Tuesday 28 February 2017

The Jungian Structure of the Psyche



Jung writes: ‘By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious’, (CW6 para 797) so we use the term ‘psyche’ rather than ‘mind’, since mind is used in common parlance to refer to the aspects of mental functioning which are conscious. Jung maintained that the psyche is a self-regulating system (like the body). The psyche strives to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while at the same time actively seeking its own development or as he called it, individuation. For Jung, the psyche is inherently separable into component parts with complexes and archetypal contents personified and functioning autonomously as complete secondary selves, not just as drives and processes.




It is important to think of Jung’s model as a metaphor not as concrete reality, or as something which is not subject to change. The ego Jung saw the ego as the centre of the field of consciousness which contains our conscious awareness of existing and a continuing sense of personal identity. It is the organiser of our thoughts and intuitions, feelings, and sensations, and has access to memories which are not repressed. The ego is the bearer of personality and stands at the junction between the inner and outer worlds. The way in which people relate to inner and outer worlds is determined by their attitude type: an extroverted individual being orientated to the outer world, and an introverted one primarily to the inner world. Jung also noted that people differ in the conscious use they make of four functions which he termed, thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. In any individual, one of these functions is superior and is therefore more highly developed than other functions, since greater use is made of it, but each attitude operates in relation to the introversion or extroversion of the person, as well as in conjunction with other less dominant functions, giving a number of different theoretical possibilities.

The ego arises out of the Self during the course of early development. It has an executive function, it perceives meaning and assesses value, so that it not only promotes survival but makes life worth living. It is an expression of the Self, though by no means identical with it, and the Self is much greater than it. Jung compared the nature of consciousness to the eye: only a limited number of things can be held in vision at any one time, and in the same way the activity of consciousness is selective. Selection, he says, demands direction and other things are excluded as irrelevant. This is bound to make conscious orientation one sided. The contents which are excluded sink into the unconscious where they form a counterweight to the conscious orientation. Thus an increasing tension is created and eventually the unconscious will break through in the form of dreams or images. So the unconscious complex is a balancing or supplementing of the conscious orientation.

The personal unconscious is a product of the interaction between the collective unconscious and the development of the individual during life. Jung’s definition of the personal unconscious is as follows: Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious’ (CW8, para 382). ‘Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the “personal unconscious”’. (CW8, para 270). 1 One can see that there is more here than the repressed contents of the unconscious as envisaged by Freud, for while it does include repression, Jung also sees the personal unconscious as having within it potential for future development, and thus is very much in line with his thinking about the psyche. Complexes Jung considered that the personal unconscious is composed of functional units called complexes, and he reached the concept of the complex through some important and ground-breaking work he did as a young man on word association. He found that there were internal distractions which interfered with the association of the subjects to the test words, so that their reaction time was longer for some words than others. These responses tended to form groups of ideas which were affectively toned and which he named complexes or ‘feeling-toned complexes’. The word association test suggested the presence of many types of complex not merely, as Freud claimed, a core sexual complex, or Oedipus complex.

Complexes are determined by experience but also by the individual’s way of reacting to that experience. A complex is in the main unconscious and has a tendency to behave independently or autonomously so that the individual may feel that his behaviour is out of his control. We probably have all said at one time or another when we have done something seemingly out of character: ‘I don’t know what came over me’. This sense of autonomy is perhaps most marked in abnormal states of mind, and can be seen most clearly in people who are ill; whom we sometimes think of as possessed, but complexes are parts of the psyche of us all. Complexes have their roots in the collective unconscious and are tinged with archetypal contents.

The problem for the individual is not the existence of the complexes per se, but the breakdown of the psyche’s capacity to regulate itself. Jung held that the psyche has the ability to bring into awareness dissociated complexes and archetypal material in order to provide a balance or compensation to conscious life. He thought that the ego was prone to making inappropriate choices or to one-sidedness, and that material arising from the unconscious could help to bring a better balance to the individual and enable further development to take place. The further development tends to take place in a situation of conflict, which Jung saw as a creative and inevitable part of human life. When unconscious contents break through into consciousness it can lead to increased development in the individual. However, complexes can easily manifest themselves without the ego being strong enough to reflect on them and enable them to be made use of, and it is then that they cause us (and other people) difficulties. Jung was more concerned with the present and with future development than with delving into the past, emphasising a teleological approach and being concerned with the meaning of symptoms and their purpose.

