Freud and Jung

 Among the backlog of unread books on my shelf was a copy of Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.  It consists of a course of 28 lectures delivered by Freud at the University of Vienna in 1915 and 1916, designed to introduce students to the main ideas involved in psychoanalysis.  I gave this book to my father many years ago, I forget why, and eventually it made its way back to me and sat on my shelves until this year, when I finally read it.  Perhaps there is some kind of subconscious significance to the fact that the volume fell apart as I was reading it, so I had to bin it when I got to the end.

My first introduction to Freud's ideas was not encouraging.  When I did introductory psychology subjects at the University of Queensland in 1979 and 1980 as part of my social work degree, the psychology faculty there was very much dominated by the idea of psychology as an experimental science, driven by scientific methodology and randomised control trials.  Freud's deductions and speculations could hardly be further from this world, and his ideas were given short shift.

Yet you could hardly escape Freud's cultural influence.  Jokes circulated based on his ideas.  His face, with his short beard and intense eyes, was synonymous with psychology in the same way Albert Einstein's shock of curly white hair stood for scientific genius, or Che Guevara's handsome young face symbolised radical politics.

Over the years I've bumped into Freud's ideas over and again - in religion, where he is a widely read atheist; in literature, where his ideas permeate a lot of early 20th century writing; even in my somewhat rare forays into human behaviour and psychology.  Perhaps there was something wrong with the dismissive approach taken by my first teachers.  Could someone be so influential, and yet so wide of the mark?

The Introductory Lectures are, of course, a good place to start getting a handle on his ideas.  They are broken into three sections - in the first, he talks about the idea of the unconscious, as revealed to us in everyday life.  He uses the term 'parapraxes' to describe the various ways our unconscious intrudes on our daily lives - slips of the tongue (which to this day are called 'Freudian slips'), lost objects, forgotten names or dates, accidental breakages.  These, he says, are ways that our unconscious thoughts push their way into our notice, alerting us to the fact that what we openly acknowledge as our feelings or opinions is not the full story.  Sometimes our accidental words reveal our real feelings far better than those we intend to say.  Sometimes our forgetfulness reveals a hidden reluctance.  If we reflect on these incidents, we can arrive at a better self-understanding and perhaps live with a little less self-deception.  I have certainly found this to be the case.

Yet as he goes on his ideas become more baffling and, to my mind, more arbitrary.  In the second group of lectures he talks about the interpretation of dreams.  Like parapraxes, dreams are forms of unconscious mental activity, giving vent to things that we don't admit to consciousness.  He starts out by describing how they use incidents from our waking life as raw material and twist these in ways that often don't make obvious sense.  

Interpreting dreams is one of the central methods of psychoanalysis, and for this Freud primarily uses the technique he calls 'free association'.  In this technique patients are asked to say whatever words come to their minds in relation to the dream, and then these are explored for their own associations until the patient and analyst together reach some kind of bedrock of meaning.  Freud only hints at this technique and its results, regarding it as an advanced subject rather than an introductory one.  Yet as he progresses through the discussion you can see that he regards the ultimate meaning of the most significant dreams as relating to sexuality and sexual development.  

This view is made clear in the final group of lectures, which deal with neuroses.  Here Freud outlines his theory of sexual development, which centres around what is possibly his most famous idea - the 'Oedipus Complex'.  As children, he says, we naturally identify with the parent of the same sex (boys with their fathers, girls with their mothers) and experience sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex.  This leads us into a deep psychological conflict as we experience our same sex parent as both role model and rival, and cope with the forbidden love for our opposite sex parent.  This all, of course, takes place unconsciously.  Freud believed that it happens to all of us, but if we mature properly we move past it, fix our attachment onto a more appropriate person and live well-adjusted lives.  If for one reason or other this normal development is blocked, the result is a neurosis - what we may describe as OCD, severe anxiety, panic attacks, etc.  

How did Freud reach this conclusion?  He says it was the result of his clinical work, but we can also learn, if we read a little about Freud, that much of it came from self-reflection about his relationship with his parents and his experience of what we might now call depression, although he referred to it as 'neurasthenia'.  My early teachers were dismissive because, of course, this is not subject to objective verification.  Indeed, even in his own day many of his closest associates questioned these conclusions, but although he refined his theories over the years he remained immovable on this point.

