ON THE NEUROSIS OF PSYCHOLOGY OR
THE THIRD OF THE TWO
1. The Third Person of Psychotherapy. In contrast to “group therapy” we speak of “individual therapy,” “Einzeltherapie.” A strange formulation, for does it not imply a one-person affair? This formulation evokes reminiscences of the early “talking cure,” the monologue of the patient, in which the therapist functioned only as an observing audience, an outsider. Through this term a conventional medical thought pattern seems to intrude into our psychological thinking, or rather cling to it, although we believe to have overcome it long ago. Surely, we know and accept that psychotherapy is a two-person affair, a dialogue; that the analyst is inevitably drawn in, and that Jung even went far beyond the acknowledgement of a duality based on transference by demanding that the doctor step out of his role altogether and fully enter into the process on an equal footing with the patient. Just as the patient is to lift his mask in analysis, so is the analyst supposed to give up his anonymity. Mutuality takes the place of asymmetry. We know and affirm this—but the term “individual therapy” (let alone our practice) shows what a powerful hold conventional thinking has over us. We obviously still think of psychotherapy as a one-way process in which everything revolves about the patient. He has to be cured. Psychotherapy is fixated on the patient.
Jung even went beyond the dialogue-idea to a dialectic understanding of psychotherapy. Whereas a dialogue is an interaction or communication between two persons, dialectics involves a Third. A dialectic understanding of therapy thus implies that doctor and patient are not alone. There always is a third factor, a third “person” present. This idea of the Third characterizes Jung’s view of psychotherapy throughout. We read, e.g., in “Psychology of Transference” (CW 16, §399): “Psychological induction inevitably causes the two parties to get involved in the transformation of the third and to be themselves transformed in the process.” It is this third “person” on which the therapy ultimately depends. The psychological induction is here not thought of as running from the patient to the analyst or vice versa, but rather as an embeddedness of both persons in the Third, in “mutual unconsciousness” (ibid., §364). Instead of asymmetrically concentrating on the patient, both persons now focus their attention on this objective third factor. What is this factor, who is the third person of psychotherapy? It is, of course, the soul, which is no longer to be imagined as the individual property of each of the two other persons, but must be given independent reality. It is the world of complexes and archetypal images, of views and styles of consciousness, and thus it is also psychology itself, in the widest sense of the word, including all our ideas about the soul, its pathology and therapy, as well as our Weltanschauung. “As the most complex of psychic structures,” writes Jung (ibid., §180), “a man’s philosophy of life forms the counter pole to the physiologically conditioned psyche, and, as the highest psychic dominant, it ultimately determines the latter’s fate. It guides the life of the therapist and shapes the spirit of his therapy.” The third person unfolds into two aspects or counterparts, which can be distinguished, but ultimately belong together: the soul itself and the theory about it (psychology), and, if we follow Jung, it is the latter on which the fate of the former depends.
Our psychological theories are thus of highest importance to the outcome of therapy (cf. CW 10, §340). They are present from the beginning, and they guide and shape the spirit of therapy. If psychology is in this sense the third autonomous person with a living and decisive presence in psychotherapy, it may also be suspected of having its own unconsciousness—and possibly even its own neurosis.
2. The Neurosis of Psychology. It was again Jung who formulated this suspicion and elaborated on it. In a paper of 1934 he comes to the conclusion that “Psychology today, it seems to me, still has a vast amount to unlearn and relearn … But first it must cease thinking neurotically” (CW 10, §369). To begin with, psychology itself thinks in a neurotic fashion, according to Jung. In the same paper we find a number of different formulations for this idea, mainly in reference to Freud’s psychoanalysis. Thus Jung argues that precisely that which happens to the neurotic has been dignified with the name of a “theory” by the psychoanalyst, so that patient and doctor ride “the same hobby-horse” (ibid., §362). “It is positively grotesque that the doctor should himself fall into a way of thinking which in others he rightly censures … and wants to cure” (ibid., §356). Or: “Freud, it seems, took the neurotic conjectures quite seriously and thus fell into the same trap as the neurotic” (ibid.).
These sentences contain a scandalous thesis. Neurosis is not what the patient has and for what psychology provides the remedy, but is already inherent in therapeutic psychology itself. Patient and doctor—a case of folie à deux! Instead of being the healing answer to neurosis, instead of overcoming it and bringing an end to it, therapeutic psychology is the continuation of neurosis by other means. Or in the words of the cynical joke attributed to Karl Kraus: psychoanalysis is that illness whose cure it thinks to be.
Because Jung exemplified this thesis mainly by psychoanalysis, it was usually taken as an expression of his alleged anti-Freudian resentment and thus it was not felt necessary to take it seriously. We do not want to follow this train of thought and place Jung’s idea within a fantasy of the battle among the schools of depth psychology. We rather take it seriously as containing an important principle, a critical tool with which to examine our own psychological assumptions. Our critical question is: where do we, in and with our theories, ride the same hobby-horse as the patient?
The question is not directed at us as persons. Our purpose here is not to analyze the neurotic features of the therapist as a private individual, but rather those of psychology itself, which we are here regarding as an autonomous “person.” We want to find out whether our psychological theory has taken over neurotic thought patterns and mechanisms into the structure of its own “consciousness” and whether it tries to fight or cure those very same mechanisms in the patient in order to defend itself against becoming aware of its own neurosis. Of course, it is impossible to review the sum total of our psychological ideas in this paper. We must content ourselves with a number of characteristic examples that show the principle indicated by Jung at work in central areas of our psychology.
