SOME ASPECTS OF THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
OF DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY
In looking for a standpoint from which to evaluate Freudian and Jungian psychology with a fair amount of objectivity, I believe that a comparison of the effects of these two depth psychologies upon the things of the spirit and the cultural disciplines in general1 will provide the best approach. And this calls for an indirect, a pragmatic method.
The two psychologies are not only meaningful in their present form but significant also in their past development. Therefore I shall try to indicate where they evolved from the great spiritual currents of their time, and to show how they unfolded, partly under the continuing influence of those same currents, partly through the immanent logic of their own nuclear ideas. I plan to go into these questions much more thoroughly in a book which I am now writing. Here I shall be able to deal with them only in so far as they bear on the main question: In what way have these two psychologies influenced the cultural attitudes of our times?
Beyond doubt the effects they have exerted have been very different. Do these differences come mainly from the content of their doctrines? Or should other important factors be taken into consideration when assessing them? Historically speaking, the meaning of the symbol is the problem wich brought these two psychologies to a decisive parting of the ways. The capital difference in their attitudes towards it shows why the widest gulf between them today is still to be found precisely in their relation to the things of the spirit.
For forty years, Freud and his school have written one psychological paper alter another on themes of general cultural significance. Freud’s own writings of this kind, from Gradiva to Moses, hold a particular place in his work. Through them he tried to extend his doctrine beyond the purely psychological: to law, in his study of the incest taboo; to religion, in what he wrote about monotheism; to works of art, such as Leonardo’s Ste Anne; to literary works, as for example to those of Dostoyevsky. The review, Imago, first published in 1912, was almost exclusively dedicated to cultural subjects of this sort; and its articles, generally speaking, were conceived according to the methods which Freud himself used when he originally began to treat of such themes.
With the exception of Jung, the most gifted among Freud’s pupils—even after they got themselves excommunicated, like Otto Rank—never found any radically different method of addressing themselves to cultural subjects. True, Rank’s own theory sets the artist apart from other mortals. According to Rank, the artist not only says, “I will not perceive what is; but I will that it is otherwise and just as I want it.”2 However, even this exaggeration is accomplished within the entirely personal framework of the original Freudian scheme. And the theoretical writings produced by the Freudian school today (like Bergler’s latest book,3 which presents us with a new kind of neurosis, called “writing”) are exaggerations ordering on caricature. Surely it may be assumed that a method leading to such results had faults from the beginning.
Let us take one of the most outstanding examples: A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci by Freud.4 It was published in 1912 at the height of the first phase of Freud’s doctrine, and Jung, in The Psychology of the Unconscious,5 said that it was 1912 at the height of the first phase of Freud’s doctrine, done in a masterly manner.” The choice of this book seems particularly fitting because it became the model for so many which were to follow.
Out of the immense amount of material which has been published from the handwritten notes of Leonardo, the most universal of men, Freud selected four lines. As you know, Leonardo tried to construct flying machines and for that purpose he studied the flight of birds, especially vultures. In Leonardo’s notebooks the following is to be found:
It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early struck me many times with his tail against my lips.6
From these four lines Freud derives: an infantile sexual experience, the sexual evolution, and the sexual character of Leonardo, his turning to art, the remarkably intermittent manner of his artistic production, his dropping of art for the sake of science, and finally even the secret of the smile of certain figures in his paintings. How is this Freudian reconstruction done?
Leonardo’s sexual inversion is supposed to be a fact, and indeed a document exists which scarcely permits us to doubt it. But how did it come about? If the psychological interpreter wishes to read into this data a proof of his theories, he is, in this case, in need of two concepts: a mother-fixation and a father-hatred. Leonardo was an illegitimate child. It would be interesting to learn something about his relationship to his mother. Freud tells us a great deal. But as practically nothing is known about her, Freud borrows her character and behavior ready-made from a novel, Leonardo da Vinci, by the Russian, Merejkowski.7 Freud says that “she had awakened him to early sexual maturity by her kisses,” and he is very positive about this significant detail which he badly needs for his theory. But Merejkowski is his only source. In his novel, we read:
Sweet to him [the boy, Leonardo] was … the mystery of the seemingly criminal embraces, when, having gotten into Caterina’s bed, in the darkness, under the blanket, he would cling to her with all his body. 8
Yes, but historically, Leonardo left the village where he lived with his mother, Caterina, when he was five years old. After that, he lived with his father, a well-to-do lawyer, and with his father’s legitimate wife.
Sexual curiosity, we are told, was to lead Leonardo, in his later life, to his strong desire for research. For the sake of research he would even abandon art itself, into which he had sublimated his early awakened sexual desire. Freud accounts, too, for the negligence with which Leonardo handled his own works of art. They were his children, and as his father neglected him, he in turn neglected his works of art.
