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Jungian Psychology and the Public Self
James W. Heisig
The search for an idea of the "public self" in the psychology of Jung
is doomed from the start. Indeed, it is precisely the absence of such an
idea that secures the distinctive quality of his thought. The reasons for
this are not as complicated as the psychological theory in which they
are encased. Put simply, J ung felt that in order to restore the rightful
place of unconscious mind in psychic health, he had to bracket all
questions of the relation to objective reality, be they natural or social,
of the fantasies, symbols, archetypes, and ideas generated by the
psyche. This is not to say that these "psychological facts" are not
"real," but only that their reality is neither publicly demonstrable nor
publicly verifiable. The subject who experiences this reality of the inner
world may, from another standpoint, be seen as a public person inter·
acting with the outer world of social structures and institutions, but this
is not the concern of psychotherapy.
THE QUEST OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF
Jung himself saw this suspension of judgment as a
"phenomenological" strategy. Unlike ordinary philosophical pheno·
men·ology, however, he did not see the bracketing of the question of
existence---the so-called epoche---as the first step in a more com·
prehensive process of coming to the truth. His concern with truth began
and ended with the phenomenon, something that Husser! and those who
followed his lead would have found inimical to the philosophical quest.
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Husser! himself already rejected this approach of empirical psychology
as early as 1911:
Modern psychology no longer wants to be a science of the "soul" but rather of "psychical phenomena." If that is what it wants, then it must be able to describe and determine these phenomena with conceptual rigor. ... We seek for it in vain throughout its vast literature.
The question as to how natural, "confused" experience can become scientific experience, as to how one can arrive at the determination of objectively valid empirical judgments, is the cardinal methodological question of every empirical science .. .. How are things to be determined with objective validity? ... With regard to knowledge of the psyc:.ical, ... this science is still from the most important point of view pre-Galilean.'
Contrast this with Jung's understanding of phenomenological objec
tivity. In the same year, 1911, when Jung was in the throes of separating
himself from what he called the "constricting atmosphere" of Freud's
thought, he sets up a distinction between literal truth that consciously
reflects on common experience from metaphysical truth, which he saw
as trying to stand in a third territory apart from the working of mind
and the objects of the real world, and then distinguishes both of these
from psychological truth that is spontaneous and "turns away from
reality."2 His option for the latter to the exclusion of the former was a
position he maintained throughout his work to the end and earned his
thinking the disdain and then neglect of philosophers that has never
abated. The idea that one form of truth might lead into the other or
1 . Edmund Husser!, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology
and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 99-
100.
2 . The Collected Works of C. G. ]ung (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961- ),
5:7-33 (hereafter cited as CW).
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form the foundation for another never seemed to occur to him. He had
carved out a standpoint and defended it against all incursions, in the
name, he thought, of psychological science.
I draw this contrast not to measure Jung's work against the views
of the father of phenomenology or to assess the disagreement. On that
enough has been written. My aim is rather to locate the root reason why
there is an absence of concern with the public self in Jung's thought, and
it seems to me to come down to this: the objects of psychology are
thoroughly private events, which ideas, records, artifacts, religious
rites, doctrines, and all manner of philosophies in the public domain can
serve with interpretative tools but cannot "validate" or "disprove."
THE RETREAT FROM THE ETHICAL SELF
What there is in the way of an idea of the public self in Jung's
thought is minimal. Not that he was bent on isolating the psyche from
its social setting. The very therapeutic setting itself and the language
with which it is negotiated constitute social interaction.3 He knew that
social conventions themselves survive as a kind of unconscious infec
tion.4 What is more, the appeal to the arcana of images and symbols in
our collective past preclude any possibility of treating the individual in
3. See CW 5:15; 16:171. Jung gives far less attention to the problem of the
objective truth of patient's accounts than Freud did, assuming--but
not citing--Freud's introduction of the concept of the Imago through
the famous case of Anna 0. His own advice for countering the transfer
ence phenomenon was to insist on the therapist's self-knowledge (see
cw 10:162).
4 . Note for instance the following: "Every Roman was surrounded by
slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every
Roman became inwardly a slave. Living constantly in the atmosphere
of slaves, he became infected with their psychology" (CW 10:121).
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isolation from the community. Still, it was not the public dimension that
was psychology's concern, but the way that dimension is constellated in
the psyche of each individual. The Self, as designating the highest goal
of the psyche or the progress towards its attainment, could never be a
public affair. His category of the persona, which might seem at first
thought to qualify as a public self, merely designated the face that one
wears in public, more often than not disguising the inner reality. Never
did Jung make the persona into a moral subject, since it was the
persona seen from the inside that was his final concern.
There is no question of usurping the rights of therapeutic psychol
ogy to be faithful to its concerns and methods. The question is whether
the totality of the psyche can be spoken of absent attention to individ
ual as the concrete agent of legal, moral, and political existence. At
least in a formal sense, the Self deprived of sufficient awareness of this
public agency would seem incomplete---even in a science whose aims
are aimed at the care of the individual psyche. In other words, whereas
we cannot in principle fault a psychotherapy for not taking up legal and
political issues or even for refusing to pronounce on specific moral
questions, the psychological fact of this ethical dimension of conscious
ness cannot be merely incidental to understanding the totality of
psyche.
J ung's refusal to bring ethical questions to bear on the psyche began
in some rather wild ravings against morality as the bete nair of depth
psychology. At the time, he was lumping morality and religion together,
both of which he identified with ecclesiastical institutions that "crush
the human spirit."5 Later, of course, he was to single out religion as the
5 . "Randbemerkungen zu dem Buch von Fr. Wittels: Die sexuelle Not,"
]ahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 2
(1910), 315. "Referate tiber psychologische Arbeiten schweizerischer
Autoren," ibid ., 380.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self -367-
soul-mate of depth-psychology, but a religion pared of the church and
moralistic trappings to which he remained adamantly allergic. In time,
due not only to a more balanced regard of religion but also to the
interest shown in his work by professional religionists and pastors, he
tempered his remarks but retained his distance.