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Freud's professional life was turbulent, to say the least.  As his reputation and fame grew he founded a society of psychoanalysts, starting out as a small discussion group in his home in Vienna, and later becoming more formalised as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and eventually the International Psychoanalytic Society as the ideas spread beyond Austria.  Although Freud encouraged others, such as Viennese pupils Alfred Adler and Otto Rank and his Swiss protege Carl Jung, to take on formal leadership roles in the society, he remained the ultimate authority and had strictly limited tolerance for deviation from his ideas.

The result was a series of splits, as Adler, Jung and Rank all published ideas that differed significantly from Freud's narrow focus on sexual development.  Freud was too deeply invested in his ideas to budge, and the societies he founded couldn't cope with the resulting diversity of views and fractured as Adler, Jung, Rank and others went their separate ways.

Of all the dissenters, Jung is the one whose influence has most rivalled Freud's beyond the confines of clinical psychology.  Having been stimulated by Freud's writings I thought it would be interesting to delve a little into those of his pupil/rival, and I borrowed Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and his Psychology and Religion from the BCC library.  

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is a collection of writings published in other places as early as the 1920s and as late as the 1950s, often revised from their first form for later publication.  As such it represents a series of fragments, overlapping and reinforcing one another so that you get the full picture piece by piece rather than via a sustained argument.

The cornerstone of his view is that humans inherit what he calls 'the collective unconscious'.  He distinguishes this from the 'personal unconscious', which is formed by our own life experiences and particularly by experiences of childhood which are repressed or forgotten - the way Freud uses the term.  The collective unconscious, on the other hand, is something we all share, analogous to inherited instinct, which is present naturally in our brains and emerges without anyone needing to teach us.  

Jung thought that the collective unconscious expresses itself through a series of archetypes - the 'animus/anima' which represents the soul, the wise old man, various animal symbols (snake, fox/wolf, ram, eagle, etc) which represent various aspects of our psyche, and various numbers and shapes such as the numbers three and four and various multiples thereof, and the circle, triangle, square and cross, to mention just a few.  These symbols and archetypes are used and repeated in religious and mythological symbolism from around the world and from various ages, but are also reproduced symbolically in the dreams and artworks of people who have no prior knowledge of them.  

This basic set of ideas leads him to a detailed analysis of the symbols he finds in the dreams and drawings of his patients.  He interprets these in the light of a range of religious and mythological sources.  Although these include mainstream faiths (Catholic Christianity and Buddhism in particular) he is particularly interested in esoteric ideas such as Hermetic philosophy and alchemy, and he goes into great detail analysing the meaning of his patients' productions in the light of alchemical symbolism.

It is not clear to me what he does with this knowledge in a clinical context - it seems that his aim is to help his patients to greater self-understanding in order to become more fully integrated personalities.  No doubt he dealt with this more fully in technical publications I am never likely to read, or perhaps he reserved it for personal instruction with his students.  

Freud believed that religion was simply an illusion, or perhaps delusion, born out of our primal conflict with our fathers.  Jung, however, is more coy about his own views.  In Psychology and Religion, a series of three lectures first delivered as the Terry Lectures in 1938 at Yale University, he goes so far as to say he believes atheism is foolish, but I haven't read anything in which he locates himself in any religious tradition - he approaches religion as a psychological phenomenon.  He certainly has no interest in creeds or religious systems, which he sees as diversions from the unconscious meaning of the symbols of religion.  The closest he comes is perhaps the following:

...I never preach my belief.  If asked I will surely stand by my convictions which do not go further than what I consider to be my actual knowledge.  I am convinced of what I know.  Everything else is hypotheses and beyond that I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown.  They do not bother me.

Yet he sees that religious dogma has a greater value, at least psychologically, than scientific theories because it represents the accumulated wisdom of generations, and is best suited to 'irrational facts' such as the operation of our unconscious.  For this purpose, it doesn't matter a great deal which particular religion you follow, and he sees the core symbols and ideas as recurring across religions in any case.  For instance, at one point he says, 'The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old, and the Trinity is probably even older.'