3. The “Negation of the Negative.” I take this phrase and idea from Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, where it is revealed as being at the core of the scapegoat mentality of old ethics, whereas depth psychology in its entirety has meant the confrontation of modern man with all those factors that he wanted to close his eyes to. This was true from the very beginning of psychoanalysis with Freud, who brought about the recognition of sexuality within a Victorian world, to Jung’s emphasis on the shadow and his attempt to integrate the idea of evil even into the image of God. The principle of depth psychology is the lifting of the repressions, and there can be no doubt that this principle guides the practice of analytical psychotherapists, who do not want to talk the patient out of his symptoms, but allow him (or her) to “regress,” that is, to follow the path of his pathology. So much for analytical practice. But how about psychological theory?
It seems to me, what our theory thinks about regression can be summarized in the oft-quoted saying reculer pour mieux sauter: regression for the purpose of an even better progression. We affirm pathology and regression, but only because a reward is in the offing. Psychological theory holds out a carrot, much as in Christian theology the promise of Heaven makes the vale of tears palatable. It is only a token acceptance, necessitated by the circumstances, but not a wholehearted affirmation. Just as the neurotic, if it turns out that his fantasy cannot be realized, is ready to put up with all kinds of disagreeable symptoms and to accept all sorts of concessions—so long as he does not have to give up his fantasy altogether—so is psychology willing to make concessions to the id, the infantile fantasies and pathology, if it can thereby avoid having to change its innermost attitude of hostility towards the pathological. Even if in analytical practice the symptoms and the regressive tendencies are accepted, our thinking retains the habitual attitude that we call negation of the negative. Reculer pour mieux sauter means a return, not of the repressed, but of repression! The repression that we fight in the consulting-room returns as a repressive spirit in our very own theory. Here, our psychological ideas clearly follow the neurotic mind.
Likewise, when psychotherapy as a whole is conceived after the model of medicine and thinks of itself mainly as a healing and curing profession, it inherits the hostile position that medicine holds towards illness. A standpoint which continues the hostility of the patient toward his disturbance is of course not in accordance with the principle of depth psychology. Both Freud and Jung were aware of this. Freud clearly stated that psychoanalysis was not a department of medicine, not a chapter in a psychiatry textbook, not even medical psychology, but psychology purely and simply.1 And Jung went so far as to reject altogether the will to heal and change, or at least to query it. ”But when a patient realizes that cure through change would mean too great a sacrifice, then the doctor can, indeed he should, give up any wish to change or cure” (CW 16, §11; my italics), for what we call healing actually amounts to an amputation (CW 10, §355). Instead of the usual hostile attitude Jung envisions a gratefulness toward the neurotic symptoms (CW 16, §11) and demands, “We should even learn to be thankful for it [the neurosis], otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity” (CW 10, §361). “In the neurosis is hidden one’s worst enemy and best friend. One cannot rate him too highly [!]” (ibid., §359). “We should not try to ‘get rid’ of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us” (ibid., §361). Here, Jung’s thinking has fully given up the reculer pour mieux sauter attitude. This is true depth psychology, because the negative is no longer negated, not even secretly, but unconditionally erinnert and affirmed—without leaving open an escape hatch.
Jungian theory distinguishes a positive from a negative aspect of the archetypes, and when we find the negative aspect at work in a patient, we think it necessary to “constellate’” the corresponding positive one. Here our “panic fear” (CW 10, §530) of psychopathology expresses itself, as well as does our attempt to combat it through apotropaic measures. We use the good mother to drive out the bad mother. The negative must not be. But we do not simply fight it through activities (constellating the positive aspect), but also theoretically through the “neurotic trick of euphemistic disparagement” (ibid., § 365): we conceive all “negative” images as merely temporary, as an expression of an intermediate stage that hopefully will be followed by “positive,” “prospective” images. Thus we devaluate the negative. Darkness is “nothing but” a night-sea-journey upon which there will be a new sunrise, and it is for the sunrise that we are willing to go into the dark. Even worse—“death” becomes the road to rebirth. If this is how we see death, as a mere passage, it does not have a full reality of its own. It is degraded to a means to an end.
Thus psychology takes sides for life and for light and against darkness and death, it belittles the negative, and through such thinking tries to overcome it, to leave it behind or below. Here we have in our own theory what Jung terms the denial of the left hand. The acceptance of darkness is, so to speak, acted out. We want the patient (or ourselves as persons) to accept it; we project the task of accepting it onto persons and into the consulting-room, and thereby save our theory from having to admit darkness and death into its innermost structure. By the same token we like to use the formula “not yet,” this variety of the “nothing but” and thus to place the negative or imperfect into an eschatological fantasy of development or growth. The patient is “still” in the oral or uroboric phase, he has “not yet” reached the genital level or the solar-rational stage. With such formulations we implicitly cast out the condition in which he is now; the present condition is not accepted as what it is, but only for what may come out of it. Inherent in the positive hope for a better future is a condemnation of the present. We only seem to accept the shadow, in actuality we still repress it, only in a more subtle and less obvious way. The very distinction between the positive and the negative means a dissociation. Moreover, as a moralistic value judgment, it necessarily involves a devaluation and repudiation. Speaking about symbols Jung takes a stand against such thinking. “The moralistic and hygienic temper of our days must always know whether such and such a thing is harmful or useful, right or wrong. A real psychology cannot concern itself with such queries; to recognize how things are in themselves is enough” (CW 6, §203). Positive (prospective) and negative are not psychological categories but instruments of moralistic repression.
