The Wounded Researcher

Research with Soul in Mind

Robert D. Romanyshyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000292428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Wounded Researcher addresses the crises of epistemological violence when we fail to consider that a researcher is addressed by and drawn into a work through his or her complexes. Using a Jungian-Archetypal perspective, this book argues that the bodies of knowledge we create degenerate into ideologies, which are the death of critical thinking, if the complexity of the research process is ignored. Writing with soul in mind invites us to consider how we might write down the soul in writing up our research.

PART I
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Theory

CHAPTER ONE
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Soul and the Complex of Psychology

If we could reoriginate psychology.., away might open toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology ….¹

—James Hillman

Language is an intervention into psychology, not a neutral medium for it.²

Psychology is the web of all discourses.³

—Susan Rowland

INTRODUCTION

In his essay “On the Nature of the Psyche,” Carl Jung makes the provocative statement that “[p]sychology is doomed to cancel itself out as a science and therein precisely it reaches its scientific goal.”⁴ Is the statement provocative because it suggests that psychology has been and is a questionable enterprise? Does the attainment of its scientific goal mean the end of psychology? If so, then what lies beyond psychology when it reaches its scientific goal? My intention in this chapter is to show how the notion of the psychoid archetype that Jung presents in this essay leads to a science of soul, which on the one hand takes psychology beyond itself and on the other forces a radical shift in psychology’s attitude toward its own language. In the final section of this chapter, entitled “An Afterword,” I will return to these two possibilities to suggest that they are not as incompatible as they might seem.

Jung himself confesses that the psychoid archetype does take psychology beyond itself. Concerning the reformulation of the archetype that he presents in this essay he says that in the end he discovered that he was enmeshed in “a net of reflections which extend far beyond natural science and ramify into the fields of philosophy, theology, comparative religion, and the humane sciences in general.” These transgressions, he adds, caused him “no little worry.”⁵ What worries Jung here? Is he worried that these ramifications dissolve psychology? When psychology dissolves itself does it, for example, return to its roots in philosophy?

I do not think that this is the path that Jung is imagining, because he was always quite clear that his psychology had an empirical base and was not a metaphysics. Yet there are times when Jung sounds like a philosopher of old, like those philosophers of the ancient world who practiced philosophy as the love of wisdom. For example, in his essay “Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life,” he says, “I can hardly draw a veil over the fact that we psychotherapists ought really to be philosophers or philosophic doctors—or rather that we already are so, though we are unwilling to admit it because of the glaring contrast between our work and what passes for philosophy in the universities.”⁶Perhaps, then, it is not that psychology becomes philosophy but that the psychologist as a philosophic doctor has to draw upon the wisdom of philosophy and be conversant with its ways of knowing and styles of being.

So much of Jung’s psychology is also concerned with religion. His book Answer to Job still stands, I believe, as one of the key texts of the 20th century.⁷Would a science of soul that takes psychology beyond itself become a religion? Notwithstanding this possibility for Jungian psychology to become another church or creed, which Richard Noll suggests is the case in his book The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, I would argue that for Jung the question of religion is definitively removed from the contexts of dogma and creed.⁸ As his book on Job indicates, religion is about the responsibility we have as humans to become aware of the part we play in bringing to greater awareness the God-image in the psyche. This responsibility seems especially important today, when the powers of technology not only threaten to destroy us, but also imperil large portions of the earth. Of course, we cannot deny the many dangers that go with religion, as witnessed by the rise of fundamentalism, which, as Karen Armstrong shows in her book, The Battle For God, is the other side of technological modernity.⁹Nevertheless, as Lionel Corbett indicates, there is a religious function to the psyche, and Edward Edinger documents the necessity for a new God image.¹⁰ Perhaps, then, a science of soul would be less about religion and more about the recovery of a religious sensibility in a world that has lost touch with the sacred.

Another ramification in Jung’s thought that seems to lead psychology beyond itself is his forays into the symbolism of alchemy and astrology. With respect to the latter, Richard Tarnas in his new book, Cosmos and Psyche, shows in a comprehensive and remarkable fashion the connection between the movement of the planets and the archetypal patterns of the soul.¹¹ But again, as with philosophy and religion, a science of soul that would take psychology beyond itself does not become either astrology or alchemy. Both are ways of knowing and being present to the psyche and each becomes a habitus for a psychology that would keep soul in mind. Each becomes a way of remembering that psyche is indeed a part of nature and is not apart from it.

