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It has been twenty years since the first edition of The Alchemy of Discourse. The book’s original publication in 1982 came at a time when Jungian psychology was just beginning to extend beyond its two dominant theoretical perspectives: (1) the Zurich School with its classical Jungian approach and (2) the London School (SAP) with its blend of Jung and Klein. It was a time of theoretical expansion in the field. James Hillman was in the midst of developing new ideas in the direction of archetypal psychology and Andrew Samuels was just beginning to forge a pluralistic approach reflective of the theoretical diversity emerging post Jung. Through a re-examination of Jung’s early research with word association, The Alchemy of Discourse located analytical psychology within the broader context of evolving psychoanalytic and academic concerns. While twentieth century philosophy and critical theory had made major contributions in our understanding of the role language plays in mental life, little had been written by Jungians on this issue after the original Burghölzli research. The Alchemy of Discourse forged a new understanding of the inter-relation between image, sound and psyche and worked to revitalize interest in language and its role in psychic development. Since its original publication, three additional books on language have been published by Jungian analysts: Words as Eggs (Russell Lockhart, 1983), Metaphor & Meaning in Psychotherapy (Ellen Y. Siegelman, 1990) and Sounding the Soul: The Art of Listening (Mary Lynn Kittelson, 1996).

The book is constructed around six inter-related themes: (1) the function of psychic images in the onset of subjectivity, (2) the creation of a divided subject (representational ego / experiential self), (3) the primacy of image and sound in the unconscious, (4) the function of language in the formation of dreams, symptoms and psychic life, (5) the dynamics between phonetics and imagination, and finally, (6) the role language plays in the process of interpretation.

The first chapter has been significantly expanded from the original edition to include sections on the role of psychic images in the development of an ego / self structure capable of self-reflection and language acquisition. Drawing on, but differing in significant ways from, Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, I explore the emergence of the dynamic between sound and image, phonetics and the imagination. Jung’s early experiments in word association confirmed the existence in the personality of unconscious complexes, unknown psychic factors lying outside of consciousness, exerting a significant influence on the formation of dreams, symptoms and linguistic associations. In addition to the existence of “autonomous groups of associations,” the experiments also revealed that the more unconscious a person becomes the greater the tendency to shift the mode of association from semantic to phonetic consideration. This chapter explores the possibility of extending these observations to language as a whole. Does our language contain groups of associations connected phonetically and rooted in archetypal images?

Chapter Two, “The Primacy of Structure: A Brief Genealogy,” locates Jung’s theoretical shift from libido to psychic energy and his subsequent theory of archetypes within the broader intellectual climate of the twentieth century. The traditional approach to this theoretical shift has been to read it against the backdrop of the history of psychoanalysis and the personal dynamics of Jung’s “break with Freud.” This chapter re-examines Jung’s revised theory within the larger cultural context of emerging theoretical sensibilities in the humanities and sciences. During the same period in which Jung is formulating his new theory of depth psychology based on the primacy of psychic structures (1910-1921), similar paradigm shifts are occurring in fields as diverse as atomic physics and linguistics. Several decades later parallel theoretical reformulations appear in anthropology and French psychoanalysis.

The paradigm shift which occurred in linguistics through Saussure’s shift in focus away from logic and etymology to the internal structures of language is the focus of chapter three. To demonstrate the significance of linguistic structures, Saussure suggests we compare the system of language to the game of chess. The historical change in the material substance of pieces does not affect their ‘meaning.’ Rather, the role the piece plays and how it is related structurally to the other pieces determines its meaning. This chapter introduces Saussure’s linguistic principles and re-examines the clinical and experimental material introduced earlier from the perspective of structural linguistics.