Our theory is full of ego; ego-psychology, ego-functions, ego-development and stages of the ego, ego-consciousness and ego-strengthening. What does this mean if not that our theory is dominated by, or fixated upon, the very same ego that ought to be “removed” by the neurosis, as we heard from Jung? Psychology has again incorporated a neurotic aberration in its very theory. The archetype of the hero, who in some ways can be considered a paramount model of neurotic behavior, has even been made the quasi-official prototype of ’healthy development. When such a heroic ego is confronted with the consequences of its violence and tires of its show of strength, it may long to abandon itself to the “Great Experience,” the Urerfahrung (Neumann), the “Peak Experience” (Maslow), or the “Creative Moment” something quite out of the ordinary that therefore can also not be attained within ordinary life. This ego will wait for an oversize numinous experience, for the very special Archetypal dream, or practice all sorts of meditative techniques, or even make use of drugs to go on its special trip. A term like “Great Experience” implies a betrayal of the small events of everyday life and the hero’s impotence to experience them. The thinking behind such terms alienates us even more from ourselves and from simple things by depreciating them and inflating us.
Another type of negation of the negative can be found in the attitude that characterizes conventional depth psychology. Whereas therapy aims for flexibility, spontaneity, free association and active imagination and wants to provide a temenos of warmth and under-standing, psychology as theory is interested in hard facts, in a systematic body of experientially based knowledge about the psyche in well-defined concepts, and tries to give itself a scientific air by using a technical jargon, typology, clinical expressions, even “cases,” by designing tests and employing various other methods for the validation of its findings. In our practice we take heed of Jung’s advice to steer clear of any rigid technique and to be open to the individuality of the patient and to the requirements of the moment. But our theoretical thinking is dominated by practical and technical questions: group therapy or not? Is one allowed to touch the patient? What to do if the patient …? How to deal with transference reactions? Could “other” techniques, such as gestalt or primal scream, enrich our repertoire? Such are the questions that really interest us, which shows that the technological mind is firmly rooted in the thought of psychology itself. The attitude prevailing in psychological theory is one of control, of “directed thinking,” of grasping. Obviously our theory uses the very same defense mechanisms of rationalization and intellectualization that it fights in the patient; imaginative theorizing, so-called speculation, is banned from theoretical psychology as is a feeling-toned personal involvement and mode of rhetoric. Symbolic thinking is something that the patient (or modern man in general) is supposed to develop, but our theory balks at it as at “inferior thinking.”
Even our idea of wholeness partakes of neurotic thinking. For we expect to achieve completeness through adding previously neglected functions to the number of well-developed ones or by compensating a one-sidedness through supplying the lacking side. In this manner we will only get an aggregate of functions, which in themselves are one-sided and split-off, but we will never get wholeness. Jung ridiculed this mistaken idea of completeness in a letter of 9.1.1960, discussing the topic of “Socrates and his flute.” He states, “The story starts with his daimonion, whispering into his ear: ‘Thou shouldst make more music, Socrates!’ Whereupon dear old well-meaning Socrates went to buy a flute and began lamentable exercises. He obviously misunderstood the advice, but in a characteristic way,” by taking the inner voice “literally and technically as if he were a modern man”—or, I would add, as if he were a modern Jungian psychotherapist. What was his misunderstanding? That he thought he could achieve wholeness through compensating his one-sided philosophical activities (thinking) with the “opposite” activity (music). The equation “philosophy + flute = wholeness” is obviously wrong according to Jung. Compensation does not mean a behavior (in the widest sense of this word: all directly or indirectly observable actions of the organism) that is added to the one-sided activity, but it means a change of attitude. Instead of thinking on the level of behavior (= literalizing), Socrates should have understood the counsel psychologically. Then he would not have played the flute by way of counterbalance; he would and could have stayed with philosophy—but he would then have philosophized in a less rationalistic, more “musical” fashion. The one-sidedness was not one of behavior (his specialization in philosophy), but one of the attitude with which he practiced this true and only profession of his (cf. Berry, “On Reduction” on this2). Thus Socrates acted out the compensation on the level of behavior when he should have accomplished it on the level of psychology, that is in the “Erinnerung,” recollection, by an inner change of mind.
Now, returning to ourselves and to psychology, we can say that we too try to act out the idea of wholeness by projecting it on the patient as a task to be accomplished and by understanding it on the level of behavior in terms of balancing the various functions or activities. But for Jung, wholeness is a matter of the “Blick fürs Ganze,” the view of the psyche as a whole" (CW 10, §370), not of becoming a psychological Jack-of-all-trades. It is not our specialization that has to change, but the narrow-mindedness with which we see. The place where wholeness has to be achieved, where the inferior function has to be developed and where the shortcomings that we call “shadow” have to be integrated is not mortal man as person—to think so would be hubris —but it is psychology, the psychology of each of us, as it was the place for Jung himself when he wrote his book on types. With these comments we are already touching upon the topic of the following section.