However, there is not the slightest proof that Leonardo was neglected by his father, or that he hated him, for that matter. But Freud needed father-hatred in order to prove his point. His proof consists in the following: that when Leonardo’s father died, Leonardo wrote in his notebook: “Today at seven o’clock died Master Pietro da Vinci, at seven o’clock.”9 Thus Leonardo mentioned the hour of his father’s death twice in one sentence. A slip of the pen perhaps? But whatever it is, this and nothing else, is Freud’s proof. Now, if a person were deeply moved, the repetition might very well be expressive of sadness. Then it would mean: “All is over, there is no longer a Signor Pietro, there is no longer a Signor Pietro.” Maybe this interpretation is arbitrary, but still it is not as arbitrary as Freud’s. And yet on this delicate premise the whole argument is suspended. Remove that interpretation and you have removed Leonardo’s father-hatred.
But this is only the beginning. According to Freud, Leonardo wished to eliminate his father altogether and feel himself to be the product of immaculate conception. Sometime during his adult life, we learn, Leonardo must have read in an ancient book that there were no male vultures, only female ones, and that they are impregnated by the wind. Freud goes on to say: “We may raise to a certainty the probability that Leonardo knew the vulture fable.”10 Therefore, he could consider himself a vulture-child, a child conceived without the intervention of a mortal father. And as Leonardo could not have read this book before he was a grown man, Freud assumes that what he presents as a childhood memory really was a later experience projected back into his childhood.
And then comes a passage which is significant and pathetic: Freud encounters the symbol and does not recognize it. He declares that “the element of the vulture, represents to us the real memory content in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy.” Now, he continues, there is a “psychological riddle.” “We do not understand how the phantastic activity (of the child, Leonardo) came to furnish precisely this maternal bird with the mark of masculinity.”11Looking for the answer, Freud is forced (by the constellation of his mind) to interpret the symbol as a projection of personal mechanisms.
He knows, for example, that Mut, the vulture-headed goddess of the old Egyptians, was distinguished as a feminine being by her breasts but also bore the masculine member in a state of erection. Putting aside the question whether Leonardo ever heard of Mut, but assuming with certainty that he knew of the “vulture-fable,” Freud emphasizes another feature. He assumes that the child Leonardo—like some of the children Freud analyzed—believed that women, and especially their own mothers, also have a penis. “The infantile assumption of the maternal penis,” Freud goes on, “is thus the common origin for the androgynous formation of the maternal deities like the Egyptian goddess Mut and the vulture tail in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy.”12 Here Freud’s psychology, taking no account of the mythological elements in the collective unconscious, assumes that the dream material derives from the personal experience of the individual. Finally he gives the solution of the “psychological riddle”:
The emphasis given the vulture tail we can now translate as follows: At that time when I, Leonardo, directed my tender curiosity to my mother I still attributed to her a genital like my own.13
In this, Freud, you see, is begging the question. He draws from the material only what he himself had previously put into it.
Freud also interprets the famous smile which we find on the lips of certain figures in the paintings of Leonardo, both male ones, such as St. John the Baptist, and female ones, such as Mona Lisa and Ste Anne. His interpretations of the smile of Ste Anne is taken directly from the imaginary family life he had to construct for Leonardo. The famous painting shows Ste Anne with her daughter, the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus. Freud assumes that Ste Anne represents Leonardo’s mother; the Virgin, his father’s legitimate wife; and the Bambino, of course, young Leonardo himself. The smile of Ste Anne? According to Freud, it expresses envy. The older woman is envious of the younger because she has stolen from her both her husband and her child. Others have called the smile on the lips of Mona Lisa, Ste Anne, and also the Virgin Mary, a smile of “calm blissfulness.” Walter Pater, in his Renaissance, wrote that “that unfathomable smile has also … something sinister in it,” and he added: “We might fancy that this was but his ideal lady.”14 Wouldn’t she be rather Leonardo’s anima?
Freud’s book on Leonardo is a fair sample of Freudianism applied to cultural themes. Note that in the course of the whole book he speaks only of the artist, almost never of the work of art. He sincerely admits that it was always the content, not the form, in a work of art which impressed him. But by so utterly neglecting its form he denied to the work of art its autonomous entity. The content and form of a work of art are one, otherwise there is no work of art at all.
C. G. Jung analyzed certain aspects of Freud’s book on Leonardo. Referring to the picture of Ste Anne he shows that, even “if it is correct to assume that Leonardo identified himself with the Chila Christ … there does not exist a shadow of evidence that he meant anything else by his picture than … Mary and the rebirth motive.” The rebirth motive was, with the Greeks, a myth and, with the Egyptians, a ritual; dual motherhood is an archetypal idea. Leonardo “was in all probability representing the dual mythical motherhood, but by no means his own personal history.”15
Now let us see a sample of the consequences of Freudianism applied to cultural sciences by another author. I refer to an American writer who has been called one of the spiritual leaders of his generation.
