Mythology of the Soul (Psychology Revivals)

A Research into the Unconscious from Schizophrenic Dreams and Drawings

H.G. Baynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317528395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1940, this classic study of two schizophrenic case-histories further opened up the seemingly intractable problem of this condition; a task preceded by Jung's own Psychology of Dementia Praecox. It was Baynes's grasp of the meaning of the symbol coupled with his wide scholarship that enable him to explore the case-histories in such remarkable and fruitful depth, thus linking pathological psychology through graphic expression and the dream of the myths of mankind and the universal man. This was truly a scientific task.

In case 1, the series of dreams, fantasies and active imagination, fully illustrated by the patients' spontaneous paintings, suggested to him a kind of mythological imagery. Baynes then demonstrates the emergence and development of a hero myth together with its therapeutic effect upon the patient, as an inner personal experience of death and rebirth.

Baynes also applied the methods of synthesis to the understanding of modern art and its reflection of the spirit of the times – a realization of the basic split in the socio-religious structure of European Culture. In case 2, the subject was an artist, and out of his own split he seemed to have created a symbolic bridge that would be a therapeutic bridge for himself and a possible model for curing the evil of the times in which we then were living.

Part One

CHAPTER I
Psychiatric Antecedents

Development of the Psychological Conception of Mental Disorders

I

THE development of a systematic psychological approach to psychotic conditions began with the twentieth century. Before this new era dawned, the position of psychiatry as a branch of medicine rested on somewhat frail grounds. It was even contended by Kant, in response to the legitimist claims of Hufeland, the eminent German alienist, that the consideration and treatment of mental disease belonged, not to the physician, but to the philosopher. Considering how long it has taken medical science to recognize the psychological criterion in the study of mental disorders, it is more than possible that Kant was justified. It must also be confessed that psychology was almost as powerless as medicine to deal with the problems and disorders of the mind until Freud and Jung began to make use of the purposive or teleological conception of unconscious mental processes.

Although the concept of the unconscious is not very congenial to the practical extraverted Anglo-Saxon mentality, it must be confessed that, in the last analysis, the unconscious is the real object of psychiatry. On the other hand, the concept is native to the introverted genius of Germany. Von Hartmann's reputation as a philosopher was based upon the success of his Philosophy of the Unconscious, written in 1869. In this work the unconscious appears as a combination of the metaphysic of Hegel and Schopenhauer. It is both Will and Reason and the absolute, all-embracing ground of all existence; the spiritual dynamis in nature. Von Hartmann inherits the Oriental pessimism of Schopenhauer, seeing Reason in constant strife against Will. Only when the unconscious impersonal Will is emancipated from this strife in the conscious reason of the enlightened pessimist can the world be redeemed. But the supremacy of a world-shaping and world-driving unconscious Will did not originate with Schopenhauer. Fichte held that the source of being is the primæval activity of Will, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action of the absolute ego. "The Will," he said, " is the living principle of reason." Schelling too (1809) in his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom wrote: " In the last resort there is no other being but Will. Will is primal being, and to this alone apply the predicates fathomless, eternal, independent of time, self-affirming." Schopenhauer's Weltanschauung was directly inspired by the philosophy of the Vedas. He is, above all, the introverted realist, affirming the psychological basis of the world. In his World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer fights with the weapons of physical doctrine on the basis of the material earth.

" He knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is exhibited by the animals. But both animals and men have come into existence within assignable limits of time, and that before this there was an age when neither eye nor ear gathered the life of the universe into perceptions. Knowledge, therefore, with its vehicle, the intellect, is dependent upon the existence of certain nerve organs located in an animal system; and its function is originally only to prsent an image of the interconnections of the manifestations in the world outside the individual; thus to give to the individual organism, in a partial and reflected form, that feeling with other beings, or innate sympathy which it tends to lose as organization of life becomes more complex and characteristic. Knowledge or intellect, therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of feeling or will which is the underlying reality—the principle of all existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic . . . there is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimately than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowledge which can strictly be called immediate; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the immediate object."¹

Schopenhauer voiced the introverted principle, not with the psychological subtlety of the East, but with the differentiated philosophical medium of the West.