4. Personalism and Reductionism. In the same paper that gave us our touchstone with which to examine psychology for a possible neurosis, Jung describes “the prime evil of neurosis” as the loss of the “great relationship.” He “who denies the great must blame the petty.” Thus did Freud want to “put an end once and for all to the larger aspect of the psychic phenomenon,” says Jung with reference to The Future of an Illusion, “and in the attempt he continues the baleful work that is going on in every neurotic: destruction of the bond between men and the gods” (ibid., §367). Psychology again perpetuates the very principle behind the patient’s neurosis.
What Jung attacks here could be called the empiricism of psychology, that view which, because it denies “the great,” looks for the causes in “the petty,” i.e., tries to “explain” the neurosis causally from all kinds of “empirical” factors: sexuality or any biological instinct, the bad mother, family structure, social conditions, an organic deficiency, experiences during infancy, the trauma of birth, etc., etc. In all such theories the defense mechanisms of displacement and projection are at work; not only is our interest then directed outside our own field and psychology rooted heteronomously in other branches of knowledge (biology, sociology, behaviorism, medicine, and so on), but the neurosis itself is displaced far away from ourselves, from the soul, into some extrinsic factor. The neuroses must under no circumstances—such theories proclaim—be located within the soul. The external source of the neurosis may of course have to be sought relatively close to us, such as in our body (sexuality) or in some “inferior function”—it will be acceptable as long as it can be experienced (imagined) as something external and objective, in other words, as long as it does not involve our innermost subjectivity, the soul.
Jung by contrast advocated the idea that the neurosis originates, not from any empirical factor, but “from the mind [Seele] of the sufferer. Nor does it come from some obscure corner of the unconscious, as many psychotherapists still struggle to believe” (CW 10, §337). Scientific psychology, which aims for knowledge of objective facts, avoids the use of the word “soul” in favor of “behavior”—and this for no small reason. It is not a matter of “mere words,” but one of intensest reality: scientific objectivity helps us to “get out of it,” it helps us to defend ourselves against the neurosis and to keep it at bay, outside. We are wrong to believe that word magic occurs only in the primitive and in some patients; it happens now and on our home ground of psychology. The avoidance of the word soul and the “euphemistic disparagement” of the word behavior is an all-too-anxious attempt to seal off our most intimate subjectivity against any “evil” influences. Little wonder that such an isolated (autistic) psychology acts out the idea of relationship to excess.
Paradoxically the carefully avoided subjectivity unwittingly returns within the objective scientific world of facts, in more than one way. I do not here want to go into the topic of the “subjective conjectures” (ibid., §356) that underlie the allegedly objective “explanations” and “laws” of scientific psychology, but will restrict myself to the discussion of personalism. Empirical psychology knows only of psychological phenomena that belong to persons, that is, it can only conceive of them in terms of personal property, of “mine” or “his” or “yours” (cf. CW 12, §562). The root metaphor of psychology is atomism. First come all the individual persons and only then the soul (each person’s soul, instincts, feelings, and thoughts). If the soul exists for psychology as countless individual, separated souls, how can there be wholeness? Likewise, the psyche itself is thought to be made up of self-identical units (called agencies, functions, and the like), units, that is, which are originally and primarily conceived as separated and which make a whole only on account of their being combined within one system (aggregate). We already talked about the fact that the very structure of our theoretical thought establishes the isolation and separateness that it wants to overcome through striving for wholeness. We also know that addition (combination) cannot create a whole out of what is defined as split off, but that a change of our theoria in the direction of a “Blick fürs Ganze” is indispensable.
Now we add that psychology must start from the “whole,” from “the great,” from the “bond between men and the gods,” if it wants to arrive at wholeness and heal the neurotic splits. This is why Jung thought very little of basing our insights on case studies, on clinical observation within the consulting room. “The scope must be widened to reveal … the meaningful whole” (CW 10 §354). For this reason Jung turned to such seemingly remote and odd fields as mythology, gnosticism and alchemy when it was a question of seeing “the full range of the human psyche” (ibid., §369) at work. And instead of explaining the “larger aspect of the psychic phenomenon” from the consulting room experience, he conversely tried to see the patient and personal behavior in the light of the insights gained from such eccentric studies.
Why Jung turned to such odd fields and what is meant by “the great” and “the petty” can become clearer from an analogy that Edgar Wind uses in a similar connection. He talks about an iconographer who on account of his reductive approach discovered that “the symbolic creations of geniuses are unfortunately harder to nail down to a definite subject than the allegorical inventions of minor artists” and adds:
If this be so, there is something wrong with the manner of nailing down. A method that fits the small work but not the great has obviously started at the wrong end. In geometry, if I may use a remote comparison, it is possible to arrive at Euclidean parallels by reducing the curvature of a non-Euclidean space to zero, but it is impossible to arrive at a non-Euclidean space by starting out with Euclidean parallels. In the same way, it seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but that the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the the commonplace. Both logically and causally the exceptional is crucial, because it … introduces the more comprehensive category.3
But are we Jungians not making use of the more comprehensive category, are not we too starting with the “whole” and the “great”? For after all, the concepts of the collective unconscious and of the archetypes are in the center of Analytical Psychology. Yet, when we look at what we actually do, then I think it is an illusion to assume that Analytical Psychology is any less personalistic than, say, psychoanalysis. The difference is merely that the latter openly admits its personalistic and reductive approach whereas our theory disguises it.
