Sonu Shamdasani, From complex psychology to the Jungian School
From the 1940s onwards, a number of training societies and institutes bearing Jung’s name began to develop from the network of nonprofessional analytical psychology clubs in various countries.
While he had a strong sense of the possibility of a discipline of complex psychology, he expressed skepticism about the possibility of a school of Jungian psychotherapy.
In 1924 he stated:
Since there is no horse that cannot be ridden to death, theories of neurosis and methods of treatment are dubious things. So I always find it amusing when businesslike fashionable doctors assert that they practise according to “Adler,” “Kunkel,” “Freud,” or even “Jung.” There simply is not and cannot be any such thing, and even if there could be, one would be on the surest road to failure.127
As a result of this position, he was opposed to the establishment of training programs. Fordham recalled that Jung
“never liked followers it was quite clear . . . He was really very much against these societies starting 127 “Analytical psychology and education,” CW 17, § 203, trans. mod.
The ancient in the modern 345 at all.”128 In a similar vein, Joseph Henderson recalled that Jung
“hated the idea of promoting a school . . . he always advised us not to organize ourselves any more than we could possibly help.”129
While opposed to trainings in analytical psychology, he did not stand in their way.
Joseph Wheelwright recalled that when he met Jung and informed him about the establishment of their training program in San Francisco,
Jung looked as if “he had been hit by a Mack truck, and I said, ‘I see you really don’t
want to hear about it.’ He said ‘To tell the truth I can think of nothing I would rather less hear about, Wheelwright.’”130
If organizations were to form, Jung held that it was incumbent upon them to represent accurately his ideas.
In 1959, Joseph Henderson informed him of the establishment of a new organization by Ruth Thacker Fry. In his reply, Jung wrote:
“As she calls her enterprise ‘the C. G. Jung Educational Center of Houston, Texas’ she is under the moral obligation
to produce something that lives up to the name, otherwise the whole thing would be a mere advertising bluff.”131
It is an open question how many organizations that currently use Jung as their figurehead would have been regarded by him as perpetrating “a mere advertising bluff.”
In 1948, the Jung Institute in Zurich was founded, and Jung presented an inaugural address.132
According to one account, Jung began his address by stating that
“My grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung once founded a home for retarded children: Now I am founding one for retarded adults.”133
His address gives the clearest indication of the directions Jung thought his students should explore. He stated that it was an honor to be present at the founding of an institute for complex psychology, and expressed the hope that he would therefore be allowed to say a few words about what had been achieved, and what it should strive for.
He drew attention to the fact that Theodore Flournoy’s contributions to psychological biography had yet to be sufficiently acknowledged.
In his account of the achievements of complex psychology, he highlighted the interdisciplinary collaborations with Richard Wilhelm, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl K´erenyi, and Wolfgang Pauli in the fields of sinology, indology, Greek mythology, microphysics, and parapsychology respectively.134
He concluded by giving some programmatic suggestions for further work, in the form of a shopping list of about twenty specific points.
He noted that in the course of his work, he had left many unfinished beginnings. 135
The following are the issues that he singled out. He thought that further work needed to be done from the experimental aspect of complex psychology, and especially concerning the associations experiment.
In particular, he highlighted the topics of the periodical renewal of the emotional stress of complex-stimulators, the problem of family patterns of associations, and the investigation of the physiological concomitants of the complexes.
In the medico-clinical field, he stated that there was a dearth of fully elaborated case histories. In psychiatry, he thought that the analysis of paranoid patients with research into comparative symbolism needed to be undertaken.
For psychotherapy, he held that casuistic dream research in connection with comparative symbolism would be of great practical value.
In addition, he recommended the collection and evaluation of dreams in early childhood and those before catastrophes,
such as dreams before accidents and death, as well as dreams during illness and under narcotics.
He suggested the investigation of pre and post-mortem psychic phenomena.
He held this to be particularly important, given the accompanying relativization of time and space.
He thought that a difficult but interesting task would be the research into the process of compensation in psychotics and criminals and into the goal of compensation in general. In normal psychology, he urged the study of the psychic structure of the family in relation to heredity, as well as the compensatory character of marriage and emotional relationships.
He also considered the behavior of the individual in the mass and its unconscious compensation to be a very timely problem.