Schopenhauer's pessimism arose from his profound sense of the overwhelming power of the unconscious, omnipresent Will. The individual creature being only an illusory, partial manifestation of will-in-itself, his only hope is to become conscious of this power and through consciousness to create detachment. There is no way of escaping the power of Will. " Suicide affords no escape; what everyone in his inmost consciousness wills, that must he be; and what everyone is, that he wills." His vision of the boundless power of the unconscious is expressed in an analogy which is constantly found in dream-expression. " Just as a sailor sits in a boat trusting to his frail barque in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves; so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual man sits quietly, supported by and trusting to the principium individuationis."

Nietzsche was also deeply impressed by the awe-inspiring creative-destructive force of the unconscious. In his Birth of Tragedy he attributes the whole artistic creation of the Greeks to what he calls the " metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ' will ' " overwhelmed as they were by the titanic, terrifying powers of nature within and without. Nietzsche's use of the term " will " is surely derived from Schopenhauer, and " metaphysical," both in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, is synonymous, as Jung has pointed out, with " unconscious."

We must bear in mind, then, that when Freud and Jung applied the somewhat equivocal term " unconscious " to the deep psychology of human beings, there already existed in German thought the conceptions of a whole line of post-Kantian philosophers, all of whom were, to a greater or lesser extent, occupied with the philosophical problem of the basic, affective or energic determination of thought and conduct. We cannot hope to do justice to the significance of our modern psychotherapeutic conceptions if we omit to see that the soil which nurtured the ideas of Jung and Freud had long been cultivated by the boldest philosophical minds of Germany. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the insight we now possess into the dark places of the human soul, and particularly into the obscurities of schizophrenia—the disease in which the antagonism between intellect and the primal affects is the essential factor—has been contributed in the main from Germanic sources.

Without much fear of being contradicted by posterity, we could prophesy that the development of the energic view of mental processes, and the immense impetus given to psychotherapy through research into the nature of the unconscious, constitute an event of decisive significance in the history of medicine.

The nineteenth century, as we have seen, provided the scholastic-philosophical forerunners of our psychology. But it also produced the beginnings of experimental investigation into psychological processes. This new direction originated with Fechner (also a German), who, in his Psychophysik, written in 1860, first introduced the physical standpoint into the conception of psychical phenomena. This fruitful beginning was carried on by Wundt, a contemporary of Fechner's, who applied his extraordinary genius to elaborating methods of experimental research and thus gave to modern psychology its empirical direction. These methods and this direction were soon taken up by certain German psychiatrists and applied in the service of practical psychology. Kraepelin, Aschaffenburg and others of the Heidelberg school realized that practical tools were now available for obtaining more exact knowledge of psychical processes, and before long word-association tests were used as a more or less routine procedure for measuring the mental competence of asylum patients.

It fell to Jung, in his experimental work at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zürich, to combine the empirical methods originated by Wundt with the energic conception of the psychic process handed down from German philosophy. It is significant that, while Jung was feeling his way towards the dynamic psychological conception by the experimental route, Freud had reached practically the same conclusion in his clinical researches with hysterical patients. Impressed by the obvious clinical importance of sexuality in the ætiology of hysteria, Freud at first conceived the unconscious dynamis exclusively as libido sexualis; this view he subsequently modified in favour of other instinctive energies.

Jung’s Application of the Complex-Theory to Dementia Præcox

II

The psychological basis of dementia præcox was first demonstrated by Freud as long ago as 1896 in an analysis of a paranoid case, where he showed that the symptoms were determined according to the transformation mechanism of hysteria. This was followed up by Jung, who in 1903 made his first analysis of a case of dementia præcox, approaching the problem from the angle of the complex-theory of mental activity established in his experiments in Word-association. In his Psychology of Dementia Præcox Jung laid down a firm basis upon which future research could proceed. Although written more than thirty years ago, his work still stands as the most original and illuminating attempt in the field of schizophrenic psychology. Many subsequent writers have paid tribute to the outstanding value of his work, but few have attempted to go further along the lines which he indicated. This may be due, in large measure, to the fact that psychiatry, as a branch of physical medicine, cannot entirely forgo the anticipation of concrete anatomical evidence upon which to build its pathological conceptions.

The two basic conceptions which gave Jung a certain mastery over the hitherto unintelligible welter of pathological material were (a) the autonomous complex, and (b) the mechanism of psychological types. The fact that a more or less systematized mental organism could break away from the hierarchy of consciousness, insisting upon its own separate and independent life, had already become a familiar demonstration in the clinics of Charcot and Janet in Paris. But although the phenomena of somnambulism, double or multiple personalities, psychasthenic automatism and the various forms of hysterical dissociations revealed by hypnosis, had been explained in a variety of ways, it was Jung's concept of the autonomous complex which finally brought all these facts within the embrace of a fundamental psychological conception.