We talk of the concrete mother and the other women in the family and entitle this “the matriarchal sphere”! We describe a mother as negative and then say she evoked the negative aspect of the mother archetype through her nature. What are we doing here? If a bad mother evokes the bad aspect of the mother archetype and a good mother the good aspect, then this means that the concrete person is the actual and decisive reality. The archetype is then no primordial image any more at all, it is not originary, but a derived and dependent factor—if not merely a big, inflated, but empty word behind which there is no other reality but the personal mother. It is a mere duplication of this mother, in the same way as Freud describes the imaginary parents in the family romance of the neurotic:4 these new and ennobled parents show characteristics that derive from the recollection of the real parents, so that the child actually does not remove the father, but only magnifies him. This euhemeristic analysis fits perfectly to our personalistic use of the term archetype: even if we rightly frown at personalistic reduction where it is used to disparage archetypal fantasy material—there are things which legitimately can be, even ought to be, subjected to a reductive interpretation: our inflated concepts.
The origin and root of the archetypal images (the way Analytical Psychology comprehends them) are the empirical persons. It is for this reason too, that in Analytical Psychology we almost exclusively find the mother (+ anima), father (+ animus), and the self archetypes: the richness and multitude of archetypal figures that we find in mythology has dwindled to these three or five (showing that our “archetypes” derive from, and depict, the (aggrandized) real family. This means that the old sensationalist fallacy is still at work and is only disguised in Analytical Psychology. How honest and relieving is Freud’s language. He means mother and he says mother. We mean the very same mother, but blow her up to an archetype. Thus we destroy what the term archetype actually and “originally” refers to, we cancel that imaginal “substance” from our thinking, but succeed in concealing this loss because with a kind of “immunization strategy” (H. Albert) we retain the word archetype as well as the numinous aura adhering to it. This aura, however, is now attributed to persons or to parts of the empirical personality. By thus undermining the concept of archetype from within and pressing the transpersonal into the narrow confines of the personal and empirical (understood personalistically) we even more definitely put an end to the larger aspect of the psychological phenomenon than Freud was able to do by denying it altogether. Our conventional use of archetypes therefore is the very opposite of “starting out with the more comprehensive category”: It amounts to nothing less than an apotheosis of the personalistic) and thus absolutely and unquestionably moors the “prime evil of neurosis” in our theory because it provides divine authentication for it.
5. The Effect of Psychology. Psychology has fallen into the very mode of thinking that it objects to in the neurotic. But if psychology itself is neurotic, how can it have a healing effect (which it obviously does have?) This is a very curious dilemma, since we cannot rightly deny either the neurosis or the healing effect. There seems to be only one possible answer: psychology does not heal despite its neurosis but because of it. This would also fit in with the insight that “healing” is itself a neurotic concept. Could it not be that the patient is freed of his (personal) neurosis because in therapy it is transferred to psychology, so that the latter carries it for him? In Freud’s view, the neurosis changes into a transference neurosis. But what happens to this new neurosis, where does it go when the transference is “dissolved.” Are we to think that the transpersonal objective realities called “transference” merely dissolve into thin air?
I would say, they are again transferred, but this time not onto a person, but onto an objective structure. Psychology receives the neurosis into itself, as into a container, and thus relieves the patient. The instrument of this transference is the endless number of interpretations ("working through") during analysis, by which the neurosis is deepened and widened (“amplified”) and the patient’s mentality raised to the objective level of psychology. What is sometimes called the “objectivation of the neurosis” could mean precisely this process. The patient is cured through his new connection with the impersonal theory which claims universal validity (e.g., overcoming of the Oedipus complex; individuation). Thus he gains a more objective, transpersonal attitude towards himself. What cures is the impersonal character of theory that appears in psychology as it does in any body of hermeneutic, in science, philosophy, or religion. This is the reason why any psychology works in therapeutic practice. That our psychology happens to be personalistic in its content does not alter the fact that as a system of meaning it remains objective and transpersonal. Indeed, from an archetypal view, it is itself of archetypal substance, although it is the very point of this psychology to deny anything archetypal (Freud) or to abuse the archetypal concepts reductively (Analytical Psychology). (In other words: personalistic reductivism is itself an archetypal mode).
If this be so, the principle of epistrophé (the reversion or return of our personal idiosyncracies to the appropriate archetypal dominants)5 would be confirmed once more; it would be the principle even behind conventional, often anti-archetypal psychotherapy, and analysis would work with theory as an autonomous factor even while denying it to be such. Inasmuch as such a revision is not a matter of intellectual comprehension, but requires, in order to have psychic reality, a ritual, we can understand why the tedious process of therapy has to be repeated with every patient anew. Therapy does not overcome, but on the contrary fully initiates into, that (archetypal) world that is called neurosis (and which is embodied in psychology). It is this initiation that relieves the individual person. Our psychology serves the same purpose that, e.g., the Mithraic cult or its successor, Christianity, had for the man of late antiquity. As redemptive religions they proclaimed the victory of light over darkness (what we would now call “The Successful Repression”) and thereby enabled the individual to reflect his personal neurosis against a transpersonal background and to give it a home there. Psychology with its eschatology of development is not merely a parallel to, and successor of, Christianity, but it is a true redemptive religion with a very severe cult—only in disguise.
