A N New developments in the post-Jungian field

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS New developments in the post-Jungian field Introduction In university settings, it is my habit to begin lectures on analytical psychology, especially to those not taking degrees in Jungian psychology, by asking those present to do a simple association exercise to the word “Jung.” I ask them to record the first three things that come to mind. From the (by now) 900þ responses, I have found that the most frequently cited theme, words, concepts, or images have (in order) to do with (a) Freud, (b) psychoanalysis, and (c) the Freud–Jung split. The next most frequently cited association concerns (d) Jung’s anti-Semitism and alleged Nazi sympathies. Other matters raised include (e) archetypes, (f) mysticism/philosophy/religion, and (g) animus and anima. Obviously, this is not properly empirical research. But if we “associate to” the associations, we can see that there is a lingering doubt about the intellectual, scholarly, and ethical viability of taking an interest in Jung. Even so, in these pages, I shall argue that there is more to the question of Jung and Freud’s psychoanalysis than the oft-repeated story of two wrestling men. Over the past decade, there has been increasing clinical and academic interest in analytical psychology in non-Jungian circles, in spite of the fact that its core texts are not effectively represented on official reading lists and curriculum descriptions. Outside of this interest, though, Jung is mentioned primarily as an important schismatic in the history of psychoanalysis and not as a contributor worthy of sustained and systematic study in his own right. Although many psychoanalysts pass over his name in silence, many therapists – and not just Jungian – have “discovered” Jung to have been a major contributor to what appears now as cutting-edge new developments in clinical work. In this chapter, I shall suggest that Jung’s ideas merit a place in their own right in general clinical training in psychotherapy and in the contemporary academy. I shall also explain how I see the overall shape of the post-Jungian field via two classifications of the field into schools of 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS analytical psychology. The first of these summarizes the proposal I made back in 1985 in Jung and the Post-Jungians; the second is more contemporary and more provocative. The “Jung” problem It is impossible to make this argument without first exploring the cultural and intellectual contexts in which it is mounted. Until recently, Jung has been “banished comprehensively” from academic life, borrow a phrase used by the distinguished psychologist Liam Hudson (1983) in a review of a collection of Jung’s writings. Let us try to understand why it is so. First, the secret “committee” set up by Freud and Jones in 1912 to defend the cause of “true” psychoanalysis spent a good deal of time and energy on disparaging Jung. The fall-out from this historical moment has taken a very long time to evaporate and has meant that Jung’s ideas have been slow to penetrate psychoanalytic circles and hence have not been welcomed in the academy whose preferred depth psychology – certainly in the humanities and social sciences – has been Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Second, Jung’s anti-Semitic writings and misguided involvements in the professional politics of psychotherapy in Germany in the 1930s have, understandably in my view, made it almost impossible for Holocaust-aware psychologists – both Jewish and non-Jewish – to generate a positive attitude to his theories. Some portions of the early Jungian community refused to acknowledge that there was any substance to the charges held against him, and even withheld information that they deemed unsuitable for the public domain. Such evasions only served to prolong a problem which must be faced squarely. Present-day Jungians are now addressing the issue, and assessing it both in the context of his time and in relation to his work as a whole.1 Third, Jung’s attitudes to women, blacks, so-called “primitive” cultures, and so forth are now outmoded and unacceptable. It is not sufficient to assert that he intended them to be taken metaphorically – not least because this may not have been how he intended his writing to be taken! We can now see how Jung converted prejudice into theory, and translated his perception of what was current into something supposed to be eternally valid. Here, too, it has turned out to be the work of the post-Jungians that has discovered these mistakes and contradictions and corrected Jung’s faulty or amateur methods. When these corrections are made, one can see that Jung had a remarkable capacity to intuit the themes and areas with which late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century psychology would be concerned: gender; race; nationalism; cultural analysis; the perseverance, reappearance, and socio-political power of religious mentality in 2 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information New developments in the post-Jungian field an apparently irreligious epoch; the unending search for meaning – all of these have turned out to be the problematics with which psychology has had to concern itself. Recognizing the soundness of Jung’s intuitive vision facilitates a more interested but no less critical return to his texts. This is what is meant by “post-Jungian”: correction of Jung’s work and also critical distance from it. Jung and Freud