The theory of the collective unconscious is one of the distinctive features of Jung’s psychology. He took the view that the whole personality is present in potential from birth and that personality is not solely a function of the environment, as was thought at the time when he was developing his ideas, but merely brings out what is already there. The role of the environment is to emphasise and develop aspects already within the individual. Every infant is born with an intact blueprint for life, both physically and mentally, and while these ideas were very controversial at the time, there is much more agreement now that each animal species is uniquely equipped with a repertoire of behaviours adapted to the environment in which it has evolved. This repertoire is dependent on what ethologists call ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ which the animal inherits in its central nervous system and which become activated when appropriate stimuli are encountered in the environment.

These ideas are very close indeed to the theory of archetypes He wrote:‘the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a “pattern of behaviour”. This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology’. (CW18, para 1228). The archetypes predispose us to approach life and to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns laid down in the psyche. There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father, child, archetypal events, such as birth, death, separation, and archetypal objects such as water, the sun, the moon, snakes, and so on.

These images find expression in the psyche, in behaviour and in myths. It is only archetypal images that are capable of being known and coming to consciousness, the archetypes themselves are deeply unconscious and knowledgable. I have mentioned the biological, instinctual pole of the archetype, but Jung perceived the concept as a spectrum, there being an opposing, spiritual pole which also has an enormous impact on behaviour. Archetypes have a fascinating, numinous quality to them which makes them difficult to ignore, and attracts people to venerate or worship archetypal images.

The Self for Jung comprises the whole of the psyche, including all its potential. It is the organising genius behind the personality, and is responsible for bringing about the best adjustment in each stage of life that circumstances can allow. Crucially, it has a teleological function: it is forward looking, seeking fulfilment. The goal of the Self is wholeness, and Jung called this search for wholeness the process of individuation, the purpose being to develop the organism’s fullest potential. It is a distinguishing feature of Jungian psychology that the theory is organised from the point of view of the Self, not from that of the ego, as early Freudian theory was, and the teleological perspective of Jung is also distinctive. The ego, along with other structures, develops out of the Self which exists from the beginning of life. The Self is rooted in biology but also has access to an infinitely wider range of experience, including the whole wealth of the cultural and religious realms, and the depths of which all human beings are capable. It is therefore capable of being projected on to figures or institutions which carry power: God, the sun, kings and queens and so on.

This is a part of the personality which comes into existence ‘for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience’. The origin of the term comes from the mask worn by Greek actors in antiquity and denotes the part of the personality which we show to the world. The persona has been called ‘the packaging of the ego’ or the ego’s public relations person, and is a necessary part of our everyday functioning. One might say that one’s social success depends on having a reasonably well-functioning persona, one which is flexible enough to adapt to different situations, and which is a good reflection of the ego qualities which lie behind it. However trouble comes when a person is identified with their persona, and everyone will have come across people who cannot leave behind their work persona, such as a teacher who treats everyone as though they were still in primary school, or bossily tells people what to do. Although this is annoying to be with, the more serious part of it is that it may leave major aspects of the personality unrealised, and the individual therefore significantly impoverished. The persona grows out of the need in childhood to adapt to the expectations of parents, teachers and peers, and this may well mean that the persona carries traits of personality which are desirable, leaving the opposite, undesirable traits to form part of the shadow.

