Dear Colleagues,
The Executive Committee is pleased to launch the first seminar in the Issues in Jungian Psychology Series with David Tacey’s paper, ‘Toward A New Animism: Jung, Hillman and Analytical Psychology.’ From David some points to consider:
The ecological crisis of the contemporary world has urged upon us anew kind of animism, in which the things of the world are alive, animated, spirited, mainly because the body of the world is experiencing pain, pathological symptoms and suffering; the psyche of the world or anima mundi is being discovered in the same way in which psyche was first discovered in suffering individuals.
Hillman’s work draws out contradictions in Jung’s theorizing, and privileges Jung’s post-Cartesian vision and its affirmation of an new kind of animism, which is easily mistaken as pre-modern animism, and hence as regressive.
Hillman’s ‘archetypal psychology’ is an attempt to re-appropriate what had been left out of ‘Jungian’ or ‘analytical psychology’, but what he re-appropriates seems so foreign to established views that it is treated as alien and disruptive.
This paper raises several issues that may be found at the end of the paper after references.
Best wishes,
Maryann
Dear Colleagues,
We have had some thought provoking and inspiring discussions of late from many contributors under the headings of TERMS and ANTIMONY.
The spectrum of perception the IAJS membership hold collectively on Jung and what comprises Jungian Studies continues to demonstrate ongoing frontiers
on both these topics. I suspect some of these debates will find a new frame in the first seminar of the Issues In Jungian Psychology Series that commences on October 1st.
The seminars are designed to raise the issues and put the emphasis on questions rather than answers. The issue David Tacey identifies is whether Jung’s vision of reality is far greater than the clinical model of psychology that purports to be ‘Jungian psychology.’ Is Jung’s psychology a psychology at all or is it a theory of culture and cosmos? Although Jung felt soul is not confined to the individual or human collective, the idea of soul has a habit of falling back into the human frame and becoming caught inside us. Identifying the issues in this seminar, begins with David and continues with you.
David’s abstract and biography follow. His absence from the discussion list appears to be time well spent with two books due for publication in 2011 and more with the editors currently.
title: Toward a New Animism: Jung, Hillman and Analytical Psychology by David Tacey
abstract: Jung’s psychology has focused not only on the psyche of the patient but also on the psyche or “soul” of the world. As Jung’s work developed, he seemed less interested in the clinical setting and more interested in recovering the ancient notion of anima mundi or the “psychological” dimension of the world. This means that Jung was forced to reverse and contradict some of his earlier findings and positions. For instance, the notion of “withdrawing projections”, a standard concept in clinical work and virtually unchallenged in therapeutic circles, was seriously challenged by Jung’s own later work. He seemed to think that projections might tell us more about the world than had hitherto been considered. In fact, at the heart of Jung’s vision is the development of a new animism, a direction of his thinking which is emphasised by the work of his follower, James Hillman. Hillman draws out and highlights a dimension of Jung’s thinking which analytical psychology has tended to ignore or diminish.
biography: Dr David Tacey is Reader in Literature and Psychoanalytic Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of twelve books, including Gods and Diseases (2011), Edge of the Sacred (2009), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and ReEnchantment (2000). David was born in Melbourne, and grew up in Alice Springs, central Australia. It was here that he was inducted, as a boy, into the animistic worldview of Aboriginal cultures. He studied literature, psychology and philosophy at Flinders and Adelaide Universities in the 1970s, and in the 1980s completed post-doctoral studies in archetypal psychology and culture in the United States, under the direction of James Hillman in Dallas.
David is a specialist in Jungian depth psychology, and his books on Jung include: The Jung Reader (Routledge 2011), How to Read Jung, (Granta 2006), The Idea of the Numinous: Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (edited with Ann Casement), (Routledge 2006), and Jung and the New Age (Routledge 2001). David regularly gives short courses at the summer school of the C. G. Jung Institute in Z¸rich and is on the editorial boards of several international journals of Jungian studies, including Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche (San Francisco). He is a public intellectual who is often invited to address contemporary issues including ecological awareness, mental health, spirituality and Aboriginal Australia. His books have been translated into numerous languages, including Cantonese, Korean and French.
I look forward to reading your responses to David Tacey’s paper and the issues that come from it.
