FREUD AND JUNG.

by Stanley

........It’s surprising how a men of enormous talent, foundational geniuses, can have a side that seems disappointingly insincere; an almost flamboyant disregard for their own principles; surprising how men such of influence and intelligence can be seduce by their own genius into believing the myth of infallibility that has grown up around them. It’s quite a thing! How easy it must be to get swallowed up by the deification of followers.
.......In some, it becomes a pathological illness as it did with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of scientology. He turned into a paranoid bully and dictator of the worst kind. Yet, in listening to some of his lectures on how to conduct therapy, what comes across is his profound sense of humanity and kindness. That’s what hooks people in. Part of the scientology code was to never evaluate a client’s data and never invalidate his person. Sounds like Carl Rogers, doesn’t it? Yet anyone who disagreed with scientology was labeled by Hubbard ‘a suppressive person’ and was hammered with a ruthless and deliberate campaign of persecution. The offender would be declared officially ‘fair game’ and subjected to numberless court proceedings – not to win a case, but to harass the offender into silence.
......Hubbard was a small fish (contrary to his own opinion). But Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are not. They are respected and influential. Yet they both seem to have a streak of insincerity – or to be more generous – let’s say, inconsistency. And it bodes well for us to be aware of it. Freud more than Jung was captive to the myth he himself engendered.
.......One of Freud’s great contributions was the idea of the analyst listening to the patient’s free associations, setting aside all judgment, listening with open attention in what Freud called ‘evenly suspended attention’ carefully listening to hints of what was going inside the patient.
.......Freud’s stated principal was that an analyst should abandon an interpretation when nothing from the patient’s unconscious corroborated it. Yet in one of his famous cases, known simply as The Wolf Man, he tells us that he gave up his interpretation after nine months of analysis. Nine months! Remember that during that time Freud would have been insisting on his own view of what was wrong with the patient and would regard any demurring as ‘resistance’.
......And Jung said, ‘I have no theory about dreams; I do not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a ‘method’. I share all your prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness’.
......A wonderfully unpretentious statement that gives an assurance of Jung’s modesty.
.......Yet, again and again, one reads his own account where, with the utmost certainty, he announces to the patient some interpretation based on an ancient myth that bears no connection with what the patient has presented. He announces this fictional diagnosis with a complete sense of certainly, so obviously based on his pet theories; and unbelievably tells us that with this single master stroke he solved the case. Here he seems to me more involved in his own world than with his patient’s.
.......In another place Jung tells us, ‘I may allow myself only one criterion for the result of my labours: does it work?
.......‘Working’ in this case could simply mean that the patient was so impressed by the famous man’s certainty that it acted as a whacking great suggestion, a powerful placebo. No one has an instant conversion like that unless they are bowled over by a massive input.
.......Some of Jung’s more obscure and esoteric writings lend themselves to our New Age Earth Worship and White Occultism. And for some they can inspire an endless search for the secret. Mysticism and mystification can provoke a search powered by a permanent unconscious conviction that ‘what I need is out of reach’.
......The scenario goes something like this:
...... “I am unhappy; therefore there is something I need to learn. What I already know is obviously not ‘it’, because if it were I wouldn’t be unhappy. Therefore I need to understand something I don’t yet understand. There is a lot in Jung’s writing I don’t get – so maybe here is something I don’t know that I need to know.”
.......But these searchers for enlightenment never get out of the trap because whatever they do understand isn’t ‘it’, because what they need to know is something they don’t know.
......The search for the answer simply validates the basic unconscious premise: ‘what I need is out of reach.’

CODA

.......But for all their weaknesses both Freud and Jung have produced intelligently critical offspring. Thinkers like Lacan and Kohut are not fools. Their refinements take off from Freud’s work and think psychoanalysis further. The same must be said for those of the post-Jungian school like Hillman who, however much he differs from the master, still stands in the light of the great man. But lets not forget that the light of great men casts long shadows.