Our psychology can be successful in therapy. But of course, the neurosis as such remains, and each successful analysis helps to neuroticize psychology once again or, at least, to keep it neurotic. Psychology as a whole does not heal the split, it rather perpetuates the neurosis and firmly moors it. And the cure of the patient is only one part of the effect of our therapeutic psychology. The other side is that over 80 years of psychotherapy have by no means been able to reduce the number of psychic disorders on a collective level. Psychology at large is abortive, it miscarries. Neurosis and medical psychology are fruits off the same tree. Together they seem to be one of the “games people play,” such as cops and robbers.
The displacement or transference from the personal level to objective psychology means that this psychology, as a cultural phenomenon and as a general way of looking (neurotically) at oneself and the psyche, carries the seeds of ever new neuroses in itself; what disturbances it takes from the patient, it somehow returns to the population at large (“Zeitgeist”). Our psychology has built repetition-compulsion into therapy; for every patient who completed his analysis there are several others waiting to begin one. With these findings we add a further aspect to Freud’s pessimistic idea of the interminability of analysis. He discussed the unending duration of the analysis of the individual patient and the possibility that an analysis may be terminated with momentary, but not with definitive (prophylactic) success. Our different point of view additionally takes into account the effect of analysis for the un-analyzed population at large, i.e., the epidemic character of the disease called analysis. Our result confirms the conclusions of Hillman who approached this same topic, also with reference to Freud, from his chosen perspective of hysteria and mysogyny.6
6. The Therapy of Psychology. In the past, we have been able to practice psychotherapy in the knowledge that even if we personally have our share in the neurosis we at least served a cause that was above board; the shortcomings and failures in therapy were due to (all-too-) human frailty, not to the very method of psychotherapy. Now we have, in addition to the humiliating insight of the possible neurosis of the therapist, to live with the much more hurtful discovery that even our cause, psychology, is thoroughly neurotic. Should we therefore abandon it? Of course not. For if we did so, we would once more react to neurosis with defenses and repression. No, as therapists we must also accept the neurosis of our own discipline. Jung says that one should be grateful to the neurosis and learn not how to get rid of it, but how to bear it. It is above all psychology which has to learn this lesson, not only the patient. The false ego-centeredness of our theory has to be disposed of. So psychology itself must be its own first patient. We now have to realize that the analysis of the persons involved (patient and analyst) will not suffice; theory needs analysis just as badly. Not all is done if I as analyst have subjected my personal neurotic mess to analysis; my impersonal mess, the neurosis of my psychology, remains untouched. (And yet, it is the impersonal neurosis that is closest and most intimate to us, since it is rooted in the transpersonal core of the personality.) This is why Jung spoke of the necessity for psychology to “unlearn and relearn,” of the need for a “radical revision” (cf. Hillman’s title: Re-Visioning Psychology) and for a “liberation from outworn ideas which have seriously restricted our view of the psyche as a whole” (CW 10, §369f.). Above all, he demanded a critique of the premises and presuppositions underlying our thinking, indeed, a “critical psychology.”
Freud, in his paper on “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” realized that the attempt to shorten the duration of analysis shows a remainder of medicine’s impatient disdain for the neuroses and himself opted for “setting oneself the goal, not of abbreviating, but of deepening analysis.”7 This necessary deepening, however, must not be understood in terms of duration or thoroughness in detail, nor as penetration to ever “earlier” disorders (primary narcissism or prenatal traumas) or more basic causes (Freud’s biological bedrock). These are the wrong categories which needs make analysis interminable (infinite) since one can always find something more basic or earlier. This thinking amounts to the futile attempt to come to an end by following the Euclidean parallels to infinity.
The deepening of analysis must rather be taken as a progression to a fundamentally new level, to Wind’s “more comprehensive category,” to the “curvature of non-Euclidean space.” Psychology must be curved (intentio obliqua), bend backwards, reflect on itself. The same analytical principles with which it hitherto turned to the patient (with the empiricist intentio recta) it may now apply to itself and thus complete and fulfill the analysis by taking itself, as third person, seriously. This is what “critical psychology” means.
So far we psychotherapists acted (and researched!) just as unconsciously in our profession as did Jung’s Kenya natives when they performed the ritual of greeting the rising sun. We have, of course, a rich knowledge of what to do and to say and how to interpret, but if we were asked (as the Africans were by Jung) why we behave and think that way, we could, as those natives, put forward no other ground than “because it is the truth, that’s the way the facts are, just look at all this case material” and would, with this dogmatism, betray our unconsciousness. (That our facts are to some extent empirically validated, whereas the Kenya ones were not, obviously makes no difference as regards consciousness. Valid empirical evidence may establish true knowledge, but does not make more conscious. Superstition and science, despite their fundamental difference, are thus on the same level in this respect because they share the same blind(ing) belief in facts. “The collaboration of the psyche—an indispensable factor—remains invisible"; CW 10, §498.)
