Jung and Film

Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image

Christopher Hauke, Ian Alister, Christopher Hauke, Ian Alister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781583911334
• eBook ISBN: 9781317711049
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung and Film brings together some of the best new writing from both sides of the Atlantic, introducing the use of Jungian ideas in film analyis.

Illustrated with examinations of seminal films including Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, and 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Chris Hauke and Ian Alister, along with an excellent array of contributors, look at how Jungian ideas can help us understand films and the genres to which they belong.

The book also includes a glossary to help readers with Jungian terminology. Taking a fresh look at an ever-changing medium, Jung and Film is essential reading for academics and students of analytical psychology, as well as film, media and cultural studies.

Part I

A Jungian perspective

Chapter 1

Jung/sign/symbol/film

Don Fredericksen

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Introduction

I want briefly to discuss meaning – meaning as we behold it in films, and meaning as we attribute it to films. I can as well say that the topic is explanation – what counts as satisfactory explanation, and what we mean when we say we have “dealt with” a film by explaining it. What follows is based upon C.G. Jung’s distinctions between sign and symbol, and between a semiotic attitude and a symbolic one. To my mind these distinctions have immediate correspondences in film and film study, and far-reaching implications for the latter.¹

By this discussion I hope to demonstrate our need and our capacity to be open to meaning – filmic and otherwise – of a kind and in places where semiotic attitudes have not previously found it. This need is not wholly or simply scholarly. Indeed, this essay grew from my own sense of personal and professional inabilities – an inability to account for the felt power of certain images, films, and film-makers (in their person and in their testaments), many of which I cherish; an inability to satisfactorily articulate the meanings of some very meaningful works and statements of purpose – and, out of growing conviction that currently fashionable notions of meaning (both those we have generated within film studies and those we have imported) are too narrow. By this narrowness we are denying ourselves a sense of meaning – and a wisdom – at once very old and very alive in the contemporary world, including the world of film. My thesis is that an understanding of the symbol and the symbolic attitude as defined by Jung significantly aids one in overcoming some of those inabilities and in escaping that narrowness.

Semiotic and symbolic attitudes in depth psychology

Jung gives an extended definition of sign and symbol in Psychological Types, from which the following is selected:

The concept of a symbol should in my view be strictly distinguished from that of a sign. Symbolic and semiotic meanings are entirely different things … A symbol always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact, which is nonetheless known to exist or is postulated as existing … Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic … The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found that formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance … An expression that stands for a known thing remains a mere sign and is never a symbol. It is, therefore, quite impossible to create a living symbol, i.e., one that is pregnant with meaning, from known associations. For what is thus produced never contains more than was put into it … Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness; for instance, on whether it regards a given fact not merely as such but also as an expression, for something unknown … There are undoubtedly products whose symbolic character does not depend merely on the attitude of the observing consciousness, but manifests itself spontaneously in the symbolic effect they would have on the observer. Such products are so constituted that they would lack any kind of meaning were not a symbolic one conceded to them.

(Jung, 1971, CW 6: paras. 814–818)

Jung is not making merely “academic” distinctions here – quite the contrary. Based upon his clinical experience and research into mythology and comparative religion, he is simultaneously countering a theory that constrains psychological meaning within the limits of the known, and arguing for the personal and cultural importance of the meaning which grows from the relatively unknown. His understood antagonist is Freud. Indeed, Jung’s argument with Freud regarding the meaning and value of incest symbolism, published in 1912 and now titled Symbols of Transformation, first brought him to the distinction. We must understand that Jung’s distinction between sign and symbol ultimately elaborates two distinct modes of apprehending and explaining the psyche and its products – not just two distinct psychologies but two distinct ontologies and philosophies of value.

This point is succinctly illustrated by Jung’s and Freud’s differing explanations of, and attitudes toward, incest fantasy and symbolism. Freud interpreted the incest fantasy concretely. Since this impulse cannot be maintained by the ego at the conscious level of the psyche, it is repressed into one’s unconscious, only to return in disguised or distorted forms in dreams or neurotic symptoms. The psychoanalyst’s task is that of making conscious to the patient what the patient once knew. This is accomplished by working back along a causal chain connecting the disguised or distorted wish to its undisguised source – hence Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent dream content, the “dreamwork” which connects them by an ensemble of semiotic tactics, and the “dream censor” (see Freud, 1900/1954). Freud labels the distorted or disguised expressions of the incest wish “symbols,” incorrectly so according to Jung. For the latter, Freud’s “symbols” are in fact signs, standing for the putatively known, albeit repressed, desire of the patient to have physical intimacy with a parent. Their meaning can be completely explained by Freudian analytic procedures that reduce them to their underlying cause. When the explanation is complete, the disguised or distorted expressions per se are taken to be empty of meaning, for they have been exposed as mere covers. And the explanation itself brings patient and analyst to a full-stop; there is, as we say, “nothing more to say.” Indeed, nothing more can be said, for the explanation has said everything. Or so it might be thought. To his dismay, Freud found incest imagery persisting, and persisting in its fascination, after its concretistic, allegedly semiotic meaning was made again conscious to the patient.² Jung’s experience led him to conclude that something relatively unknown, neither explained by, nor satisfied by, concretistic interpretation and its attendant semiotic attitude, generates such imagery. That something, Jung claimed, is the psyche’s urge toward rebirth – not another physical birth, but a spiritual birth into any one individual’s truest “self.” What appeared to Freud as mere regression into the infantile was for Jung a necessary step into the “maternal depths” for spiritual unfoldment and psychic wholeness:

Wisdom dwells in the depths, the wisdom of the mother; being one with her means being granted a vision of deeper things, of the primordial images and primitive forces which underlie all life and are its nourishing, sustaining, creative matrix.