In the preface of his popular book, The Story of American Literature,16 Ludwig Lewisohn wrote in 1931, that when looking for an “appropriate guiding principle for his attempted portrait of the American spirit … in its mood of creative expression … it was … inevitable” that he “use the organon or method of knowledge associated with the venerated name of Sigmund Freud. The portrayer of any aspect of human life or civilization who does not so will soon be like some mariner of old who, refusing to acknowledge the invention of mathematical instruments because their precision was not yet perfect, still stubbornly sailed his vessel by the stars.” In the text of his book Lewisohn deals, for example, with Thoreau, according to his organon, the Freudian method, and writes of him: “He was hopelessly inhibited, probably probably to the point of psychological impotence or else physiologically hopelessly undersexed … ,”17 and Lewisohn arrives at his final evaluation of Thoreau from this characterization of his sexuality. The case is almost the same in his chapter on Emerson.
What does Lewisohn mean when declaring Freudian psychology to be his “organon”? The first Organon was written by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago, and it gave thinkers for the next 1800 years their scientific method. Then came Francis Bacon with his Novum Organum. This book, stressing the inductive method, was basic for the next three hundred and fifty years. When Lewisohn calls Freudianism an “organon,” doesn’t that point to his having a rather defective sense of proportion?
I see Freud and his doctrine at the crossing point of at least three currents: modern natural science, modern materialistic philosophy, and the psychiatric clinic of his time. Freud belongs, without suspecting it, to a well-nigh forgotten school of modern materialism. the school of French materialists dating from the end of the eighteenth century, called the school of the ideologists, and particularly the school of Dr. Cabanis. While many indirect threads lead back from Freud to the ideologists, and while their “spiritual atmosphere" is remarkably similar, Freud insists on not having any philosophy. However, as Bertrand Russell once wrote, a writer who declares that he has no philosophy is probably still following the philosophy of his teacher, or of the teacher of his teacher. In the case of Freud, that would mean the leading German natural scientists of his generation, Helmholtz, for instance, and, of course, the French psychiatrist, Charcot, who was himself influenced by the French ideologists.
Moreover, and this is very important, Charcot and his school were influenced by, and in turn influenced, that great French literary school which itself grew out of modern science—the school of the realistic, later the naturalistic novel. Freud himself was certainly influenced by Zola.
However, all those currents were summarized in modern science itself, which is the real matrix of Freud’s doctrine. Both the great merits and the insurmountable limits of his doctrine can be derived from this premise. In a recently published book, From the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis, which contains letters written by Freud to the German scientist Wilhelm Fliess as well as his seventy-page “Draft of a Psychology,” we can study the real origin of his theory of psychic mechanisms. It is a unique document in that it shows what Freud was aiming at in the decisive years from 1895 to 1899, when preparing his Interpretation of Dreams. Here we witness a titanic struggle of a mind with an idea—or an idea with a mind. The idea may be best described in Freud’s own words:
It is the purpose of this draft to furnish a scientific psychology, viz., to described psychic processes as quantitatively determined states having demonstrable material parts and, by doing so, make them visible and free of contradictions.18
Freud, in the “Draft” tries to merge brain physiology with psychology. He calls “quantity”: “that which distinguishes action from rest,” and explicitly assumes that such psychic quantity is subjected ”to the general law of motion”; he further assumes that it is the neurons which are the “material parts.” He works with three interconnected systems of neurons, the Psi-Phi-Omega systems, each of them being related to a definite psychic function; although he frankly admits that the third system is purely hypothetical. The significant thing is that Freud first tried to incorporate his early findings concerning the etiology of neuroses into a wholly materialistic system. Later on he apparently dropped important parts of the theory, and very little of it went into the seventh chapter of his Interpretation of Dreams, “The Psychology of the Dream-Processes,” dealing with the psychological mechanisms of the dream.19 Only in his second period, and especially in his paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,”20 did Freud come back to some of the basic ideas developed in the “Draft.” And yet those very ideas greatly colored the Language of his writings, and they appear, in a more or less veiled form, wherever he mentions psychic quantity. They form a deep but still perceptible layer beneath the more familiar surface of Freudian theory.
Freud’s discovery of the personal unconscious was, of course, a scientific achievement of the first rank. What I am emphasizing is that there are substantial elements both in the method and doctrine of Freud, which drove him necessarily into denying to any spiritual factors the nature of autonomous entities. His method is characterized by three features. It is isolationistic, mechanistic, and individualistic. By “isolationistic” I mean in order to do so, isolates them. He supposes that the whole of which a fragment is a part, will function in the same way that the fragment did. This method has brought ample results in the last three hundred years in the field, of the physical sciences. However, the same method when applied to the psyche, after having furnished some initial results, proved a failure. It had to, because it led to suppositions about the structure and functioning of the psyche which did not fit the facts.
The ultimate unit, isolated by Freud for observation and speculation, was the sexual instinct and what had developed from it. It was due to this mainly that Freud was unable to see man as a whole. And besides, both Freud and Cabanis made the mistake of looking at man as no more than a bundle of instincts.
Freud felt satisfied by an explanation only when he could make a mechanical model of it that would work. The “Draft of a Psychology” contains several very interesting sketches of such mechanical models of psychic processes. But although the method of imagining mechanical models was successful in the physical sciences of the nineteenth century, today’s scientists do not consider that it works any more, even in the field of physics. In psychology, I would say, it never really worked at all. It was always out of place there.
