Rubedo, Artigos, O Amarelecimento de um analista

Introduction

Freud famously referred to what he called “the narcissism of minor differences,”[1] Jung to the antipathy of competing truths.[2] Ironically, despite these insights, Freudian and Jungian approaches to psychoanalysis have long been characterized by an historical enmity, acutely felt differences having widened into strikingly different styles of discourse. In the past, many Jungians have read the Freudian literature, but few Freudians have explored the Jungian canon. While there continues to be little referencing of Jungian texts by Freudian writers, there is increasing receptivity by Freudian analysts to entertain opposing ideas and multi-theoretical approaches within their own tradition. Various schools of Freudian psychoanalysis have initiated professional conversations, opening up constructive dialogue between their dominant theoretical models: id psychology, ego psychology, object relations and self psychology.[3] In the Jungian world as well, we find an ever increasing exchange of ideas taking place between the various schools of thought: classical Jungian, developmental, and archetypal.[4] While these ‘conversations’ have produced healthy debates within the Freudian and Jungian communities, there still remains little discussion between the communities themselves.[5] In the following chapters, the two great traditions of depth psychology are brought together in an effort to critically rethink basic tenants of psychoanalysis.

Recent trends in critical theory have worked to deconstruct oppositions in favor of increased emphasis on the value of differences. This has led to the development of a style of discourse that allows for a non-adversarial discussion of competing ideas and the possibility for a new type of dialogue between the various schools of depth psychology. The tradition of totalizing master narratives and absolute notions of truth and reality that so dominated the past century of depth psychology is being replaced by more modest theoretical claims based on relational models, inter-subjectivity and increased openness to theoretical difference.[6] This tendency is evident in the recent movement towards greater diversity in psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic technique. In the past, rigidity and orthodoxy often stifled theoretical dialogue, preventing collaborative work on clinical issues. Freudian and Jungian perspectives will never dispense with nor replace one another, but, hopefully, will draw more significance from the difference between them. In contrast to viewing the traditions through the lens of ‘either / or’ logic with an emphasis on preserving a single orthodoxy, it is the imperative of every new generation of psychoanalysts to critique and revise their theories, to reread them through their unique subjectivity and the cultural influences of the historical moment.

While it is not possible to completely free ourselves from the unconscious influences of these traditions, if we are to avoid being completely determined by them, we must consciously acknowledge their place in our history. To this end, Chapter One, “A Bridge to the Sublime,” examines the evolution of the concept of psychic image (‘mental representation’) in Western thought. Beginning with its early formulations in Greek philosophy, up through Medieval onto-theology and early modernism, to the current debate over the status of image in post-structural thought, the concept has undergone a dramatic transformation. From the beginning, psychic image has been marginalized, sandwiched between two, assumed to be more primary, ontological entities: reason and matter; mind and body; inside and outside; subject and object. Through a careful analysis of the history of this pivotal psychoanalytic concept, Chapter One locates an essential difference between Freudian and Jungian psychology, a difference that reflects complementary aspects of our psychic life: reproductive and productive imaging.

Psychoanalysis developed out of Freud’s attempt to understand the role unconscious factors play in the formation of psychic life. Unconscious experiences in everyday life were observed interfering with word association, disrupting consciousness, and contributing to symptom and dream formation. Chapter Two, “The Unthinkable in Depth Psychology,” explores a second difference between Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis. Freud differentiates three different unconscious psychic processes: (1) preconscious thought (latent); (2) the dynamically repressed; and (3) psychic process in principle inaccessible to consciousness. The majority of Freud’s references, however, are to the repressed unconscious, referring to a particular meaning or referent (ideational representative) once conscious in the individual’s psyche, but no longer so.

