Jung
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Freud, S. (1913), Totem and Taboo (London: WW Norton, 1989)
Jones, E., The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2. Years of Maturity, 1901–19 (Oxford: Basic Books, 1955)
Jung, C. G. (1906), Diagnostic Association Studies (Leipzig: J. A. Barth) (Chapters in this book can be found in C. G. Jung, Experimental Researches, CW2 (London: Brunner-Routledge, 1957)
Jung, C. G. (1912), Symbols of Transformation, CW5 (London: Brunner-Routledge, 1967)
Jung, C. G., Freud’s Theory of Hysteria: A Reply to Aschaffenburg (1961)
Kerr, J., A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) Film partly based on this is Cronenberg, D., A Dangerous Method (Canada: Sony Pictures, 2011)
McGuire, W. (ed.), The Freud/Jung Letters (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974)
Rycroft, C., Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1995)
Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 (Dover Edition, 1966)
Storr A., Jung: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Fact-check (answers at the back)
1 What was Jung’s view of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams?
a Initially he thought it lacked significance, but he came to see its importance
b He thought Freud should have stuck to writing about neuroses
c Initially he thought it was very important but later felt it was insignificant
d He thought Freud should only ever write about dreams from then on
2 What was Freud’s view of Jung’s work on word association?
a Less significant than his
b Too fixated on the idea of ‘complexes’
c Confused
d Valuable in shedding light on unconscious processes
3 After they began working together, how did Freud see Jung?
a As a rival
b As more knowledgeable about the human psyche than him
c As his ‘heir apparent’ as future leader of the psychoanalytic movement
d As unable to grasp the key principles of psychoanalysis
4 What were Freud’s and Jung’s differences on sexual influences due to?
a Freud’s insistence on sexual libido as the dominant influence on the psyche
b Jung’s insistence on the dominance of the spiritual in the psyche
c Freud’s need to prove dominant psychosexual influences scientifically
d Jung’s need to disprove dominant psychosexual influences spiritually
5 What are deterministic versus prospective influences about?
a Remembering your past in therapy versus avoiding the future in it
b Early psychosexual influences versus how the psyche unfolds into the future
c Freud had more determination versus Jung being distracted by his prospects
d Early prospective influences versus future psychosexual influences
6 How did Freud and Jung disagree about the structure of the unconscious?
a Freud thought the unconscious was formed purely by the environment
b Jung thought the unconscious was made only of archetypes
c Freud thought the personal unconscious was collective, too
d Jung thought there was a collective layer of the unconscious
7 Why did they disagree about the place of religion?
a Freud had a Jewish background and Jung a Christian one
b Jung thought the whole unconscious was spiritually based
c Freud thought religion was an illusion and Jung thought it served a purpose
d Jung thought science was an illusion and Freud thought it served a purpose
8 Why did Freud and Jung come to different views on the role of dreams?
a Jung thought dreams are all collective and Freud did not
b Freud thought they were all about sex and Jung thought they were all about religion
c Jung saw dreams as all about the future and Freud saw them as all about the past
d Freud saw dreams as wish fulfilments, Jung as compensatory and archetypal
9 Which of Freud’s clinical tools did Jung take and use?
a Therapeutic hour, neuroses, manifest and latent dream content
b Transference, archetypal processes, free association
c Therapeutic hour, transference, working with shadow
d Transference, free association, therapeutic hour
10 What did Freud and Jung do when they split?
a They still kept writing letters to each other
b They agreed to stop writing letters to each other
c Jung threw all Freud’s letters into Lake Zurich
d Freud burned Jung’s letters to light his pipe
Section 2
The world within: Jung’s model of the human psyche
5
Self and ego: listening to the inner voice
The nature of ego and self, and the relationship – or ‘axis’ – between them, was a key element of Jung’s ‘map’ of the psyche, located within the context of Jung’s notions of the collective, the archetypal and the personal. In this chapter we will explore the tasks of ego, and the compensatory capacity of the unconscious to express what self is trying to convey. There will be examples of how this can play out in ordinary life, including the case study of a man who kept locking himself out of his car… Finally, the ‘bigger picture’ around the self will be explored.
As well as a driver of individuation, we will look at how the self can act as archetype of the numinous (or divine), and what this can mean – in both destabilizing and enriching ways.
A new formula for ego?
We have seen how the painful split between Freud and Jung played out, and how this was about more than just personality or the politics of the psychoanalytic world. The theoretical and philosophical tensions between the two men reflected Jung’s move away from the purely deterministic and psychosexual emphasis of Freud’s model. Although their ‘divorce’ was traumatic, once the two went their separate ways, the silver lining for Jung was that he could foster a model of psyche and its workings, free from the pressure to stay aligned to Freud’s. He could build a conceptual structure in the spirit of the more expansive view of the human condition that informed his growing emphasis on the realization of hidden potential in the psyche.
