Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015, 60, 1, 122–125

Some reflections on Barreto’s response Mark Saban, Oxford, UK Disappointingly, Barreto’s lurid claim to have revealed a nefarious ‘hidden goal’ within my paper turns out to merely underline his failure to grasp the full nature of my argument. In fact, the conclusion my paper reaches (that Giegerich’s psychology is irrelevant to modern Jungians) is quite clearly implicit in my stated intention (to show that ‘the ‘rigorous notion’ at [the] centre [of Giegerich’s psychology] finds no source in Jung’s psychology’). Giegerich explicitly grounds his own importance to Jungian psychology upon a single claim: that he alone provides an immanent critique of Jung. By casting doubt upon such a claim, I have therefore also cast doubt upon his relevance to analytical psychology—the very relevance which Giegerich claims for himself. Given this context, the broad question of ‘who owns Jung’ as Barreto puts it, does indeed dominate my paper, precisely because this is the subtext of much of Giegerich’s own work. Let me remind the reader that Giegerich’s key work, The Soul’s Logical Life (Giegerich 2008) expounds his, Giegerich’s, claim to have identified the ‘Notion’ at the heart of Jungian psychology and therefore to be its true inheritor. Readers of the chapter entitled ‘Jungians: immunity to the Notion’ (ibid., pp. 79-101), and particularly the section entitled ‘Polemic vs. conventional Jungianism’ (ibid., pp. 81-87) (in which Giegerich attacks Jungians for having betrayed this implicit ‘Notion’) may be amused by Barreto’s hilarious representation of Giegerich as a tolerant pluralist who welcomes many different approaches to Jung. This improbable depiction is also conspicuously undermined by Giegerich’s numerous and ferocious polemical attacks on those individual Jungians who have had the temerity to offer approaches alternative to his own. (See, for example, Giegerich 1975, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2012a, 2012b). Strangely, I am the one Barreto accuses of ‘fundamentalism’ and of ‘moralism’. Let me be clear: I have done my best to show respect for the context and meaning of those texts by Jung which I understand Giegerich to have skewed and distorted. Moreover, I have tried to articulate and passionately argue for a particular understanding of Jung’s psychology. Finally, I have admitted a preference for an interpretation that does justice to the whole of Jung rather than one that disfigures and dismembers him. If this adds up to fundamentalism and moralism so be it. 0021-8774/2015/6001/122

© 2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12132

Reflections on Barreto’s response

123

According to Barreto, I advocate what he describes as a Freudian ‘personalist theoretical presupposition’. What is telling here is Barreto’s stubborn refusal to see beyond the crude dichotomy of Freudian/personalist as against Giegerich/ soul, and to accept the challenge of Jung’s actual standpoint whereby the personal is seen through the archetypal and the archetypal through the personal. Barreto argues (on the sole ground that Jung understands religion to be a psychic function) that a dream ‘about religion’ merely offers yet another example of ‘soul’ speaking to and about ‘soul’. Here, he follows Giegerich’s lead: [Jung’s] psychology is sublated (aufgehoben) religion inasmuch as it negates the immediate religious interpretation with which the contents of the inner experience come, but it also preserves the religious contents and atmosphere, however, only as a ‘moment’ of the new Notion of the reality of the soul. (Giegerich 2008, p. 67).

As so often, Giegerich misrepresents Jung’s thought by Hegelianising it and, as so often, downplays the crucial role of (religious) experience which, for Jung, is so important. Jung never intended to subsume the religious into the psychic. Jung sees religion as concerned (theologically) with man’s relation to God(s), and (psychologically) with the ego’s relation to the Self. The relation he delineates therefore rests on an encounter between the I and an alterity which must exceed any human attempts to encompass it. For Jung, then, a dream that speaks of religion is inevitably reaching out to an otherness that bewilders and exceeds the bounds of psyche. To describe this as ‘soul’ speaking to and about ‘soul’ not only woefully under-determines but also utterly misconceives what Jung is attempting. Giegerich’s ‘psychological difference’ inflates one factor (the vertical ‘soul’ dimension) to the level of true psychology, while diminishing the horizontal ‘personal’ dimension to the banality of the everyday. This conceptual scission effectively eradicates any meaningful relationship between the two, a relationship that, for Jung, is central to psychology. Invariably, Jung uses terms that convey a sense of ‘encounter’ or ‘confrontation’ (Begegnung or Auseinandersetzung) when describing the interaction of conscious with unconscious, because he wants to emphasize that a real meeting is occurring. But the categorical barrier that Giegerich erects between ‘soul’ and ego utterly frustrates the possibility of any such meeting. Giegerich’s further distinction between a ‘pragmatic I’ and a ‘psychological I’ merely compounds the problem by introducing a vicious circularity, since the latter is simply ‘soul’ by a different name. In the meeting of ‘soul’ with ‘soul’, where is the alterity? Barreto also offers us a predictably reductive conception of ego (‘a pragmatic orientation of consciousness’). By contrast, Jung sees ego as: a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself … in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face. (Jung 1955, para. 129)

