Ann Casement, Post-Jungians Today – Introduction
Introduction -Ann Casement
Post-Jungians Today not only reflects the pluralism and diversity of postmodern
analytical psychology but also attempts to explore the place of Jungian concepts
in the history of ideas. It brings together thirteen ‘post-Jungians’ from very
different social, cultural and professional backgrounds, each of whom engages
the reader in a dialogue about Jungian psychology as it is practised in a
‘postmodern’ world.
The term ‘post-Jungian’ is used here not simply to refer to those who have
come after Jung, but to differentiate ‘post-Jungians’ from ‘Jungians’. Post-
Jungians are committed to developing further the original insights of Jung
himself and include those who have moved away from a total emphasis on psychic
reality to an approach that also takes into account the reality of the outer world.
(Andrew Samuels explores these differences in a provocative chapter which
opens the book.)
The title of the book is also deliberately chosen to link the Jungian enterprise
to ‘postmodernism’.
The term stands for both a temporal and an intellectual
relationship to a ‘modernism’ regarded as having its roots in the Renaissance and
its initial flowering during the Enlightment. ‘Modernism’ was seeking ways to
overcome a past steeped in superstition and ignorance and held out the hope of a
promised land. Reason and logic were judged to be the keys to this utopian
future. Postmodernism is sceptical of these claims for mankind’s salvation,
resting as they do on beliefs in an objective world underwritten by
metanarratives such as those of Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Marx.
Uncertainty,
pluralism, debate, flexibility and changeability are central to postmodern
thinking.
The post-Jungian, postmodern world of analytical psychology today is located
in thirty different countries.
(There are currently over 2,220 members of the
International Association of Analytical Psychology, practising in Argentina,
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, The
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, the UK, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.)
It is located in
the academy as well as in clinical practice. An explosion of clinical and cultural
interest in Jungian ideas has resulted in university appointments in analytical
psychology being made in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Japan, South
Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. This usually
involves sharing a department with psychoanalytic studies and the politics
between the two disciplines can cause difficulties. In Germany, the UK and the
USA, there has been a considerable degree of cross-fertilization between
analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, but it has to be said that the initiative
in this regard has always come from the analytical psychologists.
The Jungian academic at La Trobe University in Melbourne, David Tacey,
who is a contributor to this book, initiated an international conversation between
academics in a recent issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology (Vol. 42,
No. 2, April 1997). Tacey concentrated his initial article on examining the
fanatical loyalty to Jung that he finds amongst undergraduate students and
opposed this to the fanatical resistance to teaching Jung on the part of the faculty
at his academic establishment.
Three academics in analytical psychology responded to Tacey and, in
particular, took up the challenge of trying to undermine resistance to teaching
Jung in the academy. Renos Papadopoulos (UK and previously of South Africa)
pointed to Jung as a postmodern epistemologist; Roger Brooke (USA and, also,
previously of South Africa) discussed presenting Jung as a phenomenologist; and
Ann Ulanov (USA) proposed that Jung’s perspective be seen as ‘only one view’
in a multitude of psychodynamic theoretical viewpoints.
The overall message was
that Jungian studies have to emerge from a ghetto mentality in order to survive.
Tacey’s impassioned response is to say that to try to make Jung acceptable to
contemporary intellectual taste is to miss the point that it is the religious attitude
that Jung takes which sticks in the throat of the secular academy.
Both academic
resistance and student devotion to Jung must be seen essentially as a religious
problem.
One way forward would be to relate the post-Jungian discourse to the
postmodern interest in the ‘Other’ which carries the possibility of a mutually
fulfilling spiritual exploration.
Another academic initiative to be applauded is the generous donation on the
part of the International Association for Analytical Psychology to underwrite a
two-year ‘Course in Basic Principles of Analytical Psychology’ for the East
European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg.
This was the original idea
of two UK analysts, Jan Wiener and Catherine Crowther, and will entail a dozen
senior UK analytical psychologists spending a weekend each teaching on
Jungian topics in Russia.
The three UK contributors to this book are amongst
those who will be embarking on this enterprise in 1998, which will also involve
follow-ups, continuity and reciprocal visiting rather than just ‘experts’ flying in
to post-perestroika Russia to deliver lectures before flying out again.