The fact is, I believe, that the basic elements of the Freudian method could only be meaningful within a definite system of reference. All the mechanisms he described can be supposed to function only when referred to that system which is the isolated individual, the individual who is nothing but a bundle of instincts, the homo Freudianus, the Freudian man. It is a bad system because no such being really exists.
Summing up: The Freudian doctrine cannot grasp the whole, because of its isolationism; it cannot grasp the collective, because of its individualism; and it cannot grasp the organic, because of its mechanistic point of view.
Freud, as William McDougall21 also pointed out, left the field of sound induction too soon for those of mere deduction and spec-ulation. For instance, it was through speculation that the Freudian concept of sublimation was created. In order to build up a closed theory Freud stretched or cut facts on the Procrustes bed of his hypotheses. Today the Freudian theory not only centers the human personality around sexual desire, but also makes this the virtual center of the whole spiritual world. It thus presents both the clarity and the rigidity of a dogma. This is its “first error,” from which all the others follow by necessity.
We would say that the thinker who conceives of the psyche as a thing cut off from the collective will fail to perceive the values in any work of art. If the soul of the artist, or simply the soul, is like that described by Freud, how could a work of art ever be conceived?
And yet, the Freudian point of view exerted not only detrimental but also beneficial influence. The period between 1890 and 1900 when Freud was developing his concepts was colored by an immoderate worship of all the material things of life and especially of technical progress. Moreover, as has often been pointed out, this same epoch, the closing years of the Victorian era, also had its characteristic repressions, bearing mainly on the sexual sphere. Now Freud’s point of view, revealed not only the dangers of sexual repression but at the same time drew attention to the importance of the psychic world.
This should be particularly stressed, I believe, because the epoch also aspired toward something which one cannot call simply materialistic. It longed unconsciously, and judging by certain features of its literature, half-consciously too, for an expansion of its ego-consciousness, or perhaps I should say, for a new consciousness in general. Such longing, of course, involved much more than the removal of sex repressions. The time longed for just what it most lacked and therefore stood most in need of: it longed for compensation.
And the “compensatory thing”: was about to appear; it was already approaching. The moment was one of those out of the very fullness of which, as Renan once said, the necessary genius is born. Signs of great changes were observable in the general philosophic trend of those days. The “cultural disciplines” of an epoch always express its stage of consciousness—and its unconscious aspirations too. Already the keen intuition of Nietzsche had given great impetus toward change in what he said about the immense role played by the instincts, not only in ourselves, but in our civilization. However, it was still only an isolated impetus.
The “compensatory thing” which was about to appear received its initial formulation in Freud’s vast mind; and we know the shape that it took there. I have tried to describe the limitations of the Freudian method; now let me add that these limitations were conditioned by the constellation of Freud’s mind which in turn was very much conditioned by the constellation of the consciousness of his time. That is why the “compensatory thing,” when it took shape, found itself hemmed in by iso-lationist, mechanical, and individualistic attitudes, which prevented it from reaching its full growth and its true form. Nevertheless, with its appearance the compensatory process had set in, and the fact that Freud now began applying depth psychology to cultural subjects was part of it. To be sure, this was done in an unsatisfactory way, as I have indicated; but even so, the first step had been taken toward applying depth psychology to the cultural disciplines.
Freud had not supplied the full measure of compensation for which the time longed, nor the new consciousness of which it stood in need. However, he had done something of tremendous import. With him, a process of self-awareness had set in, which later would become self-regulatory—an autonomous process which would continue thereafter. The “compensatory thing” itself was searching, as it were, for other minds on which to seize. I feel there is something archetypal about the process by which the “compensatory thing” came into being. Could the emergence of the idea of the personal unconscious have marked the emergence of a new archetype?
In the years that the Freudian school continued to experiment with cultural phenomena, the Jungian school was developing new interpretations of such phenomena. From 1912 until the present, Jung has worked along these lines, and the last two decades have seen the development of the great annual symposium, called “Eranos.” When one enters this world from the world of Freud, one breathes a new spiritual atmosphere. Here the authors conceive of things of the spirit as autonomous entities; they view the work of art with open minds and hearts; they detach it from its merely personal elements and see it whole; then they link this whole with a greater whole, the inner history of the soul. They survey a wide field with a keen desire for authenticity, and therefore they like to draw on the original sources. In some significant cases, they seem to stand before the work of art in an attitude of “pure contemplation” (reine Schau), to use a phrase of Goethe’s. All this leads to characteristic and powerful reactions between the points of view of analytical psychology and the cultural disciplines. Take, for example, the volumes published to commemorate Jung’s sixtieth, seventieth and seventy-fifth birthdays and you will be astonished at the extensity and the growing intensity of the phenomenon they reveal, at the amount of reciprocal illumination taking place in these areas.
That the great Eranos symposia should have been held under the influence of Jungian psychology, and especially under the influence of the idea of the archetype, can be explained in two ways: first by the character of Jungian psychology itself, and second by the role that it plays in the spiritual history of our time.
