Jung, Irigaray, Individuation

Philosophy, Analytical Psychology, and the Question of the Feminine

Frances Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135448363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Salute mentale in psicologia

How do philosophy and analytical psychology contribute to the mal-figuring of the feminine and women? Does Luce Irigaray's work represent the possibility of individuation for women, an escape from masculine projection and an affirming re-figuring of women? And what would individuation for women entail?

This work postulates a novel and unique relationship between Carl Jung and Luce Irigaray. Its central argument, that an ontologically different feminine identity situated in women's embodiment, women's genealogy and a women's divine is possible, develops and re-figures Jung's notion of individuation in terms of an Irigarayan woman-centred politics. Individuation is re-thought as a politically charged issue centred around sex-gendered difference focussed on a critique of Jung's conception of the feminine.

The book outlines Plato's conception of the feminine as disorder and argues that this conception is found in Jung's notion of the anima feminine. It then argues that Luce Irigaray's work challenges the notion of the feminine as disorder. Her mimetic adoption of this figuring of the feminine is a direct assault on what can be understood as a culturally dominant Western understanding. Luce Irigaray argues for a feminine divine which will model an ideal feminine just as the masculine divine models a masculine ideal. In making her claims, Luce Irigaray, the book argues, is expanding and elaborating Jung's idea of individuation.

Jung, Irigaray, Individuation brings together philosophy, analytical psychology and psychoanalysis in suggesting that Luce Irigaray's conception of the feminine is a critical re-visioning of the open-ended possibilities for human being expressed in Jung's idea of individuation. This fresh insight will intrigue academics and analysts alike in its exploration of the different traditionsfrom whichCarl Jung and Luce Irigaray speak.

Chapter 1
The dreaming body

Dreaming might seem like a strange place to start up the conversation between Jung and Luce Irigaray. Yet it brings together Hegelian Dialectic, the unconscious and the body. Once we encounter the body, we need to imagine what kind of body we are engaging with; and since bodies are not neutral with respect to their material properties, their social locations and how they are valued, then we are on the road to exploring just what is entailed in the dreaming process. In the first instance my discussion explores Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious by examining his notion of dreaming. I argue that Jung understands dreaming as both a collective affect and as a personal or individual response to one’s lived-in world which is structured by and structures, in part, the collective unconscious: the relation implied here is dialectical. The focus on the collective unconscious draws attention to the role the body plays as a limit of both consciousness and the unconscious. I then propose that the body question provides a link to Luce Irigaray’s work because her conception of the body is never simply ‘body’ but always ‘sexed’ body.

The argument I advance about dreaming and the unconscious constitutes a significant intervention in our considerations regarding our embeddedness in the world, as both conscious and unconscious selves. It raises some salient questions about the mode of embeddedness, viz. as bodies that are lived-in bodies and the kind of effect that has on us. Carl Jung’s insight regarding the restricting role the body plays in the production of consciousness out of unconsciousness, and the ubiquitous presence of unconsciousness, requires careful deliberation, however, because, as we all know, our bodies are sites of differences as well as similarity. His theory misses out on an important feature: it speaks in generalities; it is not specific to sex/ gender, race, age or class. The repercussions of a theory which fails to take cognisance of these specificities are clear: if we are to take seriously the idea of collective constitution then we must likewise take cognisance of difference as difference is manifested through constitution. Importantly, too, acknowledgement of the role of the lived and living body, in the elaboration of consciousness and unconsciousness, means that we must reorient our thinking around the relevant relationships we are socialised into, and/or internalised by them, through our collectives.

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Carl Jung claimed that:

[t]he collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal experience . . . The personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes.

(Jung 1968a: 42)

He goes on to remark that:

[i]n addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

(Jung 1968a: 90)

This might appear to be a pretty unfashionable thesis by today’s theoretical standards.¹ The thesis invokes notions such as universality and innateness which intellectual fashion dictates are politically and intellectually suspect. But Jung’s claims give a serious account of the unconscious collective aspect of what it means to be a human being and his realisation of collective influence on the individual psyche pre-figures the social-constructionist turn of the past fifty years. Friedrich Nietzsche has been a big influence on the turn to the body and social constructionist theory and he was also a major influence on Jung in this respect.² I begin my exploration of the collective influence with a short discussion of dreaming and the unconscious because, as Jung also remarks, the main source of knowledge of the archetypes, hence of the unconscious, is dreaming (along with active imagination and paranoid or extreme psychic state delusions (Jung 1968a: 100–3). The discussion of dreaming will bring into focus the important role of the lived-in body in the work of Jung, an importance which cannot be gainsaid given the refiguring of the mind–body problem over the past one hundred or so years. It also brings into focus the binary nation of the psyche, as both conscious and unconscious.

