Anthology of Contemporary Theoretical Classics in Analytical Psychology

The New Ancestors

Stefano Carpani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000554243
• Subtopic: Movements in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

2022 Gradiva Award nominee for Best Edited Book!

This anthology of contemporary classics in analytical psychology bring together academic, scholarly and clinical writings by contributors who constitute the "post-Jungian" generation.

Carpani brings together important contributions from the Jungian world to establish the "new ancestors" in this field, in order to serve future generations of Jungian analysts, scholars, historians and students. This generation of clinicians and scholars has shaped the contemporary Jungian landscape, and their work continues to inspire discussions on key topics including archetypes, race, gender, trauma and complexes. Each contributor has selected a piece of their work which they feel best represents their research and clinical interests, each aiding the expansion of current discussions on Jung and contemporary analytical psychology studies.

Spanning two volumes, which are also accessible as standalone books, this essential collection will be of interest to Jungian analysts and therapists, as well as to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies.

Chapter 1

Paul Bishop

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148982-2

Although I had been aware of Jung through the usual undergraduate interest in such vaguely fringe or occult interests as dream interpretation and the I Ching, it was, of all people, a politics tutor at Oxford who opened my eyes to the potential of taking Jung seriously. As an avid reader of Nietzsche, I found that Jung joined those other figures such as Heidegger or Klages who were, one way or another, reacting and responding to the cry, “God is dead” – and who all wrote in German. As a student of German (and French) at Oxford, this was good news! Yet strangely enough, I also discovered that, at least within Germanistik circles in Britain, being interested in Jung was a bit like the case mentioned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections of the old peasant who discovered that, presumably as a result of witchcraft, two cows had got their heads in the same halter, and who replied to his son’s question, “How did that happen?” by responding, “One doesn’t talk about such things.”¹ For some reason, it seemed that “one doesn’t talk about Jung,” but that only served, of course, to make him more attractive. Embarking on doctoral research into Jung and Nietzsche, I had the good fortune to have a supervisor who cheerfully described himself as working on the dustbin of German literature and was more interested in helping me to write and structure an argument than in petty point-scoring against outsider figures. Time and again, however, I was struck by the marginalization of Jung by the academy: his Collected Works (in English) were in the Radcliffe Science Library, but the Gesammelte Werke (in German) were in the Bodleian and had to be ordered by individual volume; only isolated copies of single works were in the Modern Languages library, the Taylorian. For this reason, I have appreciated all the more the kind support of Jungian institutions and individual Jungians, who have generously offered bibliographical advice or invited me to speak to their analytic groups or seminars

1Jung, C.G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in Aniela Jaffé, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston, London: Collins, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 124.

Having completed my doctorate in Jung and Nietzsche, and having had the extremely good fortune to have secured an academic job at Glasgow, I now felt that the task was clear: to situate Jung firmly in the German intellectual tradition represented by such figures as Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. These projects were never intended to be a simple “Jung and …”; as one colleague caustically remarked, “the next thing he’ll be writing about is Jung and the Spice Girls” (actually, now there is an idea). For one thing, my approach to Kant and Jung in relation to the concept of synchronicity was largely sceptical (and it remains so: surely, sometimes a beetle is only a beetle); for another, under the influence of a wise, senior colleague at Glasgow, the relationship between Jung and Weimar Classicism turned out to be far more significant than a simple Quellenforschung could have possibly imagined. Yet here fate intervened. For while I had hoped to recuperate Jung for the academy by demonstrating his affinities with such central figures as Goethe and Schiller, these figures themselves were gradually losing their centrality. As dead, white males, they were being swept aside in the name of “theory,” albeit a theory that was often insufficiently understood (and even more insufficiently taught). So whilst I had tried to bring Jung back into the academic fold, I had unwittingly brought him into a more postmodern form of disrepute.