According to the views of the French school, dissociation was a weakness of consciousness, caused by the splitting off of one or a series of ideas, which, having cast away from the hierarchy of the conscious ego, began a more or less independent existence. According to Janet, dissociation was the result of l'abaissement du niveau mental which, through destroying the hierarchy of the mind, either favoured or effected the origin of automatisms. This view, although contributing a valuable clinical picture of the morbid state, did not provide an intelligible psychological conception. It afforded no insight into the factors which brought about the weakening of consciousness, or which so dangerously lowered the conscious level. A patient of Janet's said to him, "There are always two or three of my personalities who do not sleep. Nevertheless I have fewer personalities during sleep: there are some who sleep but little. These persons dream, but not the same dream. I feel that there are some who dream of different things."¹ Janet, therefore, was perfectly familiar with the surface clinical picture of dissociated subsidiary personalities; but what the French school lacked was a fundamental conception of psychic causation. Jung's dynamic conception was born of experimental evidence, pointing to the existence of emotionally charged complexes which, under the stress of repression, produced characteristic disturbances in the word-association tests. The combination of these facts taken from two independent fields of observation gave Jung the master-key he was seeking. A similar syncretistic inspiration, and one that was destined to affect the whole course of his scientific development, was Jung's realization that the mechanism of defence that surrounded and concealed the painful complex was identical with the mechanism of repression described by Freud in his clinical investigations of hysterical patients. Thus, Jung's conception of the autonomous complex became the syncretizing basis which united the classical conceptions of the French school with those of Freud, the great pioneer of psycho-analysis. It was fitting that Zürich should thus become the mediate function between Paris and Vienna.

When we observe the manifestations of the autonomous complex in a developed case of schizophrenia¹ we see the emergence of sudden impulses, autochthonous ideas, hallucinations, sudden deprivation of thought, imperative commands apparently emanating from an alien source, disturbances of attention, inspirations, irrational movements and actions; whereas in the word-association experiments only the negative aspect of the complex was in evidence. The reaction to the stimulus-word was found to be indefinitely prolonged, or the words given by the patient to certain stimulus-words had the character of evasion, superficiality, or mere similarity of sound. In order, therefore, to find the concealed painful complex, which was producing these disturbances of normal mental activity, Jung had to look, as it were, through the cracks which the experiment revealed. He selected those responses where the disturbances or irregularities were most marked, and, by means of careful questioning, or by exploring the associations leading back from the suspected response, he discovered that these led always to an emotionally accentuated complex of representations left by some painful experience in the patient's life. When he applied this same method to his schizophrenic patients, he was able to prove that the apparent farrago of delusional ideas and the meaningless conglomerations of words and automatic repetitions of the insane mind were symptoms of fragmentation in conjunction with abnormal activity of the morbid complex which no longer submitted to the co-ordinating control of consciousness. In order to refresh the reader's memory, I shall quote certain passages from Jung's Psychology of Dementia Præcox. The English translation being unfortunately out of print, it cannot be assumed that many readers are familiar with its content.

Discussing the characteristic cleavage between the ideational and the emotional or affective function, Jung writes:

" The striking incongruity between idea and affect which we can daily observe in dementia præcox is a more frequent symptom during the development of the disease than the emotional dementia. This incongruity between idea and emotional tone forced Stransky to accept two separate psychical factors, the Noöpsyche and the Thymopsyche (Ι'όος = mind, reason; θυ̑μός = soul, breath, life: Latin, anima). The former term comprises the intellectual, reasoning faculties; the latter the dynamic, purposive or affective aspect of the psyche."¹

Because of this incongruity, Stransky assumed a condition of ataxia or basic inco-ordination between the ideational and the emotional functions. Jung criticizes this idea as follows:

" Although, judging from clinical appearances, there are frequent incongruities, they are by no means limited exclusively to dementia praecox. In hysteria likewise, the incongruity is an everyday occurrence. One can see it in the fact of the so-called ' hysterical exaggerations ' whose counterpart is the well-known belle indifférence of hysterics. We also find violent excitements over nothing, at times ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Conclusion
• Index