Jung and Levinas

An ethics of mediation

Frances Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415816823
• eBook ISBN: 9781135068530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book brings C.G. Jung into conversation with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, taking a radical view of post-modernist theory which, the author argues, is relentlessly introverted. Frances Gray presents completely new research which extends analytical psychology into the world of dispute resolution in mediation within a deeply philosophical framework. Arguing that mediation is a therapeutics that entails a psycho-social archaeology which, in turn, requires recognition of the foundational roles of sex/gender, time and narrative in inter-subjective relationships, this book develops Jung's approach to projection as an ethical process that assumes the presence of a sex/gendered Other.

Chapters explore the possibility of a psycho-social archaeology through development of the argument that a radical turn to the fundamentals of our own consciousnesses can open up a landscape on which we begin to fashion the moral courage necessary for the practice of alternative dispute resolution in mediation. This book highlights Jung's contention that withdrawal of projection is a fundamentally moral endeavour and that although Levinas' face of the Other can be seen as a way of acknowledging the Otherness of the Other, there are limits to its application in Jungian thinking. This book maintains that the face of the Other is critical to any moral encounter and, above all, brings us to the transformational possibilities of the process of dispute resolution in mediation.

Jung and Levinas will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners of analytical psychology, dispute resolution, applied ethics, conflict studies and transformation.

Chapter 1 Mediation as therapy

Time and memory

DOI: 10.4324/9780203585382-2

The past, the present, the future, the triad in which we, as human beings, understand time are all implicated in the gathering of ourselves together: we work, now, within a framework of an inescapable past, towards some future about which we like to believe we can make some choices and decisions. An understanding of time seems requisite, then, if we are to countenance the ubiquity of memory in our lives. So let take a brief look at the concept of time as it has been understood in Western thinking. We will see that Plato, in his attempts to define knowledge, alludes to the role of memory. I claim that once he does that, time becomes an issue, since memory and time are logically tied. Time surrounds and infiltrates memory as well as providing the space in which memory can live. Time ‘passes’; we remain vigilantly in the now, aware of its passing. What sense can we make of time? How can we explain time to ourselves?

It is not difficult to locate some of the earliest discussions of time in Plato's texts, albeit not always in the context of memory. The context in which he does frame his discussion is metaphysical and cosmological in so far as he is attempting to account for creation. Plato argues that there are two opposing states or conditions: the unchangeable and the changeable. He argues that whatever is apprehended by intelligence and reason must be unchangeable, and that what is conceived by the senses and opinion, and thus without reason, is changeable. In his view, whatever is unchangeable is fair and perfect, and whatever is changeable ‘is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is’ (Plato 1970: 28a).

In the dialogue Timaeus,¹ Plato gives an account of the creation of the soul and the corporeal universe. He describes the creation as coming into being, ‘a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God’. This creation is in the likeness of ‘the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings … like the perfect animal’. What is important for our purposes is that Plato, as does Genesis, imagines a beginning, a solitary world, of which he says, ‘there is and ever will be one only-begotten and created heaven’ (Plato 1970: 30b–31b). The creation of the world marks the creation of time. Anticipating Aristotle's discussion of cause, Plato maintains that things that become and/or are created must have a creator ‘for without a cause nothing can be created’. He also maintains that the ‘artificer’ must have looked to the unchangeable when he made the world because ‘the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best cause’; but the world is a copy or likeness and not the eternal itself (Plato 1970: 28a–29c). It cannot be eternal as the world is apprehended by the senses, not by reason and the mind. Plato argues that the creator was so full of joy when he created the creature that is the world, that he wanted to make it more like the original. But the original was everlasting, an attribute not predicable of the created copy. The created image moved ‘according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time’ (Plato 1970: 37dff.).

He explains that there were no days or nights before the creation. As Plato conceived of it, the creator exists in an everlasting, unchanging state, thus outside time. However, the created image has eternity as an aspect of its being, albeit with a starting point. Thus we end up, in Plato, with two different conceptions of eternity, one of which encompasses time: what is outside time, thus unchanging (and apprehended by reason and intelligence); and what is everlasting or never ending given that it has come into existence (and apprehended through belief and opinion and the senses (sempiternity). Time belongs with the latter, but not to the former understanding of eternity, and time comes into being with the creation, the heaven.²

Plato's was amongst the first, but certainly not the last word on the nature of time. Aristotle asks ‘does time belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist? Then second, what is its nature?’ (Aristotle 1941: Physics, 217b, 30ff.). These questions frame his arguments about time's relationship to motion and measurement of motion and closely shadow Plato's reflections on the changing and the unchanging. Along with the concepts of now, before and after, these are the very questions with which Augustine will later be preoccupied in Chapter XI of the Confessions. Following Aristotle, Plotinus’ The Enneads (Plotinus 1917–1931), St Augustine's Confessions (Augustine 1961), and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius 1897) recall the importance of time and eternity as the metaphysical problems that they are. Of particular interest to us are Augustine's reflections on time. Broadly speaking, one can identify two intertwining streams in his thinking: a phenomenological and a theoretical, with the phenomenological being the occasion of his more intellectual appraisal.