Of course, still another foray in Jung’s psychology that one could say leads psychology beyond itself has been the thread of mythology. The depth psychologies of Freud and Jung have always reached into mythology, and James Hillman has emphasized throughout his work that myth-making is soul-making. Against the backdrop of myths, psychological events—from individual pathologizing to psychology’s theory-making—are de-literalized. So Hillman deconstructs psychotherapy as The Myth of Analysis, and Aniela Jaffé, in her book, The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C. G. Jung, suggests that for Jung the idea of meaning as something apart from human participation is a modern myth.¹² Moreover, in her book C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Marie-Louise von Franz situates Jung’s life and work within the context of his lifelong dialogue with the unconscious, which has resulted in a finely honed description of the mythic themes and patterns that connect the inner events of Jung’s life with the outer events of the 20^th century.¹³

All these threads take and have taken psychology beyond itself as a delimited field of research. Does psychology proper get lost in these ramifications? Is it dissolved? Does it cancel itself out? Is it the end of psychology? Or is a more significant point being made here? Is a proper psychology a science of soul that is all of these threads and none of them? Perhaps, in the end, a science of soul is the living practice of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and/or as the art of consolation in an age of sorrow, as well as the recovery of the need for and a sense of the divine in human affairs. In addition, perhaps a science of soul is the recovery of the ancient arts of alchemy and astrology that do not separate us from the larger forces of creation, and in this respect the creation of a new myth, which acknowledges that at bottom soul and nature are one and that we partake of this wholeness and belong to this web of interconnections.

All of these threads are present within the weave of Jung’s psychology and maybe we miss the weave when we see only the end result—psychology! And maybe we miss all the threads that compose the weave when we move too far away from the multiple threads that compose the pattern of soul and slip into the singularity of a psychology. After all, psychology as a special and specialist discipline in its own right is a rather recent invention. Indeed, “[t]he history of psychology reminds us that ‘psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” Psychological curiosity is an ancient interest, as old perhaps as “the inquiring, self-conscious mind of man.” It is only in the 16th century that the term psychology is first used, apparently by Melanchthon, a friend of Martin Luther’s, to describe a separate field of study. Prior to this development, psychological life was multiple and dispersed. “The studies pertaining to the soul were distributed among metaphysics, logic and physics.” Matters of soul were, so to speak, “in the middle of things, and one could find it everywhere and nowhere.” But after this development, “... [t] he multiplicity of psychological life gives way to the unity of psychology.”¹⁴

Perhaps, in the end, the self-cancellation of psychology for the sake of reaching its scientific goal is only the recovery of this ancient wisdom. Perhaps, in the end, the end of psychology means the end of any specialist attitude. Certainly this is what Jung suggests when, concerning the practice of psychotherapy, he states, “Although we are specialists par excellence, our specialized field, oddly enough, drives us to universalism, and to the complete overcoming of the specialist attitude, if the totality of body and soul is not to be just a matter of words.”¹⁵

A psychology that is not just a matter of words! That is the point of a science of soul that would take psychology beyond itself, and the notion of the psychoid archetype that Jung presents in his essay is the vehicle that disturbs psychology in its comfortable isolation as a singular discipline in its own right. In the sections that follow, I will draw on Jung’s seminal essay to show how psychology reaches its goal, becomes what it is meant to be, when it stops being a psychology for the sake of becoming psychological. In the Introduction to this book I said as much when I spoke about a psychology with no name as being less than a formal discipline and more a style or a disposition, a way of being present in and to the world in a psychological way, no-thing as substantive, then, as a noun, but something adjectival, a qualifier to ways of living, loving, and working with soul in mind. All the ramifications that Jung worries about, all those threads of mythology, alchemy, astrology, religion, philosophy, among others that weave the pattern of Jung’s work, are so many different ways of speaking about psychology’s object of study, the soul. And all are approximations of soul, metaphors that both reveal and conceal soul. I am proposing in this chapter that Jung’s notion of the psychoid archetype leads psychology home, back to soul, and that this return for the sake of a new beginning requires a radical shift in how psychology regards its own language about soul. The language of psychology as a special and specialist discipline is also an approximation of soul. It, too, is a metaphor that both reveals and conceals soul. A proper psychology, then, is a science of soul that knows it cannot name soul with any definitive finality. Speaking of the psychoid archetype, Jung says it is a transcendent reality that is inconceivable in itself. A science of soul cannot know, or name as if it knew, the transcendent, but it can remember in its speaking that it cannot.

