It's no secret that Carl Jung, for all the brilliance and insight that his ideas hold, was a bit of a prick. He was an opportunist. A womanizer. A closet Nazi. And despite all his objections to being any sort of leader, he certainly behaved in the manner of a cultist. Though his misleading sorta autobiography, Memories Dreams Reflections, gives the impression that Jung was an immense introvert who talked only to "Freud and God", as one author nicely put it, the truth was that he was a very shrewd businessman who seemed to know how to find right people to incubate and sell his ideas. After all, one of the main reasons Jung became close to Freud was not a desire to be Freud's disciple as much as it was Jung's hope of using ideas from psychoanalysis to fertilize his own working theories. In that context, it makes perfect sense why the two of them would eventually come to have such a bad fall-out.
Well, that and that they were both pricks.
But the point is I think it's important to tear down the reverence to Jung, and to separate the ideas from the man, or at least to make them our own. That certainly seems to be what some professors here are encouraging, much to my relief. To Jung's own credit, he himself at least consciously hated the idea of followers, because he (correctly) felt his theories were his own observations, and thus his own psychology, and thus all subsequent psychologists should not just use derivatives of his model, but rather that they should devise their own. Or better put, as Jung once said: "Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian."
Like I said, hearing this is quite reassuring to me. One of my classmates, an older British gentleman who is a respectable journalist, having appeared on the BBC and such, asked me Wednesday: "What do you describe what you're studying, Jungian Psychology or Analytical Psychology?" I answered what you read on the sidebar on this blog as well as my twitter: Analytical Psychology. I have always felt more comfortable doing that, not because I dislike Jung per se, but because I would rather not be seen as a mere derivative of his work. I would like to invent my own ideas and make my own observations, not just stay trapped within the given framework. I do not have any particular reverence towards Jung: I think his psychological model is beautiful for precisely the same reason the theories of evolution or relativity are beautiful, because they all merely describe things that already exist, without constructing overly complicated imaginary models (although I suspect archetypes, or at least how we describe archetypes, fall into this category. More on this later). I think how he created his ideas out of murky happenstance is a great life lesson for anyone with ambition. But I don't worship the man. In some ways, and I am not comparing myself to them at all, but I suppose I want to use his work in the same way Jung used Freud's: to further his own work.
I'm an opportunist.
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Tuesday classes seem to focus more on Jung the man and his writings, while Wednesday classes feature modern applications and clinicians coming in to talk about their work. All the modules (as they call classes here) have their place, and I generally enjoy the discussion in all of them, but I wholeheartedly prefer and genuinely love the Wednesday lectures. I love seeing all this theory come to life, and the only way to catch a glimpse of that is through case studies and dialogue with therapists. For instance, hearing a therapist almost completely disregard archetypes in favor of discussing complexes, daddy-issues, and REAL people problems is very motivating for me. I love seeing the mythos surrounding Jung torn down. I get excited hearing a speaker say that if the gnostic, dogmatic side of Jungian psychology continues to prevail, that analytical psychology will be dead in ten years. I get a kick out of seeing the spiritual side of this field get kicked in the balls. So many seem to study Jung PURELY to find themselves, and I'm sick of it. Not that the spiritual side of analytical psychology is at all a bad thing; indeed, it's one of its greatest aspects, as was Jung's insight into why religion will always matter. But, but. Good science is not subjective. Good science fuses subjectivity into a greater objective scheme. This is, in some ways, the whole point of Jung's psychology I think, and why it could be so useful in destroying the postmodern epidemic infecting academics.
This is also why I am drawn to clinical or social work: how does one know what they posit in their research has any merit lest they actually work with people? We can talk about archetypal images till the cows come home, but how do we know that they are even real? What if they're just really nice toys for making people feel important and thus boosting their psyche? What if archetypes are inherently unknowable, as Jung posited, just atomic patterns of both mind and matter, and thus our real concern should be not on self-important mythical images, but rather complexes and how our consciousness handles them? And therefore, is it not most important to understand how our consciousness functions, since it's the only thing in the mind we can even directly comprehend?
And this is why I study personality types.
A lot of Jungians resent personality types, since it's by far the most mainstream and commercial of Jung's theories. Only a few, such as John Beebe out in San Francisco, even bother to research it. Many give that intuitive-feeling objection, that four-letters "could not possibly explain my personality, whatever personality even is." What most fail to understand is that those four letters (I am assuming you read my first post or already have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator at some point) denote not the whole personality, but merely the style of one's consciousness. Consider your personality type your Ego Style. The Ego Style affects your perception, which in turn affects your lower cognitive-sensory functions, which in turn affects the information gathered by your brain, in turn shaping the differentiation of your ego from the 'self'. There is a feedback loop at work here. And I think that's what makes personality types integral on a conceptual level alone: they explain individuation and confrontation with the shadow on a very clear and accessible scale.
We have to write four essays in this course, two of which are unfortunately bound to certain questions. Then we have our MA Thesis. I will almost certainly write about the psychological types for that, probably along the lines of what I've stated above. I don't yet know the exact argument, but I want to demonstrate how important psychological types are to consciousness, and how that feedback loop demonstrates the power of the conscious mind. I want to show that squabbling over mythical images is not nearly as important as confronting the lone tangible aspect of the mind. I want to attack postmodernism and promote a deterministic yet free-willed approach. I want to bring back some scientific thought here.
Then there is the matter of the doctoral dissertation. For that I want to bring in biology. But one step at a time. The sun's still only setting at 6:30PM. It's early in the game.
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