Rezension zu C.G. Jung - Zerrissen zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Spring 2011, Vol. 5. No. 2.
Rezension von Paul Bishop
Trouble at the Mill
Review of: Brigitte Spillmann and Robert Strubel, C.G. Jung:
Zerrissen zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Über die Folgen
persönlicher und kollektiver Spaltungen im tiefenpsychologischen
Erbe1, Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2010.
The nonanalyst who picks up this book finds himself in the position
of a visitor who, unannounced, has rung the doorbell only to
discover that a massive family quarrel has just taken place.
Realizing it is probably best to avoid taking sides, it is only
when the nonanalyst has left the house or finished reading the
book, that the full impact of what he has witnessed can be
assessed. (For the family members, or the analysts involved, this
book’s contents might still be too raw or painful.) This is the
case not least because of Brigitte Spillmann’s and Robert Strubel’s
audacious move in their study of C.G. Jung and the recent history
of the Institute in Zürich that bears his name, specifically, the
link stablished between the book’s two topics – the defensibility
(or otherwise) of Jung’s relation to National Socialism and the
disputes at the C.G. Jung-Institute Zürich that led to the founding
of the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in
2004.
In Part 1, “C.G. Jung-Trapped in the Myth,” Brigitte Spillmann
discusses some of Jung’s most controversial papers, including “The
State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934a/1968) and “After the
Catastrophe” (1945/1968), and interviews, including his broadcast
on Radio Berlin with Adolf Weizsäcker in 1933 and “Diagnosing the
Dictators” (McGuire and Hull 1977, 59-66, 115-135). This material,
in which Juntg offers a commentary on the rise of National
Socialism and the causes of the Second World War, is well-known,
and the debate over Jung’s alleged anti-Semitism has been
thoroughly covered in a collection of essays, Lingering Shadows
(Maidenbaum and Martin 1991). After admitting in 1934 theat he had
been “so incautious as to do the very thing most open to
misunderstanding at the present moment” and to have “tabled the
Jewish question” (Jung 1934b/1968, CW 10 §1024), Jung’s
self-exculpatory attempts do little more than prove his maxim that
“one carries one’s worst enemy within oneself” (cf. Jung 1952/1967,
CW 5 §553). When, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1934,
Jung confesses his „total inability to understand why it should be
a crime to speak of ‚Jewish’ psychology“ (1934b/1968, §1027), one
can only squirm. Aniela Jaffé placed her finger on the problem when
she wrote that the fact Jung “dragged [the difference between
Jewish and non-Jewish psychology] into the limelight at this
particular moment, when being a Jew was enough to put one in danger
of one’s life, […] must be regarded as a grave human error” (Jaffé
1972, 84-85). Now, Spillmann is certainly no apologist for Jung:
indeed, she argues that, in the 1930s, Jung was so overwhelmed by
his negative transference toward Freud that he unconsciously joined
in the symbolic (and, in the case of the Holocaust, the literal)
“death of the Father” desired and enacted by National Socialism
(2010, 89). Furthermore, she detects in Memories, Dreams,
Reflections (and particularly in its comments on the
inscription above his “Tower” in Bollingen, Philemonis
Sacrum-Fausti Poenitentia) a tendency to flee from reality and
a splitting of the personality she diagnoses as pathological and as
characteristic of a borderline patient (130). Despite the attempt
by Jung’s relatives to “auntify” (tantifizieren, a
neologism coined by Jung) and neutralize the text of Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, Spillmann argues that, as a work, it is
“for the most part authentic” (125). In Jung’s rresponse to
challenging situations – “In my youth I was hot-tempered; but
whenever the emotion had reached its climax, suddenly it swung
around and there followed a cosmic stillness” (Jung and Jaffé 1963,
219) – she discovers a dynamic that explains his own apparent
blindness toward his attitude during the 1930s, which has had, she
believes, devastating consequences for (some of) his followers.