As there are diversities within the analytical psychology world itself it would
be useful to orientate the reader to the background of each of the book’s
contributors. Beebe, Kast, Kawai and Zoja have clearly emerged from a classical
Jungian tradition but personal and cultural differences between them have lent
each a unique style of working and writing.
Their chapters provide fascinating
insights into grounding the classical approach in an American (Beebe), European
(Kast and Zoja), and Japanese (Kawai) setting. Casement is a broadly based
Jungian and an anthropologist, which is reflected in the sociocultural motifs that
run through much of her work.
The work of Gambini and of Kalsched shares a mythopoetic archetypal
quality. Kalsched’s original combination of archetypal and psychoanalytical
theory relates back to the dialogue that was happening between Freud and Jung
in relation to the psyche’s mysteries before their split in 1913. Gambini, on the
other hand, is a soulful writer who demonstrates how anthropology combined
with analytical psychology can be used to understand Third World problems
from an archetypal perspective.
Samuels, Sidoli and Young-Eisendrath have emerged from what has been
called by Samuels (1985) a developmental background in which psychoanalysis
played a central role. Samuels, for his part, has become increasingly pluralistic
over the years, while Sidoli’s chapter presents a concise and authoritative
exegesis of the work of the English analyst Michael Fordham. Young-Eisendrath
has incorporated many other disciplines into her approach and, along with
another of the contributors, Papadopoulos, gives an insight into postmodern
Jungian identity, opening a door upon what it is to be a Jungian analyst in
today’s world.
Papadopoulos comes from a varied background starting as a
psychoanalyst and behavioural therapist before finally becoming a Jungian
analyst and systemic family therapist.
Springer’s approach exemplifies the Berlin tradition that emerged after the
Second World War and resulted in neo-Freudian psychoanalysts and analytical
psychologists interacting and working together under the same roof. Lastly,
Tacey is doing inspiring work as an academic in the field of analytical
psychology.
Part I of the book incorporates two ‘think pieces’ each quite different from the
other.
The first, Andrew Samuels’ provocatively titled ‘Will the post-Jungians
survive?’, sets out initially to define the difference between ‘Jungians’ (those
who seek to retain a personal affiliation to Jung and his ‘teachings’) and ‘post-
Jungians’ (those who wish to be other than only Jungian). As the term ‘post-
Jungian’ was coined by him, Samuels is in the best position to define it and he
does so as follows: ‘a connection to and at the same time a critical distance from
Jung’.
The alarmist tone of his chapter is a genuine expression of what he perceives
to be a necessary response to the criticisms aimed at analytical psychologists in
general, namely that they are non-clinical, have sexual relationships with their
patients and are the cultist followers of a leader with Nazi sympathies and
pretensions to being a demi-god.
However, the picture is by no means totally negative and Samuels points to a
certain acceptance of post-Jungians in clinical, cultural and academic circles.
An
important reason for this is the changing view of the nature of knowledge in the
postmodern world.
Samuels also reiterates the point he made in Jung and the
Post-Jungians (1985) that Jung might be seen as the pioneer in numerous
advances in psychoanalysis since the Second World War. His tripartite
classification of the Jungian movement in that book is now in general usage.
The
three schools cited are the classical school, consciously working in Jung’s
tradition; the developmental school, emphasizing the importance of infancy in
the evolution of the adult personality and also the clinical importance of a
transference-countertransference-based approach to analytic work; and the
archetypal school which concentrates on the exploration of images in therapy.
In Chapter 1, Samuels modifies his classification. He considers the archetypal
school to have ceased to exist and adds two new schools to those of the classical
and developmental models.
The first is what he terms the ‘Fundamentalists’, who
are devoted to following ‘a’ or ‘the’ Jungian way. Like all fundamentalists they
have iconicized their ‘leader’, conferring on him and his sayings divine status,
and they tend to be cruel and stigmatizing in their misuse of Jungian concepts in
an unproductive and oracular way.
For instance, in the way that typology is
travestied by this particular view, ‘extroverts’ and ‘intellectuals’ are beyond the
pale, although Jung himself was a ‘thinking’ type.
The polar opposite to the fundamentalists is a further school of post-Jungians
who advocate a merger with psychoanalysis (hence ‘psychoanalytic school’),
often because of their disaffection with and denigration of their personal
experience in the classical or developmental schools.
This is frequently
accompanied by an idealization of psychoanalysis as being clinically—some
even claim scientifically—superior to analytical psychology.
Samuels attributes this split in the Jungian movement to the fact that Jung has
not been properly mourned and as a result the movement is in a depression.
Mourning Jung would mean getting beyond an idealization-denigration split in
relation to him.
Samuels rounds off his consciously polemical piece with a ten-point Jungian
charter, which includes the plea that Jungians should develop a relationship to
outer-world issues such as politics and social and multicultural problems in
recognizing that the spiritual and social are two sides of the same coin.
Further, post-Jungians need to join in the celebration of the postmodern
approach to a knowledge base which involves a shift away from metanarratives,
so that they can join in the cultural movement that is happening at universities
and in society generally.
A really vital contribution that Jungian psychology can
make is its perception of the reality of evil.
Another is the clinical excellence of
post-Jungians in combining rigorous use of boundaries and transferencecountertransference
with vision and a search for meaning.
The charter ends with
a plea for lack of defensiveness and openness in the face of criticism from
academe, the media, and so on.
Luigi Zoja’s chapter, ‘Analysis and tragedy’, follows on from his book
Growth and Guilt (1995), in researching tragedy for the roots of problems
presented in analysis.
He links the specialized form of narrative that happens in
analysis to that of tragic narrative in saying: ‘The tale and its telling are the one
true religion to which all of its personages, without exception, pay obeisance.’
Tragedy is not a stable form such as poetry and the novel but flourishes in some
civilizations at the height of their splendour: Ancient Greece, Elizabethan
England, German Romanticism and the Christian West.
Discontent has
accompanied the latter since its inception and Zoja’s explanation is that it has
committed treason against its cultural roots in Greek myth, mystery and tragedy
and turned instead towards philosophy and rationalism. Added to this,
Christianity betrayed its religious roots in adopting the new faith so that:
‘Treason has thus remained in the genes of the Christian West, and in its
tormented mind, no less than in its blood.’
Christian monotheism, biased as it is in favour of unilateral goodness, lacks
the profundity of Hebraic monotheism and this gives rise to the twin persecutors
of envy and guilt. Christian guilt is different to the inevitability of guilt in the
Ancient Greek psyche which was a question of destiny and not of individual
responsibility. Instead, Christian guilt gives rise to self-torture and psychological
guilt.
This lack of tolerance of opposites in both the Christian and Cartesian
approaches is compensated in Jung’s perception of an opposition between the
two peoples, Christians and Jews. Paradoxically this view in its turn appears as
one of his major errors.
Zoja links the way in which the tragic spirit views human beings as an
inseparable mixture of good and evil that finds expression in ambivalence which
is inherent in psychic functioning. It was in response to this inner need that analysis
came into being and it is the modern age’s means of providing a cure for
unilateral modes of expression.
Tragedy teaches that the human being is only a
tiny instrument in the hands of destiny, just as analysis teaches that the human
ego is in the same position with regard to unconscious forces. In this way,
analysis presents itself as one of the few antidotes to modern hybris, which Zoja
describes as the search for ever greater power to do.
The analytic approach
points instead to the need to be, in the course of which intentions but not
emotions are suspended on the part of both patient and analyst, which can result
in a kind of pure or tragic emotion.
Part II of the book is devoted to Jung’s central concept of individuation or
selfrealization with the two chapters in this section posing very different models
of this process. John Beebe’s chapter Toward a Jungian analysis of character’,
holds as its central thesis that the development of integrity which an analysis can
facilitate is enough to
help contain the continuing limitations of character that
belong to the human condition.
He first sets out to define ‘character’ as the
notion of good or bad character and this is evaluated in terms of its moral
impact. Beebe has explored ‘moral process’ in his 1992 book Integrity in Depth,
and his chapter is part of his continuing work in this area. Moral philosophy,
which was dealt a near-death blow after the twin horrors of the Holocaust and
Hiroshima, is being revived in recent times as an interdisciplinary enterprise but
has so far received little attention from analytical psychologists.
He ponders the
relationship that this may have to the fact that the Jungian approach is held to be
soft on character issues and that its limitations are nowhere more evident than in
dealing with patients with character defects. For such patients: ‘the narcissistic,
loving, Jungian brand of empathy is judged to be very poor medicine indeed.’
