Edward F. Edinger, Transformation of Libido,
Epigraph
[The god] appears at first in hostile form, as an assailant with whom the hero has to wrestle. This is in keeping with the violence of all unconscious dynamism. In this manner the god manifests himself and in this form he must be overcome. The struggle has its parallel in Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the ford Jabbok. The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power. ~C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transfornwtion
LECTURE I -¢- PARAGRAPHS 1-83
Tonight we beginour study of Symbols of Transformation.
1 This is a wonderful book, packed with riches. Hilde I<irsch2 once said she read it cover to cover at least once a year. It is the kind of book that can sustain a good many readings, and it has a very interesting personal history connected with it.
Originally written in 1912, it is a prelude to Jung’s descent into the unconscious, which began in December 1913.
He talks about this descent in what is now published as Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925.3 On page 23 of this seminar, Jung describes a big dream he had shortly before writing the book:
I dreamed I was in a medieval house, a big, complicated house with many rooms, passages, and stairways. I came in from the street and went down into a vaulted Gothic room, and from there into a cellar.
I thought to myself that now I was at the bottom, but then I found a square hole. With a lantern in my hand I peeped down this hole, and saw stairs leading further down, and down these I climbed. They were dusty stairs, very much worn, and the air was sticky, the whole atmosphere very uncanny.
I came to another cellar, this one of very ancient structure, perhaps Roman, and again there was a hole through which I could look down into a tomb filled with prehistoric pottery, bones, and skulls; as the dust was undisturbed, I thought I had made a great discovery. There I woke up.
On page 24, Jung goes on to say:
Slowly out of all this came the Psychology of the Unconsciousl4l [that was the title of the English translation of this book published a few years later], for in the midst of it I came upon the Miller fantasies, and they acted like a catalyzer upon all the material I had gathered together in my mind . I saw in Miss Miller a person who, like myself, had mythological fantasies, fantasies and dreams of a thoroughly impersonal character.
Their impersonality I readily recognized, as well as the fact that they must come from the lower “cellars,” though I did not give the name of collective unconscious to them. This then is the way the book grew up.
Jung started studying the Miller fantasies, together with the attendant mythological material. On page 27, he writes:
It took me a long time to see that a painter could paint a picture and think the matter ended there and had nothing whatever to do with himself. And in the same way it took me several years to see that it, the Psychology of the Unconscious, can be taken as myself and that an analysis of it leads inevitably into an analysis of my own unconscious processes.
Difficult as it is to do this in a lecture, it is this aspect I would like to discuss, tracing out especially the ways in which the book seemed to forecast the future.
As with all books I discuss, I like to start with the title. This book was originally written in 1912; the original title, translated from the German, is Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. In 1916, the English translation by 4 C. G. Ju ng, Psychology of the Unconscious, CW.Vol. B, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Beatrice Hinkle was published as Psychology of the Unconscious, which was not Jung’s title but the English publisher’s.
In 1952, when Jung was 77 years old (he was 37 when he wrote it originally), he revised it extensively, adding a good bit of material. When he wrote the original, Jung was still about one-third Freudian.
That revision was called Symbols of Transformation; he left the word libido out. However, t11e word libido is still a ghost in the title. If you ask yourself, “Transformation of what?” the answer is transformation of libido.
This is an important matter in understanding the book because one of its central issues is the whole concept of libido. It was that issue on which Jung and Freud had their main disagreement, namely the nature of libido and of how psychic energy, the motive power of the human psyche, is to be understood.
Jung thought it was to be understood in a much broader way than Freud did, and this book explores that idea. Basically, the issue is thinking of the human psyche as an energy mechanism.
I want to emphasize that particular conception. Another thing I pay special attention to when I start looking at a book is the first few sentences. Like the initial dream in analytic work, they are apt to carry in summary the basic themes for the whole process. In this instance,
it is really a very beautiful beginning. Jung speaks about reading Freud’s The In terpretation of Dreams and Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex.
He says:
The impression made by this simple remark [concerning Oedipus] may be likened to the uncanny feeling which would steal over us if, amid the noise and bustle of a modern city street, we were suddenly to come upon an ancient relic – say the Corinthian capital of a long-immured column, or a fragment of an inscription. A moment ago, and we were completely absorbed in the hectic, ephemeral life of the present; then, the next moment, something very remote and strange flashes upon us, which directs our gaze to a different order of things. We turn away from the vast confusion of the present to glimpse the higher continuity of history.