One of the major difficulties in understanding dreams and dreaming is that the conscious and the unconscious seem inevitably to be invoked: when we are awake we are conscious, when we are asleep we are unconscious. What ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ are, however, is difficult to discern, particularly in the context of dreaming, because dreaming does not occur during waking life, during conscious life. ‘Waking life’ and ‘conscious’ seem to go together, just as ‘sleeping life’ and ‘unconscious’ seem to go together. Yet some would argue that they are conscious of having dreams when they dream: they feel emotions (of elation or fear or anger or love), for example, of which they are conscious while they are dreaming. They do not wake up and then become afraid or feel happy when they remember that they dreamed. Rather they wake up already feeling afraid or happy because their feelings are continuous with what has been going on for them while they were asleep. One view of this suggests that there is a sense in which we are conscious while we dream during our sleep.³ Dreaming and dreams are a way of sorting out what might be the implications of such a view. Descriptions of consciousness and the unconscious provide the basic data of any conclusions one might draw about the nature or ontological status of the mind. How consciousness operates in the world is the only evidence, the only experience, we have of the mind. A satisfactory account of the mind of the unconscious and consciousness has to be, minimally, phenomenological and this applies to dreaming as an important function of the psyche.⁴

That said, a good account of dreams and dreaming thus will have the following features:

1. it will not overlook or eliminate the subjective, that it is an embodied subject who dreams
2. it will acknowledge its objective grounding in socio-cultural factors which are collective
3. it will be subtended by a satisfactory account of the conscious and the unconscious, the mind and
4. it will attend to the dialectical nature of dreaming, to the intrusion of the unconscious into consciousness.

A good account situates the dreamer at the centre of the dreaming process. It takes, as primary material, the experience of the dreamer as an embodied, situated collective member. Further, such an account would be both phenomenological and analytical; which is to say that such an account is not simply descriptive but also deals with the relations which might be exhibited in the dreaming process. For example, that the dreamer is an embodied social being, in a social network with specific structures and arrangements, illuminates what is going on in the dream (and I assume that something is). So a good account will also display its awareness of the dreamer’s social context, the dreamer being seen as a product, to some extent, of her/his world environment and lived experience in that environment.

Freud attributed the existence of the unconscious to repression.⁵ In Freud’s theory, we see the imbibing of the self’s local domain as a moral issue: unconsciousness is produced through the persuasions of the collective’s sanctioning some possibilities, prohibiting others. For Freud, the unconscious is a domain constituted by the effects of prohibition. Coming to know what is prohibited, and the frustration of desire associated with that, contributes to the making of the self. Frustration and disappointment emerge in dreaming, a psychic activity by which the unconscious makes itself known to the self as an aspect of herself. The subject finds herself immersed in her outer world, her local domain, and by her inner world, both circumscribed by collective objectivity, history and culture. She learns the rules of sanction and disapproval; she does not arrive in the world with a pre-inscribed set of rules with which she judges that world. The unconscious is manufactured from the subject’s own experience of the world, from what is acceptable and not acceptable, from what can be encountered openly and what needs to be repressed. Yet even as Freud argued for three aspects of the psyche: the conscious (Cs.) the preconscious (Pcs.) and the unconscious (Ucs.), he further distinguishes between two kinds, and then three kinds of unconscious: ‘there are two kinds of unconscious, but in the dynamic sense only one . . . We still recognize that the Ucs. does not coincide with the repressed; it is still true that all the repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed. A part of the ego, too – and Heaven knows how important a part – may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs. . . . When we find ourselves thus confronted by the necessity of postulating a third Ucs., . . . we must admit that the characteristic of being unconscious begins to lose significance for us’ (Freud 1961: 15 and 18).⁶ So Freud’s account is not limited to repression as an explanation of the whole unconscious, yet he does not seem to know what to do with the apparently unrepressed elements.

Jung’s account of the unconscious retains elements of repression, but attempts to account for anomalous material that appears in dreaming (like how one can have dreams containing apparently ancient symbols of which one has no lived-experience, no imaginary or actual encounter). We can imagine that he does this by attending to those aspects of the unconscious which have lost significance for Freud, those aspects which are ‘unconscious instinctual impulses’. The instinctual impulses appear to be structural. Jung’s account is both structural (he talks about the archetypal forms, for example) and is also content based (it ‘contains’ pictorial images and sensations). Such material is anomalous because it is not locatable in the subject’s personal history and experience of the world. On this view, what transpires in dreams is irreducible to lived experience either directly or derivatively through association. Hence some dream material might be thought of as existentially anomalous.