Jung's own struggles to liberate religious experience and imagery
from the confines of the Christian institutions that claimed it as part of
their tradition belonged to a larger effort within European culture.
There it was not only religion but the ethical subject that was loosened
from the authority of organized religion and seeking its own roots in
experience and new perceptions of the world and society. In other
words, there was every reason for Jung to take up the question of the
ethical dimensions of the public self. That he did not do so had to be a
deliberate decision, and one that he had to make repeated times. On the
one hand, as I hinted earlier, this decision helped him to concentrate on
his own strengths and not dilute his theories to suit the causes cele
brated in the press or intellectual fads of the day. On the other, it set a
pattern of thought that Jungian psychologists have had a hard time
breaking through.
As a historical individual, of course, Jung had opinions about all
sorts of legal, moral, and political affairs. And such judgments crept
willy-nilly into his writings with far more frequency than his methodo
logical rigors would allow for. Still, taken together these do not amount
to anything like a psychological argument, nor do they lay much of a
ground for a theory of the public self at all. They are the detached
musings of an extraordinarily gifted curator of souls that can cut close
to the bone at times, even as they show how the brightest lights can cast
a twisted shadow. Stringing his comments together, one realizes that
there is not the stuff of a solid idea of a public self. His strengths as a
theoretician lay elsewhere, and he made no consistent pretense other-
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wise.
This brings us to the heart of the question I wish to take up today.
Despite the fact that Jung's work lay in the interpretation of imagery
as keys to the structure and transformations of the psyche, he was
convinced throughout his professional career that a theory ignorant of
scientific method and naive as to its philosophical assumptions was not
to be trusted. He did not feel the same about the social dimension of his
science, but it is clear that our times oblige us to raise questions here
that reach beyond Jung's own body of work to include all psychologies
focused on the care or transcendence of the Self. Does Jungian psychol·
ogy need to come to terms with the public self? Does failing to do so
doom his thought to the esoteric? And if so, does J ung's own thought
give us any clues about how to go about the corrective? To reply to
these question, we must begin with locating the problem on Jung's own
ground.
THE AVERSION TO THE COLLECTIVE
Among the immediate disciples and colleagues who had an influence
on J ung, to the best of my knowledge only one of them seems to have
shaped an ethic that faced the neglect of the public self squarely.6 I refer
to Eric Neumann and his 1949 book Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic.
Jung saw the book prior to its publication and was elated at the results.
Not only did the author rely almost entirely on the Jungian model of the
psyche to make his case, but he turned Jung's concentration on the
individual into a virtue whose exercise would elevate the ethical self to
6. Ira Progoff's "sociological" approach ended up where its initial assump·
tions about sociology were fated to lead: to a concentration on the
psychological individual. I therefore exclude this from consideration
here. See his ]ung's Psychology and its Social Meaning (New York:
Julian Press, 1953).
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 369-
new heights.
In his preface to the book, Jung has high praise for Neumann's view,
which perfectly reflects his own, that "the individual must work
through his own basic moral problem before he is in a position to play
a responsible part in the collective."7 A few years later, in the course of
a recondite study on alchemical symbolism, he made his own position of
the psychotherapists role as clear as he ever had:
His duty is always to the individual, and he is persuaded that nothing has happened if the individual has not been helped. He is answerable to the individual in the first place and to society only in the second.
There is no faulting the therapist faced with the individual patient
for concentrating his efforts on his patient. The question is how that
"second duty" is integrated into the practice and theory of psychother·
apy. In Jung's case, it was, to put it simply, set aside as irrelevant.
Theoretically, all that was necessary was to leave it out of the thera·
pist's job description. But Jung's views surpass that necessity.
If he therefore prefers individual treatment to collective ameliora· tions, this accords with the experience that social and collective influences usually produce only a mass intoxication, and that only man's action upon man can bring about a real transformation.•
Elsewhere, he is more forthright:
A hundred intelligent people together make one hydrocephalus .... Man in the group is always unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable .... The larger an organization, the lower its
7. Erich Neumann, Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 93.
8. CW 14:105- 6. In a footnote, Jung mentions this as his reason for resist
ing attempts to deal with individuals by group analysis.
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morality .... Nations being the largest organized groups are from a psychological point of view clumsy, stupid, and amoral monsters like those huge saurians with an incredibly small brain .... They are caught in every swindle, ... they are stupid to an amazing degree, they are greedy, reckless, and blindly violent, like a rhino suddenly aroused from sleep.•
Jung's aversion to the collective runs beneath the surface of his
thought like a steady stream, determining the audience for his ideas and
his giving his critics a foothold for contention. What makes Neumann's
work important is that he brought this distrust of the public sphere to
the surface.
It may seem odd to characterize Jung of all people as having ignored
the dimension of the collective. In deliberately leaving out Freud's idea
of super-ego from his map of the psyche, he preempted the question of
the attempt to improve the structure and function of the super-ego as
part of the health of the individual. But if there is no place for "collec
tive consciousness" in J ung's thought, surely his emphasis on the role of
the collective unconscious and the need to assimilate its contents into
consciousness satisfies the demand for collectivity. I think not.
Jung's collective unconscious does not function as a community but
as a collection of individuals, each with its own role to play, interacting
with each other but ultimately impervious to transformation through
the influence of the others. The archetypes are like colored stones in a
kaleidoscope. The mirrors of mind working in the relative freedom of
dream and fantasy states combine them into a variety of patterns, but
the stones themselves never change. What changes is the conscious
individual's perception of the given, which includes noticing things
previously passed over, reassessing the relative value of the parts that
make up the collectivity, and finally attempting to achieve harmony
9 . cw 18:571.
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among all the individuals--suppressing nothing, giving everything
and its opposite the right to be. For the conscious ego to achieve this
state of laissez faire in the encounter with unconscious mind is a task of
immense proportions that requires great effort. But it is also a task that
nature has set us by providing a more or less stable, universal, ar·
chetypal order to things.