Best wishes,
Maryann Barone-Chapman
Seminar Muse
Member of the Executive Committee
Dear all,
First, David thank you for presenting this stimulating paper. There are a lot of directions which one might take here. I guess my initial response to the new animism is how it relates to technology. I now live in sunny California and my drives to work and school proceed along the Pacific ocean. Indeed, there is eternal magic to the expanse of the ocean, especially when its surface is broken by the fins of peaking dolphins. My emotional response to this is most certain a combination of it (the ocean) and me.
Yet … contra Robert Frost – “The people along the sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./They look at the sea all day.” – the people in the thick rush hour traffic next to me are typically not looking out to sea. Their noses are buried in their Blackberries. So, even if Jung has won a victory of sorts, is it a Pyrrhic one? Has technology overrun all? Or does technology partake in the new animism?
Best wishes,
Dan
Dear Dan and All,
Firstly, I have only been put back on the List a few hours ago, so only now do I have the chance to read and respond to postings.
It is great to be back on this List, even if for a limited time. I need a bit of self-imposed isolation to get my work done…..
I take my cue on the new animism from James Hillman, who has written about it in several places, and we talked about it last month in Montreal, at the IAAP congress.
If anyone on this List is interested in my full discussion of this subject, I have an 8 thousand work unpublished paper on it, which I am prepared to send out on PDF format to those who might want to go deeper than my original 5-page paper could allow. The 8,000 worder explores Hillman’s animism in depth.
I think the idea of a reanimated world extends far and wide today. Yes, technology is not to be seen as contra animism but as an integral part of it. Just think about how many people have pet names for their cars and bikes – that is animism, of course. Technology is obviously key to this reanimated experience of the world, but in technology we tend to find reanimation in both a positive and a potentially demonic form. That is, the world is “alive” with machines that at times seem hell bent on destroying the natural world. This is a large theme in late Heidegger – the technological world as a demonic form of animation.
You quote Robert Frost, but allow me to quote Hillman, who waxes lyrical here in ways that remind me more of Heidegger than of Jung:
‘In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, ‘The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.’ The world has become toxic and full of symptoms. Isn’t that the beginning of recognizing what used to be called animism?’ Hillman continues: ‘The world’s alive – my god! It’s having effects on us. ‘I’ve got to get rid of those fluorocarbon cans.’ ‘I’ve got to get rid of the furniture because underneath it’s formaldehyde.’ ‘I’ve got to watch out for this and that and that.’ So there’s pathology in the world, and through that we’re beginning to treat the world with more respect.’[i] <#_edn1> [i] <#_ednref1> Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse, p.4.
best wishes,
David
Dear Dan
I have not had time yet to read and digest David’s paper, let alone consider how to negotiate the set of stimulating questions which follow it. However, in part continuation of my recent remarks on the enchantment/disenchantment question, I would like to take up Dan’s introduction of the question of technology into the debate.
It is a keystone of the old Weberian argument that one of the factors which has ‘disenchanted’ the modern world is technology. This argument sets up the binary: Nature, the wild, enchantment vs. Technology, the city, disenchantment. As urbanisation and technology spread, so, we are told, the world becomes disenchanted. Romantic and enlightenment thinkings agree about this, though they disagree about whether to rejoice or despair about it. At the risk of becoming tedious about the antinomial, I would suggest that we should really have left this polarity behind a long time ago. Is it really the case that technology and the city are less animated than the wilderness, or might it be that they are merely differently animated? I would be the first to agree that the modern world has seen a collapse of the kinds of overarching spiritual containers previously provided by the great religions, and furthermore that myths of the inexorable progress of science and reason can and have been dehumanising. However, if as moderns we want to engage with soul in the modern world we inhabit, rather than the lost world of nostalgia, we need to pay attention to the places of enchantment which show up in the midst of modernity, if, that is, we are not going to be blinded by our prejudices about what the numinous or animated world ‘ought’ to look like.
For example, from the moment of its invention, the entirely modern technology of photography was experienced ìas an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identities of objects and people … creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the sensesî.( Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny, Tom Gunning). The mystery of such a phenomenon becomes amplified in the ‘animated’ and dreamlike world of the cinema, which has never ceased to haunt modern life and fantasy, but it can also be found in successive waves of technological ‘wizardry’: the telephone, the gramophone, the wireless, the television, the internet… all have the capacity to penetrate the ‘uneasy space between the physical and the imaginary’ and thus destabilise the hard and fast boundaries of ego identity in parallel ways to what we expect from a animistic phenomena.