We may place Jung, as we placed Freud, at the crossing point of three important currents. The first of these derives from the findings of the psychiatric clinic and includes Freud’s own first findings. This current developed from modern natural science and is entirely rational in its approach.
The second and third currents, however, as Jung himself is well aware, have certainly to do with the non-rational sphere. The second, for example, took rise from the gropings of all those thinkers from Leibniz, through Schelling and Carus, to Nietzsche, who, although they already spoke of the unconscious matrix of consciousness, were not yet able to say with any degree of concreteness what its function actually was: Jung was the first to fill the concept of the unconscious with concrete contents.
Thirdly, Jung belongs among the great revivers of the symbol—the meaning of which was lost toward the end of the eighteenth century. However, symbols never disappear entirely, they only go underground, as it were, and sooner or later their meaning is rediscovered. Now, together with Herder and Hamann and certain German authors of the Romantic epoch, with Jacob Grimm, and with Bachofen, Jung definitely belongs to the great rediscoverers of the significance of the symbol. His work crowns their endeavors in that he is the first to realize the symbol’s deep psychological implications.
Perhaps I should add, as a fourth current, the influence of Bergson which greatly strengthened Jung’s appreciation of intuition as one of the main functions of the psyche. But whether this philosophic influence be included or not, it is certain that, by comparison with Freud, Jung’s mind is definitely of a philosophical turn.
Beyond these specific influences, the spiritual atmosphere of Basel, Jung’s native city, the city of Erasmus, Bachofen, and Burckhardt, may account for much in the early broadness of his outlook. One point in particular needs stressing, I think, if we are to understand how it was that he was the first to perceive the archetype as a psychological reality, and that is his eager interest, even as a youth, in the kind of poetry which he was later to call “symbolic” or “visionary.” The way in which he refers to literature and poetry in many of his works is evidence of his lifelong familiarity with such subjects. Think of his significant commentaries on Hölderlin’s poems,22 and on Spitteler’s Prometheus and Epimetheus,23 of his essay on Joyce’s Ulysses,24 and his inexhaustibly rich seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.25
As a result, the atmosphere of his writings is entirely different from that pervading Freud’s. Clearly, Jungian psychology was predestined from the beginning to come face to face with the cultural disciplines at just the points where their problems were most deeply challenging.
Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious, which I like to quote by its German title which begins with the word Wandlungen (transformations), is actually the document which records the transformations occurring in his thought around 1912. Phenomenologically speaking, the core of the book is composed of poetry, associations to poetry, and interpreted amplifications of the associations. Although he is still using Freudian terminology, Jung arrives at an utterly non-Freudian concept of the symbol. From this fact one thing becomes unmistakably clear to any careful and unprejudiced reader of the book: namely, that it was precisely at this point, in reference to their difference of opinion concerning the meaning of the symbol, that the two psychologies inevitably came to a parting of the ways.
The thirty-eight years which have passed since then, and especially the last thirty, have seen the full unfolding of Jung’s original idea of the symbol. This was also the period of the unfolding of the idea of the archetype. Both evolutions were conditioned by the intimate collaboration of Jungian psychology with other cultural and philosophic disciplines.
The origin of the broad stream of ideas now grouped around the concept of the archetype was casual and modest. This concept first occurred to Jung when he analyzed a story by Anatole France. The main character of the story, an abbe, was haunted by the question of whether the soul of Judas had been saved or not. Jung felt that the abbe, haunted by this problem, was actually haunted by the image of Judas, that is, by the image of the betrayer of the hero, living within his own soul and in all of us. Then, in a footnote, he quoted Jacob Burckhardt who once wrote:
There was a chord of the Oedipus legend in every Greek which longed to be touched directly and respond in its own way. And thus it is with the German nation and Faust.26
Burckhardt called Faust a great primordial conception, a primordial image in which everyone can find himself, his own nature and destiny. It was this “primordial image” which Jung was later to call the “archetype.” He first identified the term with Plato’s “idea.” However, what Plato saw on the metaphysical level, Jung looked for on the psychological.
It is true that under the influence of a very popular biological theory of his time, Semon’s theory of the “mneme,” defined as the sum of the typical experiences of our ancestors, Jung spoke of the “engram,” meaning the traces left in the individual brain by this long series of experiences. But later on Jung tacitly abandoned the “engram,” and in his later works he tends to speak more and more of the archetype as a spiritual phenomenon.