This Shadow carries all the things we do not want to know about ourselves or do not like. The shadow is a complex in the personal unconscious with its roots in the collective unconscious and is the complex most easily accessible to the conscious mind. It often possesses qualities which are opposite from those in the persona, and therefore opposite from those of which we are conscious. Here is the Jungian idea of one aspect of the personality compensating for another: where there is light, there must also be shadow. If the compensatory relationship breaks down, it can result in a shallow personality with little depth and with excessive concern for what other people think about him or her. So while it can be troublesome, and may remain largely unconscious, the shadow is an important aspect of our psyche and part of what gives depth to our personalities. The fascination which the differing, contrasting, or opposing aspects of personality hold for us, is illustrated in such novels as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or The Picture of Dorian Gray. The way in which we most immediately experience the shadow is as we project it on to other people, so that we can be fairly sure that traits which we cannot stand in other people really belong to ourselves and that we are trying to disown them. While difficult and painful, it is important that we work at owning our shadow to bring it into relationship with our persona, and so provide some integration of these two complexes within our personality.
The next two complexes in the personal unconscious are perhaps the most difficult to understand and the most contentious. Jung conceived of there being at another psychic level a contra-sexual archetype, designated as anima in the man and animus in the woman. These figures are derived in part from the archetypes of the feminine and masculine, and in part from the individual’s own life experience with members of the opposite sex beginning with mother and father. They inhabit the unconscious depths as a compensation for the one-sided attitude of consciousness and a way of rounding out the experience of belonging to one sex or the other. Just as happens with the shadow, these archetypes are met with firstly in projected form. They carry with them the numinous quality which accounts for falling in love at first sight, which one can think of as a projection in a man on to an unknown woman of an archetypal image and the woman then becomes fascinating and immensely appealing. While he was influenced by the gender-based thinking of his time, Jung recognised that the “masculine” aspects of the psyche such as autonomy, separateness, and aggression were not superior to the “feminine” aspects such as nurturimg , relatedness, and empathy. Rather, they form two halves of a whole, both of which belong to every individual, and neither of which is superior to the other. One can see this as a development of the emphasis on the masculine psyche in Freud’s work. These complexes need to be related to in their “otherness”, and connect the ego to the objective psyche. Individuation Jung called the search for wholeness within the human psyche, the process of individuation.

It may be described as a process of circumlocution around the Self as the centre of personality. The person aims to become conscious of him or herself as a unique human being, but at the same time, no more nor less than any other human being. For Jung, conflict is not only inherent in human psychology, but is necessary for growth. In order to become more conscious, one must be able to bear conflict. There are many internal opposites, as well as those experienced in the outside world. If the tension between the opposites can be borne, then out of this clash something new and creative can grow. In Jung’s view, this ‘something’ is a symbol which will contribute to a new direction which does justice to both sides of a conflict and which is a product of the unconscious rather than of rational thought. For Jung the symbol is something which cannot be fully explained or understood but has the quality of both conscious and unconscious worlds. The symbol may be the agent of transformation which brings about the development which was so important an aspect of his thinking, and which leads towards individuation as the goal towards which humans strive.

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.”
[Collected Works Volume 10, paragraph 317

Jung saw the mind/body/feelings (or what he called ‘the psyche’) as all working together. Even negative symptoms could be potentially helpful in drawing attention to an imbalance; for example, depression could result from an individual suppressing particular feelings or not following a path that is natural and true to their particular personality. In this way he saw the psyche as a self-regulating system with all psychic contents – thoughts, feelings, dreams, intuitions etc. – having a purpose; he thought the psyche was ‘purposive’.
Jung saw dreams as the psyche’s attempt to communicate important things to the individual, and he valued them highly, perhaps above all else, as a way of knowing what was really going on. Dreams are also an important part of the development of the personality – a process that he called individuation. Whilst Freud thought that dreams expressed forbidden wishes that had to be disguised (he differentiated the manifest content of a dream – what was on the surface, from the latent content – what was hidden), Jung saw dreams as expressing things openly; he wrote:

They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise … They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.” [CW 17, para. 189]
If dreams are sometimes difficult to comprehend it is because we need to understand that dreams express themselves through the use of symbols. Of symbols Jung wrote:
A symbol is the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown psychic content”.
He also wrote, the dream is “a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” [CW 8, para. 505]. A symbol doesn’t just tell us about what the dream may appear to be about on the surface, but has meaning and resonance above and beyond the particular situation.