Best wishes
Mark
Dear David, Dan and All,
In light of your paper, I’ve been thinking about Jung’s interpretation of UFO citings. What interests me about this was how an increase in ‘ufo sightings’ was interpreted by Jung regarding a shift in the collective to look to the skies – in effect foreshadowing the new age as a social phenomenon – a rise in animism – perhaps. I don’t read Jung as jumping on the UFO bandwagon but finding the increase in these sightings the desire for hope in the future.
What do you think?
Best,
Maryann
Dear Maryann and All,
You make a very important point here, which I had inadvertently overlooked while preparing my long and short papers on Jung and animism.
Of course, UFOs are key to the whole picture, but I had not seen this until now. The UFOs started coming, or more precisely, “being seen”, in the year 1947, just after the War.
They combine a fantasy that involves technology + animated spirits – i.e. “aliens” from other worlds, which are nothing if not the spirits of animism in a new form. They are definitely the 20th + 21st century counterparts to the “spirits” that once animated the natural world in ancient cosmologies. But to link back to Dan’s post, they take the form of technology.
So it’s back to the drawing board for me, and possibly to a much longer paper than I had originally anticipated on this subject. Thank you very much for this post, which is helpful. As you would know, Jung was not so keen on the idea that the Ufos were literally real, but only on the idea that people were seeing them – i.e. phenomenology. But it is the phenomenology of a new animism.
Now, I have to re-read Jung’s 1958 paper on UFos, with this discussion in mind.
David
Hi Mark,
I enjoyed your post, and thanks for it.
Yes, we set up an unnecessary binary between nature and technology, I agree.
But just as some of the spirits of the woods are (were?) demonic, cheeky and evil, so too some of the spirits of technology are apt to move in the demonic direction. So we must not create a further binary, i.e., that “spirits” are good, and “lack of spirits” (or disenchantment) bad. Enchantment gets good press today, but we have to recall that it is close to bewitchment, and needs to be seen in this context.
In his book, “The Re-enchantment of the World”, Morris Berman accuses Jung of going back to a lost pastoral idyll, and not taking us into the postmodern or post-Cartesian world. I disagree with this reading of Jung’s animism, but for what it’s worth, here is some of Berman’s critique:
Jung broke with scientism, but doing so propelled him backward in time. In Medieval and Renaissance alchemy he recognized a wholeness that permeated the psyche of the Middle Ages, and which was still present in human dream life. Clearly, dream analysis has a timeless importance, but any science constructed on Jungian premises would necessarily be a straightforward revival of the occult world view and thus a return to naÔve animism. Jung shows us the path to a non-Cartesian world view, but his premises cannot be the basis for a post-Cartesian paradigm.[i] <#_edn1>
[i] <#_ednref1> Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 156.
I have been told by Maryann that you, Mark, have been discussing Zizek on this list, and Zizek has nothing but contempt for Jung’s form of animism, which he sees as sentimental and regressive. Here is one quote I have found to date:
Jung advocates a return to the pre-modern universe of Wisdom and its sexo-cosmology, the universe of a harmonious correspondence between the human microcosm and the macrocosm – that is to say, for him the subject of psychoanalysis is the pre-modern subject living in a universe in which ‘everything has a meaning’.[i] <#_edn1>
David
Dear David
Thanks for this stimulating paper. Good to have you back, however temporarily.
As you have been informed it arrives synchronistically (?) in the wake of a short discussion on the list on the subject of enchantment/disenchantment which originally came out of a reference to the very quote from Lacan you cite in your paper. My responses to what you have written are inevitably coloured by this discussion and while I shall attempt to avoid repeating myself in what I say now, a certain amount of reiteration is probably unavoidable.
In brief, I question the Weberian binary opposition of pre-modern enchantment/modern disenchantment, which I see as itself a modernist fantasy. It is an important fantasy because it underpins two very different perspectives on the world: first, the romantic narrative of a lost and irretrievable paradise, and second, the enlightenment narrative of the triumphal progress of rationality overcoming superstition etc. Two sides of the same coin. We know that the Jungian perspective is much more sympathetic to the first of these, but my point is that both depend upon the same dubious assumptions. I think we need to be very careful about taking this enchantment/disenchantment fantasy too seriously as historical or ethnographic fact: it tells us a lot about where we are as moderns but not a lot about the supposedly enchanted world of animism.
