How and Why We Still Read Jung

Personal and professional reflections

Jean Kirsch, Murray Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135046989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How relevant is Jung's work today?

How and Why We Still Read Jung offers a fresh look at how Jung's work can still be read and applied to the modern day. Written by seasoned Jungian analysts and Jung scholars, the essays in this collection offer in depth and often personal readings of various works by Jung, including:

Ambiguating Jung

Jung and Alchemy: A Diamonic Reading

Chinese Modernity and the Way of Return

Jung: Respect for the Non-Literal

Including contributions from around the world, this book will be of interest to Jungian analysts and academic Jung scholars globally. With a unique and fresh analysis of Jung's work by eminent authors in the field, this book will also be a valuable starting point for a first-time reader of Jung.

1

AMBIGUATING JUNG

Mark Saban

Mark Saban reads Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the same openness that one brings to a big dream or an active imagination. He captures the enthusiasm Jung brought to rediscovering, remembering, and mythologizing the most important moments of his life, while also noting Jung’s ambivalence toward the “so-called autobiography”, which Saban relates to a parallel tendency in Jung’s psychology to undermine the univocality of the self. He suggests that the importance of this posthumously published text, which stands outside Jung’s official body of writing, derives from Jung’s willingness to reconfigure in this book the deeper meanings and ambiguities of his life’s work.

J. K.

One of the few undisputed facts about the text we know as Memories, Dreams, Reflections (henceforth MDR)¹ is that, thanks to the groundbreaking work of Sonu Shamdasani² and Alan Elms,³ we can no longer read it “naively” as Jung’s autobiography. However, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that, in the wake of Freud and Jung, it has become difficult to persist in a naive reading of any text, if we mean by this the passive reception of what presents itself uncomplicatedly as univocal and unidirectional truth. This is not to suggest that all reading must be shadowed by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but rather that the very process of reading is subject to an inevitably reciprocal movement of meaning. For example, if analytical psychology itself is built on the idea that we do not read the world literally – as an object “out there” – but are already imaginatively intertwined with it, then how can our reading of any text, even one published in Jung’s name, remain immune from such a notion? In other words, if to read a dream is to approach it through a motion of close attunement, opening us gradually and gently to the rich and ambiguous specificity of its very rhythms and images, so that eventually, deo concedente, an inner reverberation of meaning is attained, one that inhabits a paradoxical place of complexity and simplicity in which objective is seen through subjective and vice versa, why would we not bring such a notion of reading to the very texts that have brought us to this understanding, such as MDR?

A reading of this kind, which requires from the reader a certain willing vulnerability, a proneness to be affected by the alterity of the text, should be understood as quite different from a personalistic or pathologizing reading, one designed to reduce the text to a catalogue of “unconscious motivations” or “complex indicators”. A reading of this prophylactic kind is evidently designed to protect the reader from contamination by the text. What, for example, saves Winnicott’s famous review of MDR⁴ from being reductive in this way, is that, despite an insistence upon diagnosing Jung as suffering from childhood schizophrenia, his reading of the text has transformed his attitude not only towards Jung, but also, more importantly, towards himself. Those who have gone on to dismiss Jung by parroting Winnicott’s diagnoses, but without undergoing the transformative nature of his reading, have failed to enter the space in which true reading can occur.

It is quite clear from Jung’s writings on the transference, among others, that he is quite aware of the impossibility of engaging psyche in depth without opening oneself to the potentially destabilizing experience of radical ambiguity. He asserts his commitment to the equivocal nature of psychological life in a 1952 letter to Zvi Zerblowsky:

The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings, in order to do justice to the dual aspect of our psychic nature. I strive consciously and deliberately for ambiguity of expression, because it is superior to unequivocalness and reflects the nature of life.⁵

It is impossible to differentiate the ambiguities of reading from the ambiguities of self. They occur in the same place and derive from the same source. Jung’s writings never stop circling the intricacies and paradoxes of subjectivity. Often Jung seeks to dismember us, pointing at our infinite dissociability, revealing the enlightenment subject as no more than a chimera, or, rather, a shoal of chimeras, an alchemical ocean of fishes’ eyes, each with its own consciousness offering its own perspective. In such a sea, most of the old metaphysical self simply dissolves, and what survives bobs – tiny, uncertain, and unstable – on the vast surface of the deep. No longer impermeable and unitary, this is a self that no longer knows itself and is obscurely aware that it can no longer know itself in full. Once the master of language, now inextricably caught in the linguistic net, it has lost both confident agency and authoritative sovereignty.

But in uneasy tension with this centrifugal solutio comes the coagulatio of individuation, the mandala, the Self – a teleology that dictates an endless spiralling toward an (inevitably virtual) centre and a perpetual straining toward an (ultimately ineffable) meaning. Jung is read most fruitfully as a difficult place of tension and torsion – always holding the strain between impossible alternatives.

Nowhere is this more evident – because, as we shall see, it is not just stated but performed – than in the “so-called autobiography” as Jung insisted on calling what eventually saw print as the posthumous Memories, Dreams, Reflections. One reason why this text is a locus classicus for the enactment of ambiguity in Jung is because, as I shall attempt to show, it succeeds in achieving indeterminacy on several different, though related, levels.

