Jung Again

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This video of an interview with Jung in his old age kept me up late last night:

I come back to reading Jung every year or two and have just finished reading the second edition of his Symbols of Transformation.  Freud is very much in the background of this book, first written in 1912, which precipitated their estrangement. I appreciate and identify with Jung's warmth, humor, enthusiasm and personal character, that are so evident in the film, much more than with Freud.

Sigmund Freud

Auden's ode, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” written at the time of Freud's death in exile in London in 1939, humanizes Freud's “autocratic pose” and “paternal strictness” as being “a protective coloration for one who'd lived among enemies so long” and acknowledges that “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd.”

Carl Gustav Jung

But there is something about Jung, so evident in that video, that rings my bell, whereas, when I think of Freud, the first thing that comes to my mind is his statement in The Interpretation of Dreams that the tunnel-to-light-and-loved-ones vision in near-death experiences “is nothing but” (sic) a memory of coming down the uterine canal at the time of birth. That statement is not just protective coloring or absurdity. It's mean, in my opinion.

Anyway, what struck me most during this reading of Symbols of Transformation was that both Freud and Jung accepted, at least at that time, what is basically a hydraulic imagery of the mind! Freud used the word “libido” for the fluid, and Jung preferred the phrase “psychic energy,” giving it a broader and less sexual connotation, but still frequently used the word “libido.” They speak of this fluid as becoming “blocked,” “dammed,” “canaled,” “reverting,” “flowing to other outlets,” and such, just the way you would speak of a system of pipes or canals or some other hydraulic system.

This may seem like a little cavil, not worthy of notice given the great matters involved, but once you have studied any subject really deeply you find that it is just such a metaphor or analogy that destroys what is most crucially important in the subject for you or brings a lifetime's work to nought!

Here are just a few quotes from Symbols of Transformation that tell the story:

p. 132. “the libido appears subject to displacement, and in the form of 'libidinal affluxes' can communicate itself to various other functions and regions of the body which in themselves have nothing to do with sex. This fact led Freud to compare the libido with a stream, which is divisible, can be dammed up, overflows into collaterals, and so on.”

p. 169 “The blocking of the libido leads to an accumulation of instinctuality and, in consequence, to excesses and aberrations of all kinds.”

p. 135. “An interpretation in terms of energy seemed to me better suited to the facts than the doctrine set forth in Freud's Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It allowed me to identify 'psychic energy' with 'libido.'”

p. 139. “This brings us back to our hypothesis that it is not the sexual instinct, but a kind of neutral energy, which is responsible for the formation of such symbols as light, fire, sun, and the like.”

Now, this sort of hydraulic imagery has its usefulness, its real-world practicality. It could be argued, and has been argued, that just about everything we know about dreams today is footnoting to Freud and Jung. I myself can't imagine my own life without having read Jung on dreams. But a true understanding of symbols involves what I believe to be missing in almost all current theory, namely the fact that the mutuality of a true symbol requires that that both parties to the sharing of it have to be able to put themselves in the place of the other in order to see what that other holds the significance of the symbol to be. That “putting oneself in the place of the other” is not hydraulics. It's love!