Your (and Berman’s and Hillman’s) argument seems to rely broadly upon this enchantment/disenchantment narrative, but with the twist of suggesting the possibility of a third stage: re-enchantment. I find myself in agreement with much of what you say about the ways this third stage reveals itself, and its importance from a socio-/eco-/politico- angle, though I think we differ in that I see enchantment as being always already present in modernity. In other words modernity is and always has been thoroughly enchanted, and though this enchantment has remained hitherto, for various reasons, mostly hidden, nonetheless in recent years, in the light of a post-modern perspective on modernity, it has become more visible as enchantment, though in characteristically modern forms.
However, I’d like to point up a couple of issues and questions which, for me, get thrown up by the detailed argument of your paper.
In your first paragraph you describe a three stage model of the ìdevelopment of human thoughtî. The first stage (ìenchantment through pantheism and animismî) is characterised by what you call an ìarchaic literalism about ‘spirits’ in natureî. Later you suggest that in animism the ‘depth dimension in nature’ is ìinterpreted… in literal and metaphysical waysî. I am not sure what you mean by ‘literal’ in this context. It seems to me that the whole concept of literalness (as opposed to metaphoricity) depends upon a whole set of distinctively modern distinctions. Perhaps you could give an example of the kind of literal belief you are attributing to the animist.
You contrast this ‘literalness’ of the animist with a ìfluid and metaphorical awareness about soul in the worldî that is to come with the third ‘re-enchanted’ stage. I have recently been reading anthropologist Willerslev on the Siberian Yukaghir tribe (whose religious beliefs tend to be categorised as animist, though the use of this label is itself controversial). In the light of this, it occurs to me that a ìfluid and metaphorical awareness about soul in the worldî would seem to describe the Yukaghir approach pretty well. Willerslev talks about the Yukaghir cosmos being saturated with liminality: souls are substance and not substance, people are soul and body, self and reincarnated other, hunters are human and animal, predator and prey, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ etc. I don’t think we can describe this very nuanced worldview as in any sense literalist; Willerslev describes the Yukaghir cosmos as a mimeticised world in which everything is paired with ìan almost limitless number of mimetic doubles of itself, which extend in all directions and continually mirror and echo one another.î The mimetic quality of their interraction with the world means that they are neither, on the one hand, fused with it in some kind of Levi-Bruhlian undifferentiated participation mystique, nor cut off into Cartesian ‘objectivity’. While this is a worldview which evidently differs enormously from our own in the developed West, I would claim that there are fundamental aspects of this ‘being in the world’ which are shared by both cultures, though in ours these mimetic/animistic aspects are not thematised and therefore not theorised: they tend to remain invisible, though still present. My suggestion is that the differences between these two very contrasting cultures are at least partly perspectival rather than qualititative, let alone evolutionary. Obviously these differences in perspective still need to be recognised as different, but it does make it harder for the animist perspective to be viewed as either an earlier ‘primitive’ stage of the evolution of soul or as a superior ‘noble savage’ state of nature, the twin pitfalls into both of which, as you point out, Jung fell at various times.
I would like to take up the important question of projection too, but this post is long enough already.
Best wishes
Mark
Dear Mark and All,
Thanks for your post. I need to point out that I do not have the time to respond to every post to this seminar, much as I might want to. My time for emailing is limited, as I have several projects that have already gone beyond the so-called deadline (!).
For me, a key difference between archaic and postmodern animism is the question of literalism. The archaic perspective seems to see “spirits” in landscape and nature as literal things, which could be, for instance, photographed if one were in the right place at the right time, or had the right kind of photographic equipment. The postmodern animist, and I would certainly count Jung and Hillman in this category, “sees” gods, spirits, souls in the world in primarily metaphorical terms. Such forces are “there”, but not literally. Indeed, to regard them literally is for Jung a sign of psychosis, and for Hillman a sign of paranoia – or what he calls a “disorder of meaning”. So this question about literal and metaphorical is central to this entire argument.