Autobiography

As recently as the early 1970s, the field of autobiography seemed relatively secure as a bastion of the unitary self. James Olney writes in Metaphors of the Self:

What is …of particular interest to us in a consideration of the creative achievements of individual men [sic] and the relationship of those achievements to a life lived, on the one hand, and an autobiography of that life on the other is … the isolate unique-ness that nearly everyone agrees to be the primary quality and condition of the individual and his experience.⁶

Olney offers an essentialist view of individuality, which, rising above social, political, or historical factors, achieves apotheosis in autobiography. This is a portrait of the enlightenment self, flourishing in its proper element: unified, univocal, unique.⁷

But even as Olney wrote in 1972, this notion of autobiography was beginning to suffer a profound internal destabilization. Battered for more than a century by antagonists as diverse as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of unitary selfhood was in the process of undergoing radical dismemberment by energies we can summarize under the names of Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida. Under such an attack, the genre of autobiography found itself deconstructed from within. Latent ambiguities of the self now began to be manifested, paradoxically in the very place that had hitherto provided for self-identity: autobiography itself.

The “essential core of selfhood”, constituted in and by our self-narratives, appeared suddenly all-too-fragile. In this new light, the deeper and closer we read the autobiographical text, the more the all-important I seems to split: I as narrator, I as narratee, I as he or she who re-members, I who is re-membered in fiction.

Eventually, distinguishing the autobiographical text from any other text becomes hard. For Paul de Man, for example, autobiography consists of two persons constructing their own identities through reading each other, a process that establishes a “specular structure” within the text. The author reads him- or herself in autobiography, the subject of his or her own knowledge, and the writing I gets substituted for the written I. But, de Man goes on, this structure is merely a special case of what happens in any text that claims to be “by” someone: “any book with a readable title page is, to some extent, autobiographical”.⁸

The so-called autobiography

As I have suggested, psychoanalysis constituted one of the primary threats to the unitary self and, therefore, to the very possibility of writing (or reading) the self as unitary. This is partly the case because to think of self as naively self-identical becomes impossible once one has recognized the potentially destabilizing factor of the unconscious psyche, whether characterized as id and superego or as anima and shadow. But with regard to life stories, what is equally important is the complex way in which psychoanalytic work simultaneously weaves together and tears apart the fabric of our self-narratives.

We can catch the ambivalent nature of this process at the very birth of psychoanalysis. In his first case histories, Freud wants to tell us the story of the patient, to offer us the meaning behind it, and to show us how he, Freud, has uncovered the truth. In effect, what we eventually read is a dialogue (and not infrequently a competition) between Freud’s version of the story and that of the patient. And all this occurs within a therapy that has the stated goal of enabling the patient to achieve full possession of her own story.

These narratives also serve to weave Freud’s life closely into the development of his theory. The early case studies are at least as much the story of a man called Freud discovering a new science, as they are the story of the patient. As the secret lives of the patients are revealed, so are the secrets of the new science of psychoanalysis. With The Interpretation of Dreams,⁹ the autobiographical element becomes more disguised, but even more central: the dreams interpreted are Freud’s own dreams, the analysis his own self-analysis.

In his own An Autobiographical Study, Freud makes an attempt to disentangle the personal from the theoretical: “The Autobiographical Study shows how psychoanalysis came to be the whole content of my life and rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations to that science.”¹⁰ As Linda Anderson comments, “Oddly …for someone uniquely aware of the decisive influence of the hidden aspects of the psyche on the public self, Freud pushes his own private and affective life to the margins of his autobiographical text.”¹¹ It is as if the overtly autobiographical nature of the early case histories has become superfluous for Freud, as his writings on psychoanalysis, he realizes, constitute and are constituted by all that matters in his life.

In the case of An Autobiographical Study then, such a sketchy and blatantly unsatisfactory (“no personal experiences of mine are of any interest”) enterprise is, in effect, inviting the reader to fill in the gaps and, like a psychoanalyst, explore the very ambiguities that Freud is attempting to erase. But Freud’s insistence that “psychoanalysis came to be the whole content of my life”, can, of course, also be read to mean that Freud’s life came to be the whole content of psychoanalysis. Such a claim lends support to a fundamental and oft-repeated belief of Jung’s, that “every psychology – my own included – has the character of a subjective confession”.¹² When Jung playfully said, “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian”, he was making a serious point about the paradoxes that spring up around a psychology that purports to offer to all a more or less clear map of the territory of “individuation”, even though the map is itself closely modelled upon Jung’s own personal and peculiar psychic development. It would sometimes seem that individuation is all about doing it your way, so long as you do it Jung’s way.

By the time he had celebrated his 80th birthday, Jung had made it very clear that, not only was it theoretically necessary for his psychology to be his alone, but also, in fact, it had emerged out of his own inner and outer experiences. What, then, beyond a kind of tautological embroidery, could the project of an autobiography have to offer him or his reading public? Replying in 1952 to an enquiry about the possibility of a biography, he offered two related reasons for avoiding it:

As long as people don’t understand what I have done with psychology there is little use for a biography. My psychology and my life are interwoven to such an extent that one cannot make my biography readable without telling people at the same time about the things I have found out about the unconscious.¹³

Nor did he see how it could be done. How could anyone manage to “disentangle this monstrous Gordian knot of fatality, denseness and aspirations and what-not!”?¹⁴

Jung’s other stated reason for disliking biography in general was that it was seldom true: “I know too many autobiographies, with their self-deceptions and downright lies, and I know too much about the impossibility of self-portrayal, to want to ventur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Ambiguating Jung
• 2 A Lecture for the End of Time – “Concerning Rebirth”
• 3 Jung and Alchemy: A Daimonic Reading
• 4 On Reading Jung in German: Jung’s Significance for Germanistik
• 5 Reading Jung for Magic: “Active Imagination” for/as “Close Reading”
• 6 Reading Frye Reading Jung
• 7 Tangled Up in Blue: a Reappraisal of Complex Theory
• 8 Chinese Modernity and the Way of Return
• 9 Philosophy, the Thinking Function, and the Reading of Jung
• 10 Jung: Respect for the Non-literal
• 11 A Lifelong Reading of Jung