One of the hazards about Jungian analysis is that the moral balance is biased
towards the self rather than to others. In this way, an analyst’s empathy may
often be more directed to the patient’s self and intrapsychic others than to the
outer world of spouses, parents, colleagues, and so on.
However, the most fundamental danger in working with character disorder in
the Jungian approach is the idea of individuation.
The central theme of alchemy
linked to the individuation process in Jung’s work went beyond the idea of
transformation of character in seeking to eliminate the problem of character
altogether.
In any case, character is a given and not susceptible to change and
this can lead to its being left out of the analytic work altogether. ‘However, what
can individuate out of a person’s character is integrity.’
Casement’s chapter in this section is centred on an exploration of the dark side
of the self. From this vantage point, she draws attention to the affinity between
Kierkegaard and Jung as deeply religious philosophical thinkers and links the
former’s ‘qualitative leap of faith’ to Jung’s process of individuation.
The emphasis in this chapter is on existential anxiety as the precursor of new
life which Casement links to the archetypal trickster father.
All fathers have
ambivalent feelings for their offspring and it is the unconscious tricksterish side
that is so often at work in propelling the child into life.
She cites both Beebe’s
interpretation of the biblical story of Joseph and the coat of many colours and
Kierkegaard’s of Yahweh and Adam as examples of the subversive influence of
the father.
Both of these are linked to the problematic relationship that
Kierkegaard and Jung had to their own fathers. The Freud/Jung rupture is also
revisited from this perspective.
The chapter ends with two vignettes (one
personal) which illustrate how the work of individuation entails humanizing the
archetypal aspect of the trickster father.
Part III is devoted to clinical issues and incorporates two chapters.
The first,
‘Archetypal affect, anxiety and defence in patients who have suffered early
trauma’, is by Donald E. Kalsched. He has pioneered a New York approach to
synthesizing archetypal and object relations theory. In his introduction, Kalsched
links archetypal anxiety with the ‘unspeakable horror’ of early trauma and the
lasting anxiety it evokes in the personality, as described by various
psychoanalytic theorists such as Winnicott’s ‘primitive agonies’.
This threatens
the core self with disintegration and leads to the creation of a false life which is
trying to defend against a breakdown that has already been experienced but
cannot be remembered.
In his attempt to reconcile archetypal theory with that of object relations and
self-psychology, Kalsched casts a Jungian perspective on what psychoanalysis
terms primitive defences. As he movingly expresses it, the archetypal meaning
of these is to act as life-savers for a person whose heart has been broken by
trauma.
Kalsched is in agreement with Jung’s assertion that dreams often portray
traumatic anxiety and he illustrates this with nightmares from certain patients.
Primitive anxiety is personified in these dreams in the form of daimonic images
and motifs and these give insight into the ‘unthinkable’ affects of infancy where
the environment was incapable of ‘holding’ the infant.
These dreams often
involve a confrontation between a dyad with one side personifying a tyrannical
personality threatening the more vunerable, innocent one.
This latter Kalsched
sees as the personification of Winnicott’s ‘true self’. The struggle may be centred
around issues of embodiment as patients in the grip of primitive anxiety often
somatize their terror and may, for instance, experience difficulty in breathing.
The dream tormentor could be pointing to an actual abuser from the patient’s
past but Kalsched also images this persecutory figure as the dark side of the
ambivalent godhead or self which has at its disposal all of the archetypal
aggression that in other circumstances would have been directed to adaptation to
the environment.
In primitive anxiety, this aggression is directed against the self
and the individual’s immune system turns persecutory against any sign of new
life instead of acting as a helpful defence against attack.
Kalsched’s chapter
points to the creative use of play in the transference as a way of reconnecting
such an individual to a transitional space that could not happen in infancy.
Mara Sidoli’s chapter is the second clinical piece in Part III and is called
‘Archetypal patterns, mental representations, and replicative processes in
infancy’.
This sets out to explore the connection between archetypes as
organizers of experience, Michael Fordham’s developmental model, and mental
representation described by infant researchers such as Daniel Stern.
Sidoli starts with a brief summary of Jungian metapsychology and she makes
it clear that she is using the term ‘self’ in the same way that Fordham uses
‘primal self’.
Both represent in potentia the totality of psyche and soma of the
organism.
This ‘primal self’ is intensely active in infancy when it is articulated
through the deintegration-reintegration processes.
Fordham adapted this usage of
the term ‘self’ from Jung’s concept of the ‘Self’ which also includes something of
the divine hence the use of the capitalized ‘S’.
Jung saw archetypal activity, that
is, the underlying organizing principle of experience, as located within the Self.
Sidoli discusses the bipolar functioning of the archetype in relation to the
infant and says that the instinctual end is readily available at this stage, while the
spiritual pole is there potentially but has yet to become available through the
development of the capacity for symbolization.
Replication is important in the
emotional life of the infant in the way that it continuously experiences mother/
breast as being present or absent.
Within this matrix the baby can begin to
acquire a sense of time and space and to develop emotionally.
Where negative
replication predominates then only negative aspects of the mother archetype
become constellated leading to dysfunctional adaption on the part of the infant
Part IV has two chapters, based on fairy tales, by Verena Kast and Hayao Kawai.
Both of these analysts work in the classical style contained in the
transferencecountertransference and it is fascinating to see this applied in the
work of individuals from such diverse cultural backgrounds as Switzerland and
Japan.
Kast’s chapter, ‘Can you change your fate? The clinical use of a specific fairy
tale as the turning point in analysis’, describes how she was drawn to the fantasy
world of fairy stories in childhood and how they still play an important part in her
work.
She particularly values the way in which they speak in symbols and
images and she defines symbols as a mix of experiences, psychic contents and
emotions that cannot be represented in any other form.
Each fairy tale has an
archetypal motif which can shed light on individual problems and conflicts and,
like Zoja above, Kast points to the narrative process as affording the possibility
of a creative solution to conflict.
Kast also draws interesting parallels between fairy-tale motifs and
transferencecountertransference reactions and illustrates this with an in-depth
account of her analysis of a 37-year-old professional woman.
The chapter winds
down with her description of the fairy tale as a transitional object and of all
stories as a transitional space acting as a reservoir of collective creativity through
time and space.
Kawai, in his chapter, ‘Splitting: resolved or reserved?’, is uniquely placed to
address this subject as a Japanese who has adopted many aspects of Western
culture.
He extrapolates the growing phenomenon of splitting and multiple
personality disorder (MPD) from this kind of cultural identity problem which is
greatly on the increase in the postmodern age.
He warns against treating MPD by
trying to integrate the different personalities as this can lead to renewed splitting
on the part of the patient.
As a result, he is against constellating the hero
archetype in order to subjugate all of the other parts of the personality and he
looks to fairy tales to provide material for alternatives to the modern concept of
the ego.
The psychological mechanism of splitting leads to experiencing life as a half
person and Kawai describes the motif of half persons in fairy stories from Japan
and Italy. In explicating the latter he touches on similar ground to Casement with
his idea of an individual being led into temptation through the voice of
prohibition by a supraordinate power.
He concludes that the world is full of half
people, that is, people living with a split consciousness, and goes on to say that
splitting not only brings about crises but can also help in negotiating them. In the
therapeutic setting he warns that if the therapist seeks to resolve the split he may
set up a split between himself and the patient with the two becoming polarized as
the good therapist/bad patient. Kawai suggests instead that it is more helpful for
the therapist to reserve or act as a container of the split. This can eventually lead
to its transformation in the process of self-realization.
P
art V has two chapters devoted to the theme of ethnicity, the first by Roberto
Gambini from Brazil and the second by Renos Papadopoulos from the United
Kingdom. Gambini’s ‘The Challenge of Backwardness’ is a profoundly moving
but also disturbing chapter on the traumatic history of a country belonging to
what is called the Third World. He uses the twin lenses of Jungian psychology
and the social sciences to analyse the imbalance in his country’s psyche.
Gambini’s chapter encapsulates so much that gives the Jungian approach its
depth and meaning, including the archetypal, the alchemical and the astrological.
He turns to the latter in Jung’s Aion to point to the convergence of the
Renaissance and the Discovery (Invasion) of Brazil by the Portuguese in the year
1500.
The whole ‘discovery’ of the New World represents an archetypal
encounter of two contrasting parts of mankind which culminated in the climax of
its achievement for one culture and the loss of the ancestral soul for the other.
The alchemical synthesis that could have happened between European and
Amerindian ways of being was replaced instead by the domination of one
polarity over the other.