Within this changed academic context, however, it seemed to me that Jung acquired fresh significance. While I admire (not least because of their brilliant titles) The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, it nevertheless seemed to me that this new, historiographical critique of Jung fell somewhat wide of the actual academic political mark: to be sure, there were difficult questions to be asked about Jung’s political views, but when the arts and humanities themselves were under attack, to focus on them increasingly seemed like an irrelevant skirmish. After all, what is the problem with Jung? I, for one, feel that I owe him an immense debt of gratitude because I have learned so much from his works; to read the Collected Works is to undertake an entire course in the liberal arts, civilization studies, and intercultural studies. One learns so much from Jung. Could this, then, be the real source of the problem?

After all, analytical psychology places – in contrast to postmodernism – great emphasis on continuity rather than on rupture or fissure. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the second part of Goethe’s Faust is described as “more than a literary exercise” and instead as “a link in the aurea catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra” – and on, one might add, to The Red Book of C.G. Jung, a work which might justly be described, as Faust and Zarathustra are, as “unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous … a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.”² For not only does Jung, time and again, invoke Goethe as an essential reference point (and this, for me, is the real significance of the legend that Jung loved to hate to relate about his grandfather being an illegitimate child of Goethe) for his own psychological development: Memories, Dreams, Reflections records that Faust had “struck a chord” in Jung and “struck him” in a way that he could not but regard as “personal,” adding that in Faust he saw a dramatization of his own “inner contradictions” and that this work had provided “a basic outline and pattern” of his own “conflicts and solutions.”³ But Jung also links the project of analytical psychology as a whole to what, in his view, Faust had “pass over,” namely, “respect for the eternal rights of humankind, recognition of ‘the ancient,’ and the continuity of culture and intellectual history.”⁴ Or, in the famous words written by Thomas Mann in his letter to Klaus Mann of 22 July 1939: “In the end, to inherit something one has to understand it; inheritance is, after all, culture (Aber schließlich, zu erben muß man auch verstehen, erben, das ist am Ende Kultur).”

2Jung 1963: 213–214. 3Jung 1963: 262. 4Jung 1963: 262.

In a lecture of 1932, Jung included hope (along with faith, love, and understanding) among the “four highest achievements of human endeavor” that are “so many gifts of grace.”⁵ For what, Jung asked his audience, is a doctor meant to do when he sees that a patient has

5Jung, C.G. Collected Works, in Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W. McGuire, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Vol. 11, §501.

no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world … no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; [and] … no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence.”⁶

6Jung Vol. 11, §499.

Jung was highly critical of what he called a “psychology without psyche,” and he would also be critical of an education without psyche. For alas! All too often education does not “give enough meaning to life,” and “it is only meaning that liberates.”⁷

7Jung Vol. 11, §496.

Seeing With the Eyes of the Spirit

Originally published in Bishop, P. (2013). “Seeing with the Eyes of the Spirit” [Guild Paper 313], London: The Guild of Pastoral Psychology, May 2013. Reprinted with permission.

In his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gives us one quite specific, and strange, instance of what “seeing with the eyes of the spirit” might mean. He speaks about “the sensation of past and present being one,” describing it as “a perception that introduces a spectral quality into the present” (GE 4, 457).¹ He gives the example of how, after taking leave of one of his early lovers, Friederike Brion, he experienced the past-in-the-present in a case of what one might term “second sight” when, riding along the footpath towards Drusenheim, he was “seized by the strangest premonition”:

I saw myself, not with the eyes of the body, but those of the spirit [nicht mit den Augen des Leibes, sondern des Geistes], coming toward myself on horseback on the same path, and, to be sure, in clothing I had never worn: it was bluish grey with some gold trimming. As soon as I shook myself awake from this dream, the figure vanished.

(GE 4, 370)

“Yet it is curious,” Goethe added, “that eight years later I found myself on the same path, coming to visit Friederike once more and dressed in the clothes I had dreamed about, which I was wearing not by choice but coincidence.” Here we have a particularly curious instance of what Goethe calls seeing with the eyes of the spirit: but what are the eyes of the spirit, how can one see with them, and what sort of vision do they give us?