The break in relations between Jung and Freud is usually presented in introductory, and even in more advanced texts, as stemming from a father– son power struggle and Jung’s inability to come to terms with what is involved in human psychosexuality. On the surface of the Oedipus myth, the father’s son-complex is not nearly as easy to access as the son’s fathercomplex. It is tempting to forget Laius’ infanticidal impulses and so we do not see much analysis-at-a-distance of Freud’s motives. And yet I believe that Freud’s actions and intentions toward Jung played at least as large a role as did Jung’s toward Freud in bringing about their split and subsequent rivalry. As far as Jung’s angle on sexuality is concerned, the fact that much of the content of his 1912 breakaway book Wandlungen und Symbolen der Libido – originally translated as Psychology of the Unconscious (CW B) – concerns an interpretation of the incest motif and of incest fantasy is usually overlooked. The book is highly pertinent to an understanding of family process and the way in which events in the outer family cohere into what might be called an inner family. In other words, the book now called Symbols of Transformation (CW 5) is not an experience-distant text. It asks, How do humans grow, from a psychological point of view? It answers that they grow by internalizing – that is, “taking inside themselves” – qualities, attributes, and styles of life that they have not yet managed to master on their own. From where does this new stuff come? From the parents or other caretakers, of course. But how does it happen? Characteristic of the human sexual drive is the impossibility for any person to remain indifferent to another who is the recipient of sexual fantasy or the source of desire. Incestfuelled desire is implicated in the kind of human love that healthy family process cannot do without. A degree of sexualized interest between parents and children that is not acted out – and which must remain on the level of incest fantasy – is necessary for the two individuals in a situation where each cannot avoid the other. “Kinship libido,” as Jung named this interest, is a necessity for internalizing the good experiences of early life. This account of Jung’s early interest in family incest themes challenges the assumption of a vast difference between Jung and Freud’s foci. The 3 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS scene is then set for a linkage of Jungian ideas with other critically important psychoanalytic notions, such as Jean Laplanche’s (1989) theory of the centrality of seduction in early development. In a more clinical vein, Jung’s incest theory leads us to understand child sexual abuse as a damaging degeneration of a healthy and necessary engagement with “incest fantasy.” Situating child sexual abuse on a spectrum of expectable human behavior in this way helps to reduce the understandable moral panic that inhibits constructive thinking about the topic and opens the way for its troubling ubiquity to be investigated. Jung’s contribution to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy Most contemporary psychotherapists accept the idea that Freud’s ideas and theories undergird modern practices. However, post-Freudian psychoanalysis has gone on to revise, repudiate, and extend a great many of Freud’s seminal ideas. Ironically, as a result of these critiques, many positions of contemporary psychoanalysis are reminiscent of those taken by Jung in earlier years. This is not to say that Jung himself is responsible for what is most interesting about contemporary psychoanalysis, or that he worked these things out in as much detail as the psychoanalytic thinkers concerned. But, as Paul Roazen (1976, p. 272) has pointed out, “Few responsible figures in psychoanalysis would be disturbed today if an analyst were to present views identical to Jung’s in 1913.” To explicate this claim, I explain twelve vital psychoanalytic issues in which Jung can be seen as a precursor of recent developments of “post-Freudian” psychoanalysis. The list that follows culminates in an extended discussion of Jung’s pioneering role in what is now known as Relational Psychoanalysis. (1) While Freud’s Oedipal psychology is father-centered and is not relevant to a period earlier than about the age of four, Jung provided a mother-based psychology in which influence is often traced back much earlier, even to pre-natal events. For this reason, he may be seen as a precursor of the work of Melanie Klein, of the British School of object relations theorists such as Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip, and Balint, and, given the theory of archetypes (of which more in a moment), of Bowlby’s ethologically inspired work on attachment. Post-Jungians, such as Knox (2003) and Wilkinson (2006) have shown how Jungian archetypal theory anticipates and expands neuroscientific research into the centrality of early relationships. Jung’s theories are useful also for re-conceptualizing psychotherapy from a neuroscientific perspective. 