Spotlight: Does psyche look forwards as well as backwards?
Jung thought the human psyche had a ‘prospective function’. In other words, he thought the unconscious has the capacity to sense, or intuit, what may lie ahead, or is yet to unfold in our journey through life. This does not usually refer to ‘prophetic’ phenomena such as dreams, which we think might ‘tell the future’ (though, on occasion, they may provide such hints). More, it refers to the nature of the individuation process and how the self (which we shall explore in more detail in this chapter) carries some sense of where we may be heading, although the ego still holds the power to change course in life. This clearly differs from Freud’s emphasis on how, almost exclusively, past (psychosexual) influences are the determining influences on psyche.
Although Jung retained parts of the essential profile of Freud’s model, he made some subtle but profound adjustments to it. What remained was Freud’s identification of ego as the centre of the conscious mind, managing the many pressures and possibilities of daily life, as well as governing the tensions between powerful internal forces. Freud’s proposition that – given the right conditions – ego was able to notice and retrieve previously unavailable information from the unconscious also remained an important principle for Jung in his analytic approach, although the emphasis shifted.
Why was this shift in the place of the ego in Jung’s model significant, and why did it contribute to the deepening of the divide between Freudian and Jungian perspectives on the human condition? To answer this, we need to explore what Jung meant by ‘self’ – a construct that lay outside the classical psychoanalytic framework an
d radically redesignated the place and role of ego in the human psyche.
Self: the missing piece for Jung
If the idea of the collective unconscious was to be appended to the notion of a personal unconscious, there was a risk that this might be seen as having only a tangential influence on the day-to-day life of the individual, unless it was represented within the personality structure of the psyche. The ‘self’ provides this by representing deeper wisdom associated with who we most deeply are, and by representing archetypally numinous (‘mysterious’ or spiritual) possibilities of human experience. Jung argued that self can guide us aright in our individuation process – a wisdom we do not find readily available most of the time. Jung wanted to find a place in his structure of our inner world for this voice that emanated from something beyond the day-to-day life of ego.
Jung’s formative experiences of life – his contact with organized religion, and the many flaws, and qualities, he saw in it, and the numerous encounters he had with unconscious influences via his imagination and dreams, led him to a fresh conclusion. Leaving out something deeply personal and yet also connected to the evolution of the numinous in the collective psyche would be like leaving out the centrepiece of a jigsaw puzzle. So, before considering the significant implications of the presence of the self for ego, we need to elucidate the notion of self and explore the way, according to Jung, it operates.
Self and its place in the psyche
How can we envisage the place of self in the human psyche? Jung provides a helpful guide by referring to what happens if we acknowledge the influence of the unconscious on our lives:
‘if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. The new centre might be called the self.’
Jung, 1966a, para. 67
Jung is describing a centre of who we are that is able to connect us to the depths of the unconscious and archetypal processes; but also to contact, and influence, our conscious mind.
Taking this specific quote of Jung’s and comparing it to Freud’s model of the psyche, self may perform one function of his model of ego: i.e. the latter is able to relate to unconscious id and superego influences which Freud would posit are close to the surface of conscious awareness (in the preconscious). However, the self is not, for Jung, just able to tune into images, words, thoughts, feelings and sensations with a psychosexual provenance. In line with the observations about his way of thinking about libido in the previous chapter, self enables contact with a broad range of energies in the unconscious, including creative and relational ones that are conducive to the stage of life, and of the individuation process, the person is in.
In a sense, then, ego and self both mediate. Ego mediates between day-to-day reality and the guidance of the self. In turn, self mediates between resources which the unconscious can provide, and the demands of the ego to be guided and contained (as it wrestles with the demands of life). An implication of this, which we will come back to, is when we do not, as Jung recommended we do in the quote above, take unconscious demands into account alongside conscious ones; then the guiding and containing functions of the self may become unavailable, and the relationship between ego and self gets thrown out of kilter.
Staying with the theme of location, we need to say more about what Jung means by self being the true centre of who we are:
‘The symbols of the process of individuation that appear in dreams are images of an archetypal nature which depict the centralizing process or the production of a new centre of personality… The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind.’
Jung, 1953, para. 44
Here Jung is proposing that the self is doing two things at once – it is being both the central point of psyche and the boundary around all of the conscious and unconscious contents of it. Rather than seeing this as a contradiction, this idea works if one bears in mind the idea of archetypes as bipolar, as described in Chapter 1 (see Key terms). In this instance, the topography of the archetype of the self has two poles: ‘self as centre’ and ‘self as totality’. Jung contended that reality is full of paradoxes, and that what he is describing here speaks to our lived experience. On the one hand, we feel a sense of our unique identity as encompassing all of who and what we are: mind and body (for some also something about ‘soul’, perhaps?). But we can also have a sense of there being some elemental sense of ‘I’ at the core of our being.