Later on in the same long paragraph:
By penetrating into the blocked subterranean passages of our own psyches we grasp the living meaning of classical civilization, and at the same time we establish a firm foothold outside our own culture from which alone it is possible to gain an objective understanding of its foundations.
This experience of discovering an ancient relic in the midst of a busy, modem street is identical to our experience in working with dreams containing archetypal images that belong to the level of the collective unconscious, rather than the personal unconscious.
Once you are familiar with this dimension of the psyche, you are in a position to analyze dreams from an archetypal perspective.
Chapter 2 deals with two kinds of thinking: directed thinking and fantasy thinking. Directed thinking is linear, ego thinking, problem-solving kind of thinking; fantasy thinking is spontaneous -natural musings that are effortless as far as the ego is concerned.
What these two aspects indicate is that there are two centers of volitional activity in the psyche. The ego is the center of directed thinking; the Self, the center of the unconscious, is the volitional source of fantasy thinking. Jung uses the word thinking here in a very general sense; not in the sense of the thinking function, but rather as the functional aspect of psychic attention. It is attentional effort that he is referring to, whether it be directed thinking or fantasy thinking. I think we can say that there is also a third mode of thinking that is a combination of these two.
There are two aspects to this third kind. One aspect would be what I would call “monitored imagination,” in which the imaginative fantasy process is allowed to proceed, but is watched at the same time. It takes a certain amount of effort to watch it (if you lapse off into a reverie you will not quite remember what was going on when you wake up).
It is still a relatively passive process, so it could also be called “passive imagination, ” at least in contrast to the more rigorous state that we call “active imagination. ” With this technique, not only does one monitor the imaginative process, one also talks back to it.
This requires still another level of attention, as a dialogue with the unconscious is hard work Active imagination is the mode of psychic function that brings about the reconciliation between the modes of fantasy thinking and directed thinking.
In paragraph 26, Jung says:
These considerations tempt us to draw a parallel between the mythological thinking of ancient man and the similar thinking found in children, primitives, and in dreams . . .. The supposition that there may also be in psychology a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis therefore seems justified.
Ontogeny refers to the developmental process of the individual, while phylogeny refers to the developmental process of the race. The formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is used in embryology because it is well established that the human embryo goes through certain stages that correspond to the evolutionary stages of development of the race. For example, each embryo has
gills at one stage of its development. It is a fish.
This formula is quite helpful in making connections between cultural and anthropological history on the one hand, and individual psychological development on the other.
The outstanding example of this is Erich Neumann’s The Origins and His tory of Conscinw;ness,5 which Jung alludes to in his preface.
Miss Miller has made several references to the theater.
In paragraph 48, Jung writes: “One might describe the theater, somewhat unaesthetically, as an institution for working out private complexes in public.” Very apt, indeed.
We have great opportunities for increasing our self-knowledge by noticing what it is we identify with, and the theater is a wonderful opportunity to make those observations.
People do not all identify with the same things by any means, and the particular dramatic events that most move some people can leave others cold, because different complexes are struck.
I urge you to take this remark of Jung’s very seriously. We are barraged with dramatic images everywhere, not only on the stage, but in the movies and television.
Whenever we note what particular theme or dramatic event moves us, we are collecting a part of our own dispersed psyche. Our psyche does not start on the inside. Our psyche begins in identification with the world, with the environment; it is spread out everywhere.
The theater offers us a chance to notice what it is we respond to. If we are psychologically motivated, we can recognize this as a piece of our own psyche and withdraw the projection.
Then it is no longer just a quality of the play, but it belongs to oneself. Jung points out that Miss Miller identifies with Christian, the victim in the Cyrano de Bergerac play. This informs us that she has a victim psychology, a characteristic that will play itself out as the material unfolds.
In paragraph 61, after a little bit of information about Miss Miller’s sea trip, we are told that a poem came to her out of a dream. I will read the “more exact ” version:
When the Eternal first made
Sound
A myriad ears sprang out to hear,
And throughout all the Universe
There rolled an echo deep and
clear:
“All glory to the God of Sound!”
When the Eternal first made
Light,
A myriad eyes sprang out to look,
And hearing ears and seeing eyes,
Once more a mighty choral took:
“All glory to the God of Light!”
When the Eternal first gave Love,
A myriad hearts sprang into life;
Ears filled with music, eyes with
light,
Pealed forth with hearts with
love all rife:
“All glory to the God of Love!”
This poem, says Jung, is a reaction to an unconscious animus projection, i.e., the officer singing in the night.