In Part 2, “From the Dyad to Triangulation,” Robert Strubel picks
up this thread of psychoanalytical diagnosis applied to Jung and to
the current generation of Jungians. According to Winnicott, the
transitional object enables the transition from the limitations of
the dyad to the multidimensionality of triangulation (2010, 193,
195; cf. Winnicott 1982/1971, 1-25), and Strubel shrewdly detects a
conceptual parallel between the transitional object and Jung’s
notion of the symbol of the Self (214). Yet, according to Strubel’s
account of Jung’s own psychosocial development after his split with
Freud, the loss of this friendship dealt a fatal blow to Jung’s
narcissistic pride—which, in turn, exercised a malign influence on
the community of analytical psychologists. Strubel follows Roman
Lesmeister in voicing the suspicion that “the phantasy of (psychic)
totality can imperceptibly merge into the reality of (political)
totalitarianism” (220; see Lesmeister 1992), and he joins Erik
Erikson in noting the subtle, yet crucial, difference between
“totality” in the sense of completeness or Ganzheit, and
“totality” in the sense of Totalität or absolute
limitation (311; see Erikson 1974). More specifically, Strubel
draws on the work of Michael Balint (1970), François
Roustang(1982), and Otto F. Kernberg (2000) to argue that “shadows
of destructive power in the younger generation” (321), even a
“destructive narcissism” (327), are detectable in recent events at
the Jung-Institute in Zürich and in the founding of the ISAP.
In those events, both Strubel (as a member of the Institute and a
chairman of various working parties) and Spillmann (as President of
the Curatorium from 1997 to 2007) were themselves major players,
and in Part 3, “On the Consequences of an Unanswered Past,”
Spillmann offers, from their perspective, an account of the
Institute’s recent history. Now, knowing little of that history,
this reviewer must judge the book’s argument on its intellectual
credentials, rather than in terms of its empirical validity: their
account may (or may not) provide an accurate record of the actual
management decisions taken, and its occasionally
self-congratulatory tone and choice of rhetorical register may (or
may not) reflect the imposition of a top-down managerial culture.
Even though the pathologization of one’s opponents has, sadly, a
long pedigree in the history of psychoanalysis, Spillmann’s and
Strubel’s central thesis—that Jung’s blindness vis-à-vis his
conduct in the 1930s was the source for the split in the Jung
Institute half a century or so later—nevertheless comes perilously
close to identifying those who disputed the Curatorium’s decisions
with the totalitarian spirit of National Socialism (2010, 312, 399,
425, 483). And one might question the legal wisdom of
characterizing the Institute’s critics as borderline personalities
and regressive narcissists (395, 483).
For the lay reader, potentially familiar with the background of
intolerance and exclusion (not to mention harassment and mobbing)
associated with institutional change in other professional spheres
(including, and arguably especially, the education sector), it is
interesting—if slightly dismaying—to discover a similar dynamic of
claim and counterclaim at work in the analytic sphere. Obviously,
all parties involved would concede there was, as the Glaswegians
say, a wee stooshie at the Institute. The fact that people
disagree, sometimes violently, in all areas of life might, however,
give one reason to pause before concluding that Jungians are
uniquely caught up in a mythical constellation, particularly one
prompted by the question: “Are you related to something infinite or
not?” (Jung 1963, 356). Or, in other words, given that (a) Jungians
disagree, and that (b) other people also disagree, why argue that
(c) disagreement among Jungians is due to their particular
“enchantment” through myth? (Here, the rhetorical dimension of
Jung’s question—its echo of Spinoza’s invitation [Ethics,
part 5, prop. 30; Spinoza 1955, 262] to regard the world sub
specie aeternitatis, or “under the form of eternity”—goes
unremarked.) Moreover, the reader should remember that Jung was by
no means alone in his (mis)diagnosis of dictators; after all, Freud
dedicated a copy of his dialogue with Albert Einstein, Why
War?, to Mussolini, as Michel Onfray has recently reminded us
in his scorching critique of psychoanalysis (2010, 519-533).
Spillmann is evidently proud to have transformed the Institute from
a “family enterprise” into an “institution” with clear structures”
(2010, 348, 462) or a “business” that does “not waste its
resources” (354), and she teases previous members of its management
committee for their consultation of dreams, horoscopes, or the I
Ching (354). Yarrow sticks, one assumes, are now banned from board
meetings, but is the business model the only valid one in the
twenty-first century? If not in the Jung-Institute, then where
can one consult the I Ching? The transformation, under
financial pressures, of “colleagues” into “competitors” has, in UK
universities, had equally devastating consequences to those
acknowledged to have occurred at the Jung-Institute (362). It is
beyond the scope of a book review to provide a solution, but even
after the collapse of New Labour in Britain, one wonders whether a
“third way” is not possible—a way between, to put it bluntly, the
“cloud-cuckoo-land” approach that avoids hard questions and the
purely economic approach of brutal efficiency? For in an age when,
as Alexander Mitscherlich observed some thirty-five years ago,
analytical psychology is “one of the scarce alternatives to a
positivism which has long since acquired in the world all the
qualities of a one-party-system” (1974, 406), it would be a
dangerous distraction if the Jungian community were to become
entirely absorbed with its own problems. So, leaving aside the
querelle des anciens et des modernes at the Institute in
Zürich, this book poses a ticklish question: namely, whether, as
members of society in general or of a specific professional
association in particular, we need more analysis—or less.
