by Phil Goss
As mentioned in Chapter 3, Jung – like Freud – was influenced by Schopenhauer’s (1966) ideas on the presence of the unconscious, and the primacy of the procreative drive in the human species; a biological impetus that overruled individual human intentions. However, he felt there was more to libido than this. Jung noticed from his work with patients, as well as from his own personal experiences, how powerful energy from within the human psyche could be channelled into activity, and areas for gratification that may not have a predominantly sexualized root. This includes the development and sustaining of relationships, creative and artistic endeavours, and more contemplative activities which some might term ‘spiritual’ (or possibly ‘religious’).
While Freudians might argue these are all, at root, influenced by sexual impulses – either directly gratified (intimate relationships), sublimated (through artistic expression of otherwise repressed drives), or denied (spirituality as an avoidance of full expression of one’s sexuality) – Jungian perspective sees these having a key place in the human psyche in their own right. This is not to leave sexuality out of these influences; rather, Jung tended to see all archetypal, instinctual and intuitive influences such as these as a reflection of where the human psyche is able to marshal together all needed inner resources, including the psychosexual, in order to enable an individuation ‘task’ to be addressed, and maybe fulfilled.
Jung linked this idea to his thoughts on individuation and the journey through life. He felt that differing kinds of libido were suited to different life stages. The more playful, formatively creative and imaginal libido suits childhood, while sexual and relational (possibly also ‘vocational’-oriented) libido suits adolescence and early adulthood. Creative libido also has its place in later adulthood, especially for those who have not expressed some aspects of themselves while being busy making their mark on the world.
Likewise, more spiritually oriented libido usually comes to the fore in mid to later life. This can be expressed in religious form, or in less formal expressions of meaning making (including humanistic and existential reflections not based on religious or spiritual beliefs). Jung saw these influences, noticed and incorporated as fully as can be, as part of the individuation process, where unconscious energies are directed into helping us become ‘more fully who we are’.
This developing perspective of Jung’s, which applied a wider lens on what drives and influences the human being, contributed to his gradual distancing from Freud’s position. The latter was convinced of the veracity of a wholly deterministic stance: all we are in the ‘here and now’ being determined by what happened back then, when profoundly powerful, biologically led impulses laid down the road we are now on. In contrast, for Jung, the route we take through life is not just determined by the ‘road building’ at the beginning. For him, there is a forward-looking, prospective, aspect to our being and becoming. Where we are heading is therefore strongly influenced by how we embrace present and future possibilities, as well as the past.
Key idea: The unconscious and the libido
Jung prioritized the need to listen to the unconscious, working with it to draw on different types of libido to bring into life aspects of ourselves that have not found proper expression as yet, then integrate these into the totality of who we are. A perspective on unconscious libido arose for Jung, perhaps as much from his encounters with his own unconscious as from his clinical practice and theorizing.
COLLECTIVE VS PERSONAL INFLUENCES
However, in the period leading up to his break with Freud, Jung had not yet immersed himself in these encounters, in the way he would do from 1913 onwards, when he had his ‘creative illness’. Rather, the underlying tension between the two men’s standpoints would show up more in theoretical debate. For Jung, his work on what would become Symbols of Transformation (Jung, 1967) was moving him towards exploring archetypal psychological influences on the individual psyche.
Freud had a keen interest in anthropology and other cultures, as testified by his impressive collection of artefacts from a swathe of old and exotic cultures from around the world (on display at the Freud Museum in London). However, this was more oriented towards illustrating the ways in which sublimation of psychosexual impulses and drives showed itself through cultural expression. Here, civilization’s channelling of otherwise uncontainable id drives could be expressed, often with great artistic skill.
Jung, meanwhile, became more and more convinced of the underlying power of collective influences on individual psychological development. Listening to the dreams of his patients, for example, he noticed where archetypal images came in, even where there did not seem to be a relevant link to the current or past experience of the dreamer. Jung also reckoned he had evidence of the autonomous activity of the collective unconscious, as demonstrated (he thought) by a case of a man with schizophrenia who seemed to experience features of an old Mithraic myth in his delusions, despite having no knowledge of this (see Chapter 5).
Spotlight: Sabina Spielrein and Jung
The influence of Spielrein (1885–1942) – whose alleged affair with Jung was portrayed in the film A Dangerous Method – on the early development of depth psychology is often overlooked. Covington and Wharton (2006) describe how she played an influential part in helping Freud in his thinking about the death instinct, but also Jung’s work on the anima. Yet her place is rarely recognized as significant in the history of depth psychology. Is this a reflection of the male-dominated, patriarchal nature of early psychoanalysis? If you are interested in this question, then do have a look at Covington and Wharton’s book!