(Jung, 1967, CW 5: para. 640)

The incest imagery generated by this urge toward renewal is essentially symbolic, linked as it is, simultaneously, to the relatively unknown depths of the psyche and to the psyche’s unknown future. Jung’s attitude radically revisions the meaning and value of symbolism, including that of incest. The Jungian scholar and analyst Frey-Rohn points out:

The characteristics of the symbol (its transforming and modulating qualities, unifying the opposites) should make it sufficiently clear that the symbolic truth was anything but a compromise formulation, the result of distortion and falsification – as was Freud’s contention. In Jung’s psychology, the symbol has the function of a creative “transition from one attitude to another.”

(Frey-Rohn, 1974: 267)

The contrast between Freud’s semiotic attitude and Jung’s symbolic one is significant, not only in the depth psychological analysis of individuals but also in our response to the character and functions of humankind’s cultural artifacts, including films.

Matters of definition

Roland Barthes aptly states a warning that must be kept in mind as one works through the various definitions of sign and symbol vis-à-vis Jung’s:

Now this term, sign, which is found in very different vocabularies (from that of theology to that of medicine), and whose history is very rich (running from the Gospels to cybernetics), is for these reasons very ambiguous … According to the arbitrary choice of various authors, the sign is placed in a series of terms which have affinities and dissimilarities with it: signal, index, icon, symbol, allegory, are the chief rivals of sign. Let us first state the element which is common to all these terms: they all necessarily refer us to a relation between two relata. This feature cannot therefore be used to distinguish any of the terms in the series; to find a variation in meaning, we shall have to resort to other features … expressed here in the form of an alternative (presence /absence) … It must be added that the distribution of the field varies from one author to another, a fact that produces terminological contradictions.³

(Barthes, 1967: 35–36)

The point to be gained here is that terms such as “sign,” “symbol,” “index,” and “signal” are to be understood in each instance according to the differentiating criteria used by the author or authors in question and cannot be assigned stable definitions across authors. As we have seen in Jung’s typology, the essential differentiating criterion is the presence or absence of a relatively unknown entity for which a known entity stands – presence signals a symbol, absence signals a sign. Like Jung, I want to counter the too-easily-assumed thesis that every case of semiosis in the broad sense is an instance of the sign-process in Jung’s narrower definition of sign. That is, I want to counter the thesis that every time one entity “stands for” another, we have an instance of one known thing “standing for” another known thing. This inflation of the narrower notion of sign to encompass all semiosis leaves no room for the symbol as Jung defined it and denies legitimacy to his symbolic attitude. To counter that inflation and its underlying attitude in film study is my secondary and polemical goal. The primary aim is to argue for the meaning in, and the meaning-fulness of, filmic situations in which a known entity “stands for” a relatively unknown one.

The semiotic attitude in film study

Within modern American and European film study there are three major semiotic approaches: film semiotics as such, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses, and the various Marxist approaches. In their various guises, they have set the agenda in the field for the last thirty years. My purpose in this section is not to attack these approaches, but rather to note in each case the absence of that which Jung designates the “symbol.” That absence in turn signals the absence of what Jung tagged the “symbolic attitude.” If there are films partially or wholly symbolic in Jung’s sense, for which a symbolic attitude is appropriate, if not compelling, then it follows that the notions of meaning used in semiotic approaches are too narrow and in need of augmentation.

The first of these semiotic approaches is the one which we conventionally label as such, instanced by works such as Peter Wollen’s sketchy but seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Christian Metz’s equally seminal Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema and Language and Cinema, Gianfranco Bettettini’s The Language and Technique of Film, and Jurij Lotman’s Semiotics of Cinema. The tasks these authors assign themselves are not identical. Also, with the exception of Wollen’s discussion, these studies have moved, under the influence of Saussure and contemporary linguistics, well beyond consideration of the traditionally defined sign (Barthes’s “relation between two relata”) in isolation. The question of meaning has been increasingly moved from what Lotman calls the “semantics” of the film-sign to the sign’s place and function within a larger system of signs – in keeping with Saussure’s thesis that meaning is essentially generated by differences within a system.

In Metz’s work one consequently finds little mention of signs per se, the emphasis falling instead upon higher-order concepts such as “message,” “code,” “text,” and “system.” (For definitions, consult Heath, 1973: 225.) Jung certainly does not ignore the systemic in dealing with the meanings of signs and symbols, but the criterion by which he differentiates sign from symbol is not placed there. Where the character of semantic ties is not given much attention, concern for differentiating criteria – and for the possible implications of different kinds of ties – will not occur.

Suffice it here to cite three instances where Metz – the most sophisticated and influential of the film semiotics scholars – reveals the absence of the symbolic attitude as it is understood by Jung. First, an example from his discussion of filmic connotation:

Suffice it to say that cinematographic connotation is always symbolic in nature. The significate [signified] motivates the signifier but goes beyond it. The notion of motivated overtaking may be used to define almost all filmic connotations. Similarly, one says that the cross is the symbol of Christianity because, although Christ died on a cross (the motivation), there are many more things in Christianity than there are in a cross (the “overtaking”). The partial motivation of filmic connotations does not prevent them from giving rise quite often to codifications or to conventions

(Metz, 1974: 109)

Metz’s notion of the symbolic here is, to put it bluntly, strikingly mundane. There is indeed more “in” Christianity (its dogma, its 2,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of films
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I A Jungian perspective
• Part II Four films and a director
• Part III Studies in genres and gender
• Glossary
• Index