Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole

Roderick Main, Christian McMillan, David Henderson, Roderick Main, Christian McMillan, David Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367428747
• eBook ISBN: 9781000171341
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

This book of expert essays explores the concept of the whole as it operates within the psychology of Jung, the philosophy of Deleuze, and selected areas of wider twentieth-century Western culture, which provided the context within which these two seminal thinkers worked.

Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines and with an eye to contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, the contributors aim to clarify some of the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society, or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole.

Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole will contribute to enhancing critical self-reflection among the many contemporary theorists and practitioners in whose work thinking in terms of the whole plays a significant role.

Chapter 1

The ethical ambivalence of holism

An exploration through the thought of Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze

Roderick Main

Among the many ways in which the concept of holism has been used since it was coined almost a hundred years ago (Smuts 1926), two polarised extremes stand out. On the one hand, holism – briefly, the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts¹ – has been championed as the solution to a range of scientific and cultural problems associated with the condition Max Weber termed disenchantment (1919: 139, 155). For example, as Anne Harrington has related, various life and mind scientists in the German-speaking world during the first decades of the twentieth century sought to develop ‘a new science of Wholeness’ that, as well as solving scientific problems that seemed intractable to an analytic approach, would counteract the cultural sense of alienation and meaninglessness that was seen as stemming from ‘the old science of the Machine’ with its ‘mechanistic, instrumentalist thinking’ (1996: xv–xvi). Later in the twentieth century, Morris Berman, lamenting how a disenchanted worldview had ‘destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human psyche’ and ‘very nearly wrecked the planet as well’, proposed holism as a key component in an urgently needed ‘re-enchantment of the world’: ‘Some type of holistic, or participating, consciousness and a corresponding socio-political formation’, he wrote, ‘have to emerge if we are to survive as a species’ (1981: 23). Similar sentiments also inform many of the more recent manifestations of holistic thought in spirituality, therapy, ecology, and other areas (Hanegraaff 1998: 119–58; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Fellows 2019).

On the other hand, holism has been charged with facilitating the emergence of totalitarianism and its associated ills. Organicistic and other holistic tropes were part of the Nazi rhetoric, for instance, and for at least some scientists in the interwar German-speaking world there were very real connections between the holism promoted in their scientific work and their support for aspects of Nazi ideology, such as the expectation that individuals should subordinate their self-interest in order to serve the organic whole, the Volk, of which they were parts (Harrington 1996: 175–78). While Harrington notes that ‘the history of German holism is a history of many stories and […] other political relationships [than conservative, antidemocratic, and totalitarian ones] were possible, and in various ways, persuasive’ (ibid.: 208), other commentators have argued that the connection between holism and totalitarianism is intrinsic. Karl Popper, for example, identified holism as one of the presuppositions, along with historicism and essentialism, that typically leads to totalitarian political formations (1945, 1957). More recently, Jozet Keulartz concluded a discussion of holism in the thought of Jan Christiaan Smuts, Alfred North Whitehead, and late twentieth-century ecology with the claim that ‘the link between holism and totalitarianism does not rest exclusively on historical coincidence but may well be the consequence of an internal relationship’ (1998: 141; see also Cooper 1996).

The ethical ambivalence that seems to attach to holism – where it is seen alternatively as the solution to a range of social, cultural, and political ills or as a major cause of such ills – is explored in the present chapter through an examination of the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jung’s professional life overlapped with the emergence of the principal forms of both twentieth-century holism and twentieth-century totalitarianism. His work is itself deeply holistic (Smith 1990; Main 2019) and has been construed as, on the one hand, re-enchanting (Main 2011, 2013, 2017) and, on the other hand, problematically implicated with Nazism and anti-Semitism (Grossman 1979; Maidenbaum and Martin 1992). It thus exemplifies the problem under discussion.