Writing in 1938, he is profoundly disturbed by the way Protestantism has stripped European religion of its mystical content,

...to such an extent that it forgot the unaccountable forces of the unconscious mind.  The catastrophe of the Great War and the subsequent extraordinary manifestations of a profound mental disturbance were needed to arouse a doubt that everything was well in the white man's mind. When the war broke out we had been quite certain that the world could be righted by rational means.  Now we behold that age-old spectacle of States taking over the age-old claim of theocracy, that is, of totality, inevitably accompanied by suppression of free opinion.  We again see people cutting each other's throats to support childish theories of how to produce paradise on earth.  It is not very difficult to see that the powers of the underworld - not to say of hell - which were more or less successfully chained and made serviceable in a gigantic mental edifice, are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm.  There are not a few people, nowadays, who are convinced that mere human reason is not entirely up to the task of fettering the volcano.

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I thought that perhaps it might be unjust to compare Jung's detailed writings with Freud's basic introduction, so I also borrowed a copy of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. This is a slim volume first published in 1930, in which Freud grapples with the question of why, in the face of the many benefits of civilization, modern humans are so discontent with it and seem so intent on upending it.  

His analysis of the question revolves around a version of human anthropology which suggests that humans, in their first state, were isolated individuals who began to band together mainly for the purpose of sexual convenience - men (in his very male-centric scheme) found it convenient to have their sexual partners on hand, as it were, and so formed stable pairs which included their children.  These became the site of the primal oedipal conflict as the sons became rivals with their father for their mother's affections and eventually killed him in order to take his place, then deified him to cope with their subsequent guilt.  

This primal conflict continues to be played out in our individual and social lives.  Our sexuality is a fraught mix of desire and guilt which leaves us restless.  This can be usefully contained and channeled if we have sufficient opportunity to express this sexuality with appropriate partners.  However, he traces developments in the time leading up to his own in which the scope for appropriate sexuality was progressively more and more restricted - firstly to within monogamous marriage and then even within marriage to the purposes of child-bearing rather than pleasure.  The result was frigid women, impotent men and all round discontent.  Blocked from legitimate expression, sexual conflict expressed itself more and more often through neurosis, both individual and collective.

You can see, no doubt, why even Freud's closest followers felt a need to take a different path.  You wonder what Freud would have made of the fact that we now have abundant sexual freedom and yet still seem intent on destroying the civilizations that nurture us.

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There is no need to labour the point.  Suffice to say that to me, at least, Jung's thought world is rich, varied and illuminating whereas Freud's, beyond his basic seminal concepts, is thin and artificial.  Still, Jung was building on the foundation Freud laid.  Whether either is right in all respects is, to some extent, beside the point.  The question is, do they stimulate us to see ourselves more fully, to become more complete people?  My sense is that they do, and that is certainly their intent.

Nonetheless, I can also see why my early teachers were repelled by psychoanalysis.  While both Freud and Jung - and others in this tradition - based their ideas on lifetimes of clinical work, they are hardly verifiable by an objective observer.  On what basis does Freud decide that the sexual components are the most fundamental, or Jung that the archetypal content is of crucial importance?  How do we know that they are not simply interpolating their own views into the dreams of their patients, and even (although they deny it) subtly suggesting this content through their own theories?  It's hardly surprising that psychologists went looking for a more objective, experimental framework for their discipline.

Yet this irrationality is kind of the point.  Both the psychoanalysts and their more scientific successors are trying to make sense out of irrational phenomena.  We draw these things from the unconscious, where the laws of rationality don't apply, and bring them into the light of reason, but in the process we change them.  We can be no more certain that the experimental psychologists have asked the right questions than that the psychoanalyists have drawn the right conclusions.  The best we can hope for is that in the process we become more self-aware, and that we find better ways to treat those who are mentally unwell with skill and kindness.  Perhaps, along the way, enough of us might reach a level of collective self-understanding which will help us to avoid destroying ourselves.