The conceptual framework in which Augustine raises the issue of time and eternity is Platonic: ‘Oh Lord, since you are outside time in eternity, are you unaware of the things that I tell you?’ (my italics) (Augustine 1961: Book XI, 1, 253). Augustine's faith, and his familiarity with Genesis 1:1 (‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth’), finds him addressing God: ‘when you had not made anything, there was no time, because time itself was of your making. And no time is co-eternal with you, because you never change; whereas, if time never changed, it would not be time’ (Augustine 1961: Book XI, 14, 263). With his very next question, ‘What, then, is time?’ Augustine takes us into the Aristotle's Physics. Thus, there are at least three influences apparent in his discussion of time and eternity: Plato, Aristotle and (the author of) Genesis.

Although his is close to Aristotle's analysis, Augustine brings to the forefront the division of time into past, present and future, and makes of time a dimension of the human mind. Thus Augustine's meditation on time also echoes Plotinus’ suggestion that time ‘is a thing seen upon Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as Eternity to the Intellectual Realm’ (Plotinus 1917–1931: Part 3.7). This does not entail the absolute subjectivity of time, but it does make the perception of time relative to individual consciousness. Indeed, one must always be cognizant of the cosmos, and thus of time outside human conception and theorisation. That is to say, the time that pre-exists, and presumably post-exists, human being. This is time: change and movement, that can be thought of as inherent in the cosmos or as cosmological time that is not in stasis.

Augustine argues that time is conceived of as past, present and future. These, he maintains, are modes of the present, existing in the mind in the present.³

It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but no-where else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception and the present of future things is expectation.

(Augustine 1961: Book XI, 20, 269)

So, according to Augustine, when we speak of past, present and future, we are actually referring to something that is happening in our minds now: so that all time actually is modally related to the present. Hence, the present becomes a kind of temporally modulating organising principle. Augustine points out that one can continue to speak of the past, present and future, provided that ‘he understands what he is saying and does not imagine that the future or the past exists now. Our use of words is generally inaccurate and seldom completely correct, but our meaning is recognised none the less’. One problem, though, is that the present has no duration; nor does the future or the past. So we are left with the problem of how to measure what does not persist and has no duration. How, then, he asks, can we measure time? His attempts at a solution weave in and out of movement, sound, recitation and silences. In the end, he appeals to the regulatory function of the mind as it expects, attends and remembers. The mind, then, in its persisting attention, measures time as

through it that which is to be passes towards the state in which it is to be no more. So it is not future time that is long, but a long future is a long expectation of the future; and past time is not long, because it does not exist, but a long past is a long remembrance of the past.

(Augustine 1961: Book XI, 28, 277)

How can one attribute length to the future or the past? In what sense can an expectation or a remembrance be long? In my view, these are not questions that admit of a non-phenomenological answer: Augustine cannot be alluding to any metaphysical properties of the mind in a present state. His attribution is metaphorical, and it points to the importance of how we experience, as distinct from how we theorise, time. Time seems to pass quickly or slowly; we expect that something will happen in three years’ time: that seems like a long time away; we recall that something happened thirty years ago. Again, that seems like a long time ago, a distant past. We deploy spatial metaphors in describing our expectations and our remembrances. The quickness or slowness attributed speaks to the relativity of time, to the events that are occurring now, to what we expect, and to what we recall in relation to that now. This is our perceptual appreciation of time. And it is the idea of time with which many of us work when we think about memory.

The mind of memory

Long before the emergence of modern psychology and recent artistic preoccupations, memory had been a topic of interest to philosophers, mainly from an epistemological perspective. Plato, for example had held that knowledge was a form of recollection (Plato 1956, Meno: 81Bff.). Plato's later dialogue Theaetetus, in which he seems to abandon the recollection theory of Meno, is dedicated to an examination of knowledge, belief, perception, false judgement, memory and their relationships.⁴ The principal characters in Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus, argue whether perception is knowledge, and in the process introduce the role of memory in the ‘preservation’ of perceptual experience (Plato and Cornford 1935: 163Aff.). They also discuss the problem of mistaken judgements (where I mistake a for b, for example). In this context, they consider memory as a kind of ‘intaglio’ medium, or as a ‘repository’ on/in which items of knowledge are stored. These two tropes envisage memory firstly as a wax tablet ‘which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller … comparatively pure or muddy and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes just of the right consistency.’ Perceptions or ideas are imprinted as images ‘as we might stamp the impression of a seal-ring … we remember so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.’ Socrates also proposes that memory might be like an aviary in which ‘every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all’ (Plato and Cornford 1935: 191C/D;197D). On this view, one makes a mistake if one selects the ‘wrong’ bird for inspection.

