C. G. Jung

1. C. G. Jung Symbols of Transformation A general review based on Jung’s introduction and his opening comments for Part 1

2. Jung’s psychoanalytic theorising is the last of the theoretical treatments of self-hood that will be featured in this module. Once you have grasped the principal ideas in this set of slides and the next, you will have a relatively rich theoretical vocabulary with which you can discuss the experiences of isolation, and the kinds of thinking that might lead someone to seek solitude. By way of a review, what follows is a brief summary of the three theorists that we have tackled so far, and alongside their theories are similarly brief statements of the educational implications that may be drawn from them.

3. Harré argues that the social nature of personhood determines the ‘theory’ of selfhood that each of us sustains in our conscious lives. Educationally, this turns children into ‘plastic’ – think of the Jesuit saying: give me the child up to 7, and I will give you the man. Freud argues the reverse, insisting that our common and intrinsic biological nature dictates a form of consciousness that is dominated by selfish concerns for individual survival and reproduction. Education becomes the principal means by which this ‘savage’ perspective is controlled so that each of us can grow and ‘survive’ in society. Winnicott sits on the fence! He also thinks that the basic ‘relational’ structure of consciousness is fixed, but he is much more optimistic about the possibility that so long as this is respected, positive individual growth is possible.

4. All three men are prepared to see much of their work as being particularly relevant to the period of one’s life when one is undergoing education; but this also differs in emphasis. Harré’s account can be applied to any circumstance where the notion of person-hood is subject to change, and for Harré, this means that the social environment changes: remand schools should work if they are well designed. Freud is particularly impressed by the influence of early childhood experiences as either matching normal biological certainties, or else disrupting them in some way. For him, therefore, whatever the perfection of the developing infant psychology, schools can only serve to substitute social goals for biological ones – and such social substitution is always very weak when compared with the biological starting points of an individual consciousness.

5. As we have seen, in many ways Winnicott is both the most optimistic about what a good school can achieve, and also the most pessimistic about what a bad one can bring about. The good school will act as an effective substitute for the good-enough-mother, continuing to offer a developing range of transitional settings and experiences that matches the developing potentialities of each child. The defective school will, of course, fail significantly in this respect. It will not provide anything other than the most basic transitional spaces, so that few children will feel sufficiently nurtured in these to use what potentialities for personal growth that there are, and none will find that the space offered admits of significant adjustment should they show any sign of developing! Perhaps one should have in mind the stereotypical ‘Victorian’ school.

6. And so to Jung. Offering the same kind of profile as has been provided by the other theorists is almost impossible, because Jung focussed in particular on the analysis of adults, and not even young adults. In terms of education, then, we move into the arena of continuing education, and although Winnicott also ventured into this same arena, he did so from a position that insisted, like Freud, on the significance of the experiences of early childhood. But Jung even went so far as to say that what he had to offer was only really suitable for those who had reached the point in their personal lives where economic independence was gained, and whatever career was being followed, perhaps some of the most significant decisions had already been taken, i.e., for the times when he was writing, the assumption was that this would be around the individual’s mid-thirties.

7. Because of this, it may strike you as being a rather unappealing theory, but before rejecting it – particularly if you are following the early childhood pathway - keep in mind that you too will reach eventually reach this age and, hopefully, this level of security. And it is also the case that the writers featured in this module have also reached this age (in some cases living substantially beyond what used to be called life’s ‘mid-point’). Jung’s theory, like most psychoanalytic theories, takes the fact of consciousness much more literally than does Harré; the social for Jung is much closer to being a background, rather than the central location for all ideas about self-hood. However, unlike Freud or Winnicott, Jung does not attempt to derive his version of the self from either the biology of the individual, or the early bio-socialisation of the mother and child.

8. For Jung, psychic reality is underpinned by what he calls the archetypes of the collective unconscious; the phrase obviously needs unpacking. The first thing to note is that whatever these are, they exist only in the unconscious. According to Jung, we only have limited proof of their existence through specific dream-forms, and specific types of experience and ‘driven’ activity. In his various books Jung provides many vivid accounts of the different archetypes, but they share a common nature. These are fundamental forms of social being and social agency that are shared by all human groups. They constitute the final principles of human experience that, because they are the final forms, can never be broken down any further into smaller components or functionalities. They therefore constitute a basic ‘vocabulary’ or typology of social experience.

9. Any further detail is best reserved for treatment and illustration based on the one book of Jung’s that we feature in this module: Symbols of Transformation. In this book, Jung offers a detailed analysis of how individuals undergo a process of self-renewal, effectively re-making themselves according to an innate and singular definition of their unique self-hood. But to achieve this they must first slough off their previous sense of self – one that probably has served them well as the means by which they have established themselves in society as being separate from their parent, and subsequently capable of keeping a job, developing a career, and perhaps becoming parents themselves. Clearly, then, there will be much at stake in such a change, much that is obvious which may be lost, may have to be lost, and all to gain an independent self-hood, the value of which cannot possibly be judged until the change has already taken place.