In several places in Goethe’s scientific writings, we find the suggestion that, in addition to our conventional perceptual apparatus, we can use our imagination or what he calls the “mind’s eye.” When in On Morphology (1817–1824), for example, he writes that “we learn to see with the eyes of the spirit” (WA II.8, 37), he is drawing attention to the role of the “productive imagination” not just in scientifically determined or artistically formed intuition but in simple empirical intuition as well. This was pointed out by Ernst Cassirer, who also drew a link between what Goethe called “seeing with the eyes of the mind” and the saper vedere, “the perfection of seeing,” of which Leonardo da Vinci had spoken (Cassirer 1996: 81).

Even further back, we find the idea of the “eye of the spirit” in some of the early fourth-century patristic writers, such as St Ambrose, who writes in his treatise On the Mysteries that “what cannot be seen with the eyes, is seen in a higher sense; it is seen with the eye of the spirit,” or St Augustine who, in a famous passage from the Confessions, turned his gaze inward and discovered “with the eyes of my soul” the Lord within himself. In his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite distinguished between “the eye of the body or of the mind,” and earlier still, we find Plotinus talking in his treatises or Enneads about “inner vision,” about “the mind’s eye” and about “seeing of a quite different kind” (Enneads, I.6.9 and VI.9.11). Thus, there is a rich philosophical, theological and spiritual tradition behind this idea.

At the same time, we also find the expression in contemporary philosophical texts of the eighteenth century. For example, the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte urged his audience that

just as your sensuous eye is a prism, in which the ether of the sensuous world, which is in itself quite self-identical, pure, and colourless, breaks into manifold colours on the surface of things [… . ] so proceed likewise in matters of the spiritual world, and from the view of your spiritual eye’.²

Elsewhere in Goethe’s writings, in one of his drafts for the introduction to his Doctrine of Colour, he emphasizes the uniqueness of the organ of sight in his conclusion that “the totality of the inner and outer is completed by the eye.”³ In the course of the Doctrine of Colour, it becomes apparent that Goethe is thinking not just of physical sight but of a particular kind of schauen or contemplation, which could be termed “aesthetic perception.” In the aesthetic theory of Johann Gottfried Herder, who was part of the wider circle around Goethe and Schiller in Weimar, (aesthetic) seeing is the end product of all the senses working in concert – “the eye is merely the signpost, merely the reason of the hand; only the hand provides the forms, concepts of what they mean, what dwells within them.”⁴

Now, in “A Few Remarks” on the botanical theories of Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Goethe draws on Herder’s emphasis on the “haptic sense” or the sense of touch, contrasting the “eyes of the body” with what he calls “spirit-eyes.” There is a difference, he writes, “between seeing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The New Ancestors and the “Agenda 2050” for Analytical Psychology
• 1 Seeing With the Eyes of the Spirit
• 2 A Critical Appraisal of C. G. Jung’s Psychological Alchemy
• 3 Narcissus’s Forlorn Hope: The Fading Image in a Pool Too Deep
• 4 Complexes and Their Compensation: Impulses from Affective Neuroscience
• 5 Hesitation and Slowness: Gateway to Psyche’s Depth
• 6 The Other Other: When the Exotic Other Subjugates the Familiar Other
• 7 Jungian Theory and Contemporary Psychosomatics
• 8 Feminism, Jung and Transdisciplinarity: A Novel Approach
• 9 From Neurosis to a New Cure of Souls: C.G. Jung’s Remaking of the Psychotherapeutic Patient
• 10 The Dao of Anima Mundi: I Ching and Jungian Analysis, the Way and the Meaning
• 11 A Personal Meditation on Politics and the American Soul
• 12 On Jung’s View of the Self—An Investigation
• 13 Seeing From “the South”: Using Liberation Psychology to Reorient the Vision, Theory, and Practice of Depth Psychology
• 14 The Clash of Civilizations? A Struggle Between Identity and Functionalism
• List of Contributors
• Index