From a very simplistic perspective, we can see that the notion of time is implicit in these conceptions of memory: memory consists in past perceptions, ideas, impressions, external to a person, coming into the mind, but leaving something of their presence behind once the external stimulation has gone. While Plato seems in both cases to be proposing a tabula rasa view of the mind, a pure untainted tablet or an empty receptacle, memory becomes the store in the present moment for one's life perceptual (and other intellectual) experiences. Questions around the nature of the mind, impressions that remain – and if they are impressions, and if they do ‘remain’ and what that might mean and what knowledge is, are all beyond the scope of this book. What is important to us is the tropes that Plato uses in his discussion of memory, and that there appears to be a necessary connection between memory and time. Plato also seems to think that memory is functional – as a container or engraved surface, memory ‘retains’ what is required for knowledge and the operations of the mind. In my view, this sets the scene for future discussions of both memory and time, even when they are not specifically linked.

For example, Aristotle, again in an epistemological vein, argued that we must ‘form a true conception of the objects of memory, a point on which mistakes are often made’. He quite deliberately links memory with past time when he asserts that one cannot remember the future, nor the present in which there is ‘only sense-perception’. Memory, he remarked, ‘relates to the past’. In the present, he argued, one does not remember since one has either an object before one (Perception) or one is considering ‘an object of scientific contemplation’ (Conception). He maintained that memory is ‘neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time … All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed’ (Aristotle 1941, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, 449: 9–29).

Augustine's later discussion of time reiterates Aristotle's schematic. In Augustine's hands, however, memory, and thus the past, becomes a formidable hermeneutic tool that contributes to the creation of a topology and theory of mind. Memory, together with the soul ‘joining’ it to the body, and also the faculty of the senses, forms the third part of a triad staged to bring Augustine to the God who made him.

Augustine pursues memory in both de Trintate and in the Confessions. ⁵ The beseeching tone of a soul that is searching permeates his reflections in Chapter X of Confessions, which produces a wonderful meditation on the phenomenal nature of memory.⁶ However, Augustine's discussion of memory, is both phenomenological – what has happened to/with him, his personal experience and understanding of memory – and intellectual. Additionally, we need to bear in mind that Augustine carries the Platonic heritage of linking memory and epistemology. Thus, following both Plato and Aristotle, Augustine includes a discussion of the intellectual/cognitive and the ability to recall from memory what one has learned, the nature of the images one finds in one's memory that are evidently related to objects in the world, and the notion of forgetfulness (Augustine 1961: Book X, 12, 219). These topics echo the earlier Platonic and Aristotelian attention to perception and errors in judgement. The intellectual dimensions of his discussion come to full fruition in his account of time, as I noted above.

Memory affects us to a profound degree. We are memory: memory brings us into being. And, in many ways, we are in memory. We are in memory in so far as we live in worlds that have collective identities and memories that create them and then continue to accompany them. We are in memory in our own personal and private lives in much the same way. But we can claim an ownership of personal memory in a way that we cannot of the collective or the social. Historically, Joseph Breuer, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung each acknowledged the centrality of memory as they reported on, and theorised out of, case studies which drew attention to the importance of memory as a meaningful living presence, but also a disturbing and healing dimension of our lives. Some of the most enduring insights of psychotherapy came out of their work – for example, in Breuer's and Freud's work on hysteria, and Jung's work on the collective unconscious (Breuer and Freud 2009; Jung 1968).

The container trope, for example, Plato's aviary, or even at a stretch, the wax tablet (which is three-dimensional) seems to fit in with most of our own allusions to memory: we speak of memory as going back in, diving into, digging deep, losing one's memory, all of which suggest height and depth and hiddenness. Memory functions not just as a repository or container, and a structuring mechanism, but it also functions to ground our being, our existential selves. A fourth dimension of memory is that it is the seat of our morality. We learn, as we grow, the moral codes of the socio-cultural worlds in which we find ourselves. While we may be ‘naturally’ disposed towards good or evil – and who is to tell if this is the case or not – we learn about what is acceptable or not within those worlds, what is within the law and without. We learn that there are consequence for not toeing the line, and we also learn that some of those consequences may include punishment and exclusion from the places we know and love, and which give us our familiarity with the world. Memory's role is here as a recorder of moral codes and how to obey them; disobedience and punishment affect our selves, so conscience arises as a response to the consequences of our actions (or non-actions). In other words, we learn to be moral, we learn to act ethically, through becoming aware of rules of behaviour and the praise and blame that accompany them.⁷ Memory is an active constituent of our moral lives and thus of our selves. We will move on to this in the next chapters. But why the preoccupation with memory? Let me sketch some historico-theoretical background as the beginnings of an answer.

From the late nine...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: mediation as therapeutics
• 1 Mediation as therapy: time and memory
• 2 Narrative and conversational texts
• 3 The Face in the ambiguity of Otherness
• 4 The Face in the ambiguity of Otherness: responsibility issues
• 5 Thinking about conflict: strife and love
• 6 Listening: mediation as ethics
• Conclusion: sometimes none of this works
• References
• Index