Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan

On the Blazing Sublime

Ann Casement, Phil Goss, Dany Nobus, Ann Casement, Phil Goss, Dany Nobus

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000191462
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Psychology
• Thema: Physiological Psychology

This groundbreaking book was seeded by the first-ever joint Jung–Lacan conference on the notion of the sublime held at Cambridge, England, against the backdrop of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. It provides a fascinating range of in-depth psychological perspectives on aspects of creativity and destruction inherent in the monstrous, awe-inspiring sublime.

The chapters include some of the outcrop of academic and clinical papers given at this conference, with the addition of new contributions that explore similarities and differences between Jungian and Lacanian thinking on key topics such as language and linguistics, literature, religion, self and subject, science, mathematics and philosophy.

The overall objective of this vitalizing volume is the development and dissemination of new ideas that will be of interest to practising psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics in the field, as well as to all those who are captivated by the still-revolutionary thinking of Jung and Lacan.

PART I
THEORY

ONE
Simply sublime? Lacan, Jung and The Red Book

Paul Bishop

The starting point of this chapter is the famous question, Wie hast du es mit der Religion, posed by Gretchen in Part One of Goethe’s Faust.¹ Here, in the scene in Martha’s garden, we find the following exchange:

MARGARETA: Promise me, Heinrich.

FAUST: Whatever I can!

MARGARETA: Then tell me, how is’t with thy religion, pray?

Thou art a good and kindly man,

And yet, I think, small heed thereto doth pay.

(Goethe, 1908, p. 164)

Gretchen’s question is entirely pertinent, since Faust is a man who is in league with the devil! In this respect, Gretchen’s question pushes against the theological framework of Goethe’s entire text (reflected in the “Prologue in Heaven” of Part One and in the famous concluding scene, “Amid Mountain Gorges”, at the end of Part Two). But Gretchen’s question is also, it seems to me, a good question to put to Lacan and to Jung.

After all, an important dimension of psychoanalysis is its reactivation and revival of ancient traditions and doctrines, especially the notion of divinity. There already exists a body of scholarship in this field of enquiry: for instance, on Freud and Empedocles (Tourney, 1956) or on Jung and Heraclitus (Bodlander, 1990), and in his recent work Peter Kingsley has placed fresh emphasis on the significance for Jung of both Heraclitus and Empedocles (Kingsley, 2018, pp. 197–198, 608–610, 602–603). The writings of Jung positively teem with references to antiquity; Psychological Types, for instance, is rich in references to the problem of types in history of classical and medieval thought, including the figures of Tertullian and Origen, theological disputes of the ancient Church, the problem of transubstantiation, the Scholastic debate between nominalism and realism, and the Communion controversy between Luther and Zwingli.

For his part, Lacan also moves at ease across various epochs of intellectual history, among which his references to Plato (especially the Symposium) for a definition of desire as lack, are especially important. When Socrates says in the Symposium (200a), “Everything longs for what it lacks, and … nothing longs for what it doesn’t lack” (Plato, 1989, p. 552), we find stated with eminent clarity the central thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Then again, in his seminar of 1960–1961 on the transference, Lacan explained the objet petit a in terms of the agalma from the Symposium. In Greek, an agalma is an ornament, offering or gift left in a temple for the gods; for Lacan, it is above all “a precious object, a jewel, something which is inside” (cf. Lacan, 1991a, p. 167). So when, in the Symposium (216e-217a), Alcibiades describes how he had once seen “the little images … so golden, so beautiful, and so utterly amazing” inside Socrates, famed for his ugliness (Plato, 1989, p. 568), Lacan sees in this something fundamental about the dynamics of desire. As Lionel Bailly explains, desire’s “ultimate but unattainable object is the agalma within Socrates, its subject is the castrated (symbolically – wanting, drunken, and demanding) Alcibiades, who uses as a lure for a secondary object of desire (Agathon) his own desire or neediness, which he knows makes him desirable” (Bailly, 2009, p. 131).

