticism on Melville was Henry A. Murray, the Harvard psychologist who (in collaboration with Christiana Morgan) had developed the Thematic Apperception Test, or “TAT.” One of the inspirations for the TAT was evidently Murray's reading of “The Doubloon” chapter in Moby-Dick, where Melville describes the various interpretations of the gold coin by Captain Ahab and the other sailors as, in effect, a projective test. As one of the sailors says of the attempts to interpret the doubloon: “There's another rendering now; but still one text” (1988: 434). Another, equally important source for the TAT was Morgan's artistic renditions of her fantasies, or “visions,” which Jung employed in seminars to illustrate the technique of “active imagination” (Douglas 1993; Jung 1997).

The immediate consequence, for me, was that I began to entertain the possibility that I might become a psychoanalytic literary critic. I also began to perceive (or, more accurately, to project) sexual symbolism everywhere in Melville's works. This interest of mine made a certain impression on Jay Leyda, the eminent literary, music, and film scholar. Leyda, who had edited The Melville Log (1969), two magnificent volumes of biographical documents, visited the University of Texas while I was a graduate student there. We had lunch, during which I waxed enthusiastic about my interest in Melville and in sexual symbolism.

The next year, Leyda published an essay, “Herman Melville, 1972,” in which he reflected on the then current state of scholarly and critical work on Melville. He lamented that “the art of Herman Melville has been reduced from discovery to a reading assignment” (1973: 163). According to Leyda, the study of Melville was now merely an academic exercise:

What we once read for joy has been transformed into a “subject,” or rather an object for criticism and interpretation. The man who wrote these works has been pushed aside (again!) by well-meaning persons who tell us what the words really mean – so that there's not much room for either man or works. Critical microscopes are brought into play, but I'm no longer sure for what purpose.

(1973: 163)

Whom, exactly, did Leyda have in mind? As I read the essay, I was chagrined to realize that he had me in mind. Leyda wondered what the purpose was of “a close, a very close hunt for the sexual puns” in Melville's works (1973: 163). He asked: “Is it to learn more about its author than we knew before? or to draw attention to the ingenuity of the interpreter?” (1973: 163–4). Leyda even gave me a funny name: “the hunting inspector” (1973: 164). My critical microscope was, of course, psychoanalysis.

In the meantime, I was awarded a Marshall scholarship (comparable to a Rhodes scholarship but funded by the British Parliament in commemoration of the Marshall Aid Plan for Europe after World War II) to pursue doctoral research in American Studies at the University of Sussex in England. I proposed to write a psychoanalytic dissertation on – what else? – the sexual symbolism in Melville's works. I spent much of the next three years in the library of the British Museum, at a desk under the dome of the Reading Room (I felt as if I were sitting inside a beautiful blue eggshell). I tried to read every book on symbolism that Melville might have read. Many of these books were late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century works in what we would now call comparative mythology. The more I read, the more I began to suspect that my psychoanalytic approach to Melville was woefully naïve.

As I discovered in those works of comparative mythology the sources of much of Melville's symbolism in Moby-Dick, I realized that the symbolism was not, in any psychoanalytic sense, unconscious. I began to appreciate Melville as a literary “psychologist” who had imaginatively adapted symbolism from works in comparative mythology to serve his own, quite conscious purposes. I finally decided that psychoanalysis had less to say about Melville than Melville had to say a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Permissions
• Preface
• Part I Imaginal Psychology
• Part II Jungian Interdisciplinary Applications
• Part III The 2011 Moscow Lectures on Jungian Psychoanalysis
• Name Index
• Subject Index