In the intervening years, as we learn from his significant essay “Der Geist der Psychologie,”27 Jung’s major effort has been to demonstrate that the archetypes, so familiar to him from experience with his patients, could also be shown to have existed throughout history. And he has found ample proof for this in a variety of cultural phenomena. In the course of his endeavors it has become clearer and clearer that what the archetypes actually express is the existence of the collective unconscious and its ways of working. This was made plain not only by Jung’s own prolonged excavations but by the analogous endeavors of many students of allied subjects whom his psychology had inspired. Now the idea is gradually gaining acceptance and the archetype is beginning to prove itself of inestimable value in interpreting all kinds of cultural phenomena. There is an essay of Jung’s, written in 1922, which can be considered the starting point of a long evolution. I refer to the lecture “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology and Poetic Art,”28 delivered before a group of historians of literature in Zurich. Here a whole system of important results is summarized—though without showing the road by which those results were reached. Significant in itself, it is invaluable when seen from the angle of the history of ideas. I quote Jung who begins:
Before analytical psychology can do justice to the work of art, it must entirely rid itself of medical prejudice; for art work is not morbidity … It is essentially extra-personal … A psychology with purely biological orientation … can never be applied to the true work of art, and still less to man as a creator … The art work …can … almost be described as a being that uses man and personal dispositions as a cultural medium.
Here we may be reminded of Jung’s paradox: “It was not Goethe who wrote Faust; it was Faust who wrote Goethe.”
Jung considers the work of art, or, more precisely, the creative process, to be the result of an autonomous complex.
But of what does that autonomous complex consist?[he asks]. The work itself, [he answers], is accessible to analysis just in so far as we are able to appreciate it as a symbol. Our first question should run: To what primordial image of the collective unconscious can we trace the image we see developed in the work of art? The source of symbolical art works is not to be found in the personal unconscious of the author, but in the sphere of that unconscious mythology, the primordial contents of which are the common heritage of mankind. The archetype … is … a figure or a process that repeats itself in the course of history, wherever creative phantasy is freely manifested. These mythological forms [he goes on] are in themselves themes of creative phantasy that still await their translation into conceptual language, only laborious beginnings of which exist. These concepts, still to be created, could provide us with an abstract scientific understanding of the unconscious processes, processes that are the roots of the primordial images
Since Herder, many minds have approached the problems expressed here, but no one prior to Jung has come so close to their essence. This is a real breakthrough to the meaning of the symbolic in poetry, to the secret of the creative process.
The shaping of the primordial image is, as it were, a translation into the language of the present which makes it possible for every man to find again the deepest springs of life which would otherwise be closed to him. Here lies the social importance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age (the Zeitgeist) since it gives birth to forms in which the age is lacking …
Quite a way from Freud’s Leonardo to these statements!
The set of questions which Jung finally posed constitutes a challenge to all students of literature and culture:
What was the significance of realism and naturalism to their age? What was the meaning of romanticism and of modern) Hellenism for their age? … They were tendencies of which the contemporary mental atmosphere had most need … Thus … art … also represents a process of mental self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.
In writing this, Jung surely anticipated that the archetype would prove to be the link connecting analytical psychology with a variety of other subjects. Everything was there: a new and significant point of view, a study program for the historians of our culture, and a method for putting it into effect. Let us see what the historical development actually was.
During the years of the first World War and after, Jung intensified his pursuit of the archetype; he visited primitive tribes of African natives and also American Indian tribes, he reexamined the ancient cultures of China and India; and in all these places he found viable proof of his ideas. As the climax, perhaps, of this long investigation, he wrote the book, Psychologie und Alchemie, which shows how some of the oldest and greatest symbols survived in alchemy although they had, to all appearances, been lost with the advent of Christianity.
At the beginning of this period, the cultural disciplines were just emerging from a crisis. The ambitious efforts of the positivistic school of the eighteen sixties and seventies to approach cultural subjects with the methods of natural science had proved a failure. Taine, who promised to analyze moral phenomena like sugar or vitriol, was, of course, never able to do so, and the failure of his effort was followed by an aftermath of resignation. After that for a while the students of culture were interested in nothing but facts; but that could not last long and so again they began to look for a new principle to explain their facts.
But the natural sciences were obviously unable to present them with such a principle; and besides, since the beginning of the twentieth century the natural sciences themselves had produced so many radically new discoveries that their philosophical foundations had become shaky. The very nature of “natural” law had been challenged by a new idea: the idea of statistical law. So the cultural subjects now had to revise their relationship to natural science. The German philosopher Rickert wrote of the limitations of scientific thought, and Dilthey and his disciple Spranger tried in many ways to show how cultural subjects could develop a genuine method, adequate to deal with their own material; but no great unifying principle had yet made its appearance. Meanwhile, masses of new material accumulated, excavations revealed unknown cultures, anthropological expeditions furnished new data on the life of primitive peoples, history and philology discovered meaningful new details; and, as our understanding of cultural matters threatened to break down completely under the dead weight of all this additional material, the need for a unifying and all-pervading principle became increasingly great.
It was at this stage that the concept of the archetype became known to a few qualified students of cultural subjects. Let me mention Heinrich Zimmer and Richard Wilhelm among the first. Soon, however, the archetype was to prove itself a veritable catalytic agent in bringing about the meeting of minds required for the advance toward the goal I have described. The initial group—which contained more than one of Jung’s personal friends—greatly expanded, until, in 1933, the Eranos seminar group was founded at Ascona.
The Eranos Yearbooks consist mainly of papers on the inner history of the soul, and the universalizing principle to be found in them is the archetype. One representative member of the group who should be mentioned here is Karl Kerényi, who came into contact with Jung through his work on mythology, a contact which was to lead to a fruitful collaboration.
