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© Andrew Samuels
Preface
to Paul Kugler's
|
| Este texto está sendo reproduzido aqui mediante expressa autorização de Paul Kugler. |
I am delighted to write a Preface for the revised edition of this most important book. Having reviewed the first edition for the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 1983, I have followed its progress with interest. Two decades later, the originality and timeliness of the work seem as marked as ever. Paul Kugler played, and continues to play, a key role in the revitalization of Jungian psychology and the re-presentation of that body of work to the wider world.
The two projects – refreshing analytical psychology and communicating with the worlds of academia and psychoanalysis – are, of course, closely linked. What Kugler has done is to revisit some of Jung’s earliest scholarly work to dig out its contemporary significance. The Word Association Test, hailed by Freud as an important contribution to placing psychoanalysis on a scientific basis, unveiled phonetic associations as well as meaning associations. Phonetic associations could even be understood as ‘deeper’ than meaning connections because they increased as the level of unconsciousness increased. In other words, phonetic associations, seemingly superficial, were psychological gold-dust. They may even, as Kugler argues, not be at all accidental – ‘does our language contain autonomous groups of associations connected phonetically and rooted in an archetypal image?’
Nowadays, the idea that depth resides on the surface (and in the sounds) of life as it is experienced, strikes us as somewhat less paradoxical or odd. But it is still necessary to fight this observation through in the face of traditional and Romantic opposition that cannot do other than locate depth (and hence everything of value in life) in ‘deep depth’, as it were.
Kugler has revised his prescient work to take into account many changes in the intellectual and clinical climates since its original publication. At the time, he could not have known how significant the role of language, narrative and text would be in many areas of exploration – not only in linguistics, literary criticism and philosophy, but also in psychotherapy, where reference to ‘story’ is, by now, ubiquitous.
Nor could he have known how significant his expanded definition of the term ‘image’ would come to be, following his extension of it into ‘acoustic image’. Images are both directly experienced (as Jung understood) and also testimony to the impossibility of direct (in the sense of unmediated) experience of culture. Social and cultural constructivism, the decline of the eternalities in many areas of experience, the relativistic cast of post-modern discourse, have thrust the image, with the paradoxical qualities of directness and indirectness just noted, centre stage. The self is not only divided and plural, it even sounds different according to context and preference. The sounds one makes will sound different according to who is listening. As I said in that review, ‘the archetypal image facilitates the possibility of there being plural meanings in a single phonetic pattern, so that we may speak of “phoneticizing an image”.’
Although Kugler is far too sophisticated a thinker to make sound foundational, his repositioning of aurality does have implications for philosophical and clinical theorising. In this regard, his is an alchemical enterprise, in which base matter (sounds) may be understood and worked with as capable of transformation into something of greater interest (to understate the case). Think of a conversation. There is a relationship. The communication has its substantive content. There are psychological dynamics. None of these are surprising. But the conversation also has its sound, too – with rhythm, pattern, intense and rapid mutual cueing based on what the ear hears.
I mentioned earlier that there is the question of communicating developments in post-Jungian analytical psychology to a wider world. In this regard, Kugler’s work was ground breaking in its linkage of Jung’s thought to structuralism in many different contexts, ranging from anthropology to linguistics to physics, and not forgetting Lacanian psychoanalysis. The oft-noted tendency in academic circles to ignore or marginalise Jung can only be countered by scholarly work at this level. Kugler never overstates the case. He is careful not to suggest that Jung invented the wheel. Nor does he complain stridently about plagiarism and the general failure to cite Jung. This quiet but, in its own way, extremely forceful approach seems to me the only one worth following. Perhaps Kugler, like many Jungian analysts of his generation, is indeed rather fed up with the cruel treatment meted out to Jung as part of an ‘anti-Jung cult’, but he carries the struggle forward gracefully and exclusively on the intellectual and conceptual levels. This is one of the great virtues of his book.
I want to say a few words about the possible groups of readers for this revised edition. First, clinicians of every camp, not only Jungians, will find themselves forced, as I was when first encountering these remarkable ideas, to re-conceptualise clinical interaction. Moreover, they will have to learn to do their clinical thinking very quickly because of the evanescent nature of sound. And this will be no bad thing because so many clinical papers groan under the weight of post-hoc theorising designed, or so it can seem, mostly to impress colleagues. To quote again from my review: ‘clinical practitioners, regarding themselves at work within a humanistic tradition, need to recall that it is not only the patient who speaks, but language that speaks in and through him.’
A second group of readers will inhabit the academic discipline coming to be known as psychoanalytic studies (which includes Jungian and post-Jungian studies). Here, whilst not forgetting the clinical roots of many of the themes being interrogated, students engage at an intellectual level with psychological ideas. Kugler’s book has already had a vogue in this regard and, wherever the second edition is read, this might be expected to continue. A third group of readers would be found in those philosophers and historians of ideas whose main area of research is psychoanalysis. These would include linguistic/analytical philosophers, continental philosophers, and historians of ideas in those fields. Kugler’s scholarly ability to make linkages and summarise trends makes it altogether likely that the book will have a readership in this third grouping.