Jung thought of self’s operation as ‘core’, in the sense where we experience a ‘call’ from deep within us to attend to something crucial, say something we have overlooked in our lives up to now. He also referred to it in the ‘encompassing’ sense, where we notice a sense of all elements of our being working together – say in working on a project that demands a blend of physical, mental and creative energies, drawing fluidly on conscious and unconscious resources.
Key idea: A single self?
In line with contemporary thinking on the complexity of being human, Andrew Samuels (1989), a post-Jungian thinker, writes about plural versions of self. He argues that Jung’s model does not take into account the ways in which we can feel and be quite different in how we are with others, and ourselves, at different times. He argues that this is more than just different personas we wear to adapt to different contexts and demands; it is, rather, deeper identities of self that seek to find expression across our experience of life. An example would be how different versions of our sexuality may reveal themselves at different times.
Jung’s Liverpool dream of the self
Jung refers above to dream images portraying the workings of the self. He had a dream in 1927 that illustrates this point. In this dream he found himself in Liverpool, and walking towards the centre of the city. He noticed the way the layout of the city in the dream seemed to converge on to a central square around which the four quarters of the city were arranged (for Jung the number four represented ‘totality’ or completeness). As he comes to the centre of the square, he sees a pool, at the centre of which lies a small island with a magnolia tree on it. He tells himself he would like to live in this city (Jung, 1963). This is a dream about the development of the self, in Jung’s view, as it portrays a movement towards the centre, where there is a ‘tree of life’, in a city with the name ‘Liver – pool’, which means ‘pool of life’. The city represents the totality and circumference of his conscious and unconscious, and the tree on the island represents the centre where both meet.
This, then, is a dream that portrays what Jung means by self. It is something that works quietly within us, behind the hubbub of daily life, to integrate all aspects of us. It also holds together the totality of who we are, as the centralizing influence promotes wholeness and takes us to the centre of who we are. Of course, for such a process to work well enough across our lifespan, our ego has to listen and respond to the demands of this process, so as not to wander too far off track, or in extreme cases suffer a loss of soul, where neurosis haunts the individual with the very values they need (Jung, 1966b). An example of this could be where an addiction reflects the very thing a person is seeking out but cannot find – e.g. seeking spiritual meaning but this being drowned out by the consumption of alcoholic ‘spirits’.
Through the self, archetypal polarities are presented to us to test our capacity to deal with the paradoxes and tensions of life, e.g. the archetypes of good and evil. It is for us to make the ego choice around which direction to take things when confronted with an ethical dilemma, e.g. where we may get gratification from a choice that then harms another person rather than upholding the priority to protect their well-being. At times we may need to make a decisive choice while we still have
the chance, but often self seems to challenge our capacity to hold both possibilities when confronted with a choice, e.g. over the future of a relationship we are in, rather than jump in one direction too hastily. All of this is relative to external circumstances, life stage, personality and formative influences.
The other key archetypal dynamic, held by self, concerns the relationship between the human and the divine. Jung came to the view that the self is the source and container of all symbols of the numinous. As Samuels et al. (1986, p. 136) put it: ‘Symbols of the self often possess a numinosity and convey a sense of necessity which gives them transcendent priority in psychic life. They carry the authority of a God image…’ As implied, this means key religious, or mythological, images representing God or Gods, such as Christ, Rama and Sita or Aphrodite, are actually symbols of the self, when it is charged with divine, or numinous, energy. The self can also be seen as a complex of opposites where archetypal good and evil reside (Casement, 2010). Jung was also keen on the symbol of the mandala as being one that represents self : it has a ‘whole’ quality with a clear central point, like the imagery found in the ‘Liverpool’ dream.
Spotlight: A mandala a day…
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), Jung reported how he would spontaneously draw a mandala every day, as a kind of ‘snapshot’ of what was happening in his psyche. As he put it: ‘With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformation from day to day’ (Jung, 1963, p. 220). Some of these changing mandalas can be observed in The Red Book.
The ego–self axis
How does self enable access to deeper archetypal influences, and transmit its messages to ego, to help psyche stay on its individuation path? Jung’s model of psyche stressed how important each was to the other – self needs ego to represent and actualize it as much as ego needs self to help it navigate through this challenge. Jung proposed a dynamic of relations between the two, bridged by conduits of communication, for example where dreams serve to convey from self to ego what is going on at a deeper level (as described in the example below), or where ego then responds to this by adjusting conscious attitude or making an ethical choice. He did not give this bridge a name, but a Jungian thinker later did – Edward Edinger, who termed this the ‘ego–self axis’ in 1972 (Edinger, 1991).