Kerenyi quotes the following from Herman Broch, the German novelist:
In the myth the fundamental truths of the soul are revealed to herself; she recognizes them in the events of the world and of nature, and transforms them into narration.29
It was the recognition of this fact that made it possible for Jung and Kerenyi to collaborate.
Thomas Mann in his now published correspondence with Kerényi characterized the collaboration of Jung and Kerenyi as follows:
This connection [mythology plus psychology] represents to me no more and no less than the world of the future, a humanity blessed by the spirit from above, and from the depth which lies below.30
The correspondence shows clearly that Mann himself is influenced by the spirit of Jungian psychology. Thomas Mann sees in the collaboration of Kerényi and Jung “a moment characteristic of the evolution of the spirit.” With Lawrence, Powys, Döblin, and of course Mann himself, the “mythological novel” appears which, according to Mann and Kerényi, is destined to become the genre of the future. Reading the papers of Kerényi and Jung, which are complementary to one another, we feel that we are entering the sanctum of the symbol. Interpreted by the depth philologist out of his knowledge of ancient forms and ideas, interpreted by the depth psychologist out of his insight into human nature, the symbols finally begin to reveal their hidden meaning. And we may say this of the whole Eranos group: In its works, the symbol speaks again. One of its most important members, Walter Willi, a classical philologist of Basel ,31 declares that psychology is the central subject of the cultural disciplines. He is convinced that the collective unconscious actually exists and, speaking of his hopes for our culture, predicts that analytical psychology “will take over and mobilize the history of religion.” Willi also hopes that analytical psychology will furnish history in general, but especially the history of literature and art, “with a whole new set of questions.” He predicts: “Then, out of the depth of the soul will come a thing deeper and greater than the grasp of the laws of artistic form as outlined by Wölfflin.” And Heinrich Wölfflin’s lifework stands certainly as one of the most solid in art history.32
After Kerényi and Mann, John Layard, the Oxford anthropologist, should be mentioned because of his criticism of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. I cannot go into the details of his excellent paper, “The Incest Taboo and the Archetype of Virginity,”33 which is a model of dream interpretation, mythology, and anthropology combined in a single method. But I want to emphasize one point.
In the first part of Layard’s paper the anthropological basis of Freud’s Totem and Taboo is definitely revealed—even more definitely than by Malinowski—as a piece of speculation founded on non-existent experience. Layard writes:
Freud’s hypothesis, as advanced in Totem and Taboo, is that a primitive horde was led by an aged patriarch, who possessed all the women, and whose sons finally rebelled against him and killed him and married his wives, thus giving birth to the Oedipus complex. This has done more to discredit Freud among anthropologists than any of his works, for there is no evidence whatever that such a condition ever existed.
Then Layard describes the real marriage patterns of primitive peoples and his account is founded on exact observation and sociological interpretation. Finally, he gives a new interpretation of the incest taboo.
The basic error of Freud, according to Layard, is that he considers the taboo as something imposed from without, by an authority; Layard holds that the
taboo comes from within … It is a dictate of those deeper layers of the collective unconscious. Authority asserts itself only where those older, inward truths are lost sight of.
Layard gives his new explanation of the incest taboo, first, by pointing to its positive content, its social function, which is to expand the bases of society, and, second, by pointing to the latent complementary content of it. This content is, according to Layard: fulfillment within the soul of the very thing the taboo forbids doing in the flesh, i.e., a union with the original principle of motherhood, represented by a spiritual return to the womb.
When reading the Eranos Yearbooks, we see the archetype gradually becoming filled with more and more concrete content; we see it developing from a hypothesis to a reality.
I wish to quote a last author and a great one, although not of this group, Ernst Robert Curtius. I am quoting him for his own sake, but also in answer to Lewisohn’s conception of Freud’s work as a modern “organon.” In Die europäische Literatur und das lateinische Mittelalter,34 Curtius takes up the subject of those general motives of literature and oratory which the ancients called “commonplaces” (loci communes, koinoi topoi) and which were taught in the Greek schools of rhetoric; he gives them a new and interesting interpretation. “The old child” or “the youthful old man” are examples of such commonplaces, and they emerge, according to Curtius, en masse at certain moments of history, only to disappear more or less completely again. Curtius found such commonplaces in various literatures of the Middle Ages, compared them by the traditional methods of philology, and asked, What are they really, those commonplaces of literature? Where do they come from? What makes them come and go? And his answer is: “Those commonplaces could only be explained by means of Jung’s analytical psychology; they are projections of the collective unconscious.”
These thoughts of Curtius measure the distance separating his theory of literature from that of Ludwig Lewisohn. But Curtius goes even further. He declares that “in the coming and going of these commonplaces … the changing psychical situation of a period reveals itself.” By this statement he also assigns to the historians of culture a new, clear and very broad task; and simultaneously he points to the means that would help them to accomplish it, namely, to analytical psychology and the concept of the archetype. In other words, he accepts the idea formulated by Jung in his paper published in 1922. Now in the essay on Balzac in his most recent book,35 Curtius even identifies the basic force, moving all the characters in the Comédie Humaine, with Jung’s psychic energy.
