Jung, C. G. History of Modern Psychology: Lectures Delivered at ETH Zurich,
Volume 1, 1933-1934
Book reviews
Jung, C. G. History of Modern Psychology: Lectures Delivered at ETH Zurich,
Volume 1, 1933-1934, ed. E. Falzeder, trans. E. Falzeder, M. Kyburz & J.
Peck.2019. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. Pp. lx=8=xvi +=- =164.Hbk. $29.95.
Suppose that in opening your mail today, you were to find a postcard
announcing a series of lectures to be given live somehow by C. G. Jung on the
historical development of psychology as an intellectual discipline.
This is not far from the actual experience that the Philemon Foundation has given us
with the publication of this set of sixteen public lectures that Jung gave in
1933-1934 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (known by its
German acronym ETH).
Reconstructed to preserve Jung’s voice from contemporary shorthand transcriptions and other materials, the lectures have been seamlessly edited by Ernst Falzeder, who provides a brilliant introduction and thorough notes that unlock all of Jung’s passing references and correct all his little mistakes in a way that rescues Jung even from himself. And for this first, definitive English edition, the translators have attended to how Jung must have sounded in the original German.
These lectures convey an impression of a mature Jung speaking to an audience of
his own countrymen about territories of the mind he had by then made his own.
This was brave. Psychology had not been considered essential to the Germanborn
medical psychiatry in which Jung was formally trained, and he was
essentially on his own in his studies of psychology.
Here we find him nevertheless willing to stake his claim as an expert in the field. The lectures
served that purpose; the Swiss Federal Council granted him ‘titulary
professorship’ in 1935 and Jung continued under that title at the ETH until
1941.
(As the first in a series of eight volumes of the entire ETH lectures, this
one begins with a generous foreword by Ulrich Hoerni describing ‘C. G.
Jung’s Activities at ETH Zurich’.
It also includes a definitive chronology of
‘Events in Jung’s Career’ between 1933 and 1941, compiled by Falzeder,
Martin Liebscher, and Sonu Shamdasani, and set against the ‘World Events’
that marked this period.
It was a time when consciousness was stressed, and in this volume Jung
demonstrates that he is wise enough to give ample attention to all the various
objects of consciousness.
In doing so, Jung finds not just mind, but mind’s soul.
He makes it clear that he is not satisfied with the reductive attitude he
locates in Descartes, to the effect that ‘the soul is quite simply thought
directed by the will’ (p. 2).
For Jung, a better beginning for modern psychology can be found in the
Italian Renaissance, in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499), in which an anima figure leads a monk through a new psychological
vision.
In these lectures Jung makes a similar effort to construct a tradition of
mind that soul can inhabit, one that stretches from Leibniz and Kant through
Goethe and Schopenhauer and on to Nietzsche, James, Flournoy, and
numerous others who provide relevant theory and research.
Jung makes us feel that his authorities offer room for the contemporary soul to explore
psychology in a way that can keep a mind current to itself.
I think that is what Jung means by ‘modern’ psychology, one that takes the needs not just of the ego, but also the unconscious into account.
It is not the case, however, that Jung finds soul only in the unconscious.
Already aware that consciousness is inevitably lit up against a dark
background, his central theme is that it makes no sense to start speaking
about the unconscious until one has achieved an adequate appreciation of the
full range of consciousness.
Jung invites modern psychology to consider not
just the efforts a subject makes to be conscious, but also the objects that an
individual’s consciousnesses have attached themselves to.
Jung moves from an historical survey of the ideas of pioneering psychologists to an analysis of
what these doctors and professors recorded as their patients’ actual
preoccupations.
He shows that the possible objects of a patient’s concern can
extend, on the extraverted side of choice, from people and presuppositions at
one extreme to ideas and ideals at the other, and on the introverted side, from
a psychoanalytic scrutiny of complexes and projections all the way to a
spiritual obsession with spirits and notions of God.