Were the contents of unconscious mind a community struggling for
some kind of conviviality, changing itself to adjust to specific condi·
tions, suppressing what is destructive and enhancing what is for the
good of all, it would no longer be the kind of collective commonality
Jung had in mind. It would be somewhere between his own idea of a
personal unconscious and Freud's super-ego. And with that, the whole
idea of the collective unconscious would forfeit its unique interpretative
role. Jung's aversion to the collective is not some kind of covert
solipsism, but only an aversion to entangling psychology in questions of
public responsibility--that is, responsibilities that are shared and
whose consequences affect individuals insofar as they are part of a
community.
The questions here are broader than theoretical problems within
Jung's psychology. It is not as if Jung had one idea of the public domain
when speaking of the therapeutic setting and another when it came to
facing the real social problems about him. Nor is there any evidence in
his writings and letters that he encouraged his patients and disciples to
seek to fulfill their public self by recognizing the limitations of psycho·
logical science. In the same way that his allegedly "methodological"
refusals to pronounce on the metaphysical nature of God and other
religious beliefs were in fact his final word on the matter; so, too, his
conclusion that collective ameliorations are so given to collective
intoxication, that concentration on the individual is the only way to be
a responsible member of a community were more than a remark about
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the confines of therapeutic method. They constitute a philosophical
belief about human society.
OUTER SHADOW, INNER LIGHT
To persons grappling with the gigantic and widely discussed ques
tions of structuralized poverty and enslavement, the threat of nuclear
extermination, the despoiling of nature, and so forth, Jung's individual
ism must appear a kind of elitist luxury, if not an outright endorsement
of the status quo. Still, the neglect of the kinds of questions Jungian
psychology neither asks itself nor prompts its devotees to ask is only
one side of the picture. In modern cultures with media designed to drive
the interests of consumers of information this way and that, to implore
opinions about an ever wider and ever more dimly understand range of
problems, the call for a slow, ascetic attention to the workings of the
individual mind falls quickly out of pace. We must first give Jung his
say as to why the public self should be taken up as an individual
question, and for that Neumann's account is better than anything Jung
himself wrote on the matter.
Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic is a short book, and its central
thesis regarding the public self is clear and can be stated simply,
patching together the author's own phrases: It is a universal character
istic of humans to exploit ideologies of goodness to justify their own
good deeds, while at the same time hiding from themselves more basic
motivations of self-preservation. Evil is not combated because it is
intrinsically evil; rather, it is tolerated and glossed over until it
threatens one's own existence. Mass movements that arise from time to
time to combat evil, for all the apparent nobility of those who partici
pate in them, are an outward projection of self-interests that remain
hidden in the shadows of unconscious mind. The secularization, materi
alism, empiricism, and relativism of the modern world have brought
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about a disintegration of trust in the institutions that traditionally
upheld the fa~ade for ideologies of goodness, leaving individuals to face
this pessimistic wisdom about the human condition. In general collec·
tive consciousness is decades behind individuals, which makes it imper·
ative that we encourage a new ethic based on the self-awareness of
great numbers of individuals if we are ever to see a change of habits in
society at large. The object of that self-awareness begins in facing the
shadow cast by our ordinary moral behavior and from that drawing on
the creative energies of our collective unconsciousness to dissolve
projections, to see clearly through our ideologies and moralities to their
underlying ego-centered drives, and to recognize the wider ranger of
ideas and symbols that are built into human nature for its self-guid·
ance.
The individual thus stands poised between two collectivities. On the
one hand, he faces the temporal and cultural specificities of his own
social structures-the super-ego, which is blind and driven by habit,
and whose aims can be served only by the conscious suppression or
unconscious repression of conflicting individual interests. On the other,
there is the pool of autonomous, universal, unconscious contents where
both the good and the evil of specific conscious conventions have a
place, where the criminal and the saint find common ground. The
process of individuation whereby these unconscious contents are as·
similated into consciousness replaces the primacy of the super-ego as
the frame of reference for psychic health, and at the same time it takes
control over changes in the outer world and provide the only solid basis
for human solidarity.
Put so baldly, these ideas read as vintage Jung. Stripped of their
Jungian terminology, they reverberate with Gnostic ideas of self-awar
eness10 and with many varieties of the foundational Buddhist idea of
enlightenment. Those questions aside, the weakest link in the Neumann-
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Jung chain is how to negotiate the leap from what can only be private
insight into the way mind deceives itself and the treasures that it
forfeits in the process, to the activity of a public self to build a social
order where the inhumanity of man to man is kept in check, or to face
the immediate threat of real evil.
Neumann begins his work, it comes as no surprise, with the postwar
sentiments of Germany, insisting that the root causes reach too deeply
into the human soul to be weeded out merely by the decision to distance
itself from every trace of National Socialism, but. Four years earlier
Jung had written an article on the "collective guilt" of Germany for the
deeds of the Nazi regime. In it he attempted to enlarge on the psychical
illness of the Germans as pointing to the wider human tendency to
mastery by its own shadow-side, a tendency that empowered Hitler.
Towards the end he speaks of the need for "inner transformation" as
infinitely more important than political and social reforms which are
all valueless in the hands of people who are not at one with them
selves. This is a truth which we are forever forgetting, because our
eyes are fascinated by the conditions around us and riveted on them
instead of examining our own heart and conscience. Every demagogue exploits this human weakness when he points with the greatest
possible outcry to all the things that are wrong in the outside world.
But the principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the
world is man.''
10. In his introduction to the book, Jung claims to have brought down to
earth what the Gnostics had projected in the heavens (18), but this is
based on his own reading of the Gnostic texts. For my part, I cannot see
the "projection" as based purely on the unconscious, since it also seems
to be the expression of a disciplined struggle with conventional ideas
and beliefs and intended to lay the ground work-or more precisely,
the heaven-work--for a new social order.
11. cw 10:216.