To conclude: let us hope that this new edition of what has always been a key text in the post-Jungian development reinforces the book’s importance and opens its treasures to a new generation of readers.I am delighted to write a Preface for the revised edition of this most important book. Having reviewed the first edition for the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 1983, I have followed its progress with interest. Two decades later, the originality and timeliness of the work seem as marked as ever. Paul Kugler played, and continues to play, a key role in the revitalization of Jungian psychology and the re-presentation of that body of work to the wider world.
The two projects – refreshing analytical psychology and communicating with the worlds of academia and psychoanalysis – are, of course, closely linked. What Kugler has done is to revisit some of Jung’s earliest scholarly work to dig out its contemporary significance. The Word Association Test, hailed by Freud as an important contribution to placing psychoanalysis on a scientific basis, unveiled phonetic associations as well as meaning associations. Phonetic associations could even be understood as ‘deeper’ than meaning connections because they increased as the level of unconsciousness increased. In other words, phonetic associations, seemingly superficial, were psychological gold-dust. They may even, as Kugler argues, not be at all accidental – ‘does our language contain autonomous groups of associations connected phonetically and rooted in an archetypal image?’
Nowadays, the idea that depth resides on the surface (and in the sounds) of life as it is experienced, strikes us as somewhat less paradoxical or odd. But it is still necessary to fight this observation through in the face of traditional and Romantic opposition that cannot do other than locate depth (and hence everything of value in life) in ‘deep depth’, as it were.
Kugler has revised his prescient work to take into account many changes in the intellectual and clinical climates since its original publication. At the time, he could not have known how significant the role of language, narrative and text would be in many areas of exploration – not only in linguistics, literary criticism and philosophy, but also in psychotherapy, where reference to ‘story’ is, by now, ubiquitous.
Nor could he have known how significant his expanded definition of the term ‘image’ would come to be, following his extension of it into ‘acoustic image’. Images are both directly experienced (as Jung understood) and also testimony to the impossibility of direct (in the sense of unmediated) experience of culture. Social and cultural constructivism, the decline of the eternalities in many areas of experience, the relativistic cast of post-modern discourse, have thrust the image, with the paradoxical qualities of directness and indirectness just noted, centre stage. The self is not only divided and plural, it even sounds different according to context and preference. The sounds one makes will sound different according to who is listening. As I said in that review, ‘the archetypal image facilitates the possibility of there being plural meanings in a single phonetic pattern, so that we may speak of “phoneticizing an image”.’
Although Kugler is far too sophisticated a thinker to make sound foundational, his repositioning of aurality does have implications for philosophical and clinical theorising. In this regard, his is an alchemical enterprise, in which base matter (sounds) may be understood and worked with as capable of transformation into something of greater interest (to understate the case). Think of a conversation. There is a relationship. The communication has its substantive content. There are psychological dynamics. None of these are surprising. But the conversation also has its sound, too – with rhythm, pattern, intense and rapid mutual cueing based on what the ear hears.
I mentioned earlier that there is the question of communicating developments in post-Jungian analytical psychology to a wider world. In this regard, Kugler’s work was ground breaking in its linkage of Jung’s thought to structuralism in many different contexts, ranging from anthropology to linguistics to physics, and not forgetting Lacanian psychoanalysis. The oft-noted tendency in academic circles to ignore or marginalise Jung can only be countered by scholarly work at this level. Kugler never overstates the case. He is careful not to suggest that Jung invented the wheel. Nor does he complain stridently about plagiarism and the general failure to cite Jung. This quiet but, in its own way, extremely forceful approach seems to me the only one worth following. Perhaps Kugler, like many Jungian analysts of his generation, is indeed rather fed up with the cruel treatment meted out to Jung as part of an ‘anti-Jung cult’, but he carries the struggle forward gracefully and exclusively on the intellectual and conceptual levels. This is one of the great virtues of his book.
I want to say a few words about the possible groups of readers for this revised edition. First, clinicians of every camp, not only Jungians, will find themselves forced, as I was when first encountering these remarkable ideas, to re-conceptualise clinical interaction. Moreover, they will have to learn to do their clinical thinking very quickly because of the evanescent nature of sound. And this will be no bad thing because so many clinical papers groan under the weight of post-hoc theorising designed, or so it can seem, mostly to impress colleagues. To quote again from my review: ‘clinical practitioners, regarding themselves at work within a humanistic tradition, need to recall that it is not only the patient who speaks, but language that speaks in and through him.’
A second group of readers will inhabit the academic discipline coming to be known as psychoanalytic studies (which includes Jungian and post-Jungian studies). Here, whilst not forgetting the clinical roots of many of the themes being interrogated, students engage at an intellectual level with psychological ideas. Kugler’s book has already had a vogue in this regard and, wherever the second edition is read, this might be expected to continue. A third group of readers would be found in those philosophers and historians of ideas whose main area of research is psychoanalysis. These would include linguistic/analytical philosophers, continental philosophers, and historians of ideas in those fields. Kugler’s scholarly ability to make linkages and summarise trends makes it altogether likely that the book will have a readership in this third grouping.
To conclude: let us hope that this new edition of what has always been a key text in the post-Jungian development reinforces the book’s importance and opens its treasures to a new generation of readers.