POSITIVISTIC SCIENCE VS RELIGION AND THE SPIRITUAL
The implications of Jung’s developing perspective stretched further. Freud was adamant about how problematic and distracting religious belief was for getting to the root of neuroses and helping people to accept the ‘reality principle’. This means a capacity to be able to get ‘instinctual gratification by accommodation to the facts of, and the objects existing within, the external world’ (Rycroft, 1995, p. 152). For Freud, it was most unhelpful for patients to remain in thrall to delusions about God, religious faith or the existence of further layers of reality.
He saw it as the task of the psychoanalyst to help the individual come to terms with the common unhappiness (Freud, 1974, p. 393) of their existence, rather than indulge what to Freud would be fantasies, which only enabled them to avoid the psychosexual basis of their suffering. For Freud, religion represented a historical overhang from previous eras where irrational beliefs were a source of succour, prior to scientific discoveries of the nature of reality. Irrational beliefs had had an evolutionary role in helping people deal with the childlike helplessness of human beings in the face of all-powerful nature, and of death. ‘God’ was an illusion, created to meet this need, and to help hold society together. Freud’s faith in scientific materialism, with its positivist emphasis on the reliability of what can be proved, thoroughly superseded his Jewish religious heritage.
From Jung’s perspective, he could see where religious belief enabled some of his patients to find meaning in life and to orient themselves in an otherwise empty, and at times frightening, universe. He did not see how this, or the longstanding traditions of genuine religious and spiritual experiences (however ossified he thought the Christian church had become in its rituals and dogmas), could be discounted so easily. The spiritual for Jung, where defined and lived by in an individual way (even when within a broader religious tradition), was a part of who we are as human beings, as well as an aspect of the individuation process. Therefore, it was something that should be afforded its place within a framework for understanding the psyche, and working with it in the therapeutic context.
Jung’s studies of cultural and religious myths and ideas from across the world and throughout human history were also feeding his curiosity about the deeper strata of the unconscious. He wondered how this might be influenced by the apparent commonalities of religious and cultural themes he noticed eme
rging from different patients. Though he broadly concurred with his older colleague regarding the reality and nature of the personal unconscious, the impact of internal and environmental factors on the present, and the ways in which human suffering could be understood as products of powerful internal and relational influences, his perspective was shifting towards an emphasis on the importance of collective, archetypal and spiritual influences on the human psyche.
THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF DREAMS
For Freud (1900), dreams were famously ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. They enable us to see what is happening within the unconscious process of the dreamer. This is framed for him in psychosexual terms, whereby the manifest content of a dream – that is, what imagery can be remembered by the dreamer – indicates the latent significance. This significance will have a psychosexual or deeply libidinal root, and for Freud, the purpose of dreaming is to discharge the libidinal energy previously repressed into the id as unsafe to express in a conscious way. So, images of, say, a rocket would be seen as a manifest expression of unfulfilled desire for the phallus, or a box might be seen likewise in relation to the vagina.
Jung also thought dreams provide a snapshot of what is happening in the unconscious of the dreamer, and recognized psychosexual influences in them. In contrast, however (see Chapter 11 for further details), dreams for Jung are one of the most potent vehicles the unconscious has to alert the conscious mind to what is going on ‘down there’. They often have a compensatory function, indicating where we might need to adjust our attitude or behaviours in order to find or restore balance in the psyche. This principle of compensation is also reflected in how the self communicates deeper insights to the ego, which cannot see the whole picture surrounding a situation or theme. Dreams also sometimes suggest collective themes, which make them pertinent to more than just the individual having the dream.
Jung’s ‘House’ dream
While in the USA with Freud on a lecture tour, Jung had a dream in which he found himself in an unfamiliar house – although he knew it was, somehow, his house (Jung, 1961). Beginning on the upper storey (which had furniture from the eighteenth century), he descended to the ground floor (sixteenth century), then the cellar, which had Roman features. Finally, he discovered a passageway down into a cave where he saw scattered bones and pottery, and in the midst of them, two very old human skulls.
He told Freud about this dream, as Jung had become used to sharing dreams with him (although this was not reciprocated – a bone of contention, seemingly, for Jung). Freud was most struck by the closing scene of the dream, and came to see the two skulls as representative of what he thought was Jung’s ‘death wish’, in the sense that for Freud (1913) ‘killing the father’ is an common unconscious fantasy within the activation of the Oedipal complex, and Freud was much older than his colleague, reflecting the ‘father–son’ transferences suggested above. This interpretation is classically Freudian, in the sense that Freud would be looking for what of the manifest content pointed to more viscerally based latent themes. He might also have considered some connection between mother/vagina with the house/room ‘enclosed-space’ imagery in the dream. However, the potential destructive fantasy, suggested by the skulls, clearly held more interest for him.