To account for that anomalousness, Jung suggests that the unconscious is supra-personal as well as personal. The supra-personal he called the collective unconscious.⁷ The collective unconscious pre-exists the individual unconscious and the individual conscious. There is thus, to the unconscious, a bipartite configuration, a double aspect, collective and personal. The intersection of these aspects, the encounter between them, their relation one to the other, produces the content of dreams, produces the phenomenon of dreaming. But it also produces the self, in conjunction with the conscious, that about which the self is aware. From this perspective, the self is a relational entity, not only because it is in relation to the world, and the world to it, but because its internal aspects, as heterogeneous, are also in relation with each other. On this view, the self is a product of dialectical relations. We may think of the self as a synthesis of the kind which Giegerich disdains. The notion of sameness, of internal coherence and identity, is absent from this conception of the self.

The unconscious, collective or personal, has a temporal immediacy, a constant presence that consciousness does not have. Owen Flanagan proposes that ‘we are always, while alive, conscious’ (Flanagan 2000: 68). Is this claim consistent with the idea of the constant presence of the unconscious? That depends on how we figure the complexity of both conscious and unconscious and their relations. We need, therefore, to address their temporal dimensions evident in intentionality, or the directedness of mental states and mentation more generally.

Consciousness is marked in its directedness towards an object (Brentano 1973: 88). But consciousness is limited both in content and directedness while simultaneously always directed. The operativeness of consciousness suggests that a necessary condition of its being is that it is not autogenic, not self-engendering. Consciousness always and everywhere requires an object external to itself, in order to operate, in order to be consciousness. We miss out on a lot of what is going on around us, in part because of the directedness of consciousness and for the sake, I suggest, of our sanity.⁸ We need to distinguish between the directedness of consciousness (consciousness always has an object: there is always something there, external to consciousness, responsible for ‘activating’ consciousness) and the awareness of that directedness. We are certainly not always aware of that directedness (mostly we take it for granted). Hence the notion of directedness is ambiguous. Most of a subject’s life is spent with marginal awareness of both the cause and effects of one’s conscious existence. Immanuel Levinas writes of this very phenomenon:

The comedy begins with the simplest of our movements, each of which carries with it an inevitable awkwardness. In putting out my hand to approach a chair, I have creased the sleeve of my jacket. I have scratched the floor, I have dropped the ash from my cigarette. In doing that which I wanted to do, I have done so many things I did not want. The act has not been pure, for I have left traces . . . We are thus responsible beyond our intentions. It is impossible for the regard that directs the act to avoid the nonintended action that comes with it . . . That is to say, our consciousness and our mastery of reality through consciousness do not exhaust our relation to reality, to which we are always present through all the density of our being. Consciousness of our reality does not coincide with our habitation of the world.

(Levinas 1996: 4)

Our habitation of the world is primarily unconscious: we are only momentarily conscious. Consciousness itself is an effect of limitation. Indeed, Jung argues that restriction, as constraint, is of the essence of consciousness: ‘you must be able to exclude many things in order to be conscious. So restriction is the very being, the character of consciousness’ and, as we shall see in a moment, the body is important in the restricting of consciousness (Jung 1998: 94). Jung’s notion of consciousness focuses on discrimination, discernment (Jung 1998: 243). Furthermore, ‘the conscious mind can claim only a relatively central position and must accept the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides’ (Jung 2002: 215). The psyche is fundamentally intentional and this entails that both the conscious and the unconscious exhibit intentionality. The discriminating activity of the mind suggests intentional activity of which one is not conscious and could not be conscious. In other words, the directedness of the mind is discoverable through both its conscious and its unconscious contents, including dreams.

THE CONSCIOUS, THE UNCONSCIOUS, WAKEFULNESS AND EXPERIENCE

The extent of the unconscious as an aspect of the mind and of social inheritance, the idea that mind in its fullness is intentional, gives some insight into the issue of the relationship between experience, consciousness and wakefulness.⁹ What follows is a version of a philosophical argument about the relationship between consciousness, wakefulness or being awake, and experience. The philosophical arguments can be seen as an attempt to examine the cogency of various views of conscious and unconscious experience and the relation between them. Experience (what happens, what we do, what we know and believe, who and what we are in the world and our awareness of all of these) and consciousness go hand in hand. If you are not conscious, then you cannot experience, a point made by the philosophers Norman Malcolm (1959) and Daniel Dennett (1977) among others. Hence one widespread but contested philosophical construction of experience, of consciousness and being awake, is that:

• in order to experience, one must be awake
• to be awake is to be conscious, and
• to experience is to be conscious

and for being asleep or asleepness, that:

• to be asleep is not to experience
• not to experience is to be unconscious
• to be asleep is to be unconscious.

...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: THE DREAMING BODY
• CHAPTER 2: THE PHILOSOPHICAL JUNG
• CHAPTER 3: LOCATING IDENTITY: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MATTERS
• CHAPTER 4: PROJECTION: THE MIRROR IMAGE
• CHAPTER 5: DIVINE REVERSAL
• CHAPTER 6: MIMESIS REVISITED: DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
• CHAPTER 7: JUNG, LUCE IRIGARAY AND ESSENTIALISM: A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM
• CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION: SPEAKING OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS . . .
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY