Jung's Ethics

Moral Psychology and his Cure of Souls

Dan Merkur, Jon Mills, Jon Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351743389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This volume presents the first organized study of Jung's ethics.Drawing on direct quotes from all of his collected works, interviews, and seminars, psychoanalyst and religious scholar Dan Merkur provides a compendium of Jung's thoughts on various topics and themes that comprise his theoretical corpus—from the personal unconscious, repression, dreams, good and evil, and the shadow, to collective phenomena such as the archetypes, synchronicity, the psychoid, the paranormal, God, and the Self, as well as his contributions to clinical method and technique including active imagination, inner dialogue, and the process of individuation and consciousness expansion.The interconnecting thread inMerkur's approach to the subject matter is to read Jung's work through an ethical lens.

What comes to light is how Merkur systematically portrays Jung as a moralist, but also as a complex thinker who situates the human being as an instinctual animal struggling with internal conflict and naturalized sin. Merkur exposes the tension and development in Jung's thinking by exploring his innovative clinical-technical methods and experimentation, such as through active imagination, inner dialogue, and expressive therapies, hence underscoring unconscious creativity in dreaming, symbol formation, engaging the paranormal, and artistic productions leading to expansions of consciousness, which becomes a necessary part of individuation or the working through process in pursuit of self-actualization and wholeness. In the end, we are offered a unique presentation of Jung's core theoretical and clinical ideas centering on an ethical fulcrum, whereby his moral psychology leads to a cure of souls.

Jung's Ethics will be of interest to academics, scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Jungian studies and analytical psychology, ethics, moral psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

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Chapter 1
Jung’s moral psychology

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What psychoanalysts call the “dynamic unconscious repressed,” C. G. Jung termed both the “personal unconscious” and “the shadow.” The first term flowed from his belief that the unconscious is not limited to the repressed, but also contains inborn materials that he termed the “collective unconscious.” On several occasions, Jung identified the collective unconscious with the superego of Freud (Jung, 1951b, p. 120; 1958a, p. 348; 1958d, pp. 39–40; 1970, p. 473). The metaphor of shadow expressed Jung’s appreciation that consciousness determines what in the psyche is in light and in shadow. In one of his seminars, but in none of his scientific publications, Jung (1997) made a “hairsplitting” distinction between the personal unconscious and the shadow, calling the shadow “a normal and natural fact,” but the Freudian or personal unconscious was “to a certain extent a cultural fact” (p. 567). However, distinctions among inborn and acquired contents of the repressed need not here detain us. In this chapter, I shall review Jung’s discussions of his clinical work with the shadow, which is to say, the portion of analytical psychology that corresponds to psychoanalysis.

The original theory of repression

Jung introduced the term “shadow” in 1917. “Indeed it is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow-side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism” (Jung, 1943c, p. 30). Elsewhere he states: “The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly—for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies” (Jung, 1939a, p. 284).

Jung’s concept of the shadow had its basis in Freud’s theory of repression, which Jung characterized as follows:

The theory of repression forms the core of Freud’s teaching. According to this theory, the unconscious is essentially a phenomenon of repression, and its contents are elements of the personal psyche that although once conscious are now lost to consciousness. The unconscious would thus owe its existence to a moral conflict.

(Jung, 1951a, p. 478)

Because most psychoanalysts today entertain a rather different understanding of repression, it will immediately be appropriate to establish that Jung accurately summarized what he regarded as the salient components of Freud’s theory. Jung’s account of the role of consciousness in neurosis agreed with the position that Freud had taken from the 1890s onward. Freud wrote:

The actual traumatic moment, then, is the one at which the incompatibility forces itself upon the ego and at which the latter decides on the repudiation of the incompatible idea.… The splitting of consciousness in these cases of acquired hysteria is accordingly a deliberate and intentional one. At least it is often introduced by an act of volition; for the actual outcome is something different from what the subject intended. What he wanted was to do away with an idea, as though it had never appeared, but all he succeeds in doing is to isolate it psychically.

(Breuer and Freud, 1895, p. 123; see also p. 167)

Summarizing the case materials that he presented in Studies on Hysteria, Freud asserted that the traumatic moment regularly involved either sense perception of a traumatic event, or mental perception of a traumatic idea, which the person found abhorrent and deliberately pushed out of mind. This choice, to not know, to become unconscious, was subsequently perpetuated—Freud did not explain why or how—leading to symptom formation. But, Freud insisted, there must always be a moment of consciousness, of recognizing unpleasure, experiencing conflict, and pushing the unpleasure away (Merkur, 2011a).

Bakan et al. (2009) suggested that Freud took over his position from Moses Maimonides, a twelfth-century rabbi, who had contended that the voluntary commission of sin has, among its causes, the imagination that vice is virtuous and has, as its side-effects, unconsciousness of virtue and pathological symptom formation (for example, blindness, paralysis). Freud shifted the discussion from evil, whose definition rabbinical tradition treated as God-given, to a neurotic’s own sense of morality; but he otherwise retained Maimonides’ understanding of the intricate relations among fantasy, willful choice, disavowal, amnesia, and symptom formation.

From the 1890s onward, Freud had maintained that conventional morality was pathogenic, because it demanded the repression of healthy sexuality (Breuer and Freud, 1895, pp. 165, 167; Freud, 1908a; Freud, 1916, p. 316). Freud’s position allowed Burrow (1914) to infer that neurosis is, at bottom, a moral reaction. Jung agreed, as did a few early ego psychologists such as Fenichel (1928) and Alexander (1929, pp. 7–8). Freud objected to the formulations, but validated the underlying phenomenology. He qualified but never abandoned the association of psychopathology with immorality when he introduced his tripartite model of the id, ego, and superego. When he differentiated the superego as a discrete moral agency, Freud (1923a, p. 17) allocated repression to the ego, distancing it slightly from morality. However, Freud (1923b) soon reduced the separation by identifying the superego with the “dream censorship” that he had been discussing from 1900 onward. Freud slightly increased the separation of neurosis from morality when he redefined trauma in 1926. Where he had formerly argued that what is unpleasurable (to consciousness) is repressed, he now suggested that repression ends the paralysis or psychic helplessness that the ego suffers during trauma (Freud, 1926). The possibility that mental paralysis might occur for non-moral or amoral reasons was subsequently assumed by classical psychoanalysis, but Freud never proposed the idea. In New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud (1933) maintained that “repression is the work of the super-ego—either … it does its work on its own account or else … the ego does it in obedience to its orders” (p. 98).

Jung (1914) agreed emphatically with Freud’s assessment of conventional morality, as an unwholesome standard that imposed conflict and neurosis on many individuals.

In certain cases it is a recognized fact that “immoral” tendencies are not got rid of by analysis, but appear more and more clearly until it becomes evident that they belong to the biological duties of the individual. This is particularly true of certain sexual demands aiming at an individual evaluation of sexuality. This is not a question for pathology, it is a social question of today which imperatively demands an ethical solution. We are not yet far enough advanced to distinguish between moral and immoral behaviour in the realm of free sexual activity. This is clearly expressed in the customary treatment, or rather ill-treatment, of unmarried mothers. All the repulsive hypocrisy, the high tide of prostitution and of venereal diseases, we owe to the barbarous, wholesale legal condemnation of certain kinds of sexual behaviour, and to our inability to develop a finer moral sense for the enormous psychological differences that exist in the domain of free sexual activity.

(Jung, 1914, p. 288)

Because Jung habitually used the term “trauma” in its original medical sense as a physical effect of physical violence, he routinely referred to Freud’s theory that neurosis originates through sexual abuse in childhood, not as Freud’s “seduction theory,” as it is known among psychoanalysts, but as Freud’s “trauma theory.” Freud’s abandonment of the theory in 1897 is reflected in the many passages where Jung downplayed the role of trauma in psychopathology. At no time, however, did Jung deny the role of psychical trauma in the genesis of psychopathology. He was nevertheless more concerned with the content of the conflictual materials that became pathogenic when the ego was unable to integrate them. His attention to morality then followed.

Today we can take it as moderately certain that complexes are in fact “splinter psyches.” The aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche. Certainly one of the commonest causes is a moral conflict, which ultimately derives from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one’s nature.

(Jung, 1948f, p. 98)

Jung’s clinical views on symptom formation were in close agreement with both Freud’s original formulation and the position that Freud took in the New Introductory Lectures. Jung (1939b) wrote:

The symptoms were substitutes for impulses, wishes, and fantasies which, because of their moral or aesthetic painfulness, were subjected to a “censorship” that exercised ethical conventions. In other words, they were pushed out of the conscious mind by a certain kind of moral attitude, and a specific inhibition prevented them from being remembered. The “theory of repression,” as Freud aptly called it, became the centre-piece of his psychology.

(p. 44; see also 1964, p. 199; 1977, p. 320)

Freud regarded pathological symptoms as the “return of the repressed” to consciousness in disguised fashions. Concerned as Freud was with clinical facts and therapeutic interventions, he never considered why the repressed returns.¹ He claimed that drives, never previously conscious, make use of the repressed as vehicles for their own manifestations; but the question of how the repressed returns is not the same as the question of why. Freud did not formulate the answer that is implicit in his work after 1920, namely, that Eros, the life drive that always seeks to make two into one, is a continuous psychic pressure toward integration. An entirely more speculative person, Jung did ask the question why; but the question that he asked was why does the unconscious seek to manifest? Because he postulated both a personal and a collective unconscious, he wanted a general concept that would include both the return of the repressed and a parallel or corresponding process that was appropriate to the collective unconscious. The concept on which he drew was Eugen Bleuler’s “ambivalence or ambitendency, which formulates the psychological fact that every tendency is balanced by a contrary one” (Jung, 1911, p. 197). Jung developed Bleuler’s appreciation of compromise formations into a general theory of compensation throughout the psyche.