The animus projection, operating outside awareness, manifests as an image of divine creation. It is a pretty big jump. Jung points out that the psychological sequence is: animus, leading to father-imago, leading to God.
He alludes to this in paragraph 63:
We may suppose that something similar has happened to Miss Miller, for the idea of a masculine Creator-God is apparently derived from the father-imago, and aims, among other things, at replacing the infantile relation to the father in such a way as to enable the individual to emerge from the narrow circle of the family into the wider circle of society.
Paragraph 64:
In the light of these reflections, the poem and its prelude appear as the religiously and poetically formulated product of an introvert’s lion that has regressed back to the father-imago….The operative impression was the handsome officer singing in the night-watch – “When the morning stars sang together” . . . . Jung does not use the word animus here because he had not yet discovered it, but it is clear to us that this is what he is referring to.
We are immediately led to the whole question of how the animus figure is related to the father-imago and the God-image.
Working from the ego down, I would distinguish four separate entities: animus, father-imago, father archetype, and God-image, which is synonymous with the Self.
If I were listing them developmentally from infancy to adulthood, I would reverse the sequence; begin with the God-image, move to the father archetype, then to the father-imago, and finally to the animus.
Let me say a word about what the father-imago refers to, because we do not always use that term. It’s a term that is a little bit out of fashion. Imago is the Latin word for image and was used in the early years of psychoanalysis.
There is, of course, the mother-imago, too. The father-imago refers to the psychic residue that is deposited in the individual as a result of personal experiences with a father or surrogate father figures.
It is not quite the same as father image; it is sometime equated with that but the distinction is that the father-imago is the deposit. We may encounter certain father images that do not leave any deposit.
If a person constellates the father archetype at an important point in another’s life, then that person becomes an incarnating agent for the father archetype. To some extent, the result of experiencing
that incarnating agent is that it leaves a certain deposit of father experience in the psyche. The father-imago is a kind of personalization or incarnation of the father archetype, a humanized version that will take on specific qualities.
If it is particularly negative, then the negative qualities will be emphasized; if it is particularly positive, the positive ones will be emphasized. It will be one-sided as all human beings are one-sided and will not totally reflect the archetype, but will embody it partially.
The female individual starts out largely at one with the God-image, which very gradually begins to differentiate.
It differentiates first into male and female and then further into personal components, moving from God-image to father archetype to father-imago. Then with the onset of puberty, the masculine entity differentiates still further and starts to approach her own age, taking on something approaching a peer nature as opposed to a parental nature.
This development proceeds with a lot of complicated inner and outer factors that I cannot hope to do justice to, but with these four entities we can at least differentiate the components of the experience.
If we have a poorly coagulated personality, which we have in the case of Miss Miller, the constellation of a powerful animus projection can open up the pathway all the way back to the God-image.
That she produces a cosmogonic poem concerning the creative deity is made all the more likely because her animus projection has taken place unconsciously.
This is the essential feature of this whole body of material. It starts out with an unconsciously constellated animus projection that opens the psyche all the way back to the primal deity. As her fantasies unfold, they present to us a type of tragic animus drama.
It is tragic because, based on the material we have, no insight ever comes. This drama plays itself out solely on the unconscious level; consciousness does not penetrate or alter it.
An important item is found in paragraph 78, note 18.
This is a good example of Jung’s distinction between psychological analysis and psychological synthesis. He remarks that analysis “dissolves these unconscious combinations back into their historical determinants.”
This is one aspect of the analytic process, the reductive aspect, that works on the child’s historical dimension of a given situation. He goes on to say:
Just as memories that have long since fallen below the threshold are still accessible to the unconscious, so also are certain very fine subliminal combinations that point forward, and these are of the greatest significance for future events in so far as the latter are conditioned by our psychology.
But no more than the science of history bothers itself with future combinations of events, which are rather the object of political science, can the forward-pointing psychological combinations be the object of analysis; they would be much more the object of a refined psychological syntheticism6 that knew how to follow the natural currents of libido.
The idea expressed here is that the latent movements of the libido in the unconscious are pointing to the future.
If we study the unconscious, the future casts its shadow backwards, so to speak, and we can get some glimpse of what the future is.
That is one of the important aspects of dream analysis. We pick up intimations of the future and suggest to the patient that it looks as though such and such is likely to happen, and that gives the future a little nudge.
Or alternatively, if it is a negative future, we say that this is where the future is inclined to go if you do not wake up and change your direction. ~Edward F. Edinger, Transformation of Libido, Page 9
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