Jung: psychobabble or mapping the mind?

For Jung, the meaning of life could be found in the realisation of the self, which for each individual holds a different meaning and a different destiny. The driving force behind the individuation process is the archetype of the self. In this sense, the individuation process does not culminate in a life lived only for its own sake as has been determined by the ego, or even in a realisation of the “divinity of life,” but in an experience of the “divine” within oneself. And here is the heart of the matter: in the individuation process the ego — experienced for the most of one’s life as the centre of personality— comes to the realisation that it is not as absolute as it has seemed to be, and it is superseded by an experience of the archetype as a balancing or cantering force in one’s life, moving one beyond the constraints of ordinary ego consciousness. One outcome of this is the capacity for self-reflective consciousness, which functions to direct our attention away from the ego as the centre of awareness, values, and meaning, thus creating a new transcendent perspective of consciousness. Another possible outcome is that the experience of the self restores a balance to the experience of ordinary consciousness, overcoming the ego’s tendency to one-sidedness.   Loren E Pedersen: Dark Hearts. The unconscious forces that shape men’s lives: Shambala, London 1991, p.206

In order to make head or tail of Irene Pickard's archive, I had to get to grips with Jung and his theories. There were possibly helpful but complex texts like the one above, however, there were other writings about Jung which presented a very different and somewhat antagonistic picture. This is because Jung is so very annoying! He can be obscure and opaque with long and convoluted explanations which make considerable use of his own idiosyncratic nomenclature. To unpackage it you have to get to grips with what on earth he was saying. 'Individuation', 'archetype', 'realisation of the self', 'ego', 'ordinary ego consciousness', 'transcendent perspective of consciousness', as in the above, being only a few of his menagerie of terms.

As a result there are those who claim that he is deliberately obscure because he is in fact saying nothing: a tangle of words in which he trapped – netted – his admirers. That he created a cult with himself as the shaman at the centre. Foremost amongst such critics is Richard Noll (The Jung Cult: The origins of a charismatic movement). Noll points to the way in which Jung restricted dissemination of his ideas to an inner circle of acolytes who needed to have undergone his style of analysis to be fully initiated. A structure not unlike that of apostolic succession, with his inner circle acting as the equivalents of bishops. Indeed, may of the women of that circle became almost guardians of his teaching, as is described by Maggy Anthony in her The Valkyries: the women around Jung.

It is possible to view Jung as pre-eminent psychobabble: a web of words to be thrown over people's actions and intentions trapping them into a world of dark hidden forces emanating from within their own minds, from which they can only escape through years of analysis with a trained and expensive therapist. A world in which analysts are the high priests initiating the vulnerable and gullible by degrees into the inner sanctums of the self-enlightened. The ultimate prize to be won is that of liberation from the dark forces within that frustrate and distort our lives – not entirely unlike the medieval practice of exorcism with its aim of driving out 'demons'. The cure, a twentieth century application of the Delphic maxim "Know yourself", or Socrates's claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" taken to the extreme.

Certainly, much that Jung says, and he wrote a lot and gave many seminars and lectures, is seeped in his own psychoanalytic language – although he preferred the term 'analytical psychology' to describe his version, in order to differentiate it from Freud. Rather like the European 'discovers' of the New World, Jung named the features he found in order to place them on a map. Unlike those explorers, who were mapping real places, the existence of those features would seem almost entirely dependent on acceptance of his terms – his vision of the architecture of the mind. Psychoanalytic maps of the mind – be they Jungian, Freudian, or whatever – are a bit like phrenological maps. They depend on acceptance of the suppositions made about how the human psyche works. At worst, their resemblance with any map emerging from experimental psychology or neuroscience may be as little as an astrologer's map has to an astronomer's map.

Jung's work could be seen as an attempt, in part, to create a taxonomy of the mind, although, for the good doctor, that was subordinate to treating his patients. If his theories served to release them from their suffering, then, like any medicine, they had achieved the objective. Their proof was their clinical effectiveness, not their scientific validity. Effectiveness would suggest they has some validity but not confirm it. Validation would depend on a different approaches to clinical method, which is ultimately pragmatic and sometimes heuristic. It only establishes what works, not why it works. Jung always believed that his theories were provisional.