The question that this chapter addresses, then, is what are the ethical implications of holism, and more particularly whether the case of Jung suggests that there is indeed an intrinsic relationship between holistic and totalitarian forms of thought. The approach taken to exploring these issues involves first highlighting salient aspects of Jung’s holistic thought and the ethical benefits, individual and social, that arguably stem from it. This positive picture is then confronted with a perspective deeply critical of holistic thought and its possible totalitarian implications – the perspective of the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995).² Deleuze was demonstrably influenced by Jung and developed ideas that have many affinities with Jung’s (Kerslake 2007; Holland 2012: 310–13), and he also, like Jung, reflected deeply on the problem of the whole throughout his professional life (Ansell-Pearson 2007: 5). This makes it all the more interesting that on the particular issue of holistic thought, Deleuze appears to have taken a position almost opposite to Jung’s. Rather than pore over historical or biographical issues, however, the chapter examines some of the metaphysical assumptions underpinning Jung’s and Deleuze’s thought, particularly in relation to transcendence and immanence, in order to assess the extent to which Deleuze’s criticisms of holistic thought as intrinsically totalitarian might be answerable from the perspective of Jung’s holism. It also considers whether this confrontation has any implications for understanding the thought of Deleuze.

Jung’s holistic thought

The appropriateness of designating Jung’s work as a form of holism, despite his not having used this specific term himself,³ is supported by a number of considerations that have been discussed elsewhere (Main 2019). These include the pivotal and pervasive importance of the concept of wholeness in his work; the parallels between his thought and that of contemporaneous thinkers widely designated as holists; his explicit influence on subsequent self-proclaimed holists; and the close fit of his ideas with various characterisations and formal definitions of holism (ibid.: 61–63). For the purpose of the present discussion, there are several points to highlight.

As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jung’s primary concern was with processes of psychological healing and development. Increased ‘human wholeness’ (1944: §32) was important to him because he envisaged this as the goal of those processes. He characterised such wholeness as consisting in a union of opposites (1911–12/1952: §460; 1946: §532; 1958: §784), most generally as ‘the union of the conscious and unconscious personality’ (1940: §294), and he designated this united state with the concept of the self (1955–56: §145), the ‘archetype of wholeness’ (1951a: §351; 1952a: §757). The self, or wholeness, found expression in a multitude of symbols for Jung, among which the mandala was of particular importance (1944: §§323–31). The overall process of developing such wholeness he called ‘individuation’ (1928: §§266–406). Jung’s thought is holistic, then, in that it presupposes the possibility of psychological wholeness, and that presupposition informs both how psychological processes are understood and how psychotherapy is done.

While Jung was primarily concerned with psychological wholeness, he considered that the process of developing psychological wholeness could lead in the direction of a wider wholeness that included the world beyond the psyche. At one level, the world beyond the psyche included the social world. Jung was not a social holist in the usual sense of holding that social entities have properties that are irreducible to the behaviours of the individuals composing those social entities (1957: §§504, 553–54). Nevertheless, he considered that the pursuit of wholeness at the individual level, insofar as it ‘makes us aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind’, could ‘[bring] to birth a consciousness of human community’ (1945: §227). As he wrote in connection to this, ‘Individuation [the process of realising the wholeness of the self] is an at-one-ment with oneself and at the same time with humanity, since oneself is a part of humanity’ (ibid.).

At another level – or other levels – the world beyond the psyche included for Jung the physical and spiritual worlds. In the concluding chapter of his late work Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56: §§654–789), Jung presented his model of psychological development in terms of three ‘conjunctions’ (or a conjunction in three stages) as described by the sixteenth-century alchemist Gerhard Dorn. The first conjunction or stage was the union of the psyche and spirit, or of the mind within itself, a realisation of inner psychic integration (ibid.: §§669–76). The second conjunction or stage was the union of the integrated psyche with the body or with the world of physical reality (ibid.: §§677–93). The third and final conjunction or stage was the union of the integrated mind and body with the world of potential, the unitary source of all actualisations, the ‘one world’ or unus mundus (ibid.: §§759–75). This conception implied that realisation of wholeness could involve two forms of integration that were empirical or immanent: the integration of the mind within itself and the integration of the internally integrated mind with the body and with the external world. Besides this, however, the conception also implied that realisation of wholeness could involve a third form of integration that was non-empirical or transcendent: the integration of the integrated mind-body with its unitary source. At its deepest levels, Jung’s holism was thus cosmic and mystical as well as psychological and social.