10. In Jung’s treatment of what he calls ‘symbols of transformation’ (also the title of the fifth volume in his collected works) he prepares the ground for what is to come by justifying his view that there are two ways in which we reflect upon experience. In this volume, then, we find the first formulations of his mature theorising, and along with this the first expression of a major theoretical stance – what he calls here ‘two types of thinking’. (While the rest of Part I is devoted to three studies of pre-psychoanalytic texts that he thinks illustrate his theory, Part II provides detailed treatment of the symbolic components that he subsequently elaborates over some thirty years of psychoanalytic practice.)

11. Two Kinds of Thinking (all italics are Jung’s) (p.7) As most people know, one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, one must not take them literally, but must surmise a hidden meaning in them. This ancient idea of dream symbolism has aroused not only criticism, but the strongest opposition. That dreams should have a meaning, and should therefore be capable of interpretation, is certainly neither a strange nor an extraordinary idea. It has been known to mankind for thousands of years; indeed it has become something of a truism. … if we translate this into the language of psychology, the ancient idea becomes much more comprehensible. The dream, we would say, originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day. According to the old belief, a god or demon spoke to the sleeper in symbolic language, and the dream-interpreter had to solve the riddle. In modern speech we would say that the dream is a series of images which are apparently contradictory and meaningless, but that it contains material which yields a clear meaning when properly translated.

12. (p. 8) … It is an especial inconvenience that one cannot recount a dream without having to add the history of half a lifetime in order to represent the individual foundations of the dream. Certainly there are typical dreams and dream-motifs whose meaning appears to be simple enough if they are regarded from the point of view of sexual symbolism. One can apply this point of view without jumping to the conclusion that the content so expressed must also be sexual in origin. Common speech, as we know, is full or erotic metaphors which are applied to matters that have nothing to do with sex; and conversely, sexual symbolism by no means implies that the interests making use of it are by nature erotic. Sex, as one of the most important instincts, is the prime cause of numerous affects that exert an abiding influence on our speech. But affects cannot be identified with sexuality inasmuch as they may easily spring from conflict situations – for instance, many emotions spring from the instinct of self-preservation. (p.10) How is it that dreams are symbolical at all? In other words, whence comes this capacity for symbolic representation, of which we can discover no trace in our conscious thinking? Let us examine the matter a little more closely. If we analyse a train of thought, we find that we begin with an ‘initial’ idea, or a (p. 11) ‘leading’ idea.

13. (p. 11, cont.) idea, and then, without thinking back to it each time, but merely guided by a sense of direction, we pass on to a series of separate ideas that all hang together. There is nothing symbolical in this, and our whole conscious thinking proceeds along these lines. If we scrutinize our thinking more closely still and follow out an intensive train of thought – the solution of a difficult problem, for instance – we suddenly notice that we are thinking in words, that in very intensive thinking we begin talking to ourselves, or that we occasionally write down the problem or make a drawing of it, so as to be absolutely clear. Anyone who has lived for some time in a foreign country will certainly have noticed that after a while he begins to think in the language of that country. Any very intensive train of thought works itself out more or less in verbal form – if, that is to say, one wants to express it, or teach it, or convince someone of it. It is evidently directed outwards, to the outside world. To that extent, directed or logical thinking is reality-thinking, a thinking that is adapted to reality, by means of which we imitate the successiveness of objectively real things, so that the images inside our mind follow one another in the same strictly causal sequence as the events taking place outside it. It has in addition the peculiarity of causing fatigue, and it is for that reason brought (p. 12) into play for short periods only. The whole laborious achievement of our lives is adaptation to reality, part of which consists in directed thinking. In biological terms it is simply a process of psychic assimilation that leaves behind a corresponding state of exhaustion, like any other vital achievement.

14. (p. 12) The material with which we think is language and verbal concepts – something which from time immemorial has been directed outwards and used as a bridge, and which has but a single purpose, namely that of communication. So long as we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others. … Thus, language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul. … (p. 13) So our directed thinking, even though we be the loneliest thinkers in the world, is nothing but the first stirrings of a cry to our companions that water has been found, or the bear been killed, or that a storm is approaching, or that wolves are prowling round the camp. There is a striking paradox of Abelard’s which intuitively expresses the human limitations of our complicated thought-process: ‘Speech is generated by the intellect and in turn generates intellect.’ The most abstract system of philosophy is, in its method and purpose, nothing more than an extremely ingenious combination of natural sounds. Jung then starts to characterise the second type of thought. He begins by quoting a short passage from William James (p. 17): ‘Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions both practical and theoretical’.

15. (p. 17) We can supplement James’s definitions by saying that this sort of thinking does not tire us, that it leads away from reality into fantasies of the past or future. At this point thinking in verbal form ceases, image piles on image, feeling on feeling, (p. 18) and there is an ever-increasing tendency to shuffle things about and arrange them not as they are in reality but as one would like them to be. Naturally enough, the stuff of this thinking which shies away from reality can only be the past with its thousand-and-one memory images. Common speech calls this kind of thinking ‘dreaming’. … We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and it is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and as regards adaptation, is unproductive. There then follows several pages of illustration which are part of your photocopy.