So this chapter takes as its working assumption the belief that seeing Lacan and Jung in an intellectual-historical light can elucidate their common features as well as their differences and help establish a framework for approaching both thinkers in a way that can open up a dialogue that is at once constructive and critical. This is possible because the common ground between Lacan and Jung is, I shall argue, larger than is often assumed to be the case, as a consideration of three topics – language, desire and the quaternity – indicates. Yet as I shall also suggest, there are significant differences between Jung and Lacan that emerge in their respective relation to religion – and to the sublime.

Affinities: language

For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language. As he puts it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964), “[I]f psycho-analysis is to be constituted as the science of the unconscious, one must set out from the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan, 1978, p. 203; cf. pp. 20–23). In fact, his entire account of psychosexual development is predicated on the subject’s entrance into the realm of the visual (the imaginary) and language (the symbolic). And Lacan is interested not just in the structure of language, but in the structures within which we use language: for the use of language always implies a relationship of one kind or another to an interlocutor.

Consequently, for Lacan, language involves both a symbolic and an imaginary dimension. In his famous diagram he introduced in 1955 in his Seminar, known as “schema L”, the axis A-S (from Other to S/Es, or language in its symbolic dimension) has a corresponding axis, from a’ to a (from ego to other, or an imaginary axis). On this account, “the subject is separated from the Others, the true ones, by the wall of language”, and hence it is, for Lacan, a mistake to see language as something fundamentally communicative or referential: on his account, “language is as much there to found us in the Other as to drastically prevent us from understanding him” (Lacan, 1991b, p. 244).

The problem of language is one for Jung as well. At first glance, Jung approaches the problem from a different angle – from the problem of meaning. As he puts it in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934; 1954), “[F]rom whatever side we approach this question” – i.e. the question of meaning (Sinn) – “everywhere we find ourselves confronted with the history of language, with images and motifs that lead straight back to the primitive wonder-world” (Jung, 1968a, para. 67). This is so, Jung argues, because “the forms we use for assigning meaning are historical categories that reach back into the mists of time”, and hence “interpretations make use of certain linguistic matrices that are themselves derived from primordial images” (Jung, 1968a, para. 67). Jung insists on the historical context of language, which is a dimension absent from Lacan’s structuralist (and hence synchronic) approach to language. Yet for all his talk of “the mists of time”, Jung is also appealing to a timeless (or synchronic) dimension by describing the “images” from which “linguistic matrices” derive as “primordial”.

Both Lacan and Jung were aware of the importance of analogy. For Lacan, the unconscious is not a language; it is not structured as a language; it is structured like a language, and in this respect, we might note Jung’s interest, in Symbols and Transformations of the Libido (1911/1912), in the importance of analogy in general and, in particular, the term gleichwie (i.e. “like”). As he puts it, citing the German philologist and philologist Hermann (or Heymann) Steinthal (1823–1899) as his authority, “[A]n absolutely overweening importance must be granted to the little phrase “Gleich wie” (even as) in the history of the development of thought” (Jung, 1991, para. 236).² The reason for this, as Jung adds, is that his own central thesis will be that “the carryover of the libido to a phantastic correlate has led primitive man to a number of the most important discoveries” (Jung, 1991, para. 236).

This is why Jung – in this respect, similar to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) – is interested in the way linguistic connections can alert us to the hidden dimensions of concepts or fantasies. In The Psychology of the Unconscious, he suggests that “Prometheus, the fire-bringer, may be a brother of the Hindu Pramantha, that is to say, of the masculine fire-rubbing piece of wood” (Jung, 1991, para. 241). After tracing a complicated etymological path, Jung concludes that “the path from Pramantha to Prometheus passes not through the word, but through the idea” (Jung, 1991, para. 241). So here lies an important difference between Lacan and Jung: over and above language, Jung asserts the dimension of the idea. And Jung is very much aware of the etymological implications of his own terminology: for instance, he notes in relation to the question as to whether God is archetype that the word “type” is derived from typos = “blow”, “imprint’; concluding that “an archetype presupposes an imprinter” (Jung, 1968b, para. 15).