The principle of depth psychology is the lifting of the repressions, and the psychoanalytic “fundamental rule” was established to serve this principle. Freud states about the application of this rule, “It is a most remarkable thing that the whole undertaking becomes lost labour if a single concession is made to secrecy. If at any spot in a town the right of sanctuary existed, one can well imagine that it would not be long before all the riff-raff of the town would gather there.”8 I think that our much neglected psychological theory is such a sanctuary. There, as we have seen, all the neurotic ideas gather. Psychology acts out its insights in its ’behavior’ (i.e., psychotherapy), but the theory, as the “consciousness” and “attitude” of psychology, is protected and defended against any such insight. I have given a number of illustrations for this. By way of a reminder I want to point out the effect or inherent purpose of the genetic approach: the uroboros, primary narcissism, the Einheitswirklichkeit, magical thinking and the like are (via projection) placed as far away as possible from ourselves by our theory, either into what we are not (prehistoric man, the infant, or the creative genius) or what we by no means want to be (the neurotic patient), in order to avoid that our own thinking and way of viewing—our innermost subjectivity—become affected by these realities. We do not want to give up this last resort and refuge and change fundamentally, without reserve (what Jung termed to radically “unlearn and relearn”). The last and most secret, most interior stronghold of the old ego-centered attitude is psychological theory, whose involvement in therapy and transference is not subjected to analysis the way that of the other two persons is. Now we see why analysis miscarries despite its tremendous effort: the entire undertaking becomes lost labor because a concession has been made, even if only at a single spot.
There is an iron curtain between therapy and theory. The practitioner, stressing feeling-experiences, depreciates theory as an intellectualism; for the psychological scientist theory is something sacred that must be kept clean from emotions, imagination, and neurosis. Through this dissociation we get both a neurotic practice and a neurotic theory. That intellectualizing one’s affects is a defense mechanism is generally accepted, but that the reverse, ignoring theory for personalistic introspection, etc., is also used as a defense, is not seen. It would of course not help if theory were made more practically relevant and the practitioner occupied himself more with theory. This would bring the two extremes closer, but no matter how close they come, the neurotic split of psychology would remain. What is needed is their oneness, “wholeness.” This is what Freud was driving at when he spoke of the “junction of curing and research.”9 Therapy is theoretical and theory works therapy. We cannot actually restrict therapy to the consulting room and theorizing to books. Jung writing his theoretical and psycho-historical studies did not merely provide theoretical tools for analysis. His written work is in itself therapy, full-fledged therapy, inasmuch as it aims at affecting our attitudes of consciousness. By thinking otherwise, we would split off theory.
Conversely, we are subject to a self-deception if we believe an ever deeper introspection or the abandonment to feeling experiences à la primal scream would bring a genuine initiation into the “inner world.” Introspection means that we look into ourselves and thus obviously from outside. Initiation by contrast means to enter, but when this happens we are in “it” and part of it and therefore can no longer look into it. Abandonment to feeling experiences implies, to be sure, to enter. But as the term abandonment suggests, something was left out and behind which therefore does not participate in the transformation process and thus can serve as anchor and firm ground. The experiences may be as intensive as they come, nothing truly essential in the sense of initiation will have happened because of the reservatio mentalis, of the prior exclusion of our mind, which remains as rationalistic and egotistic as before. Only one half enters and feels. Or it is the whole ego that enters, but then the reservatio mentalis would mean that despite being whirled around as a unit by the emotions, the inside structure of the ego would stay intact. In the so-called feeling experience it is the old ego that experiences and feels. It remains the self-identical subject even when it “relates.” It is true that psychology must be subjective. But its subjectivity cannot be the ego’s, “my” personal property—it rather must be an impersonal and objective subjectivity, one that first gives me my sense of “my-ness.”
As we said, psychotherapy is fixated on the patient or at best on patient and doctor (on their personal experiences and reactions), in short: on the personal. Thus personalistic psychotherapy is truly a folie à deux, a Buberian I-Thou encounter, because only two persons are accepted, tertium non datur. The “grammar” of psychology is faulty, we cannot conjugate properly: I, thou—that is where we stop. But the proper “conjugation” (Greek: syzygía!) knows of a third person, of the objective and impersonal It (the objective psyche, the “great,” Psychologia) which is present along with the two other persons because it is their impersonal and larger aspect. Freud came so close to it with his id, but unfortunately placed the id within the individual as a part of the personality. Where psychotherapy is seen in terms of the dialogue between two persons, an I and a Thou, there is no syzygy and no conjugation, but an absolute “disiunctio” (cf. CW 16, §397); Jung’s usual word is dissociation): doctor-patient, sane—neurotic, conscious—unconscious, thinking-feeling, etc. The eros of transference may then try as hard as possible to bind the two together, it will never get beyond a “transference neurosis.” Where the framework of psychology is personalistic because the third of the two is not seen, there can be no conunctio. The “soul’s child,” which according to Jung (ibid., §465) is the goal of transference (and of psychotherapy), will not be born: such a psychology must be abortive; it must miscarry; soul-making cannot take place. Psychotherapy will instead have to devote itself to “practical” purposes (curing, ego-strengthening, behavior modification, sensitivity training, emotional experiences, development of all functions, etc.) and turn technological, as Faust did after the coniunctio, which had almost been achieved, finally failed. In his case, too, it had to fail since the “objective process of the union” was disturbed by “Faust’s personal intervention,” his identification with the mythological (= transpersonal) figure Paris (CW 12, §558f.).