How does a symbol originate? This question brings us to the most important function of the unconscious: the symbol-creating function. There is something very remarkable about this function, because it has only a relative existence. The compensatory function, on the other hand, is the natural, automatic function of the unconscious and is constantly present. It owes its existence to the simple fact that all the impulses, thoughts, wishes, and tendencies which run counter to the rational orientation of daily life are denied expression, thrust into the background, and finally fall into the unconscious. There all the things which we have repressed and suppressed, which we have deliberately ignored and devalued, gradually accumulate and, in time, acquire such force that they begin to influence consciousness. This influence would be in direct opposition to our conscious orientation if the unconscious consisted only of repressed and suppressed material. But this, as we have seen, is not the case. The unconscious also contains the dark springs of instinct and intuition, it contains all those forces which mere reasonableness, propriety, and the orderly course of bourgeois existence could never call awake, all those creative forces which lead man onwards to new developments, new forms, and new goals. I therefore call the influence of the unconscious not merely complementary but compensatory, because it adds to consciousness everything that has been excluded by the drying up of the springs of intuition and by the fixed pursuit of a single goal.

(Jung, 1918, pp. 18–19)

Jung’s theory of compensation had, as its corollary, a restatement of Freud’s concept of psychic conflict. Once again, Jung aimed at a generalization that he could apply to both the personal and the collective unconscious.

The qualities of the main conscious function, i.e., of the conscious attitude as a whole, are in strict contrast to those of the unconscious attitude. In other words, we can say that between the conscious and the unconscious there is normally an opposition.

(Jung, 1923, p. 522)

For Freud, neuroses arose from conflicts between consciousness and the unconscious, but otherwise the two systems might function harmoniously in an integrated manner. For Jung, however, consciousness and the unconscious were intrinsically opposed. They were categorical opposites. Once again, Jung’s view was not acceptable among psychoanalysts until it was independently proposed by an orthodox analyst, in this case, by Anna Freud. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1966), first published in 1936, Anna Freud (1966) postulated “the ego’s primary antagonism to instinct—its dread of the strength of the instincts” (p. 157). She maintained her position throughout her life. “Many disputed it when I said it, and I still say that the ego as such is hostile rather than friendly and helpful to the instincts, because it’s against its nature to be friendly” (Sandler with Freud, 1985, p. 494).

Jung’s moral discourse

Apart from the changes in nomenclature, Jung conceptualized symptom formation in orthodox Freudian terms.

The symptom is therefore, in Freud’s view, the fulfillment of unrecognized desires which, when conscious, come into violent conflict with our moral convictions. As already observed, this shadow-side of the psyche, being withdrawn from conscious scrutiny, cannot be dealt with by the patient. He cannot correct it, cannot come to terms with it, nor yet disregard it; for in reality he does not “possess” the unconscious impulses at all. Thrust out from the hierarchy of the conscious psyche, they have become autonomous complexes which it is the task of analysis, not without great resistances, to bring under control again.

(Jung, 1943, p. 25)

Jung’s formulations departed significantly from those of Freud in their respective choices of discourse. Freud wished to position psychoanalysis within the world of nineteenth-century science, with its aspirations to objectivity, universality, and materialism. Jung prided himself, by contrast, in his empiricism. As a result, he avoided experience-distant theoretical formulations, in order to stay closer to the observable data. Where Freud eliminated the moral language of his patients when writing up his scientific ideas, Jung expressed what often amounted to the same theories in language that patients would find meaningful. Jung (1930) explained: “I appeal to his sense of values deliberately, because I have to make the man well and therefore I must use all available means to achieve the therapeutic aim” (p. 33). In a similarly pragmatic manner, Jung (1932) deliberately blurred the differences between theological and psychotherapeutic concepts in an article that he penned for clergy: “The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow.… A neurosis is a splitting of personality” (p. 341).

The equation of the unconscious with evil, which led to its designation as the shadow, flowed from Jung’s empiricism. Consider, for example, the following phrasing of the theory of repression. Speaking of the child’s maturational attainment that Freud described variously as the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the origin of the superego, and the transition between the pleasure ego and the reality ego, Jung (1966b) wrote:

When the personal development of the mind begins, … reason discovers the irreconcilable nature of the opposites. The consequence of this discovery is the conflict of repression. We want to be good, and therefore must repress evil; and with that the paradise of the collective psyche comes to an end.

(p. 277)

In place of Freud’s language of libidinal energy and its counter-cathexi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s introduction
• 1 Jung’s moral psychology
• 2 Cure of souls
• 3 The creativity of dreams
• 4 Having it out with the unconscious
• 5 Jung’s individuation process
• 6 Consciousness and its expansion
• References
• Index