ENDNOTE
1 The book is not (yet) available in
English, but the title translates as C.G. Jung: Torn Between
Myth and Reality: On the Consequences of Personal and Collective
Splitting in the Legacy of Depth Psychology.
NOTE
References to The Collected
Works of C.G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number,
and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in
English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balint, Michael. 1970. Regression:
Therapeutische Aspekte und die Theorie der Grundstörung.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Erikson, Erik H. 1974. Jugend und Krise: Die Psychodynamik im
sozialen Wandel. Stuttgart: Klett.
Jaffé, Aniela. 1972. From the life and work of C.G. Jung.
Trans. R.F.C. Hull. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Jung, C.G. 1952/1967. Symbols of transformation. CW 5.
– – –. 1945/1968. After the catastrophe. Civilization in
transition. CW 10.
– – –. 1934a/1968. The state of psychotherapy today.
Civilization in transition. CW 10.
– – –. 1934b/1968 A rejoinder to Dr. Bally. Civilization in
transition. CW 10.
Jung, C.G., and Aniela Jaffé. 1963. Memories, dreams,
reflections. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. London:
Collins/Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kernberg, Otto F. 2000. Ideologie, Konflikt und Führung:
Psychoanalyse von Gruppenprozessen und
Persönlichkeitsstruktur. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Lesmeister, Roman. 1992. Der zerrissene Gott: Eine
tiefenpsychologische Kritik am Ganzheitsideal. Zürich:
Schweizer Spiegel Verlag.
Maidenbaum, Aryeh and Stephen A. Martin, eds. 1991. Lingering
shadows: Jungians, Freudians and anti-Semitism. Boston and
London: Shambhala.
McGuire, William, and R.F.C. Hull, eds. 1977. C.G. Jung
speaking: Interviews and encounters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Mitscherlich, Alexander. 1974. „Auch ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel:
Der Briefwechsel Sigmund Freuds mit C.G. Jung aus den Jahren
1906–1913. [published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 25 May 1974]. In Gesammelte Schriften, Vol.
7. 400–406. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
Onfray, Michel. 2010. Le crépuscule d’un idole: L’affabulation
freudienne. Paris : Grasset.
Roustang, François. 1982. Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud
to Lacan. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Spillmann, Brigitte, and Robert Strubel. 2010. C.G. Jung:
Zerrissen zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Über die Folgen
persönlicher und kollektiver Spaltungen im tiefenpsychologischen
Erbe. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Spinoza, Benedict de. 1955. On the improvement of the
understanding; The ethics; Correspondence. Trans. R. H. M.
Elwes. New York: Dover.
Winnicott, D. W. 1982/1971. Paying and reality. New York:
Routledge.
PAUL BISHOP is Professor of German at the
University of Glasgow and the author of various articles and
monographs about Jung’s relation to German intellectual and
cultural history (including, most recently, Analytical Psychology
and German Classical Aesthetics, 2007-2008). Correspondence: SMLC
(German), Hetherington Building, Room 211B, University of Glasgow,
Glasgow, G128RS. Great Britain.
ABSTRACT
This review discusses C.G.
Jung: Zerrissen zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Über die Folgen
persönlicher und kollektiver Spaltungen im tiefenpsychologischen
Erbe, a book that links Jung’s political attitudes during the
1930x ith developments at the Jung-Institute, Zürich, over
approximately the last ten years. It raises questions about the
kind of institutional model appropriate for analytical psychology
and about the role of analysis in professional organizations.
KEY WORDS
anti-Semitism, C.G. Jung-Institut Zürich,
Freud, International School for Analytical Psychology (ISAP), C.G.
Jung, National Socialism
Published as »Trouble at the Mill«, by Paul
Bishop, Jung Journal: Culture &
Psyche, Spring 2011, Vol. 5. No. 2. © 2011 by
Virginia Allen Detloff Library, C. G. Jung Institute of San
Francisco.
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