So we see how analytical psychology, which in the beginnings leaned for support upon the cultural disciplines, has now rendered them a truly essential service. By this time, it must be clear why I said that these fields of study were mutually illuminating. The consistency of the ideas and attitudes which this mutual illumination has produced, as well as the organic character of the process which has brought them into being, was what I meant by the “pragmatic proof.” It remains to be seen if the future will fulfill the hopes expressed by Professor Willi and others.
Having partially reviewed the story of the relationship between analytical psychology and the cultural disciplines, I want now to stress again that Freudian psychology was a great challenge, and that Jungian psychology was history’s great answer to it. The challenge clearly consisted in Freud’s misreading of the symbol, and also in his complete denial of autonomy to any immaterial cultural influences. Jung’s equally clear reply was to make that autonomy, together with a new reading of the symbol, the keystone of his psychology.
The origins, methods, and philosophies of these two depth psychologies are characterized by the entirely different outlooks of their originators, by their completely different feelings about life (Lebensgefühl).
The feeling about life conveyed by Freudian psychology throws the individual back on himself, completely isolated, and, as it were, forlorn in the world. His personality having been disjointed and never completely reorganized, he looks at himself and his world with suspicion and doubt. All the values he knew have been reduced, interpreted as no more than so many transformations of the sexual desire.
The feeling about life which the Jungian psychology conveys is primarily the sense of being part of a whole. The individual feels himself to be a link in a chain, connecting the past, the present and the future.
May I conclude with the dream of a person who is in the process of individuation. This individual dreamed of a clock made of heavy metal. The clock had two dials. One was turned outward to the world, but on the back of the clock, in its center, there was a second dial, turned to the dreamer. The hands on the two dials were moving in the same rhythm. Perhaps that clock, as a symbol of the Self, serves best to express harmony between the individual and the universe which Jungian psychology helps to build.
NOTES
This paper was read before a meeting of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York on 20 October 1950.
1. Throughout this paper I shall understand by “cultural disciplines” what the German philosopher Heinrich Rickert called “Kulturwissenschaften.” Rickert defines them as follows: “These are the disciplines which don’t aim at stating natural laws, not even at evolving general ideas: the historical disciplines in the widest meaning of the word”; quoted by Toni Wolf in Die kulturelle Bedeutung der komplexen Psychologie (Berlin: Springer, 1935), p. 17.
2. Otto Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), p. 247.
3. Edmund Bergler, The Writer and Psychoanalysis (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
4. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality, translated by A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1947).
5. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, translated by Beatrice Hinkle (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1913), p. 7.
6. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 52
7. Dmitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney (New York: The Modern Library, 1928).
8. Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, p. 339.
9. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 97
10. Ibid., p. 61.
11. Ibid., p. 65.
12. Ibid., p. 71.
13. Ibid., p. 72.
14. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: The Modern Library, 1873), p. 134.
15. C. G. Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious (New York: Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 1936). For the important dual mother role, see also Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, ch. 7.
16. Ludwig Lewisohn, The Story of American Literature (New York: The Modern Library, 1931), p. vii.
17. Ibid., p. 139.
18. ”Entwurf einer Psychologie,” in Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887–1902 (London: Imago, 1950;), p. 379; my translation.
19. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, translated by A. A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library, 1938), p. 468ff.
20. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by C. J. M. Hubback (London and Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922).
21. William McDougall, “Instinct and the Unconscious,” The British Journal of Psychology 10 (1919).
22. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 448ff.
23. C. G. Jung. Psychological Types, translated by H. G. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926), ch. 5.
24. C. G. Jung, “Ulysses,” in Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought (1949).
25. C. G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra,” 10 vols. Privately printed in Zurich, 1934–39.
26. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, Notes, p. 490.
27. Eranos Yearbook 14 (1946).
28. C. G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, translated by H. G. and C. F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928), pp. 225–49.
29. Hermann Broch, “The Heritage of Myth in Literature,” Chimera 4, no. 3 (1946); quoted in Karl Kerényi, Niobe (Zurich/Stuttgart: Rhein-Verlag, 1956), p. 36.
30. Karl Kerényi and Thomas Mann, Romandichtung und Mythologie: Ein Briefwechsel (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1945), p. 82.
31. Eranos Yearbook 12 (1944).
32. Heinrich Wölfflin, a Swiss scholar and disciple of Burckhardt. As outstanding examples of his work, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) and Klassische Kunst (1914) should perhaps be mentioned (both published in Munich by Bruckmann).
33. Eranos Yearbook 12 (1944).
34. E. R. Curtius, Die europäische Literatur und das lateinische Mittelalter (Bern: Franck, 1948).
35. E. R. Curtius, Kritische Essays zur europäische Literatur (Bern: Franck, 1950), p. 96.
Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought (1951): 78–97
© Copyright 1951 The Analytical Psychology Club of New York, Inc.