What you say about the Siberian Yukaghir tribe is very interesting. I have often wondered whether the “literalism” of archaic tribes is actually 1) a construct of early European anthropologists who did not understand what they were dealing with; 2) a misrepresentation of the animism by members of the tribe who are not sufficiently inducted / initiated into the tribal mysteries; or 3) a combination of these two.
For instance, in my country, the Aboriginal tribes are said to be “animistic”, but when one talks to men and women of high degree, as distinct from the average tribal member, one receives an entirely different, more sophisticated understanding of the spirit world. In my discussions with such elders, one gains the impression that reality is “saturated with liminality” – as you so rightly put it – rather than full of spirit beings who go bump in the night. This is similar to the difference between spirituality and spiritualism. Jungian analyst Craig San Roque, based in central Australia, has been working on this topic, and his research is very interesting. The notion of an entirely literal understanding of archaic beliefs and world views may be a misunderstanding, he has been saying.
As Hillman argued in “Re-Visioning Psychology” (p.12), the very idea of animism, originally introduced by Tylor (1871), may end up telling us more about late nineteenth century anthropologists and commentators than the tribal world itself.
The feeling I have had for some time is that those who seek to debunk Jung and Hillman always deliberately misread them as literal animists, and in this category one would place Richard Noll, who spectacularly read Jung wrongly to overthrow his argument. But this is a trick performed by many critics of the Jungian tradition, and it is, one could say, a dirty trick. It reads our field in bad faith or in the wrong spirit. On the other hand, there is a different school of debunking which tends to say that if a spirit or god is metaphorical it cannot be real. In response to this kind of criticism, archetypal and analytical psychology has to emphasize the reality of the metaphorical. The power of metaphor and symbol has to be restored, as pointing to something real, not merely to the allegorical or the decorative.
By the way, my paper does not quote Lacan, but rather Zizek commenting on Jung.
It is important to realize that Weber’s schema is not as dogmatic as you suggest.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) Max Weber noted the drying up of religion and argued that we were moving into a period of increasing disenchantment. He used the phrase, Entzauberung der Welt, the ‘demagicalization of the world’, and observed that this had taken place not only in society but in religion itself, exemplified in the Protestant reformation against the Catholic Church and its mysticism. For him ‘disenchantment’ meant not only the release from a spell that had bound us to superstition, but more broadly, that the world no longer contained any inherent meaning or values around which human beings might orient their lives. However, even as he formulated this idea, Weber himself was critical of it. He argued that these were simply broad trends, and that even in the ‘modern’ era, it is, of course, possible to see enchantment everywhere, especially in the persistence of pre-modern religions. Weber commented that his own mother, a committed believer in Christianity, was evidence of the “persistence” of enchantment during the modern period. So for him, ‘disenchantment’ was a manner of speaking. In his later work, such as “Science as a Vocation” (1918), Weber conceded further on the persistence of enchantment in the modern era.
So we have to concede that Weber was not really caught in a solid binary opposition and he was already deconstructing his theory even as he was developing it. Weber scholars Edward Shils, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills have established and gone over this argument a number of times.
It may help to think of these three terms: enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment, not so much as stages in a logical or chronological sequence, but as forms of consciousness or awareness. As such, they can and do exist side-by-side, simultaneously, and are not linear stages. Having said that, our time, in my view, is still locked into disenchantment. This is still the dominant note of our culture, and probably will be for at least the next couple of generations.
One could say that re-enchantment, or ‘new animism’, is an ongoing, continuous “recovery” project which has no real beginning or end. William Blake was engaged in this project in the 1790s – and obviously not in response to a disenchanted ‘modernity’ as we know it, but in response to a kind of consciousness that was rapidly losing its capacity for vision. Blake championed re-enchantment in this way:
“How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”
On the other hand, disenchantment was for Blake an ever-present possibility, linked to fantasies of end of the world:
When imagination, art and science and all intellectual gifts, all the gifts of the Holy Ghost, are looked upon as of no use and only contention remains to man, then the Last Judgment begins, and its vision is seen by the imaginative eye of every one according to the situation he holds. (Blake 1810: 604)
If you get a chance to think about the question of projections, I would appreciate your reflections on this topic, as well.