4 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information New developments in the post-Jungian field (2) In Freud’s view, the unconscious is created by repression, a personal process derived from lived experience. In Jung’s view, the unconscious has a collective base which means that innate structures greatly affect, and perhaps determine, its contents. Not only post-Jungians are concerned with such innate unconscious structures. In the work of psychoanalysts such as Klein, Lacan, Spitz, and Bowlby one finds the same emphasis on pre-structuralization of the unconscious. That the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan’s view) could easily have been stated by Jung. A nuanced post-Jungian review of these ideas is Hogenson (2004). (3) Freud’s view of human psychology is a bleak one and, given the history of the twentieth century, it seems reasonable. But Jung’s early insistence that there is a creative, purposive, non-destructive core of the human psyche finds echoes and resonances in the work of psychoanalytic writers like Milner and Rycroft, and in Winnicott’s work on play. Similar links can be made with the great pioneers of humanistic psychology such as Rogers and Maslow. Jung’s argument that the psyche has knowledge of what is good for it, a capacity to regulate itself, and even to heal itself, takes us to the heart of contemporary expositions of the “true self” such as that found in Bollas’s recent work, to give only one example. Stein (1996) offers a good example of a post-Jungian perspective on meaning and purpose. (4) Jung’s attitude to psychological symptoms was that they should be looked at not exclusively in a causal-reductive manner but also in terms of their hidden meanings for the patient – even in terms of what the symptom is “for.”2 This anticipates the school of existential analysis and the work of some British psychoanalysts such as Rycroft and Home. Cambray (2004) offers a fascinating post-Jungian view of noncausal approaches to psychopathology. (5) In contemporary psychoanalysis, there has been a move away from what are called male-dominated, patriarchal, and phallocentric approaches; in psychology and psychotherapy alike, more attention is being paid to the “feminine” (whatever might be meant by this). In the past two decades, feminist psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have come into being. There is little doubt that Jung’s “feminine” is a man’s “feminine,” but parallels between feminist-influenced psychoanalysis and gender-sensitive Jungian and post-Jungian analytical psychology may be drawn (see Kast, 2006, for an up-to-date account of animus/anima theory). (6) The ego has been moved away from the center of the theoretical and the therapeutic projects of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s decentering of the ego exposes as delusive the fantasy of mastery and unification of the 5 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS personality, and Kohut’s working out of a bipolar self also extends well beyond the confines of rational, orderly ego-hood. The recognition of a non-ego integration of dissociated states is anticipated by Jung’s theory of Self: the totality of psychic processes, somehow “bigger” than ego and carrying humanity’s apparatus of aspiration and imagination. Corbett (1996) offers a well-researched and argued account of Jung’s notion of Self. (7) The deposing of the ego has also created a space for what might be called “sub-personalities.” Jung’s theory of complexes, which he referred to as “splinter psyches,” fills out contemporary models of dissociation (Samuels, Shorter, and Plaut, 1986, pp. 33–35). We can compare Jung’s tendency to personify the inner divisions of the psyche with Winnicott’s true and false selves, and with Eric Berne’s “transactional analysis” wherein ego, id, and superego are understood as relatively autonomous. Guided fantasy, Gestalt work, and visualization would be scarcely conceivable without Jung’s contribution: “active imagination” describes a temporary suspension of ego control, a “dropping down” into the unconscious, and a careful notation of what one finds, whether by reflection or some kind of artistic self-expression. (8) Many contemporary psychoanalysts hold a strong distinction between ideas like “mental health,” “sanity,” and “genitality,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea of “individuation.” The difference is between psychological norms of adaptation, themselves a microcosm of societal values, and an ethic which prizes individual variation more highly than adherence to the norm. Although Jung’s cultural values have sometimes been criticized as elitist, he is the great writer on individuation. Psychoanalytic writers on these themes include Winnicott, Milner, and Erikson. Fierz (1991) shows the relevance of these perspectives to contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy. (9) Jung was a psychiatrist and retained an interest in psychosis all his life. From his earliest clinical work with patients at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, he argued that schizophrenic phenomena have meanings which a sensitive therapist can elucidate. In this regard, he anticipates R. D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. Jung’s final position on schizophrenia, in 1958, was that there may be some kind of biochemical “toxin” involved in the serious psychoses that would suggest a genetic element. However, Jung felt that this genetic element would do no more than give an individual a predisposition with which life’s events would interact leading to a favorable or unfavorable outcome. Here, we see an anticipation of today’s psycho-bio-social approach to schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. 6 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information New developments in the post-Jungian field (10) Until recently very few psychoanalysts have created a whole-of-life psychology, one that would include the fulcrum events of mid-life, old age, and impending death. Jung did. Developmentalists like Levinson, as well as those who explore the psychology of death and dying (such as Kübler-Ross and Parkes), all acknowledge Jung’s very prescient contribution. (11) Finally, although Jung thought that children have distinct personalities from birth, his idea that problems in childhood may be traced to the “unlived psychological life of the parents” (CW 10, p. 25) anticipates many findings of family therapy. (12) This much longer concluding section concerns Jung’s approach to clinical work. Relational Psychoanalysis emphasizes a two-person psychology and intersubjective influences on unconscious relating. Historians of this relatively new and increasingly influential school have begun to acknowledge Jung as a pioneering influence (e.g. Altman, 2005). Ironically, however, there has been little direct contact between Relationalists and Jungians, probably due to the fallout from the Freud– Jung split. Contemporary post-Jungian analysts (e.g. Samuels et al., 2000) have little difficulty in resonating with many of the ideas and practices evolving within the tradition of relational psychoanalysis. Jung asserted that analysis was a “dialectical process,” intending to highlight the fact that two people are involved in a relationship, that emotionally charged interactions between them are two-way, and that, in the deepest sense, they are to be conceived of as equals (CW 16, p. 8). Analysis, Jung goes on to say, is “an encounter, a discussion between two psychic wholes in which knowledge is used only as a tool.” The analyst is a “fellow participant in the analysis.” Jung’s focus was often on “the real relationship” (cf. the psychoanalytic text by Greenson, 1967), making his point in very challenging terms: “In reality everything depends on the man [sic] and little on the method” (CW 13, p. 7). Jung’s perspectives have encouraged post-Jungian analysts to explore the extent to which they themselves are “wounded healers,” bringing their strengths and weaknesses to the therapy situation (see Samuels, 1985, pp. 173–206). As early as 1929, Jung was arguing for the clinical usefulness of what has come to be called the “countertransference” – the analyst’s subjective response to the analysand. “You can exert no influence if you are not subject to influence,” he wrote, and “the countertransference is an important organ of information” (CW 16, pp. 70–72). Clinicians reading this chapter with a knowledge of psychoanalysis will know how contemporary psychoanalysis 7 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS has rejected Freud’s overly harsh assessment in 1910 (Freud, 1910, pp. 139–151) of the countertransference. Freud claimed it was “the analyst’s own complexes and internal resistances” and hence as something to be got rid of. Jung is, in contradistinction, one of the important pioneers of the clinical use of countertransference, along with Heimann, Little, Mitchell, Winnicott, Sandler, Searles, Langs, and Casement. The clinical interaction of analyst and analysand, once regarded as the analyst’s objective or neutral perceptions and the analysand’s subjective ones, is now regarded primarily as a mutually transforming interaction. The analyst’s personality and ethical position are no less involved in the process than his or her professional technique. The real relationship and the therapeutic alliance weave in and out of the transference/countertransference dynamics. The term for this is “intersubjectivity” and Jung’s alchemical model for the analytical process is an intersubjective one.3 In this area, Jung’s ideas share common ground with the diverse views of Atwood and Stolorow, Benjamin, Greenson, Kohut, Lomas, Mitchell, and Alice Miller. Let me restate the intention of providing this catalogue raisonnée of Jung’s role as a pioneering figure in contemporary psychotherapy. Recall that Jung has been called a charlatan and a markedly inferior thinker to Freud. It is by now reasonable to claim that it is clearly time that the disciplines of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis recognized Jung’s valuable contributions. A major aim of this volume is to situate his ideas squarely within the mainstream of contemporary psychoanalysis without losing their specificity. The post-Jungians What does the term “post-Jungian” mean and what is the state of the field? Since Jung’s death in 1961 there has been an explosion of creative professional activity in analytical psychology. In 1985 (Samuels, 1985) I coined the term “post-Jungian.” I did not have post-modernism in mind at all. I was borrowing from a (then) well-known book called Freud and the PostFreudians (Brown, 1961). I meant to indicate a connection to, and a critical distance from, Jung. The key word is “critical.” If I were to write my book again I would include “critical” in the title to emphasize the distance I intended alongside the overt membership of the Jungian world. I needed to find a way of describing analytical psychology because the then current classifications were so problematic. People referred to two schools of analytical psychology as the “London” and “Zurich” schools after the cities of their origins. But geography was useless as a means of 8 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information New developments in the post-Jungian field classifying what was going on. Even in the 1980s, and certainly in the 1990s, there were London school analysts and Zurich school analysts all over the world who had never been anywhere near London or