In expressing what is not known, particularly related to an imbalance, Jung thought that dreams were a form of compensation. One of Jung’s own dreams gives a good example of compensation; the dream concerned one of his patients. She was an intelligent woman but Jung noticed that increasingly in their sessions there was a shallowness entering into their dialogue. He determined to speak to her about this, but the night before the session he had the following dream:

He was walking down a highway through a valley in late-afternoon sunlight. To his right was a steep hill. At its top stood a castle, and on the highest tower was a woman sitting on a kind of balustrade. In order to see her properly he had to bend his head far back. He awoke with a crick in his neck. Even in the dream he had recognised the woman as his patient. [Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 155]

Jung said that the interpretation was immediately apparent to him. If, in the dream, he had had to look up to the patient in this fashion, in reality he had probably been looking down on her – the dream had been a compensation for his attitude toward her.
Jung wrote:

I have noticed that dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one’s own dreams.” [CW 18, para. 244
([30], pp. 1–2J
Last week I talk to my inner wounded child/ I dream that I find a note from a young child, he tells me I am not listening to him. The next day I end up without a voice suffering from tonsillitis. The dream reflects directly my inner sate and gives it a physical manifestation. As above so below so within so without.........

Jung had a much more positive view of the human psyche and unconscious than Freud.For Jung, the unconscious is not only full of wild and destructive drives; it is a source of creativity, spirituality and the capacity for relationships. Similarly, dreaanotheuntrustworthy "texts" that Freud deciphered. Rather, they tell tdreameexactly what is going on in their psyche. In Jung's idea of "individuation"wesemapping of the relations between an individual and the group ocollective (and Jucoined the term "collective unconscious" to indicate what all humans have in common from a psychological point of vie

Today there is a collective agonising over what is meant by "the west". Easy to define in contradistinction to a supposedly fanatical Islam (itself a political and media concoction), what it means to be western is a much more complicated topic that cries out for a Jungian input. Jung saw himself as a sort of therapist for western culture and, if his criticisms of it do resonate with what many Muslims are saying, then that strikes me as all the more significant.

What Jung saw in western culture is very familiar to what its contemporary critics perceive. He despaired of the over-rational one-sidedness of western culture, the way it has got cut off from nature (Jung is the pioneer of what is now calledecopsychology). He hit out at the materialism and loss of individuality in our world, focused on the mind-body split, on mechanical approaches to sex, and the west's loss of a sense of existential and spiritual purpose and meaning. He even, in a characteristic moment of imaginative genius, tried to be the therapist of the Judeo-Christian God, in his iconoclastic book Answer to Job.
Yet as far as Jung's reputation is concerned, it would be wrong to end on an upbeat note. As a Jungian analyst I have always insisted that Jungian analysts and scholars acknowledge and apologise for his antisemitism in the 1930s and try to fix those parts of the theories that are misguided or plain wrong: for instance using the word "parasite" in connection with the Jews, to refer to an alleged lack of a culture of their own and their supposed need to use the forms of other "host" cultures.


Jung defended himself against the accusation that his ideas chimed with Nazi ideology, but to some his expression of regret seemed inadequate and insincere. He helped numerous Jewish psychoanalysts to flee Nazi Germany – yet he was also an ambitious man and saw an opportunity to become the leading psychologist in central Europe in the 1930s: distinguishing Jews from "Aryans" chimed with the politics of Germany and Austria. He was not a crude antisemite. He was an intuitive person and, though his writings on what he called "Jewish psychology" (ie psychoanalysis) are often deeply offensive, there are some nuggets therein that give one pause for thought.
For example, his protest at the imposition of one system of psychology on everyone anticipates today's transcultural and intercultural psychologists and therapists, which makes him an inspiring teacher for therapists struggling to work in a multicultural society. And Jung's musings about how the Jewish people's possession of land, so far from their historic experience, would affect their group psychological functioning contributes in a very challenging way to our understanding of yet another of today's hot political topics – the situation in the Middle East.