To make what he means by the range of consciousness clear, Jung focuses on
two well-chosen examples that echo Binet’s first demonstration of how his
daughters differed in both intelligence and learning style.
Armande, whom Binet called a ‘subjectivist’, was governed by ‘introspection’, while her sister
Marguerite was an ‘objectivist’ who relied on ‘externospection’, an
‘orientation of our knowledge toward the exterior world as opposed to the
knowledge of ourselves’ (Ellenberger, pp. 702-3).
For his theorizing, Jung turns to two mediumistic women. Hélène Smith was relatively well adapted
and high functioning, developing her mediumship through the discovery of an
even more extraverted ‘control’, Léopold, who helped her to overcome her
fear of the world.
Léopold’s uncouth but ruthlessly objective outbursts of
external perception drew the attention of Theodore Flournoy, the University
of Geneva professor who studied Hélène.
Jung contrasts this case, which had already been made famous by the publication of Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars in 1900, with one far less well known, that of Friederike Hauffe.
The so-called ‘Seeress of Prevorst’, Hauffe was an extremely introverted woman who was sometimes capable of divining where water could be found.
She was attended by a physician, Justinus Kerner, through bouts of
somnambulism and epileptic fits until she died of what Jung calls ‘a severe
neurosis’ at the age of 28 (p. 43).
Although she was apparently somewhat clairvoyant, and in that sense as genuine a medium as the extraverted Hélène
Smith, Hauffe was much more cut off from reality; her ability to channel her
uncanny perceptions flowed from her close relationship to internal rather
than external objects.
She experienced these internal objects as ghosts, as what we would nowadays call phantomatic complexes (Kimbles 2014), rather
than as shadow aspects of herself or of the people close to her in reality.
Hauffe’s attention was consumed by her relation to these rather medieval
spirits from the past, and she could not find a standpoint in relation to the
world of contemporary reality in which she was struggling to survive.
These cases lead Jung well beyond the binary of ‘conscious’ and
‘unconscious’.
Rather, he asserts the need for modern psychology to consider
the various locations that consciousness can assume within psyche.
As Falzeder notes in his introduction, what starts as a useful teaching diagram
becomes a differentiation of both introversion and extraversion that cannot
be found in Psychological Types, and thus a third type model for Jung.
(Jung’s first type model identified introversion and extraversion as the basic
attitudes of consciousness; his second embraced, as well, the functions of
consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.)
Although the third model takes patience to learn, Jung uses it to show how consciousness can
become both located and limited by the individual’s capacity to get interested
in different kinds of internal and external objects.
Jung delineates five degrees
of distance one can inhabit as a subject engaged with extraverted objects, as
well as five zones of differentiation within introversion.
His specification of these objects and his description of how a genius like Freud can be confined
to some of these zones, whereas a genius like Goethe can find a way to
occupy all of them, is fascinating, as is his insight into the extremes of
extraversion and introversion occupied by Hélène Smith and Friederike
Hauffe, respectively.
The way Jung places normal consciousness as a limit within consciousness itself means that the notion of the unconscious, which
Jung does not elaborate in these lectures, is not required to hold forms of
consciousness that modern psychology has managed to evade understanding.
His demonstration of how much anyone’s consciousness will be limited by the
kinds of objectivity it reaches beyond itself to achieve has made it easier for
me to accept his vision of the need for the unconscious to function in a
continuously compensatory way.
Jung provides diagrams to help us see how consciousness is both expanded
and restricted when it moves beyond its own centre point, one’s conscious
sense of self as the subject of psychological experience, and begins to concern
itself with the otherness of external or internal objects.
As Jung explains, it is these objects that command the attention of consciousness and draw it into
heightened degrees of sophistication, at the cost of increasing distance from
itself.
As a psychiatrist who well knew the alienation that can ensue, Jung
nevertheless did not pathologize the energies that move people to go beyond
their own immediate boundaries.
He is persuasive in defining how we lose the ego at the centre of our normal subjectivity when our consciousness travels
too far afield in either an extraverted or an introverted direction.
But he also says, in passages that are sure to be quoted often once the extension of
Jungian ego psychology contained in these lectures is absorbed, that such
outward movement from the centre of consciousness is a necessary part of
education itself.
This outward movement, however, is not entirely ridiculous, but is part of the birth
process of man. Children and adolescents must forget the background.
A child who remembers the background for too long would become inept at entering the world.
Young people must erect many walls between the background and the subject so that they can believe in the world. Otherwise we would be unable to do anything.
If we are anchored in the inner world, the values of the world will seem doubtful, and we will be unable to pull ourselves together for some real action.
We will get lost in thoughts, and miss the right moments, or fail to attach to a given matter the vital
importance it actually has.
Many become procrastinators because they are anchored too much in the background, and can no longer summon faith in what matters.
To be wholly devoted to something is also an art and something good, in particular for young people (p.89).
By admitting that introversion can be seductive and avoidant, Jung seems to be disarming his Zűrich audience of their fear of the inner world.
He even advises them to see an art exhibition by Otto Meyer at the Kunsthaus showing octagonal mandalas with a human figure at the centre, which he takes as an introverted recognition of the ‘unconscious symbolic source of light’ (p. 99).
I understand this as an intuition of the archetypal roots of the eight function attitudes (extraverted thinking, introverted intuition, etc.) that make consciousness itself possible.
There is of course much else to contemplate and contend with in these lectures.
In a Kiplingesque account of what he found ‘primitive’ about the psychology of the Elgonyi tribe, with whom he stayed during his 1925-26 trip to Kenya,
Jung asserts that tribal members identify so strongly with ‘each other and with objects’ that ‘their own personal life means very little to them’ (p. 95).
I am glad that he prefaces this remark by saying how ‘primitive’ he also finds the psychology of Louis XIV, the Enlightenment era Sun King who declared ‘L’état c’est moi’, making ‘no distinction between the personal and the impersonal’ (p. 92).
That Jung directs more animus toward a Western egoist than to the group mind of an African tribe reminds us that much of the supposed progress of modern psychology is based on expanding a subjective view of reason, which is not the same as enlightenment.
Indeed, it leaves scant room for any non-rational (i.e. intuitive or sensate) basis for a greater psychological objectivity.
The modern psychology that interests Jung, and for which he lays the groundwork in these lectures, holds a sophisticated understanding of object relations that makes room for the experiences of self of both introverted and extraverted temperaments.
In this way Jung keeps the promise he made in his 1913 lecture on psychological types at the Munich Psychoanalytic Congress (Jung 1913/1971).
But Jung also makes clear that any true turn to psychology is bound to become modern, in the sense that psychology, stemming from the selves of
actual people, is a self-renewing discipline.
Jung introduces his own self psychology here, one that sees the birth of psychological consciousness as a continuous creation that moves us to relate to the objects of our deepest interests in highly individual ways, against an unconscious background toward which we have little choice but to remain humble and learn.
The reality that any subjective centre of consciousness has to develop its own psychology in this way reminds us that we all remain subject to the vicissitudes of our experiments with psychological objectivity, and that this is both the thrill and the peril of psychology itself.
References
Colonna, F. (2009). Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. J. Godwin. Oxford: Benediction Books.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Flournoy, T. (1994). From India to the Planet Mars, ed. S. Shamdasani, trans. D. Vermilye. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1971). ‘A contribution to the study of psychological types’. CW 6.
Jung, C. G. & Schmid-Guisan, H. (2013). The Question of Psychological Types, ed. J. Beebe & E. Falzeder, trans. E. Falzeder & T. Woolfson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kimbles, S. (2014). Phantom Narratives: The Unseen Contributions of Culture to Psyche. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. John Beebe C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
