Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became fast friends the
moment they first met way back in 1907 and Freud viewed Jung as protégé and
heir to psychoanalysis. Over the years they began to drift apart. Jung was
drawn séances and spiritualism, whereas Freud wanted to keep his psychoanalysis
within the fold of scientific respectability. Freud famously warned Jung,
‘beware of the black tide of the occult’. This is the same paranoid fear that
today’s militant atheists have of admitting any validity to parapsychology. They
insist that it would open the door to all kinds of crack-pot and dangerous
beliefs.
For Freud and Jung it was a difference that ran too deep
for any kind of resolution. It wasn’t just a disagreement between two
intelligent individuals; rather it was a gulf that had its origins in the age
old fight between the church and the rationalist, the belief in the supernatural
and the growth of science and scepticism in the 17th century. It was
a struggle that gouged a rift that divided these two men and still divides us
today. Having banished all the ghosts, ghouls, devils, demons, werewolves, and
spirits, the guardians of science are still scared of them coming back to haunt
us – deep down they still believe that the unfettered psyche could throw us
back into superstition and savagery.
The gulf is now deeper than ever. On one side of the
great divide is science which is objective and impersonal. This enables a
physicist in Beijing to understand exactly what a physicist in Boston or
Reykjavik is talking about; a common language, and unified view of the natural
world. Standing behind this tradition are all the technical achievements of the
modern world.
On the other side of the divide there are only subjective opinions and all our
individual slants, preference, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, dreams and moods, styles
and fashions, as well as the huge range of alternative medicines and spiritual
beliefs, as well as the many crazy religions, cults and self-opinioned gurus I
can believe in. There’s huge choice of fantastic promises out there in the
wild.
Amid all that chaos, science does give us some
certainty. Throughout history there has been wave after wave of smallpox
epidemics, decimating millions. Following aggressive vaccination campaigns
during the 19th and 20th centuries the World Heath
Organization certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979. To
this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely
eradicated. The virus is now totally extinct. The story of polio is shaping up to
go the same way.
With triumphs like this it is no wonder that we have faith
in the scientific method. Nonetheless, the growth of alternative medicines
shows that we have growing doubts. Something remains unsatisfied. Maybe our uncertainties
about science are due to its inability to deal with human subjectivity –
viruses are objective things, human minds are not. Consciousness itself is still
a mystery. In many medical treatments the placebo effect is so strong we don’t
know quite what we are dealing with. Where does science end and the power of belief
begin?
Personal subjectivity is admittedly messy and certainly
no one can say what is normal. Still, when dealing with personal subjectivity
we have to take everything into account and treat what we find seriously and respectfully,
even if we don’t understand it. We cannot tidy the mind up without losing what makes
us human. To fully grant being to something we don’t understand is a brave step;
and in our personal encounters this is exactly what is demanded of us.
Clinical and medical psychology tries to categorise
human nature. The trouble is that despite all its wonderful achievements, when
science turns it attention on human psyche it objectifies and depersonalises
it. The very project of science from the beginning was to discount ‘qualia’ and
‘feelings’ and stick to what is objectively measureable. The individual human then
becomes an object to be categorised instead of a subject to be felt.
The world of science is a world of objects, not
subjects. And so clinical psychologists are apt to deal with people more as
though they were dysfunctional machines. The wild and volatile realms of human
subjectivity do not fit well with psychological systems; we nervously hide
behind them when confronting the stormy oceans of the soul.
“I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.”
― George Carlin
― George Carlin
contact:
stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
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