The possibility of holistic relations existing between, as well as at, different levels of reality is reflected in Jung sometimes suggesting that the relationship between psychological wholeness and the wholeness of humanity or of the world could be understood as one between microcosm and macrocosm. Jung sometimes invoked this idea in his discussions of society, describing the individual person as ‘a social microcosm, reflecting on the smallest scale the qualities of society at large’ (1957: §553; see also §540). More often, however, he introduced the idea in relation to the cosmological visions and transformative practices of pre-modern, non-Western, and especially esoteric, above all alchemical, thinkers (1944: §472; 1952b: §§923, 925–26, 928–29, 937).

Although Jung did not generally present his thinking about wholeness in terms of the relationship between wholes and parts, as do most formal definitions of holism (Phillips 1976: 6; Esfeld 2003), such terms and ways of understanding are arguably implicit in his view (Main 2019: 61–63). Like more explicitly holistic thinkers, Jung prioritised the perspective of wholeness when dealing with subject matter, in his case the human personality or more specifically the self, that could not be adequately understood in terms of a purely analytic approach (Jung 1952b: §§821, 864; Phillips 1976: 6–12). Like explicit holists, he saw this whole as more than the sum of its parts (Phillips 1976: 12–15); that is, the self was for him more than an aggregate of the contents comprising it: in shorthand, the conscious ego, the shadow, and the other archetypes of the collective unconscious (Jung 1944: §44; 1951a: §43; 1955–56: §145). He also considered that the self, as the whole, determined the nature of its parts (Phillips 1976: 16); that is, to the extent that it was the ‘organiser of the personality’ (Jung 1958: §694) the self determined the nature of the conscious ego, shadow, and other archetypes. Again like explicit holists, Jung did not think the parts could be understood if considered in isolation from the whole (Phillips 1976: 17–19); in his terms, since the manifestations of the ego, shadow, and other archetypes at any time were related to their role in the process of individuation, which in turn was governed by the self (Jung 1928, 1944), it was not possible adequately to understand the ego, shadow, and other archetypes in isolation from the self. Finally, Jung saw the parts as dynamically interrelated or interdependent (Phillips 1976: 19); the ego, shadow, and other archetypes evinced for him precisely such interrelationship and interdependence, as described throughout his mature discussions of his psychology (1928; 1940: §302; 1944; 1955–56; see also Smith 1990; Cambray 2009: 33–36).

In sum, Jung’s conception of wholeness, while primarily psychological, extended to include the social world, the physical world, and the spiritual world, and the connections among these various domains of experience were sometimes framed in terms of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. Although he did not use the term ‘holism’ himself, his concept of wholeness can be quite closely fitted with formal analytic definitions of holism.

The ethical implications of Jung’s holistic thought

For Jung, attending to wholeness could generate not only certain kinds of knowledge but also distinct ethical benefits. At the individual level, the principal ethical benefit of attending to wholeness was that it enabled persons to address their one-sidedness and the pathologies that Jung considered to stem from one-sidedness (1937: §255, 258). By becoming more conscious of aspects of their whole personality that had been operating unconsciously, they would be less likely to project these aspects onto others (1951a: §16).

At the social level, we have already seen that Jung considered development towards wholeness of the self as a process that made individuals conscious of their shared collectivity (1945: §227). In a more specifically political register, he also argued that, insofar as the self or wholeness with which individuation brings a person into relationship transcends empirical experience (1957: §509; 1958: §779), it could serve, as belief in God had traditionally done, as an ‘extramundane principle capable of relativising the overpowering influence of external [social and political] factors’ and in particular could prevent a person’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The ethical ambivalence of holism: An exploration through the thought of Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze
• Chapter 2 The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form in Jung’s ‘The undiscovered self’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Treatise on nomadology’
• Chapter 3 Jung as symptomatologist
• Chapter 4 One, two, three… one: The edusemiotic self
• Chapter 5 The geometry of wholeness
• Chapter 6 The status of exceptional experiences in the Pauli-Jung conjecture
• Chapter 7 Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence: Anaxagoras, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Klages, and Jung on the beauty of it all
• Chapter 8 Holism and chance: Markets and meaning under neoliberalism
• Index