I want to emphasize in this chapter that the psychoid archetype must of necessity shift how psychology regards its own language. In the face of soul, psychology, I will argue, is humbled into regarding itself as always being an approximate science of soul. In Psychological Life: From Science to Metaphor I argued that psychological life is itself a metaphorical reality, and in this context, any psychology that would keep soul in mind would have to remain aware of the fact that psychology is the rational mind talking about the life of soul, that all our psychologies are different perspectives on soul, allusions to soul, which remains elusive.¹⁶ Psychology has long been conversant with the metaphor of myth. When psychology goes beyond itself towards a science of soul, it will have to become conversant with the myth of metaphor. By the myth of metaphor I mean a shift in consciousness towards a metaphoric sensibility. This shift would change psychology’s relation to its own language. It would humble psychology by inverting its relation to soul, by turning that relation inside out. Psychology’s humbling would amount to the recognition that soul is in our psychologies because our psychologies are within soul.

LANGUAGE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

My starting point in this chapter is that psychology has a complex about soul, and in this complex relation, its language is a symptomatic expression that both remembers and reveals the life of soul and forgets and conceals it. This complex relation between the discipline of psychology and its object of study—soul—is present at the very origins of depth psychology. At these origins we learn that language is itself a problem because of the difference between the standpoint of consciousness and the reality of the unconscious, which it addresses and by which it is addressed. In this regard, a psychologist’s conscious statements about soul always have an unconscious side to them, which for Jung expresses itself as a “calculus of subjective prejudices.” This “personal equation,” which functions unconsciously, always “has a telling effect upon the results of psychological observation.”¹⁷ There is no perception and no thought that is not mediated by a complex unconscious perspective, but “not even the psychologist is prepared to regard his statements, at least in part, as a subjectively conditioned confession.”¹⁸ The psychologist who would keep soul in mind, however, is charged to mind the gap in his or her research between his or her conscious claims about the work and his or her complex unconscious ties to the work.

This hypothesis of the unconscious, Jung notes, “is of absolutely revolutionary significance in that it could radically alter our view of the world.” It would do so because a serious consideration of the hypothesis of the unconscious would require us to acknowledge that “our view of the world can be but a provisional one.”¹⁹ Situated in the gap between consciousness and the unconscious, we live between the two worlds of collective conscious values, opinions, and prejudices and the values of the collective unconscious. To identify with either one of them is to forfeit the provisional character of our knowing. Jung speaks here of becoming “the ever ready victim of some wretched ‘ism’,” and even within depth psychology itself, which should know better, the conflict and tensions between schools of thought fall into this category of “isms.” One becomes a Jungian or a Freudian, for example, and this leads to “the utter identification of the individual with a necessarily one-sided ‘truth’,” no matter the validity of that truth. For “[e]ven if it were a question of some great truth, identification with it would still be a catastrophe.”²⁰ In place of knowledge, Jung notes, one would have belief.

A provisional way of knowing requires the ego not only to balance the tension between conscious and unconscious perspectives, but also, and more importantly, to hold off the allure and comfort of being a true believer by falling into either/or ways of thinking. A metaphoric sensibility is a provisional way of thinking and knowing that inoculates one against this temptation, and in various places throughout this text I will describe how an approach to re-search that does keep soul in mind is characterized by this sensibility. In addition, the provisional way of thinking that the hypothesis of the unconscious demands is an ethical command, and in Chapter 13 I will discuss how an approach to re-search that keeps soul in mind becomes a foundation for an ethical epistemology.

This gap, which is also an abyss, between the conscious and unconscious perspectives is a tension, which the 19th-century experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner experienced as a conflict between the “day-time and the night-time view’ of the world.”²¹ Jung saw this issue clearly in his essay “The Transcendent Function.”²² In that essay he says that the symbol mediates the gap between the conscious and the unconscious. A symbol holds the tension between what is visible and what is invisible, between, we might say, what shows itself in the light and what hides itself in darkness, and as such it requires for its expression a language that hints at meaning and does not attempt to define it or pin it down. Metaphor is such a language, that provisional language mentioned above. A metaphoric sensibility is necessary for a psychology, which, in taking the unconscious seriously, dwells in the gap of the transcendent function.

Poets trade in symbol and metaphor, and we find an elegant example of this issue of the tension between the day-time and night-time views of experience in the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly’s m...