Jung’s interest in the finitude of the human psyche focused his attention on the outer limits of knowledge and those aspects of the unconscious, in principle, inaccessible to consciousness. Jung approaches a symbol as “the best possible expression for what is still unknown.”[7] Where Freud’s primary focus is on the repressed dimension of the unconscious, Jung explores the unconscious structures (archetypes) defining the finite limits of knowledge. These two aspects of the unconscious, while different, are not in opposition to each other. One focuses on the content of the unconscious, while the other differentiates its structure. Each reflects a significant dimension of the unconscious psyche. [8]

Before an unconscious experience can be known, first it must be represented in consciousness as a word, a psychic image, or ‘inscribed’ in flesh as a psychosomatic symptom. When ‘reading’ these representations, our psychic ‘manuscripts,’ we are, paradoxically, both ‘author’ and ‘critic’ of our own ‘text.’ But what are the implications in approaching our ‘own’ psychic images as ‘other’? Who is the intended reader of our dreams? Who is the author of our psychic manuscripts? The answers to these questions are couched within the history of twentieth century textual hermeneutics. Over the past century depth psychology and literary theory have constructed a succession of theories to interpret psychic experiences, and in the process, many important questions concerning representation, interpretation and self-citation have been raised. Chapter Two surveys the terrain of twentieth century critical theory with an eye towards its implications for depth psychology.

The concept of the subject in the history of psychoanalysis and philosophy is examined in Chapters Three and Four. What are the similarities and differences between Freud’s and Jung's conception of the human subject? And how have these formulations changed over the past century? The subject of psychoanalysis as initially conceived by Freud has dramatically transformed over the past century. Major premises of his theory, from the role of instinctual drives and the centrality of the Oedipus complex to his technical principles, have been questioned and revised by contemporary psychoanalysis. To gain a better understanding of the contemporary Freudian notion of ‘the self’ and the importance of self-reflexivity in psychic formation, Chapter Three analyzes its place in the development of psychoanalytic thought, especially in relation to Lacan’s divided subject and Kohut’s concept of the self.

Chapter Four, “The Jungian Subject,” examines how our ability to reflexively study the human subject emerges in the seventeenth century. With the appearance of Descartes' cogito ergo sum, the self-reflexive subject is placed for the first time at the center of Western metaphysics and the human psyche, marking the transition from Medieval Scholasticism to Modernity. But with Descartes’ cogito, depth psychology encounters the paradox that the human psyche is not only the object, but also the subject of its discipline. In Chapter Four, Jung’s formulation of the ego and its relation to a super-ordinate other subject, the self, is situated within the historical development of the cogito in Western thought. To better appreciate the debate between Freud and Jung, it is necessary to examine the problematic of image (reproductive / productive), meaning and referentiality with respect to the constitution of the self-reflexive subject. A careful examination of Jung’s clinical hermeneutic based on objective and subjective levels of interpretation and his asymmetrical model of self-reflection, allows for a greater understanding of similarities and differences between Jungian psychology, contemporary critical theory, self psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Chapter Five, “Childhood Seduction: A Crisis in Representation,” returns to the theme of psychic images and the problematic of representation, this time in relation to clinical practice and the etiological significance of childhood sexual abuse. The same clinical concern that first engaged Freud and Jung has now re-emerged in professional debates. The current controversy over how to therapeutically address images of child sexual abuse extends between two extremes. On one end there are therapists specializing in multiple personality disorder who approach the patient's psychic images as childhood events dissociated from consciousness. On the other side of the debate, different therapists interpret the same psychic images as fabrications resulting from false memory syndrome.

The debate over how to therapeutically interpret psychic images brings into focus one of the central issues at the core of depth psychology and cannot simply be resolved with the question of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imaginal.’ In ‘memories’ of childhood seduction, we witness the dynamic interplay between productive and reproductive imaging. Each person's psychic images contain a certain ‘truth’ about their ‘reality’ and their developmental history. Where the clinical controversy develops is when the therapist attempts to make claims about ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ that exceed the limits of the analytic relationship. Chapter Five presents an analysis of the implicit assumptions various theories of psychopathology import into the therapeutic relationship to explain the significance of memory-images and fantasies of childhood sexual abuse. An examination of the ontological and epistemological assumptions operating in clinical etiologies reveals the role played by the therapist's theory of neurosis in determining what the patient experiences as ‘real’ and ‘true.’