124

Mark Saban

For Jung then, ego is precisely the site where conscious and unconscious meet in reciprocal reflection, and thereby co-achieve awareness on a deeper level. Although ego is thus a crucial factor in the attainment of a psychological perspective, the fact that ego is ultimately incapable of comprehending the furthest reaches of soul simply doesn’t register as a difficulty for Jung, since he sees the unconscious as always already an ‘irreducible remainder’, in Schelling’s words (Schelling 1992, p. 34). By contrast, Giegerich’s Hegelian agenda renders this unsymmetrical encounter between I and other insupportable, since the ‘labour of the Notion’ is won only on the explicit ground that anything and everything can and must be dialectically processed. Nothing can escape ‘sublation’. There is no remainder. In the past, Giegerich has rightly critiqued those who equate Jung’s approach to the opposites with Hegel’s dialectic (Giegerich et al. 2005, p. 7). However, his project of strong-arming Jung’s thinking onto a higher ‘logical’ level by simply substituting the latter for the former is ‘logically’ illegitimate because Hegel’s approach to the opposites, far from representing a superior development of Jung’s approach, is in fact radically alien to it. Hegel’s dialectical process of negation and negation of negation collapses the opposites into unity. They are revealed as never having been opposite in the first place; subject and object are merely different dialectical moments of one and the same. For Jung, on the other hand, the conflict and tension between the opposites cannot be sublated away. Opposites really are opposite and continue to be so, even if they share a common originary ground (unus mundus), and even when they are brought together into paradoxical conflict/unity: the coniunctio oppositorum.1 On the conceptual level, then, Giegerich and Jung occupy different planets, and it is this unbridgeable gulf between them that attests not only to the logical exteriority of Giegerich’s psychological standpoint to Jung’s, but also— ultimately—to their mutual irrelevance. References Giegerich, W. (1975). ‘Ontogeny = phylogeny? A fundamental critique of E. Neumann’s analytical psychology’. Spring, 1975, 110–29. ——— (2008). The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology. Frankfurt am Main & New York: P. Lang. ——— (2010a). ‘The psychologist as repentance preacher and revivalist: Robert Romanyshyn on the melting of the Polar ice’. Spring, 84, 325–26. ——— (2010b). ‘Psychologie Larmoyante: Glen Slater, for example. On psychology’s failure to face the modern world’. Collected English Papers Vol. IV: The Soul Always Thinks, pp. 501–30. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.

1

The dialectic which Schelling develops in his later philosophy provides a far better match for Jung’s psychology than that of Hegel. Anyone interested should read McGrath 2012, 2014.

Reflections on Barreto’s response

125

——— (2010c). ‘Imaginal psychology gone overboard: Michael Vannoy Adams’ “Imaginology”. A defense of the image against the detraction by its devotees’. Collected English Papers Vol. IV: The Soul Always Thinks, pp. 475–500. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. ——— (2012a). ‘Saban’s Alternative. An Alternative?’ http://www.ispdi.org/images/ stories/PDFdocuments/Saban%27s%20Alternative.n.pdf (Accessed 29 November 2014). ——— (2012b). ‘A serious misunderstanding: synchronicity and the generation of meaning’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57, 500–11. Jung, C. G. (1937). Psychology and Religion. CW 11. ——— (1955). Mysterium Coniunctionis: an Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. CW 14. McGrath, S. J. (2012). The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious. Hove: Routledge. ——— (2014). ‘The question concerning metaphysics: a Schellingian intervention in analytical psychology’. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 6, 23–51. Schelling, F. W. J. (1992). Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Trans. J. Gutman. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.

Some reflections on Barreto's response.

Some reflections on Barreto's response. - PDF Download Free
69KB Sizes 1 Downloads 9 Views