best wishes, David
Dear David and All,
I’m glad that you seem to have had a rapprochement with Hillman’s later work and would be most interested to hear your fuller thoughts on this. I’m not sure about new science leading us. Practitioners deal with synchronicities on a fairly regular basis whatever the latest scientific findings are. Just a few examples from my own practice are – the car that breaks down on the way to a session which will address a long avoided issue, the telephone that crackles and disconnects in a relationship that is itself breaking up, the man who’s mobile phone accidentally speed dials his wife while he is having an intimate conversation with his lover in a parked car, the ring that inexplicably slips off a client’s finger whilst they claim they have ‘nothing to discuss’, the light bulb that pops out of its socket in the middle of an intense and pregnant silence, etc, etc. The way we project our spatial awareness into machinery such as a car (with which we have a close and personal involvement) has its analogies and sometimes significant parallels to bodily life, engine for heart, windscreen for eyes etc. It’s hard not to be a least a bit ‘animistic’ when dealing with the day to day material that clients present.
The ‘old’ science supports the notion established by the monotheistic religions that there is some outside place of truth (over and above) separated from creation. We can forget that notions of the divine as well as notions of scientific objectivity are themselves fantasies and products of the psyche. With equal justice we can see ourselves as embedded and immersed in the environment. Everything that we are is also to be found in the planet of which we are an integral part. Arguably this includes our consciousness and what we sometimes refer to as sprit and soul. Given this, the idea of projection takes on a different significance – parts of the psyche which are themselves a part of nature are projected into other parts of nature. In his new book David Abram raises the notion that we live in the earth rather than on it, in as far the atmosphere is a part of the planet that spins along with the rest of the earth as it turns. Some Native American traditions believe that humanity is the ‘little brother’ of creation rather than the apex of evolution. Despite the fleeting apparent success of our species we are creatures who are remain ill adapted to survival on earth with much yet to learn from others who have mastered this art.
Lawrence speaks well of the ‘great swerve’. Practitioners are aware of the need to regress and to backtrack when important but neglected areas of the psyche demand attention through illness and symptoms. Different qualities are evoked in us not only by the imperatives of personal development or individuation processes but also from the needs and demands of a living, evolving and interactive environment. As they are brought into awareness sometimes through the alchemy of psychotherapy weaknesses can on some occasions become strengths as consciousness is adapted to the needs of the moment.
Guy Dargert
Dear Guy,
I will send you, off list, a copy of my fuller paper on this subject, which explores Hillman’s later work. Happy to send it to anyone else who requests it off line.
My argument is that Hillman is one of the few to take up the controversy about “projections”, which has become a sacred cow of Jungian psychology, and almost no one ever questions it.
Yes, synchronicity and animism seem to share common ground, I agree with you.
I personally like David Abrahm’s work very much, and always have his books close at hand. I can well imagine Hillman giving him a standing ovation at Pacifica, because Hillman has been under the “spell of the sensuous” for some time – even his early work on Image was about saving the appearances from those who would reduce them to concepts and ideas.
Lawrence is brilliant on the notion of our needing to take a “great swerve” – that particular quote is from his essay on Herman Melville, in his Studies in Classic American Literature.
regards, David
“Nothing has ever been projected; that is a wrong conception really: the term projection is wrong. Such a psychological content always has been outside, it never was inside. A so-called projection is simply a thing which is discovered to be outside and then integrated by the discoverer with himself. Our psychology was all found outside, it never was in our pockets to begin with.” C.G. Jung, “The Interpretation of Visions: V. Excerpts From the Notes of Mary Foote.” Spring Journal, (1964).
-Joel
Joel,
That quote is a real find, thank you very much (!) I will treasure this quotation, as it is a real gem.
It gives weight to what some of us have been suspecting for some time, that is, there is a real disjunction between Jung’s psychology and Jungian psychology. Sonu was one of the first to point this out, and I have been noticing it ever since. Sonu: ‘The history of Jungian psychology has in part consisted in a radical and unacknowledged diminution of Jung’s goal’.[i] <#_edn1>
[i] <#_ednref1> Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 15.
Most texts on Jungian Psychology simply assume the theory of projections as self-evidently true and axiomatic. However, Jung never did, and as I have said before, this crisis in his theory has never been fully explored – it begs further investigation by someone with time to conduct it.
But one wonders if Jung “stayed relatively quiet” about this crisis, so as not to upset the development of his school ? What factors might have been involved in this? Or was it merely a case of the Jungians not understanding Jung?
David