A brief history of the place of language in the evolution of depth psychology is presented in Chapter Four, “Language and the Unconscious.” In Freud’s celebrated case history of the “Rat Man,” he demonstrates how a patient suffering from an obsessional neurosis comes to associate different strands in his obsessions with similar phonetic patterns. The patient is plagued by fears of being tortured by rats (“Ratten”) and is disturbed over the installment (“Raten”) he had made on his father’s gambling (“Spiel-ratte”) debts. In addition, he had never recovered from the early debt of his sister, “Rita,” nor could he decide whether or not to marry (“hei-raten”) at the courthouse (“Rat-haus”). In the phonic resonance of his patient’s words Freud discovered the same associative phenomenon Jung had observed in his word association experiments: “the insistence of the letter in the unconscious” (Lacan).

In the 1950’s, drawing on Leví-Strauss’ reformulation of Freud’s topographical model of the mind, Lacan introduced into psychoanalytic terminology a new tripartite model of the psyche based on the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The real refers to the object-as-such, while the imaginary designates the object’s imago. The symbolic, on the other hand, performs a purely structural function, similar to grammar in language or rules in chess. Lacan’s tripartite model bears a certain family resemblance to Jung’s earlier distinction between the real parent, the parent imago and the parent archetype. A significant difference exists, however, in the use of the concept ‘imago.’ While Lacan borrows the term from Jung (Lacan 1968; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973), his definition is quite different. Where Freud defines psychic images as mental representation of instincts, Lacan re-conceives of psychic images (imagos) as unconscious representations of the ‘real.’ The representation, however, does not accurately reflect the object-as-such and, therefore, produces ‘misunderstanding.’ The imago’s failure to adequately re-present self and object results in Lacan’s basic distrust of the imago. The imaginary from this perspective is the world of illusion.

Jung takes a very different approach to psychic images. The imago is viewed as performing a synthetic function, analogous to Kant’s imagining (Einbildungskraft). In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant revolutionized modern philosophy by demonstrating that pure reason can not arrive at knowledge of the objects of experience except through the finite limits established by imagining. Jung extends Kant’s critique to psychology, positing imagining as a prerequisite to psychic knowledge. All mental experience is subject to the finitude of human imagining. Jung defined the imago as the very source of our sense of reality, not as a copy or re-presentation of some more primary reality (i.e. the real). “The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy...It is pre-eminately a creative activity” (Jung, 1921/1971). Inner and outer worlds come together in psychic images, giving a person a living connection to both worlds. The realm of psychic imagos is referred to in Jungian psychology as the imaginal, while Lacan refers to this realm as the imaginary. The critical difference between the two is that the imaginal is constituted by productive and reproductive imagining (Einbildungskraft), while the imaginary is constituted by reproductive imaging (Kugler, 1997).

Chapter Five, “The Phonetic Imagination,” builds on the earlier studies by Jung, Freud, Lacan and Thass-Thienemann, demonstrating that unconscious fantasies and mythic images exist in language embedded in clusters of phonetically related words. Working with the mythic image of Dionysus, we review his distinct attributes in the Greek language and observe how they are all connected to similar phonetic patterns. Other Indo-European languages are examined to determine the extent to which these attributes appear outside the Greek language. A comparative analysis of Latin, German and French reveals that similar clusters of meanings connected through phonetic parity reappear as well in these languages, often attached to etymologically distinct phonemes.

In the final chapter earlier themes are woven together: the dynamic between word, image and referent, and the paradoxical nature of language acquisition. The process of language acquisition separates the child from the ‘object’ world by allowing the infant to develop a system of phonetic patterns capable of replacing the actual objects of reference. Language allows the speaker to evoke experiences of an object (for example, the ‘mother’) in the very absence of the object. This phenomenon is made possible by the paradoxical status of a word: a presence made of an absence. In the final chapter, this paradoxical phenomenon is explored in relation to symptom formation, transference dynamics, therapeutic interpretation and the alchemical process.

After twenty years, the themes woven into the basic fabric of this text are as fresh as ever. They continue to enliven clinical and academic debates and draw us deeper into the mystery of the inter-relation between subjectivity, language, images and the unconscious dimensions of the human psyche.

                                                                        Paul Kugler
                                                                       10 June 2002
                                                                       East Aurora, NY

Alchemy of Discourse:Introduction to the Revised Edition

Alchemy of Discourse:
Introduction to the Revised Edition