Affinities: desire

Desire is clearly a master category for Lacan, and as a concept he distinguishes it from need or biological instinct and from demand, made in relation to the Other. (Seen in this way, Lacan follows the etymology of the word “desire” as meaning “to wish for, long for, or to regret something that is absent’). As well as being indebted to Plato, Lacan derives his specific concept of desire from Spinoza, for whom “desire [cupiditas] is the essence itself of man” (Ethics, Part III, “Definitions of the Affects”, def. 1; Spinoza, 1928, p. 266). (On Lacan’s fascination with Spinoza, see Homer, 2005, pp. 3–4, 72.) And Lacan refines it via Hegel, who explores how desire involves a relation to the Other, via Alexandre Kojève, who “existentializes” Hegel’s thinking. (For a fuller discussion, see the entry on “desire” in Evans, 1996, pp. 35–39; as well as Lacan, 2002.)

In Jung’s approach, we find a different understanding of desire, one that perhaps the alternative etymology of the word as meaning “to await what the stars will being” (from de + sidere, “from the stars’). For Jung, desire is linked to notion of libido; which, in turn, in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (i.e. The Psychology of the Unconscious) is intriguingly linked to idea of will: “Originally taken from the sexual sphere, this word [i.e. libido] has become the most frequent technical expression of psychoanalysis, for the simple reason that its significance is wide enough to cover all the unknown and countless manifestations of the Will in the sense of Schopenhauer” (Jung, 1991, para. 212). Elsewhere, Jung remarks that the conception of a continuous life impulse or the will-to-live “coincides with the idea of the Will in Schopenhauer, for we can conceive the Will objectively, only as a manifestation of an internal desire” (Jung, 1991, para. 223). (Seen in this light, Schopenhauer might also be seen as a highly Lacanian figure, emphasizing the constitutive function of desire yet recognizing the impossibility of satisfying it.)

And in this same chapter Jung goes on to adopt “the exact classical significance” of the word libido as it is used, “in a very wide sense”, in such authors as Cicero, Sallust and St Augustine. (To be precise: Jung refers to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Book 4, Chapter 6 (with reference to Pythagoras, Plato and the Stoics, especially Zeno), where a distinction is made between delight with a present and with a future good; to Sallust’s observation that “rage is part of a desire”, a definition developed in The War with Catiline, Chapter 7, and his Letter to Caesar, Chapter 13 [for further discussion of this aspect of desire, see Harris, 2001, esp. 207] and St Augustine’s The City of God, Book 14, Chapter 15 [Jung, 1991, paras. 212–217].)

Yet Jung does not simply rely on classical texts: once again, following the hints provided by language, he notes that “this general classical application of the conception” is confirmed by “the corresponding etymological context of the word”, namely, libido or lubido (with libet, or the older lubet) = “it pleases me”, and libens or lubens = “gladly, willingly” (Jung, 1991, para. 218). Here Jung might also be thinking of Jakob Böhme’s use of the term “lubet” in the initial chapters of his Mysterium Magnum to mean pleasing or pleasurable delight. (For further discussion, see Cardew, 2012, p. 131.)

In a chapter of The Psychology of the Unconscious entitled “The Conception and the Genetic Theory of Libido”, Jung notes, with reference to Freud’s Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory (1905), how libido is conceived here “in the original sense of sexual impulse, sexual need” (Jung, 1991, para. 219). Does this conception interpret libido as “everything sexual’? Jung thinks not, remarking that “the hypothetical idea at the basis is the symbol of the “Triebbündel” [bundle of impulses], wherein the sexual impulse figures as a partial impulse of the whole system, and its encroachment into the other realms of impulse is a fact of experience” (Jung, 1991, para. 219). As Jung goes on to write, however, “since the appearance of the Three Contribut...