Jung's Self Psychology: A Constructivist Perspective

207 Pages·1991·12.591 MB·English

by  Polly Young-Eisendrath (Author), James Hall (Author)

JUNG'S SELF PSYCHOLOGY
A Constructivist Perspective
POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, PH.D.
JAMES HALL, M.D.
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
JUNG'S SELF PSYCHOLOGY
A Constructivist Perspective
© 1991 The Guilford Press
A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc.
72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young-Eisendrath, Polly, 1947-
Jung's self psychology: a constructivist perspective I Polly
Young-Eisendrath, James Hall.
p. cm. ,
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89862-553-X
1. Self. 2. Psychology, Pathological. 3. Self pyschology.
I. Hall, James A. (James Albert), 1934- II. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961. 2. Ego.
3. Psychoanalytic Theory. 4. Psychoanalytic Therapy. 5. Self
Concept. WM 460.5.E3 Y78jj
RC455.4.S42Y68 1991
154.2'2-dc20
DNLM/DLC
for Library of Congress 91-6717
CIP
For my son Colin, who reveals and resists
in just the right measure.
P. Y. E.
For my daughters, Angela and Sherry,
with many thanks for their help
over the years.
J. H.
Foreword
It seems that the best way to comprehend and communicate what is going
on across an entire field is to invest oneself fully and passionately, with
as clear a head as possible, in a single aspect of it. I say this because
Polly Y oung-Eisendrath and James Hall have produced a work that,
responded to fully and passionately, with as clear a head as possible,
exemplifies and lays out for the reader all that is most progressive,
generous, humane, and effective at the cutting edge of psychology.
The authors make a claim, perhaps the most sustained and systema
tic to have been produced, for the crucial importance of reading and
re-reading Jung in the light of present-day theorizing and clinical experi
ence. Thus, they are partisan. But their very partisanship opens up the
way for a reversal of the flow: The assessment of Jung as a constructivist
and the assessment of constructivism as Jungian are engaged in a
ceaseless articulation. By the end of the book, it is quite impossible to
say which viewpoint is the fixed point, the arbiter, the given, the
politically powerful-and which viewpoint is the "other" viewpoint, the
"second" viewpoint, the one whose place in the intellectual and pro
fessional hierarchy is being cultivated and advanced.
Yet the authors are making a claim for the importance of reading
and re-reading Jung. We should ask ourselves: Why is such a claim
necessary? At once, we are reminded of the fact that psychology itself
consists of such claims and counter-claims. Psychology is constructed
out of them. Psychology exists within a competitive marketplace and
displays what must seem to outsiders as incorrigible, incurable com
petItIveness. Virtually every psychological text, even the most
rudimentary teaching aid, is written with an opponent or opponents in
mind. The atmosphere within professional psychological societies and
departments is charged with a scarcely restrained rivalrous energy.
I feel sure that the omnipresence of competition within psychology
has been in the minds of our authors. For, at the same time as showing
us that they have a vision of psychology as a potentially unified and
coherent field, they chose a comparative and, hence, an inevitably
VII
viii FOREWORD
adversarial model with which to cap their work. I am referring to the
extraordinary achievement represented by Chapters 6-8 of this book
which, for me, truly channel the rivalrous energy for constructive pur
poses. These chapters contain the case of Jerry, 12 diverse perspectives
on Jerry's material, and a Jungian account in which the authors, to
varying degrees, invest themselves. I feel grateful for, and applaud the
willingness of these authors to let us in on their own disagreements, their
own partially unresolved differences. Something very genuine and full of
integrity is going on here.
Though that section of the book is a tour de force, there may be some
who resent what they see as distortion of certain views by the authors for
their own ends. To those who complain of this, I say that I know of no
psychological theorizing, my own included, that does not secretly bank
on such distortion. It is part of the context of psychological theorizing.
Psychological theorizing is contingent upon and constructed out of dis
tortion of the views of the opponent. The hard thing is to argue from one's
guts and yet stay in relation to the opponent. The mixture of tolerance
and tough-mindedness with which the authors work through Jerry and
his numerous "analysts" is a fascinating, pluralistic response to the
difficulties of writing or, rather, making psychology today.
Because of the competitive and argumentative nature of psychology,
Jungians cannot complain that Jung's contribution has not received its
deserved recognition. (All's fair ... etc.) In the light of the authors'
search for a re-reading of Jung, I will focus (all the same) on three
reasons why Jung's contribution to contemporary depth psychology is
often overlooked.
First, the secret "committee" set up by Freud and Jones in 1912 to
defend the cause of "true" psychoanalysis spent a good deal of time and
energy on disparaging Jung. The fall-out from this historical moment has
taken a very long time to evaporate, making the reception of Jung's ideas
in psychoanalytic circles a rough ride.
Second, Jung's anti-Semitic writings and misguided involvements
in the professional politics of psychotherapy in Germany in the 1930s
have, understandably in my view, made it almost impossible for
Holocaust-aware psychologists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to generate
a positive attitude. There is more to Jung's work than anti-Semitism, but
the evasions in which some portions of the Jungian community often