Brazil has no myth of origin and the myths that belong to
the indigenous people, to do with incest, hunger, danger, and meaning in life,
have been completely subjugated to the dominant European ethos. It is now for
the analysts to do the soul work of rehabilitating the mythology of their native
land.
This is part of the individuating process where the quest is for the Other
and, in the case of Brazil, the Other is the Indian—literally and symbolically.
There is reference to Lévi-Strauss’s work with Amerindian myths and a plea
to restore the repressed and denied Indian part of the Brazilian psyche to
consciousness.
In this way, the ancestral soul/anima may be revived and from the
rich genetic pool or prima materia that makes up Brazil’s population the
alchemical quintessence may be extracted.
Renos Papadopoulos’ chapter, ‘Jungian perspectives in new contexts’, extends
the application of analytical psychology to work outside the consulting room and
mainly to his work with Bosnian ex-camp prisoners and other victims of
violence.
He found that Jung’s flexibility in understanding human suffering as
not necessarily a pathological category as well as Jung’s awareness of the fact
that our psychotherapeutic approaches are essentially Eurocentric could provide
a most suitable framework for this work.
Papadopoulos seems to have been able to apply creatively most elements of
analytical work (e.g. focus on the unconscious communications and the symbolic
meaning of the material, optimal therapeutic distance and stability of setting,
transference-countertransference considerations, acknowledgement and
containment of destructiveness) to his work in these contexts.
He found that
Jungian ideas such as archetypal possession and polarization, confrontation with
the shadow and the concept of evil (not as an abstraction) were most useful in
working with such victims.
Above all, it is important for Papadopoulos to
delineate as well as interrelate the psychological and political discourses which
underlie these painful and complex situations, to avoid the violence of the one
discourse over the other.
One tragic consequence of such violation is what he
calls ‘psychologization of evil’ which occurs when mental health professionals
attempt to explain away atrocities by using clever psychosocial theorizing
Two important points that emerge from Papadopoulos’ chapter are that in
applying the Jungian approach outside the consulting room there is a way to
move beyond traditional one-to-one formal therapeutic practice whilst retaining
the basic principles of analytical work.
T
he other point he makes provocatively is
that it could be more profitable for Jungians to let go of the ‘Freud-Jung saga’,
which by and large has been the source of sterile bitterness and bigotry, and to
find more appropriate comparative contexts with which they could grow in
parallel. He mentions how the systemic approach, especially as it is applied to
family therapy, could provide Jungians with such an alternative to Freud.
Part VI is about gender and comprises two chapters, Anne Springer’s
‘Reflections on female homosexuality’, and Polly Young-Eisendrath’s
‘Contrasexuality and the dialectic of desire’.
S
pringer looks at the particular issues that arise in the
transferencecountertransference when working with lesbian patients. One is that
female Jungian analysts are often seen as more tolerant of homosexuality than
their Freudian counterparts.
Springer spells out the accumulated fantasies around
this assumption, including the central one about Jungians being less preoccupied
with the ‘primacy of the phallus’.
This kind of idealization can result in a split
between a positive mother-daughter relationship versus a fantasized negative
father-son one ‘out there’.
However, Jung’s depiction of female homosexuality was brief and only
negative, seeing it as the result of a disturbed relationship to the mother or as an
expression of animus obsession.
Describing a negative mother-daughter
relationship which led to the latter’s forming a homosexual transference on to a
female teacher, Jung writes: ‘If tender feelings are thrown out of the door, then
sex in violent form comes in through the window.’
Springer’s own approach is to critique traditional Jungian concepts of
masculine/ feminine in the light of the interdisciplinary discussion about the
concept of gender identity that has developed since the mid-1960s.
The current
state of that discussion may be summarized by looking at four factors which
interact with each other: core gender identity; gender role identity; sexual
identity; and sexual object choice.
The legitimate objective of analysis can be to
help a female analysand to lead a successful life as a homosexual by working on
disturbances in any or all four of these areas.
Further, Springer states that it is especially important with female homosexual
patients to work in the transference through the aggressive-sadistic fantasies that
are directed on to their own body.
In confronting this kind of negative
transference, the analyst can enable a lesbian woman to become emancipated
from her own sado-masochistic impulses.