In his clinical work with patients he anticipated the "relational turn" in psychotherapy: writing that the therapist was as much in the treatment process as the patient, and stressing the importance of the "therapeutic personality" as opposed to the mechanical application of the technical procedures. He was an alert and compassionate therapist – another reason we should avoid only concentrating on his personal life.

Addendum

For my own outlook the implications are that a holistic universe is necessarily a mystical system. Scientific theories, which claim that all things and people are interconnected in a non-empirical realm of the world, are necessarily mystical theories. Jaffé has described the same conclusion in the following way: share essential aspects with ancient practices in an evolved way. In her appealing book, “Was C. G. Jung a Mystic?”, Aniela Jaffé [30] has described fascinating aspects of Jung’s mysticism, which confirm our view:
If the concept ‘mystic’ suggests the immediate experience of the numinous or the perceiving of an originally hidden transcendent reality, the ‘other side’, then it involves an experience which also plays a central role in Jung’s approach to analytical psychology; that is, the consideration of images and contents which enter into consciousness from the hidden background of the psyche, the collective unconscious. (…) [which] must be conceived of as a realm with neither space nor time that eludes any objective knowledge. What we perceive are its effects.”.
([30], pp. 1–2)
At this point I might ask: Does it all matter? Why should I care? Our answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living in accordance with it. Carl Gustav Jung has shown that, living in accordance with the order of the universe is a prerequisite for a wholesome life. This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life
([41], p. 8)
The state of being innate upholds a Cosmic Order that lets us think that we are part of it, that we are born in it and that we are it, but we don’t know it. In agreement with Jung’s Weltanschauung, Quantum physics confirms William James’ thesis, that modern science can no longer deny the non-empirical:
[The] unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative charge. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.”.
([42], p. 516)
The view that reality has a non-empirical background can be found at various times in the history of philosophy. We find it, for example, in the theses of the Greek Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri (420–380 BCE). “God is a circle”, he wrote, “whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”.
([43], p. 581)

Reference Works
Jung and Analytical Psychology: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Vincie, J.F. and Rathbauer-Vincie, New York: Garland, 1977

Abstracts of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung. (C.L. Rothgeb, et al., eds.) Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health, 1978

Autobiography
Memories, Dreams, Reflections. C.G. Jung. Vintage Books, USA, 1989
Anthologies
The Portable Jung. Campbell, J. (ed.) R.F.C. Hull, (trans.) Viking, 1971

The Essential Jung. Storr, A. Princeton University Press, 1983
General
Jungian Psychology in Perspective. Mattoon, M.A. Macmillan/ Free Press, 1985

Cross-Currents of Jungian Thought. Dyer, D. Shambala, 2001

Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Hopcke, R. Shambala, 1999.

Jung and the Post-Jungians. Samuels, A. Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1986

Boundaries of the Soul. Singer, J. Anchor Books/ Doubleday, 1994

Jung: A Biography. Wehr, Gerhard. Shambala, 2001.

Jung: His Life and Work. Hannah, B. Perigee, 1976

A Primer of Jungian Psychology. Hall & Nordby. Plume Books, 1999

The Discovery of the Unconscious. Ellenberger, H.F. Basic Books, 1970

From Freud to Jung: A comparative study of the psychology of the unconscious. Frey-Rohn, L. Shambala, 2001

The Psychology of C.G. Jung. Jacobi, J. Yale University Press, Eng. Edition, 1973

The Symbolic Quest. Whitmont, E Princeton University Press, 1969

The Origins & History of Consciousness. Neumann, E. Princeton University Press/ Bollingen Series, 1954

Jung, A Biography. Bair, Diedre. Little, Brown, 2003

The Power of Myth. Campbell, Joseph. Anchor, 1991

Was C.G.Jung a Mystic?: And Other Essays Paperback 1 Jan 1989

by Aniela Jaffe (Author), D. Dachler (Translator), F. Cains (Translator)

Platonis Opera: Timaeus. Timaei Locri De Anima Mundi. Critias. Parmenides. Symposion... (Greek) Paperback 9 Apr 2012

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