Jung instead connected the ‘two-ness’ to his wife and sister-in-law, though he was not primarily interested in this aspect of the dream. Instead, he saw this dream as a representation of the human psyche. The first floor was the conscious mind, the ground floor and the floors beneath it symbolizing layers of the unconscious, from personal to collective, with the cave scene representing the primitive beginnings of the human psyche. For Jung this was a powerfully archetypal, not personal, dream, through which the collective unconscious was revealing itself to him.
Points of agreement between Freud and Jung
It is important to remember that, alongside these deeper divides in perspective, there were a number of clinically related approaches and principles upon which the two men broadly agreed. These all initially stemmed from the pivotal pioneering work of Freud, and they included:
• the use of free association
• the value of dream analysis
• the transference and projective processes
• the importance of sticking to the boundaries of the therapeutic hour.
They also concurred on the use of the couch, although, as with other aspects of theory and practice, this later evolved for Jung. He came to see the value of sitting face to face with the patient, where the interaction of the human encounter was called for. He would then use the couch where a deeper engagement with the unconscious was likewise suggested. This would depend on the stage of the analysis: for example, the couch might be utilized more as the analysand went further and deeper into their unconscious influences and processes.
To that degree, as indicated, Jung owed much to Freud for the ‘tools of his trade’. They also both shared a passionate belief in the importance of what they were uncovering, and of the need to develop and make available psychoanalytically based treatment. However, in the years while they worked together in this enterprise, the shadow of the underlying differences between them – philosophical, theoretical and clinical – mixed in with personality factors, were quietly drawing the fault lines which would irrevocably drive the two men apart.
Spotlight: A weighty correspondence
Freud and Jung wrote 360 letters between them in their period of correspondence, from April 1906 to January 1913.
The end of the friendship
As Jung continued to develop his thinking, Freud remained certain of the veracity of the psychoanalytic principles he had established. Tensions between the two men grew, and Jung set out distinctions in his thinking from Freud’s in a lecture at Fordham University, New York, in 1912. These included his belief that libido and sources of pleasure did not just emanate from sexual roots, as well as the possibility that neurosis could be strongly influenced by the present as well as the past. Freud attempted to convince Jung to realign his thinking with his. However, Jung began to think in terms of an updated ‘analytical psychology’ and the publication of Symbols of Transformation in 1912 laid the foundations for a new theoretical basis for this.
Correspondence between the two became increasingly fraught. Also in 1912, Jung told Freud he was behaving in an overbearingly parental manner towards him and his other followers, while Freud responded by suggesting Jung’s behaviours were ‘abnormal’. In January 1913 they finally agreed on something amid all the discord – they would cease to send letters to, or have any contact with, one another (McGuire, 1974).
It was a moment that created a schism in the field of depth psychology, the effects of which are still being felt today. However, it was a split which, though painful, generated a burst of creativity in Jung without which the generation of the Jungian model would probably not have been possible.
Key terms
Compensation: In dream work, as well as analytic work generally, Jung identified the compensatory nature of how unconscious processes work to maintain balance or homeostasis in the psyche, including the body, in the face of life’s pressures and potential ill health.
Libido: A term to describe mental energy which originates in bodily based id drives of a fundamentally sexual nature, according to Freud. Jung saw libido, like pleasure, as having more than just a sexual root. He proposed creative, relational and spiritual versions, as influences that could act as a resource for the individuation process.
Repression: ‘The process by which an unacceptable impulse or idea is rendered unconscious’ (Rycroft, 1995, p. 157). A defence mechanism whereby id-driven sexual and aggressive desires and drives are pushed into the unconscious to enable the ego to maintain its stability in daily life. Influenced Jung’s concept of shadow.
Sublimation: The channelling of powerful sexual and aggressive id drives into activity that enables their healthy expression, e.g. playing a sport or painting a picture.
Transference: The unconscious ‘transfer’ of a key parental relationship on to another person. Freud coined the term in relation to where a psychoanalyst can ‘become mother or father’ for the patient, and argued how influential this is in terms of how the projection of strong feelings from the earlier relationship on to the psychoanalyst allows important roots of the patient’s neurosis to be identified and worked through.
Dig deeper
Covington, C. and Wharton, B., Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2006)
Donn, L., Freud and Jung; Years of Friendship, Years of Loss (New York: Collier Books, 1988)
Freud, S., Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962)
Freud, S. (1895), in Breuer, J. and Freud, S., Studies in Hysteria (London: Pelican, 1974)
Freud, S., (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, Illustrated Edition (New York: Sterling, 2010).