In order to understand his patient's minds, Jung developed a map of the human psyche and its mechanism. The healing process, he suggested, was achieved by shifting the centre of being from the 'ego' to the 'self' – a fulcrum point between our conscious world and the unconscious. That led to the incorporating of the unconscious forces at play into our conscious lives, diminishing the harm they could do, and finding a new equilibrium. Mental distress, he noted, was almost entirely due to a lack of equilibrium between the forces at play within us.

The notion that Jung had developed a map of the mind in order to understand its working, is very much the theme of Murray Stein's books, Jung's Map of the Soul and Minding the Self . Stein is a training analyst at the International School for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. I found Stein very helpful in demystifying Jung, and own a lot to his explanations.

My experience of psychology before starting on unpackaging Irene Pickard's archive, was mostly in applied social psychology, much of which used elements of behaviour modification. A far cry from anything remotely psychoanalytic! Getting to grips with Jung meant trying to understand a very different way of conceiving human psychology. My initial approach was through trying to comprehend his map of the mind. I found it helpful to take the notion of a map literally, and to try to produce a crude representation of how I thought such a map might look. You could call it "Jung's Zoological Garden".

Faint traces in time: Elined Kotschnig

Then there was Dr Esther M Harding, who died only recently in 1971 but made one of the greatest American contributions of all in volume of work and depth of character, although she was English. Her books on various aspects of psychology, literature and history, seen from a feminine point of view, have far-reaching consequences for the nature and wholeness of human awareness. Close beside her was Dr Eleanor Bertine — I speak only of those I knew personally — and many others like Elined Kotschnig and the gallant Martha Jaeger, both Quakers who laboured to carry Jung into the Society of Friends and make those indomitable “children and servants of the light” realise the the clearer the light the more precise the shadow.

Laurens van der Post:  Jung and the Story of Our Time.

One of the privileges of having the luxury of spend time researching an archive, and what you can of the lives of those who created it, is the joy of discovery, and the chance to place what traces are left of their lives into some sort of historical context. Elined Kotschnig was one such discovery. 

There were a few papers by her in Irene Pickard's archive of Jungian materials. They reveal that it was Elined who introduced that small circle of Quakers in Geneva to Jung in 1934, pointing out that he was a 'modern mystic' – modern in the sense that he underpinned his mysticism with his 'scientific' discoveries about the human mind – mystic in that he stressed the importance of deep, fully felt relationship with the the totality of being, not mere intellectual acknowledgement. Over rationalised relationships with life estranged and alienated people, creating the modern malaise he encountered so much in his practice as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Its antidote was discovering deeper, felt, connection. 

Elined was a born in Trefeca, Wales, and was a graduate of the University of Wales and a post graduate student at Cambridge. She married an Austrian, Walter Kotschnig, lived in Geneva, Switzerland, encountered Carl Jung, becoming in time a Jungian therapist, emigrated to the United States where she was one of the founders of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology (FCRP) and long time editor of its journal, Inward Light. 

Unfortunately, so much of the records of her life and contribution to psychoanalysis and Quakerism was lost after her death, when her papers were auctioned off by mistake with the furniture from her home. All of Elined's diaries, consultation notes, reflections, draft papers and letters were lost. What has survived are the few articles she wrote for Inward Light, one privately published book, Womanhood in Myth and Life, and the papers she wrote in Geneva which were preserved in Irene Pickard's archive.

There is so little reference to Elined outside Quaker circles that encountering her in van der Post's book was gratifying. She deserves to be much better know. Her synthases of Jungian and Quaker thought, extending them into a life affirming framework, was of great benefit to so many, and not just her patients, as was testified by the only person I met who met her. As a young woman my informant had attended some of the annual FCRP conferences where she had encountered Elined. She found her inspiring and liberating as well as deeply challenging: Elined excelled in confronting people with their shadow – those aspects of ourselves we would rather not see.