Our relationship to psychic images transforms as we move through the human life cycle. To gain a better understanding of how lived time affects psychological understanding, Chapter Six, “The Legacy of the Dead,” examines Jung’s life-long engagement with psychic images of the dead. Beginning with the death of his parents, through the appearance of ‘spirits of the departed’ in his patients’ pathological experiences, through the assimilation of the theoretical trope ‘revenants’ (spirits of the dead) in his metapsychology, and finally, to images of deceased loved ones in his final dreams, Chapter Six examines how during the aging process what we experience literally at one point may appear increasingly metaphorical at another time. As Jung aged, the quality of his sense of lived-time changed exerting a significant influence on his understanding of the role of ‘the dead’ in psychic life.

The concluding chapter, “Psyche, Language and Biology,” weaves together human evolution with various themes developed earlier in the book. An intense debate has surfaced in recent years over the notion of human nature and its ‘essential’ aspects. Social constructivists are on one side of the controversy, focusing on the function of language and culture in ‘constructing’ the human psyche. On the other side of the debate, evolutionary psychologists emphasize natural selection, adaptation and human biology in the development of psychic structure. To better understand the controversy, significant elements in this language / biology debate are reviewed and in the process a new approach is proposed as to how language and culture interact with biology in the natural history of the human psyche. Where the gene duplicates biological information and physically transmits it to subsequent generations, language and imaging allows for the production and reproduction of a different kind of information, psychic and cultural information that also can be copied and distributed to other members of the species. With the psychic development of this productive and reproduce capacity a second means for transmitting information across generations emerges forever altering the evolutionary process.

At the start of the introduction, I indicated how this book grew out of efforts to critically rethink basic tenants of depth psychology and in the process develop a greater appreciation of the theoretical differences and similarities between the two great traditions of depth psychology. In the following chapters, I hope to demonstrate that constructively holding the tension between Freudian and Jungian psychoanalyses is not only theoretically possible, but clinically valuable.

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), Vol. XI, p. 199, and all subsequent references will be by Volume and page number. Freud returns to this reference in SE, IIXX, p. 101.

[2] C. G. Jung, Collected Works, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Vol. 14, par. 781. All subsequent references to Jung’s Collected Works will be by volume and paragraph number.

[3] See Fred Pine, Drive, Ego, Object & Self (Basic Books, 1990) and Diversity and Direction in Psychoanalytic Technique, (Yale University Press: 1998) for an example of a multi-theoretical approach from a Freudian perspective.

[4] See Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London: Routledge 1985) and The Plural Psyche (London: Routledge, 1989) for a Jungian multi-theoretical approach. Also see Greg Mogenson, The Dove in the Consulting Room: Hysteria and the Anima in Bollas and Jung, (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003), for an example of holding the tension between the three Jungian traditions in an examination of a Freudian text by Christopher Bollas.

[5] In the 1950’s, Michael Fordham and The Society of Analytical Psychology in London, England, began a project of integrating psychoanalytic concepts, especially Kleinian, with Jungian theory. Over the past 50 years, this Klein-Jung hybrid has produced many important clinical and theoretical contributions to depth psychology. In more recent years, The Journal of Analytical Psychology has sponsored a series of annual conferences bringing together leading Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysts. The following chapters are not an attempt to create another hybrid, valuable as that may be, but to work, instead, towards developing a greater openness to the significance that lies in the theoretical differences as well as similaritie.

[6] See Christopher Hauke’s, Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities (London: Routledge, 2000) for an extensive discussion of the effect of critical theory and post-structuralism on contemporary depth psychology. Michael Adams’ two books, The Multicultural Imagination (London: Routledge, 1996) and The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2004) provides an extended discussion of multiculturalism in relation to Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis.

[7]C. G. Jung, C.W.,,Vol. 6, par. 815 and 820.

[8] For a detailed discussion of the cultural and intellectual context behind this distinction, see The Alchemy of Discourse (Zürich: Daimon Verlag, 2002), Chapter Two, “The Primacy of Structure: A Brief Genealogy.”

Raids on the Unthinkable: Introduction