Zurich. Moreover, as there are four Jungian societies in the city of London, to refer to what goes on in all of them as “London” was inaccurate and, to some, offensive – for they display huge differences of outlook and practice, which is one reason why there are four of them. Another belief that was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s was that there was a divide between “symbolic” and “clinical” approaches to analytical psychology. This divide, as Zinkin (personal communication, 1983) wisely pointed out, was undermining of the field because no self-respecting Jungian was going to say that he or she did not work symbolically and no clinician could not be clinical! And so this troubling distinction needed to be amended into a useful set of categories. What I did in Jung and the PostJungians (Samuels, 1985) was to assume that all of the schools of analytical psychology knew about and made use of all the ideas and practices available through Jungian psychology. I emphasized key prioritizing and weighting within each of three rather different schools, which are connected by virtue of the fact that they are, to some degree, competitive with each other. I admitted openly that the schools are creative fictions, that there is a huge amount of overlapping, and that in many respects it was the patients who had constructed the schools as much as the analysts. To summarize: I sorted analytical psychology into three schools: (1) the classical school, consciously working in Jung’s tradition, with a focus on the self and individuation. I made the point that one should not equate classical with stuck or rigid. There can easily be evolutions within something classical; (2) the developmental school, which has a specific focus on the effects of infancy and childhood on the evolution of adult personality, and an equally stringent emphasis on the analysis of transference/ countertransference dynamics in clinical work. The developmental school maintains a close relationship with object relations psychoanalysis (although the rapprochement is mostly one-way, with an indifference towards the Jungians); and (3) the archetypal school plays (in the most profound sense) with and explores images in therapy, paying the greatest respect to images just as they are without seeking an interpretive conclusion. The notion of soul, developed by the archetypal school, suggests the deepening that permits a mere event to become a significant experience. This classification was, in fact, prompted by my own confusion as a then beginner in a field that seemed utterly chaotic and without maps, aids, or companions as the various groups fell out, split, and, in some cases, split 9 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86599-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jung Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson Excerpt More information ANDREW SAMUELS again. I intended to indicate some connection to Jung and the traditions of thought and practice that had grown up around his name, and also some distance or differentiation. In order to delineate “post-Jungian” analytical psychology, I adopted a pluralistic methodology in which dispute rather than consensus would define the field. Analytical psychology could then be defined by the debates and arguments and not by the core of commonly agreed ideas. A post-Jungian could thus be interested in and energized by the various debates on the basis of clinical interests, intellectual exploration, or a combination of these. My threefold classification arose from a detailed examination of statements and articles written by post-Jungians which had a self-defining intent. Such polemical articles reveal more clearly than most what the lines of disagreement are within the Jungian and post-Jungian community. I have suggested elsewhere (Samuels, 1989) that argument and competition are more often than not the case in psychoanalysis and depth psychology.4 The history of psychoanalysis, especially the new, revisionist histories now appearing, show this tendency rather clearly. For example, the following comes from Gerhard Adler, whom I regard as an exponent of the classical school: We put the main emphasis on symbolic transformation. I would like to quote what Jung says in a letter to P. W. Martin (20/8/45): “. . . the main interest in my work is with the approach to the numinous . . . but the fact is that the numinous is the real therapy.”5 Next is an extract from an editorial introduction to a group of papers published in London by members of the developmental school: The recognition of transference as such was the first subject to become a central one for clinical preoccupation . . . Then, as anxiety about this began to diminish with the acquisition of increased skill and experience, countertransference became a subject that could be tackled. Finally . . . the transaction involved is most suitably termed transference/countertransference. (Fordham et al., 1974, p. x) And, finally, here is a statement from Hillman, speaking for the archetypal school of which he is the founder: At the most basic level of reality are fantasy images. These images are the primary activity of consciousness . . . Images are the only reality we apprehend directly. (Hillman, 1975, p. 174) Arising from the process of competition and bargaining, weighting and prioritizing, those distinct and opposing claims should, we may imagine an analyst or therapist who can hold in mind all these views, be used in 10 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org