Jung always insisted: the origin of the neurosis lies, not in the past, but in the present, that is, close to home. In this spirit we would need to concentrate on what is closest to home: our attitude of conscious-ness, our theories. In order to make psychology we must “erinnern,” to make soul, come home. Instead of looking for the archetypes out there and thus reifying them, we need develop an archetypal approach; instead of locating the psyche in persons we must learn to see psychologically; instead of talking about the uroboros in the child or in the patient, our psychology must advance to a uroboric consciousness. If psychology has become its own first patient and if its “space” is curved, so that all “straight” lines return into themselves as with the draco caudam suam devorans (the dragon devouring his tail), it will no longer be fixated on the patient, on behavior, and on the practical.
Both founders of depth psychology, Freud and Jung, looked at the analytical cure with a certain detachment, Freud confessing that he had never been a therapeutic enthusiast, no true physician and had never had a strong desire to help the suffering, Jung admitting to a rather meagre interest in people and the external facts of life. This does not mean that they encountered the patient with indifference, but it might throw a light on why they were destined to be psychologists. The interest of the psychologist is not directed to the factual person and his behavior, but to things psychological. The curved line which the psychological glance follows meets the patient and the facts—it does not avoid them and instead turn merely inwards (introspection)—but it goes on and returns to where it came from. Not the patient, but its own origin is its goal. Psychology does not speak about the patient, about the external object, but always about itself; and psychology proper only begins where it follows the uroboros, the dragon of imagination,10 that is to say, where it merges with the imaginal itself. But in this circular motion the patient is encompassed, not as a fixed point and an end in himself, but as something that is taken along and “seen through.” The same, however, applies to the seeing subject (ego); it, too, ceases to be a fixed point and enters into the alchemical rotatio, so that there will be nothing fixed and “factual” left, no reserve, the circling motion of imagination itself now becoming the only fact (and “factor”!). And this dissolving of the two factual persons and their self-identical egos into the circular motion is the actual purpose of therapy. This is what the goal of “changing the patient” should be taken to mean, whereas the modification of his behavior and what other practical purposes and factual problems classical psychology concerns itself with now appear not to be truly psychological at all, since only the entrance into the circulatio is an authentic initiation.
Jung tried very hard to communicate this idea. Already his typological approach of 1913 had the purpose of removing the dispute among the various schools (Freud –Adler –Jung) from the empirical level of fact to a psychological one of viewpoint: instead of empirically proving or disproving the various theories, he reflected on the entirely different question of what made Freud or Adler see things the way they did. His typology was certainly not sufficient for this task (for which reason Jung later let it lie in favor of the much more comprehensive and subtle archetypal theory), but already this early attempt left the scientific fixation on the object and on the factual behind, returning the psychological inquiry into itself and thus recognizing the autonomy of psychology.
With respect to therapy, Jung expressed the same ideas, e.g., by demanding a “counter-application to the doctor himself of whatever system is believed in” (CW 16, §168). As a whole, Jung envisioned a psychology that goes beyond all empiricism and personalism, beyond the practical and the consulting room11 and viewed psychology (and the analytical session) from the perspective of Vermittlung, mediation. Anything that goes on in therapy, indeed anything that is in the world (“our” world) is psychologically mediated. Our psychological theories are larger than we and prior to ourselves. They surround and encompass both ourselves and what we perceive (e.g., the patient). This vision starts out with wholeness and “the great” and is therefore no longer confronted with the self-defeating task of trying to unite two individual souls that are separated by definition.
I would like to repeat: the place where psychotherapy has to happen and where alone it would not have to be abortive is the objective, impersonal and yet also most subjective, third person: psychology. Inte-grating, developing, compensating, healing, recollecting, imagining, introspection, initiation, analysis, expanding one’s consciousness and what else psychotherapy aims for are tasks to be accomplished not by the person, but by psychology. Only on this level, on the “higher plane of psychological and philosophical dialectic” (CW 10, §333) can psychology become psychological, because it alone opens the third alternative to the deadlock of opposites: the imaginal realm of the soul’s child. Anything truly important cannot happen in us unless it happens in our psychology. For we are in it—even if we think it is in us. Instead of needing psychological methods for obtaining more intensive personal experiences, we might find out that psychology itself can be our richest and most personal experience: the experience of soul-making.
NOTES
1. “Nachwort zur ‘Frage der Laienanalyse,’ ” in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975), p. 343f.
2. Patricia Berry, “On Reduction,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1973): 80f. and passim.
3. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 238.
4. “Der Familienroman der Neurotiker,” in Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 4, p. 226.
5. On “epistrophé,” see James Hillman, Loose Ends (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1975), p. 50.
6. James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 291ff.
7. “Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse,” in Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband, p. 387; my translation.
8. ”Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis," in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, vol. 2 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis 1953), p. 356 n.
9. “Nachwort zur ‘Frage der Laienanalyse,’ ” p. 347; my translation.
10. On the dragon as imagination, see James Hillman, “The Great Mother, Her Son, Her Hero, and the Puer,” in Fathers and Mothers: Five Papers on the Archetypal Background of Family Psychology, edited by Patricia Berry (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1973), p. 112.
11. With a “significant turn of events” “analytical psychology has burst the bonds which till then had bound it to the consulting-room of the doctor. It goes beyond itself …” and “can claim to serve the common weal [Allgemeingut zu werden]” (CW 16, §174).
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 153–74
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