indulged merely prolonged the problem. Faced squarely, Jung's anti
Semitism can be assessed both in the context of the time and in relation
to his work as a whole.
Third, Jung's attitudes about women, blacks, so-called "primitive"
cultures, and so forth are now outmoded and unacceptable. He con
verted prejudice into theory and translated his perception of what was
Foreword ix
currently the case into something supposed to be eternally valid. It is the
responsibility of post-lungians to discover these mistakes and con
tradictions and to correct lung's faulty or amateur methods. When thi~ is
done, one can see that lung's capacity to intuit the themes and areas
with which late 20th-century psychology would be concerned was almost
incredible: gender, race, nationalism, cultural analysis, the per
severance and reappearance of religious mentality in an apparently
irreligious epoch, the unending search for meaning-all of these have
turned out to be the problematics with which psychology has had to
concern itself. Recognizing the soundness of lung's intuitive vision
facilitates a more interested but no less critical return to his texts.
In this book, the authors wrestle with lung's claim for universality
and essence on the one hand, and, on the other, his project of the
creation of a psychology of cultural difference. They provide II reading of
archetype and complex that explicitly joins together the universal and
the cultural with an acknowledgment of the tension between. If we want
to track the differing psychological experiences and behaviors of differ
ent kinds of people, then we must have in mind twin notions of similarity
and dissimilarity. For there will be some similarities and some dis
similarities between the psychological experiences and behaviors of
women and men, African-Americans and WASPs, gays and straights,
lews and Germans. It is seductive to account for difference as di
chotomy: Women are well-related, but men are emotionally distant.
Then we see total similarity or lotal dissimilarity. In their exploration of
what they term "affective-imaginal life," the authors show strength and
maturity in standing up for what William lames called "the legitimacy of
the notion of some." In so doing, they give us the bones, and a good deal
of the flesh, for a move beyond psychological types or stereotypes of
woman, African-American, gay, lew. Instead, they invite a psycholog
ical exploration of the experience of being woman, African-American,
gay, lew at a certain moment in historical time.
Moreover, it becomes clear that such explorations can go on in the
clinical situation, revealed as the place where personal and political
dimensions of psychological experience intertwine.
I conclude with a brief comment stimulated by the sections in this
book on the Russian psychologists Luria and Vygotsky, whose work is
compared to lung's. Recently, I had the opportunity to lecture on
lungian psychology in Leningrad and Moscow. I found that, in spite of
decades in which lung's works could not be published legally, many
psychologists and non-psychologists were studying his works in secret.
What they respected in lung was his concern for the interplay of
individual and cultural factors in psychological functioning and his
expose of the interpenetration of psychology, in the form of collective
x FOREWORD
imagery and an apparently social situation. These brave Russian readers
of lung appreciated the conception of psychic reality, the argument that
there is no unmediated experience, no experience that is not psy
chologically constructed. For the Russians, lung's archetypes repre
sented a non-oppressive, anti-totalitarian celebration of the myriad ways
in which humanity is joined together by the very differences we display.
I hope that they will get a chance to read this book.
ANDREW SAMUELS
Society of Analytical Psychology, London
Preface
Throughout his long career, Carl lung was passionately interested in
understanding the unity of personality. He called this unity the self.
lung conceived of personality more as a loosely organized association of
sub-personalities or complexes than as a wholly united structure. In
stead of assuming that consciousness guarantees the unity of multiple
voices of subjectivity, lung assumed that unity was hard won and
achieved only in adulthood. It resulted from a kind of dialectical balance
between conscious and unconscious aspects. It depended on a process of
development. That process, lung knew, was built from early uncon
scious beginnings into later conscious reflections and capacities to
relate. He set the achievement of unity and individuality well past late
adolescence because he believed that sub-personalities of early object
relations were so coherent and emotionally motivating as to be disruptive
of early processes of self-awareness and even consciousness.
lung was a developmental psychologist without a community of
similar ~hinkers. His discourse is full of "pattern explanation" (Overton,
1990) that uses noncausal or acausal models of metaphor and structure
to explain the process or sequence of development. Developmental
psychology uses the idea of a continuum or sequence of patterns (e. g.,
progressive reintegrations) to describe biological, psychological, or so
cial change.
Discourse in developmental psychology often includes terms such
as perspective, stage, or frame of reference to represent the momentary
organizations of phenomena. Descriptions of these organizations are
paired with studies of larger patterns that depict a progressive or di
rectional organization of forms. lung's idea of "individuation," depend
ing as it does on the differentiation and integration of psychological
complexes, is such a model of directional organization. lung speaks
about "self" both as a momentary organization of individual subjectivity
(organized as a complex of image, affect, and thought) and as a pro
gressive organizational development.
Xl