Concerning further applications of complex psychology, he thought that much of the field of the mental sciences remained virgin territory.
The same held for biography and the history of literature. Above all, he singled out the field of the psychology of religion for attention.
He held that the study of religious myths would clarify questions of ethnopsychology as well epistemology. He recommended particular attention to the quaternity symbol, the alchemical axiom of Maria the Prophetess and he would send the case to Kerenyi, noting “this is a collaboration that one should make often.
the proportio sesquitertia, the investigation and description of triadic and tetradic symbols and of the symbols of the goal and symbols of unity.
Jung could hardly have been more specific concerning the tasks confronting complex psychology. If any further indication were needed, it is clear that he conceived of complex psychology as a vast interdisciplinary enterprise.
Fifty years after this was delivered, it is fair to ask how much of this agenda has been undertaken in analytical psychology.
Clearly, very little. There are many points for which it is hard to recall a single article.
In analytical psychology, much of what Jung saw as unfinished beginnings have simply been abandoned, unattempted.
This is not to say that the topics he singled out have not met with any attention at all – it is significant that many of these topics have been extensively researched in other disciplines, such as parapsychology.
His agenda gives a clear indication of the wide gulf that lies between what he conceived to be the aims of complex psychology, and analytical psychology today. His words on that occasion have clearly carried little weight in influencing the future direction of research in analytical psychology. This is emblematic of the relation of contemporary analytical psychology to Jung.
One of the prime movers behind the Jung Institute, C. A. Meier, had actually conceived of it as a research institute. Meier was the first president of the Institute. In his presentation at the opening of the Institute in October, he argued that
“there cannot be a training course for analysts, for the development of Jungian analysts must still be left to the integration of the individual. The movement is still so young that it needs outside help in the form of lecturers in many specialised fields.”136
Meier was strongly against it becoming “a conveyor belt for turning out readymade analysts.”137
However, he was overruled by other members of the Curatorium.
As he recalled:
In the course of time I had to realize that these people were not interested in anything else; they wanted to have their own trainees. Research or interchange with other psychologists was unimportant. Whenever I made an attempt at bringing in somebody who was not of the Jungian gang, but came from an entirely different field, they said, “Oh Meier has this damn resistance against Jung.” So I finally gave up.138
It is hard to overemphasize the consequences of these changes of emphasis.
According to Gene Nameche, Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founding members of the institute, “had hoped that people there would collect ‘archetypal’ dreams and do mathematical analyses of them.
When he discovered that no one knew or cared anything about scientific methodology, he resigned.”139
After Pauli’s death, Cary Baynes wrote to Jung concerning Pauli:
“He had the idea that doctors ruined the dreams of patients they handled, and he suggested that a lot of dreams from people not in analysis should be collected and then we would know what the unconscious was trying to say.”140
Thus for Pauli, complex psychology needed to utilize the mathematical and statistical methods to validate its findings.
Only in such a way would interdisciplinary cooperation with the natural sciences be possible.
While having a strong sense of the research that future complex psychologists should do, Jung harboured no illusions about the role of institutes in safeguarding his work.
Shortly after the foundation of the Jung Institute, he commented about this development to Cary Baynes:
The institute is flourishing in a modest way . . . There is of course the danger that living ideas are systematically killed by professional teaching. Most of the ideas will hardly escape this sad fate, but if one is careful enough with the choice of the teachers, one can keep the thing afloat for a while and if the central idea itself is really alive, then it will fulfill its lifetime either in the Institute or outside of it as long as it is really living.141
Laurens van der Post recalls Jung saying to him that the Institute would be lucky if it did not outlive its creative uses within a generation
. . . “I do not want anybody to be a Jungian,” he told me. “I want people to be themselves. As for “isms,” they are the viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any medieval plague or pest has ever been. Should I be found one day only to have created another “ism” then I will have failed in all I tried to do.” (1976, ix–x.)
This comment is in line with his social and political thought – for if complex psychology resulted in another “ism” it would simply contribute to the mindlessness pervading European societies, rather than providing any point of resistance or capacity for reflection. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Jung: the Making of Modern Psychology – The Dream of a Science, Page 344-348
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu Sonu
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation