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There is, no doubt a certain insight to be had in Jung's words or
Neumann's expansion in that they help us see our own face in the face
of those we condemn as monsters. At the same time, they seem to
reassure us that our efforts spent in becoming better, more whole
persons might bear fruit someday in a better world. But the lingering
discomfort is that no matter how many persons make this effort, a
minority equipped with the right tools and institutional backing can rise
up again one day to exterminate, on the basis of their own private
prejudices, what they dislike of public life on earth, leaving the commu
nity of those enlightened to their own shadow-side with no recourse but
to forfeit their own individuation to preserve the public domain. And if
this is the case in extremity, then something must be said about the
more mundane moral responsibilities towards the public domain than
that they are prone to projection and self-deception. The question, I
repeat, is how to break into the closed world of individuation with the
notion of a public self without forfeiting the importance of that world.
MORAL SELF, IMMORAL SOCIETY
Jung's assumption that the level of intelligence of individuals decline
as soon as they begin to act as part of a group, and that the larger the
group, the lower intelligence sinks, hardly qualifies as an argument. A
case could be made that psychological problems that are by their nature
individual can be maltreated if treated at a group level. This is clearly
not true in the case of the pursuit of science, the flourishing of litera
ture, the advance of philosophy, and the accumulation of cultural
achievements in general. It is best to set his comments aside as a
passion aimed at the failures of mass movements, whose fallout he had
to treat.
The more serious is his claim that morality is through and through
a matter of individual consciousness and cannot be attributed to institu-
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tions or to groups. Granted the job of the therapist is treat moral
questions at the level of the individual. Granted, too, that moral respon
sibility is exercised by individuals or it is not exercised at all. But to
conclude that the primary focus of moral responsibility should be the
individual psyche is a monumental leap of logic. Insofar as we can
speak of as justice or injustice being built into laws, social institutions,
customs, or even language, we are not referring to a collection of
individual ego-consciousnesses, but of a morality that is somehow
institutionalized, coded, and transmitted. It is one thing to claim that
institutionalized morality depends on individual consciousness to come
to be and to be sustained; it is another to claim that it does not simply
exist at all. By asking this question and applying conscience and reason
to this institutionalized good and evil, the individual is in effect acting
as a public self. Conversely, to ignore this question is to assume that the
only formative elements of individual consciousness that matter for
morality are the more or less universal ones that transcend specificities
of time, place, culture, and social structures. This seems naive in the
extreme. There is no denying the absence of just this public self as part
of the picture of what it means to be psychologically whole--in order
words, to be a Self.
Theoretically, Jung seems to restrict his interest in such a public self
to the psychology of the ego struggling with the super-ego, which is a
necessary part of the individuation process, one that belongs properly
to what he calls "the first half of life" along with the struggle to
appropriate one's personal "shadow" of wickedness, frustrated desires,
repressions, and so forth. The second half of life, which struggles with
the archetypal dimensions of humanity, assumes that one has already
more or less appropriated the public self into the ego and is ready to
plunge into the world of universal forms and religious symbols. This is
what gave Neumann room to produce his version of a Jungian ethic,
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 377-
which in effect focuses on the "root cause" of public immorality without
giving any indication of how to act once the roots have been dug up and
examined.
It is not enough simply to claim that once one has come to terms
with one's own shadow and the archetypal instincts that nature has
built into us, one is prepared to be a more moral person in society. As
true as this may be, it places the public self outside the realm of
psychological theory and therefore deprives moral responsibility in the
public realm and the practice of psychotherapy of mutual critique.
If the question were simply how to make the leap from the self
enclosed psyche to the world of the public self, Jung's thought would
hardly be the best place to begin. In the world of psychological theory,
as the philosophical community has long recognized, Freud's super-ego
theory is not a one-sided concentration on the individual in principle.
(Habermas, for instance, tried to show how Freud's later work on social
theory and psychology, gives specific insights into the origins and
functions of social institutions. 12) Jung's work is too wanting in hints to
warrant any such attempt--and to my knowledge, no one has tried to
prove differently. He learned from Freud quite early on the bias that as
far as the deepest, inborn instincts of the True Self are concerned, all
culture is to some extent repressive, and that a relaxing of that repres
sion outside of unconscious fantasy, would bring about a barbarism and
a "catastrophe of culture." And there he pretty much stopped.
Nevertheless, I do believe there is a way to drive a wedge into Jung's
close world of Self- preoccupation, and that is uncovering an internal
alienation in the structure of the Self he sets up as the final ideal of
12. Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1968). Hork
heimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, and others associated
with the "Frankfurt School" have shown an interest in Freud for similar
reasons.
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wholeness, and then to show how this in turn reflects a wider alienation
in the social sphere. The second half of this paper will offer a sketch,
uninflected as it is, of how this might be done.
VARIEITES OF THE HEROIC EGO OF MODERNITY
The subjects whose analysis provided depth-psychology with its
various maps of the psyche were moderns. They no longer belong to the
closed traditional world where individuals, family relations, work, and
social obligation defined each other, and where "I" was simply a
pronoun referring to the point where these elements intersected in a
particular person. The adherence of civil law to divine law, and the
basic reliance on the authority of both had been broken by the critical
spirit of the enlightenment and science's proclamation of autonomy
from religion. The education of children was no longer the primary
trust of the family but was organized into a system that made them
wards of the state. The economics of work had become an ergonomics
optimized to maximize production, with precalculated wages compen
sating for the individual's loss of control over the products of labor. The
basic political unit was the democratic atom with the right of one vote
and with inalienable rights. Faith in the progress of knowledge, technol
ogy, and wealth became common sense, and with it the assumption that
this worldview was universal, irreversible, and free of cultural bias. In
this setting, it was only a matter of time before the personal identity of
individuals became a territorial right to be protected against tres
passers. And with that the stage was set for exploring the mysterious
inner realms of the psyche. The subject could become an object of
study, the "I" a noun. 13
13. See my essay, "The Quest of the True Self: Jung's Rediscovery of a
Modern Invention," journal of Religion 77/2 (1997), 252-67.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self -379-
In this modern world where individuals were trained to think of
themselves as masters of their own universe of meaning, the variety of
roles one had to play in the public and private spheres were understood
as extensions of a single controlling, skinbound ego. Spiritual health
depended not on observance of regulations or performance of preestab·
lished duties, but on the degree of control and discipline of that ego. For
the psychologist, it was only a short step to see the roles of teacher,
financier, lover, parent, worker, athlete, intellectual, religious believe,
patriot, and so forth as projections into the social sphere of that ego.
The skinbound individual could then be seen as a ruler of desires, to rein
in the various roles like a cormorant fisher trying to keep the lines from
becoming tangled. From the point of view of a traditional, premodern
worldview, this role-performing, more or less controlling, ego can only
appear an alienation of the person from the sum of social connections
that defined its place in the world. To those born into the modern
worldview, however, it represented a higher consciousness. The mobil
ity and ability to discard some roles and take on others is now seen as
among the unquestionable rights that belong to each individual. Where
individuals were once extensions of social institutions, the tables have
now been turned.
This was the context for the neuroses that Freud attempted to deal
with in his psychoanalytic theory and practice. The self fragmented by
divergent and conflicting roles needed to be strengthened into a heroic
ego, and Freud sought the reinforcement by trying to broaden aware
ness to memories, repressed feelings, and anxieties in the realm of the
primary interpersonal relations of the family that debilitate the ego and
inhibit it from carrying out its job of stabilizing identity. While accept
ing the broad definition of the individual psyche of modernity, he
challenged its fundamental bias about the strength of the ego: the idea
of the ego being in control is only a fiction created to keep the strong,
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unconscious currents of untrammeled desire from running amok. The
apparent mastery of the "I" is disclosed as accommodation to the
slavery of consciousness to an "it" (id). The primary support that keeps
this fiction from dissolving is not the heroism of the awakened con·
sciousness but the reality of social conventions set up as a kind of
"over-!" (the super-ego) to keep individuals from pursuing their own
self-interests in a way that would break society down. On this scheme,
the true and final heroism of the ego consists in bringing to conscious
ness the unconscious way of dealing with a conflict that is innate to the
psyche itself. By resigning itself to the fact that much of what appears
to be personal choice is in fact obeisance to the rules of social order, the
modern ego can attain some degree of deliverance from its predica
ment. Given this orientation, it as inevitable that Freud would turn his
attention eventually to the birth of the social institutions that embody
the conventions of repression and support the fiction of individual
freedom in the midst of social necessity.
Jung's own appraisal of Freud's probing of the breakdown in social
conventions and traditional authority is that it was driven by the hope
of substituting a higher, rational consciousness, whereas he himself was
interested in probing to the depths of the human psyche in search of
lasting moral and spiritual values. I cite one telling passage from his
late work. He is speaking of an alchemical text dealing with entry into
a "higher world" and breaks off to comment:
This higher world has an impersonal character and consists on the
one hand of all those traditional, intellectual, and moral values which
educate and cultivate the individual, and, on the other, of the products
of the unconscious, which present themselves to conscious as archetypal ideas. Usually the former predominate. But, when weakened by age or by criticism, they lose their power of conviction, the
archetypal ideas rush in to fill the gap. Freud, correctly recognizing
this situation, called the traditional values the "super-ego," but the
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 381 -
archetypal ideas remained unknown to him, as the belief in reason and the positivism of the nineteenth century never relaxed their hold. A materialistic view of the world ill accords with the reality and autonomy of the psyche. 14
Freud's strengthening of the ego through the recovery of repressed
memories and desires was for Jung no more than the business of the
"first half of life," which he soon set aside to concentrate on the more
religious concerns of life's "second half." Where Freud's ego turned
inward to the private self and then outward to public self, Jung's ego
left both these realms behind to become the subject of a new adventure
which he caiied "individuation." The self fragmented into a set of social
roles and struggling to keep them in tow turns to the world of the
unconscious where that fragmentation is replaced with a closed, tradi
tional society inhabited by archetypal desires. In this sense, the frag
mentation and a reification of the Self needed to adjust to life in
modernity is not addressed as a problem but accepted as a model for
the natural state of the human. As in premodern societies, the heroism
of the Jungian ego consists in making a home harmoniously with a
given order of things, whose authority is absolute.
At the level of theory, Jung was, like Freud, a child of the enlighten
ment with its ideas of transcultural, scientificaily reliable patterns. In
his case, though, this was tempered by romanticism's conviction of
truth hidden in the human soul and discoverable by an inner journey.
The true heroism of the ego lie not in dealing with the outer world but
in discovering the inner one. This made it inevitable that at the level of
practice he would belong to the world that Husser! rather cynically
referred to as "pre-Galilean." While his psychotherapeutic goal was to
see ail belief in demons and gods and similar religious entities as
14. cw 14:473.
-382-
projections of unconscious dispositions, he returned to those images as
the only way to come to terms with those dispositions, to wrest from
them their secret, and to unify them into the totality of psyche, which
he called the Self. Here again, while the archetypes of the unconscious,
though they are described theoretically by Jung as predispositions to
think in certain ways and to form certain images in the manner of
Kant's "categories," they function in the therapeutic setting as foreign
entities that have made their home within the confines of a kind of
archaic cave that is located inside of the body. For the modern scientific
mind, overcoming this crude, pre-Galilean mindset is a prerequisite to
psychic health. In Jung's case, however, no such reprieve is sought from
this mindset. Rather, the assumption is that only in the dream and
fantasy life of the unconsciouscan full psychic wholeness, health, be
achieved. 15
Jung's erasure of the public self, then, is not merely an obligation
imposed on the therapist as he insisted, since there is no reason in
principle that attention to the public self should not complement the
therapeutic epoche in the end. Nor can it been as part of a more
comprehensive cure for society, as Neumann argued. It amounts to a
systematic, though perhaps corrigible, one-sidedness grounded in a
neglect of the psychology of modernity.
THE PROBLEM OF THE BODY
Given the nature of Jungian psychology as an interpretative therapy,
we can hardly expect it to tackle the question of the alienation of the
15. Among more creative post-Jungians, Hillman has offered as an alterna
tive by insisting on the importance of learning to "see through" the
"personifying" work of unconscious mind, and to "depersonalize" it in
order to arrive at the level of soul. See his Re- visioning Psychology
(New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 383 -
self from the social setting which defines its parameters on the merely
philosophical level. We must see it as a disease in need of the kind of
therapy depth-psychology is equipped to bring. The Jungian assumption
that the final roots of all psychic disease lie in a failure to come to
terms with the deepest, collective layers of unconscious mind seems to
preclude that possibility. I am suggesting it does not.
The alienation of the self-individuating ego from the morally
responsibly public self that we see in Jungian psychology is mirrored in
another psychological problem endemic to life in modernity: that of the
alienation of the body. The industrial revolution represents a watershed
in the extension of the human body into machinery. As Marshall
MacLuhan pointed out some thirty-five years ago, the tools which are
extensions of our bodies--the wheel of the foot, the telescope of the
eye, the crane of the arm, etc.--have taken a massive leap forward
with the new media of radio, television, and computers (which he
predicted would be connected someday in a "worldwide web" that
would in effect extend the human central nervous system). 16 In the
process, the body has become reified and fragmented. In its reliance on
ever more and ever more sophisticated tools, the body suffers a fate not
unlike that of the social ego: it comes to be thought of as a collection
of functions. Along with this, it becomes an object made of up parts that
machines--originally extensions of that body--can test, repair,
improve, and dispose of with all the consciousness of the subject
focused on the proper use and maintenance of the tools. At the same
time as ego occupies itself with the heroic effort of trying to stay in one
piece and not fall apart, it tries to keep the skinbound environment that
is its home "in shape" and alive as long as possible. The body as person
16. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1964), 358.
-384-
--that is, as one dimension of a broader totality--is driven intoun
consciousness, replaced by the body as an object of ego attentions. 17
Jung's own views on the body are scattered and ambivalent, but for
that reason are still open to development by those who subscribe to his
theory and methods. In his psychological writings proper, his sole
theoretical conviction is a clear rejection of any form of body-mind
duality, as well as of any form of materialism or idealism that would
support it. For the rest, he prefers to suspend judgment: "In my view, we
know practically nothing about this .... Exhaustive discussions of this
question may be all very well for philosophers, but empirical psychol
ogy should confine itself to empirically accessible facts." 18 Where body
and mind are concerned, his principal interest remained in the her
meneutics of images, not in the examination of objective entities in the
publicly observable world that might correspond to these images.
Though aware of the possibility of physical causes for physical illnesses
(and vice versa), 19 from quite early on he abandoned interest in the
treatment of nervous disorders as based in physical causes and advised
others to do the same.20 Any cure of a psychological problem that could
17. This is confirmed in the redefinition of asceticism and bodily repression
as pleasure. On this see my essay, "The Recovery of the Senses: Against
the Asceticisms of the Age," journal of Ecumenical Studies 33/2 (1996),
216-37.
18. CW 8: 17- 18. At one point he appeals to his principle of "synchronicity"
to speak of the body-mind relation, although it is less an explanation
than an admission of the fact that "things happen together somehow
and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not" (CW
18: 34).
19. Even where he admitted the functioning of psychosomatic effects, he
resisted using the pitiable little we know about it as a foundation for
therapy. See CW 8:261; 7:115.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self -385-
be effected without conscious effort would only strengthen the under
lying malady. Attention to the body as the root of psychological
problems, however firmly believed as common sense, amounts to no
more than a projection.21
The relation of the private ego to its public roles and of the body to
the tools of by which it does its work is, crudely but traditionally put,
one of an inner world to an outer one. The attempt to remedy these
conflicts by accepting responsibility to keep the inner life in order--a
psychological approach typified in Jung but hardly inaugurated by him
--only really works if the public world is in some sense recovered in
the privacy of interiority. His solution, as we saw, was to redefine the
public in the form of universal, innate dispositions with which each
private individual is born. In so doing, he set up a tension between the
private realm of the ego-consciousness and its personal shadow side in
the unconscious against the public domain of a collective unconscious.
Only when both work in harmony, neither of them "inflated" or eclips
ing the other, could, can we speak of a psychic wholeness.
Ironically the body can be brought into the therapeutic scheme only
by being left out of it as body. There is no way to reduce the body to
interiority, because it is by definition something that is not psyche. The
most the can be said is that vestiges of the Freudian notion of the id
remain in the world of the personal unconscious, only to be superseded
by their true ground in collective unconscious archetypes. Obviously
Jung did not mean to deny the objective reality of the body any more
than he denied the objective reality of the public self. It was rather a
question of stressing its inner side and focusing on that. In this way he
20. cw 7:246-7.
21. He compares this to the metaphysically silly side of the alchemists'
writings, CW 14:477.
-386-
could preserve the semblance of a body-mind totality without having to
deal with the body as body.
This lack of interest in working out a theoretical position on the
mind-body question is consistent with his general lack of interest in the
problem of the body faced by life in the modern world. However, in a
1928 essay on "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man," after conclud
ing that "the crux of the spiritual problem today is to be found in the
fascination which the psyche holds for modern man," Jung ends his
essay by pleading guilty to the charge of one-sidedness:
The fascination of the psyche brings about a new self-appraisal, a reassessment of our fundamental human nature. We can hardly be surprised if this leads to a rediscovery of the body after its long subjection to the spirit--we are even tempted to say that the flesh is getting its own back. ... The body lays claim to equal recognition: it exerts the same fascination as the psyche .... The striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due .... These claims of physical and psychic life, incomparably stronger than they were in the past, may seem a sign of decadence, but they may also signify a rejuvenation!2
I cite the passage not because it is terribly profound in its percep
tion, but because the admission that the body has suffered neglect at his
own hands reads like a promise to make amends. Jung himself never did
so in his psychological theory, but neither did his theory ever close the
door on the possibility.
That having been said, there are echoes of this preoccupation with
the body scattered throughout his late alchemical work. Ideas that he
could not organize systematically into his psychological theory proper,
and which were not given any clear therapeutic connection, were given
free reign in commentaries on arcane texts that for him were seedbeds
22. cw 10:93- 4.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 387-
of suggestiveness. At times, it is difficult to know where the text ends
and Jung begins, but these are the very places that are most interesting
in terms of his alternative approach to the body. What I would like to
do here is draw these scattered comments together and suggest a way
that attention to the problem of the body can serve to open the isolated,
private world of the individuating ego into the public world.
THE UNCONSCIOUS BODY
To appreciate the importance of his later "philosophical" remarks,
we begin with the briefest of resumes of his "empirical psychological"
conclusions about the relation between body and mind. The body, he
writes in a 1926 essay, is basically a "material system ready for life,"
and the psyche "consists essentially of images, a structure that is
throughout full of meaning and purpose."
And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. Mind and body are presumably a part of opposites and, as such, the expression of a single entity whose essential nature is not knowable either from its outward, material manifestation, or from inner, direct perception!3
The psyche is not merely made up of ego-consciousness, but also of
an unconscious realm which has its own moral authority and ac
cumulated wisdom. Together, they represent the human "spirit," at
once individual and collective. In comparison, the body is a largely
undeveloped concept in Jungian psychology, a fact reflected in the fact
that its theoretic and therapeutic function is more or less restricted to
enabling images. Corpus ancilla mentis.
The following year, 1927, he published an essay on the structure of
23. See his essay on "Spirit and Life," CW 8:325-6.
- 388 -
the psyche in which he tries to explain the individual and collective
elements of the psyche by comparing it to the body: both have evolved
through time and both are inherited at their latest stage of evolution.
Both mind and body, while individually varied, have underlying univer
sal qualities. Thus, in the same way that the body preserves elements
that connect it with the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa, so
"theoretically it should be possible to 'peel' the collective unconscious,
layer by layer, until we came to the psychology of the worm, and even
of the amoeba."24 It is not altogether clear from the context of this
remark that he was merely using the body as a metaphor to describe his
view of the psyche (which is most often the case in his theoretical
writings25), or even merely as two parallel systems, perhaps of a
common origin, that somehow, mysteriously, continue to support one
another. There is at least a hint that the body is related to the uncon
scious differently from the way it is related to ego-consciousness, that
there is more here than merely the role of providing images.
That this is not the whole of the body's role in depth-psychology
began to strike Jung the more he grappled with alchemical texts. There
he found he could not avoid the body so easily, since the idea of
discovering spirit in matter, the purification of matter by spirit, and the
union of the two is a central and consistent theme of the alchemical
enterprise. 26
In his strictest definitions of the unconscious, he had referred to it as
a kind of Kantian "negative borderline concept" pointing to something
24. cw 8: 152.
25. Note the following as typical: "Just as the human body shows a com
mon anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the human
psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in
culture and consciousness ... , the psychic expression of the identity of
brain structure." CW 13:11.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 389-
itself permanently beyond the reach of ego-consciousness.27 In other
words, it is defined by what it is not--namely, consciousness. But in
actual therapeutic use, the term was described in terms closer to an
entity in the real world of some kind. It is not merely an adjective or
a collective noun for certain kinds of experiences possessed of certain
qualities. It is some thing.
The alchemical commentaries support this. The archetypal images
he associated most commonly with the unconscious in its undifferentiat·
ed form are those of mother, woman, and earth. In the alchemical
studies, it was more often "matter," except in the more explicitly
psychological of the texts, where the body appears as the human
participation in earth and nature. 28 The realm of "spirit" as such is kept
distinct from the body, particularly in the form of human consciousness.
But the realm of the unconsciousness, on the contrary, draws closer to
it than it ever had in his formal psychological writings.
Jung had recognized as an infallible sign of the collectivity of an
unconscious image the fact that the body is altered in its proportions.29
The alchemists led him to take the step that "the idea of man as a
microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth or the universe, is a
remnant of an original psychic identity which reflected a twilight state
of consciousness."30 Now this idea of the emergence of consciousness
from an awareness of the body in which the individual subject mirrors
the whole of reality is precisely is a structural definition of how Jung
26. One particularly useful section, for those with some inclination to
reading the original , appears in chapter 6 of Mysterium Coniunctionis,
which deals with the "conjunctio" of mind and spirit. CW 14:457- 53.
27. cw 13:54.
28. cw 13:197.
29. cw 7:160.
30. cw 131:92
- 390 -
understood the dawn of the individuating ego as it discovers in its own
unconscious a microcosm of all human consciousness.
By the same token, he acknowledges that the alchemical extraction
of the "world soul" from matter which is the basis for the extraction of
individual soul from its material form (the invisible body from the
visible one), leads to an idea of the body as "more a psychic principle
with quasi-material attributes" which "comes closest to the modern
concept of the unconscious."31 Drawing still closer to the idea of the
body as the bridge to the unconscious psyche, he writes that "the
unconscious is something objective in which the ego is included" and as
such "first appears in forms dictated by the experience of biological
life."32 The ego is not the center of the unconscious, which Jung insists
has no center.33 Its "inclusion" is of a sort with the inclusion of mind in
a body which has no center of its own.
When Jung meets with a despising of the body in alchemical texts/4
he is more forgiving than when he meets the same depreciation in
Christianity in general, as for instance in the passage cited above. The
reason is that the former work towards a purification of the body in
this life of its personal, selfish elements so that it can be "glorified" in
its universal dimension. Glimpses of this are to be seen, he says, in
mystical experiences where sensation is purified and detached from
particular sense organs,35 as well as in unhealthy eclipsing of conscious
ness by the unconscious, leading to body-hallucinations take place.36 In
31. The context here is Paracelsus's idea of "clarified matter," in particular
his idea of the Aquaster. See CW 13:114, 129-30, 140, 148.
32. cw 13:52.
33. cw 11:484-5.
34. See CW 13:94, 152.
35. cw 13:28.
36. cw 7:282-3.
Jungian Psychology and the Public Self -391-
cases like this Jung sees the body as more than a mere allegory of the
workings of unconscious psyche: the relationship is one of correlative
dependency such that the experience of the body virtually is the experi
ence of the unconscious.
Along with this goes a heightened sense of the importance of inte
grating awareness of the body into consciousness.37 "Without the soul,
the body is dead, and without the body the soul is unreal."38 The
"rooting" of the soul in the body that he finds in images of the cosmic
tree, which he interprets as a rooting of consciousness in the uncon
scious,39 suggests that it is not merely a matter of grounding the
particular in the universal, but consciously grounding particular mind in
the reality of a particular body. Failure to do so is seen in various forms
of "violent repression of the instincts that poisons our spirituality and
makes it hysterically exaggerated."40 Such spirituality of repression is
not only that of extreme forms of religious asceticism, but also of
attempts to elevate the body to the sole reality, absorbing without
remainder the reality of the psyche.41 For him grounding mind in body
37. In this connection of the encounter with the unconscious as a recovering
of awareness of the body, is interesting to note that his well- known
praise for the papal proclamation of the dogma of Mary's Assumption
was based initially on the introduction of the feminine, earthly element
into the image of God (CW 11:461-9), but it was an alchemical text that
prompted him to associate Mary with the introduction of the physical
body into the godhead. The implication is that incarnate Son is already
too conscious to represent collective human corporeality into the god
head, while Mary can in virtue of her association with the earth and
nature which is the unconscious womb of all consciousness (CW 14:466).
38. cw 13:255.
39. cw 13:239-40.
40. cw 13:47.
-392-
belongs to the task of unloading the contents of the unconscious into
consciousness.42 In place of blind repression, then, what is aimed at is a
kind of "freeing of the soul from the fetters of the body," by which Jung
understands a withdrawal of naive projections so as to get a "realistic
and more or less nonillusory view of the outside world."43
The logical upshot is clear: in addition to serving as the permanent
repository of the unconscious, both personal and impersonal, the body
is also the permanent reminder of the outside world independent of the
individual person. To cut oneself off from the body is to that extent to
cut oneself off from reality. The step to the public self and its responsi
bilities, and from their to an awareness of social institutions that define
the limits of subjectivity would seem, at least in theory, to be a short
one.
CONCLUSION
In the end, alas, Jung's reflections on the body and its near identifica
tion with the unconscious do not lead to an embodiment of conscious
ideals but to a spiritualizing of bodily problems. He takes a clue from
the alchemical process of joining mind to body to argue that in the
process of individuation "insights gained should remain real."44 But he
41. cw 14:543.
42. Jung makes a cryptic remark in this regard that learning to "accept the
body and world of instinct" as part of the individuation process is "not
only a spiritual problem, but is the problem of all life." CW 12:123- 4.
Unfortunately, he does not tell us what he means by "all life" or
whether he really means to dislodge the individuation from its inner
- psychic confines. If the latter, then one can hardly read this other than
as a claim to broaden his own psychology in ways he himself never did.
43. cw 14:519- 20.
44. cw 14:476.
] ungian Psychology and the Public Self - 393-
turns the invitation to transform the outer world into a demand to
externalize the inner world. In the clash with reality (by which he
includes not only the immutable laws of nature but the social structures
of the historical world), he observes, willpower driven by ideals can
only work so long until fatigue sets in. "Then free will becomes a cramp
of the will, and the life that has been suppressed forces its way into the
open through all the cracks. That, unfortunately, is the law of all
merely rational resolutions. "At such times, he proposes" reawakening
the deeper layers of the psyche, which the light of reason and the power
of the will can never reach, and being them back to memory."45 This
reawakening is an expansion of consciousness, but a consciousness that
is aware of the limits of rational ideas and ideals.46
The similarity between alienation from the unconscious and aliena·
tion from the body, for all the hints Jung gives to the contrary, does not
in the end break through the closed circle of the psyche. The epoche he
drew around the phenomenon of the inner world ends up drawing the
body inwards rather than drawing the psyche outwards. But the aliena
tion of the person from the body is not merely a private matter. The
role of public conventions and institutions is at least as strong and
collective vis- a-vis the experiencing subject as that of the urges of
unconscious mind. The sense of permanency that the unconscious gives
to the meaning of life depends on the permanency of belonging to a
larger world of nature. The outer world that envelops the unconscious
today is already too removed from nature to take this as a matter of
course any longer. What is more, for the individual surrounded by a
world of disposable commodities, permanence can no longer be said to
rest in the things in our environment as much as in the institutions that
45. cw 14:522.
46. cw 14:472.
-394-
manufacture the goods and services we use and throw away with
alarming regularity.47 That this should have an effect on values in the
public sphere is obvious; that it also vitiates the encounter with the
unconscious is not yet so obvious, and this gives depth-psychology a
curious aura of disembodied romanticism and otherworldliness that it
does not sufficiently realize how badly it deserves. It lives in a myth far
more of its own making than it seems to realize.
For Jung, the awakening of the mythifying function of the uncon
scious is not an expansion of consciousness in which myth is done away
with, but rather one in which myth is purified to preserve its core of
inexhaustible intelligibility. But to claim that continued growth of
consciousness--the way of individuation--entails a permanent
interaction with the inner mystery of the unconscious does not mean
that this is all there is to the enlargement of our human nature. If the
private inner expansion is not complemented by an outer, public expan
sion--an embodiment of self in history--then the psychological
commitment against splitting body and soul asunder betrays itself in a
most fundamental way. I believe Jungian psychology hovers at the
brink of this betrayal and needs a courageous step back into the public
realm of the embodiment of the psyche in history if it is to fulfill its real
promise.
47. In this connection, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1959), 83.