John Beebe: Jung and intuition
In 1919, on the first in-print occasion that Jung moved beyond Jacob Burckhardt’s serviceable Urbild, or ‘primordial image’, to employ a more controversially Platonizing term, Archetypus (archetype), he linked that new, self-admittedly ‘borderline concept’ that he knew could not quite sit comfortably within reasonable post-Aristotelian discourse about forms of cognition to another, even more ambiguous word that had only recently entered his scientific vocabulary, ‘intuition’, which he forever changed by making it, as it were, the pearl of the oyster.
… we also find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are inherited, e.g. instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without conscious motivation.
In this ‘deeper’ stratum, we also find the a priori, inborn forms of ‘intuition,’ namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension, which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes. (Jung, 1919/1960, p. 133, n. 7)
As Nathalie Pilard reveals in this scintillatingly scholarly book, which sparkles with careful distinctions, the English translation honed by R.F.C. Hull obscures the degree to which an archetype is revealed only through intuitive processes that allow us to perceive it.
Jung actually called these processes ‘archetypes of intuition’, implying in language that turns uroborically upon itself the degree to which his master concept, the archetype, depends upon a psychological process that, like a trident, can seize upon images and patterns of behavior without benefit of rational capacity to understand and classify them before pronouncing them to be legitimate insights.
The three prongs of this trident appear from this study, which excavates them from the layers of later codification within Jung’s translated writings, to be anschauung (representation), einfall (hunch), and einfühlung (empathy), each operating at different levels of mind that Pilard helpfully discriminates respectively as unconscious, underconscious, and conscious.
As two of these levels operate essentially outside of waking awareness, Jung was forced to see intuition as perception that arrives by way of the unconscious to emerge in consciousness irrationally, that is, delivered, as if by magic rather than through intentional application of effort.
In the recent history of analytical psychology as a clinical practice, a split has developed among Jungian therapists who concern themselves with the classical, rather Goethean unveiling of unconscious representations, a patriarchally scientific endeavor, and therapists who lovingly focus upon the developmental unfolding of empathy within analytical work, which becomes, as originally between mother and child, a participatory reading of the mind of another through an intersubjective sharing of that other’s self-experience with that of the therapist.
It is therefore refreshing to see the degree of space Pilard gives in her book to the underconscious.
The underconscious is replete with einfallen, fresh insights that are beholden neither to classical archetypes or to nurturing relationships but are simply what falls into the mind of the intuitive observer in the course of contemplating a phenomenon without either patriarchal or matriarchal prejudice as to what the observer should be learning about the person who has asked for the special parenting that is analytic help.
In these areas of the book, Pilard restores the earliest Jung, to whom insights simply came when he least expected them, and the later Jung who finally decided to call these ‘intuitions’.
The story, however, of how Jung came to the concept of intuition as a form or consciousness is not so much conceptual as colorful, and one could fairly make an opera out of the players involved.
I have spent much time myself trying to imagine how Jung came to understand what was, so to speak, right under his own nose, the degree to which intuition could be a dominant conscious orientation, as opposed to an unconscious spur to the development of what could reasonably be called conscious.
Although Pilard covers, in detail, the influence of many people to whose intuitions Jung paid attention, his is a story in which nearly all the significant figures in his personal and professional development played a part – from his rather shockingly intuitive mother (who came from a long line of Preiswerks with visionary capacities), to his cousin Helly, who led astonishing séances in which she was able to intuit the personalities of people long dead, to three women who played a shaping role in his discovery, particularly, of extraverted intuition: Sabina Spielrein, Antonia Wolff, and Maria Moltzer.
There were men, too: Otto Gross and Emilii Medtner, and mentors like William James and Theodore Flournoy who allowed Jung to find the value for psychology in religious experience on the one hand and delusional experience on the other.
Nor can we ignore the authorization of Jung’s father figures: Bleuler, who allowed him to take the associations of psychotic patients seriously as a form of consciousness, however dissociated, and Freud, who taught Jung how to listen with similar respect to the unconscious productions, including dreams, of neurotic adults.
Finally, one can hardly leave out the philosophers whose writings drove Jung to find the link between intuition and consciousness: the dramatically divinatory Swedenborg, the divinely deductive Kant, the determined and daunting Schopenhauer, the daimonic Nietzsche, and Bergson, the discloser of the value of irrationality.
All of these giants shaped in both theory and praxis the notion of intuition that Jung finally decided to steer by.
How all these figures, and more, fit into the emerging conception of a function of consciousness that, proceeding from an irrational (but not necessarily unconscious) base, allowed Jung to understand intuition in both its extraverted (entertaining, envisioning, and enabling) and introverted (imagining, knowing, and divining) aspects (Beebe, 2017a, 2017b), is the success story both told and hinted at in these pages.
Pilard’s method is academic scholarship, at which she is a master, but what she ends up offering us is also profoundly personal.
She has, in a psychoanalytic sense, produced a Kohutian analysis of the development of Jung’s ideas, the most thorough exposition of Jung’s way to a theory of mind that we are likely to have, because she discloses, in what reads like a story, the way he came to see his own self-experience operating.
That he did this through encounters with colleagues who were able to mirror and extend his own intuitive efforts led him to perceive not only the ‘archetypes of intuition’ he was consciously looking for, but to realize them as the basic features of his own way of using intuition to make the unconscious conscious.
It was through intuition – as Pilard documents in a way that allows the point to emerge, rather than be brusquely stated – that Jung became conscious, not only of who he was, but of how he thought.
What I can only gesture at here is how much reading this book takes us into the longing of Jung’s mind to know itself.
We find that he had to pair irrational and rational aspects of his own nature to realize this ambition.
One cannot do better with this book than to read it as Jung’s genius for gathering links to a grand vision of what it means ‘to proceed from the dream outward’ as he once put it.
This was, as Pilard concludes, what led him to be able to see that synchronicity is as powerful as causality in leading us to understand our position in the scheme of things.
In this way, Jung came to codify irrational consciousness beyond simply intuition, and let us see how much the irrational factors in our daily lives.
Pilard does not linger on Richard Wilhelm, whose translation of the ancient Chinese I Ching she explored much more fully in her previous book (2010), which also deals with Jung’s Foreword to that translation, which I have long regarded as Jung’s finest, and most courageous display of his own intuitive process.
I add Richard Wilhelm’s name to the list of major figures who allowed Jung’s conception of intuition to ripen because it was Wilhelm’s Confucian understanding of how divination can be used to govern wise action that complemented, in an extraverted intuitive way, Jung’s own introverted genius at intuiting how archetypal patterns organize the dynamics of the psyche.
The reader of these pages will be able to retrace the essential steps to Jung’s mature conception of intuition in both its introverted and extraverted aspects, as for all its seeming and real irrationality, a consciousness, and to see what a thrilling journey of discovery it was for Jung to use that intuition to establish an epistemology of the irrational.
Pilard herself adds useful and generous consideration of a number of writers who have come after Jung to further clarify his essential contribution to the understanding of intuition.
The rigor of Pilard’s understanding of Jung’s effort can now be placed within the history of a philosophy of psychology that can make clear that for Jung himself, understanding intuition was part of an even larger effort to comprehend the entire range of what our minds need to draw upon to turn awareness into consciousness. ~John Beebe (2017): Jung and intuition: on the centrality and variety of forms of intuition in Jung and the post-Jungians, International Journal of Jungian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19409052.2017.1340018
Notes on contributor
John Beebe is a Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco, CA, USA. With a background in medicine
and psychiatry, he received analytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
He is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous publications in the field of analytical psychology, including the books Psychiatric Treatment: Crisis, Clinic and Consultation (McGraw-Hill, 1975, co-author with C. Peter Rosenbaum), C. G. Jung’s Aspects of the Masculine (Princeton University Press & Routledge, 1989), Integrity in Depth (Texas A & M University Press, 1989), Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy (Einsiedeln, 2003, editor),
The Presence of the Feminine in Film (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, co-author with Virginia Apperson), The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915–1916 (Princeton University Press, 2013, co-editor with Ernst Falzeder), and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness (Routledge, 2017). He teaches analytical psychology throughout the world.
References
Beebe, J. (2017a). Energies and patterns in psychological type: The reservoir of consciousness. Abingdon: Routledge.
Beebe, J. (2017b). Foreword, to C. G. Jung, psychological types. Abingdon: Routledge Classics.
Jung, C. G. (1919/1960). Instinct and the unconscious. In The structure and dynamics of the psyche, the collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 8, pp. 129–138). Bollingen Series. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Pilard, N. (2010). Sur Jung et le Yi King: Intuition et Synchronicité dans le preface de C. G. Jung au Livre des Changements. Milan: Archè.
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