Polly Young-Eisendrath’s chapter begins by relating Lacan’s term ‘alterity’ to
the Jungian concept of the archetype of the Other (capitalized to distinguish this
use of the term from the interpersonal other).
This sense of otherness precedes
the notion of sexual otherness.
It is the consequences of sex differences that are
addressed in this chapter—primarily concentrating on heterosexual desire but
also touching on homosexual desire.
Young-Eisendrath makes the telling point that although her approach is
broadly based—Jungian, object relations, neo-Piagetian, feminism, Buddhism,
gender studies and clinical work are her sources of reference—there still remains
for her a mystery about Otherness.
She also urges further methodological
research within the analytic field and increased interaction with other human
sciences such as psychology and anthropology.
Jung’s theory of opposites and, in particular, his description of anima/animus
as biological consequences of the archetypal Feminine/Masculine or nature/
culture has led to difficulties related to sexual stereotyping based on social
prejudices.
Young-Eisendrath has moved away from this way of thinking to a
nonessentialist contrasexual approach in the clinical domain. She prefers not to
apply preconceived categories of female/male to contrasexuality but to discover
instead the meaning that individuals themselves bring to psychotherapy.
She points to the deadening impact of chronic envy on intimacy and sexual
desire between a couple in her clinical account of just such a dead marriage.
In
this way, she illustrates her synthesis of object relations and Jungian archetypal
theory in utilizing Kleinian concepts of envy, jealousy and idealization linked to
Jung’s transcendent function.
The latter points the way to the possibility of
opening up the psychic space between a couple that can allow for a reawakening
of desire and intimacy.
This book opened appropriately enough with Andrew Samuels’ chapter on
postJungians as they are today and it seems fitting that it should close with a
chapter dedicated to the work of James Hillman.
Part VII is entirely taken up by
‘Twisting and turning with James Hillman: from anima to world soul, from
academia to pop’, by David Tacey, Head of Psychoanalytic Studies at La Trobe
University in Melbourne, who has been closely associated with Hillman.
Tacey suggests that Hillman has experienced at least four separate intellectual
incarnations: as a Jungian analyst; as the leading exponent of ‘archetypal
psychology’; as a Neo-Platonist concerned with the ‘soul of the world’; and as a
popular writer with connections to the men’s movement and the New Age.
These
incarnations are fuelled by two archetypal energies: that of Hermes which insists
on openness, fluidity and complexity, combined with an anima emotionality
which accounts for Hillman’s extremism and dramatic reversals.
Tacey’s own writing style is a match for the poetic brilliance of his subject as
he follows Hillman through the twists and turns of the latter’s fruitful career. The
Jungian community appears to have largely ignored Hillman, with the exception
of a few writers such as Andrew Samuels, and this is reciprocated on his part by
the criticism that Jungians are not interested in ideas.
In his latest book, The
Soul’s Code (1996), Hillman launches a diatribe against the postmodern and
constructivist world and writes instead in praise of destiny, fate, providence,
truth, vision, genius, daimon, claiming that these big nouns need rehabilitation.
Doubtless he will be less than charmed to be included in a postmodern book
Tacey’s intention is not to condemn Hillman. He attempts instead to produce a
balanced analysis of the work and the shift from a purist interiority to its opposite
of ‘social conscience’.
As Tacey asks: ‘Has the anima as shy, elusive,
withdrawing Diana or Daphne been replaced by the anima as Athena, Goddess
of the polis?’
As a self-proclaimed puer, Hillman appears to personify the saying
of that other archpuer, Oscar Wilde: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves.’
In conclusion, while reflecting the pluralism and diversity of the post-Jungian
world, the common thread which runs throughout this book is a concern with
numinous experiences and the Jungian theorization of them.
But such experiences
are by no means other worldly or cut off from the lived world. Contrary to any
supposedly exaggerated inner-orientation, the book demonstrates how
postJungians today find themselves preoccupied with this-worldly issues such as
atrocities, multiculturalism and gender issues.
In this way, ‘inner world savants’
emerge as invaluable cultural critics.
References
Beebe, J. (1992) Integrity in Depth, College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University
Press.
Hillman, J. (1996) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, New York:
Random House.
Samuels, A. (1985) Jung and the Post-Jungians, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Zoja, L. (1995) Growth and Guilt, London and New York: Routledge. ~Ann Casement, Post-Jungians Today, Page 1-11
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