Building Bridges: Possible dialogues between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.

Introduction

It is undeniable that the postmodern era with its refusal of all meta-narratives marked a serious crisis in all schools of depth psychology. Nevertheless, it has also provided us with a unique opportunity to begin to rethink and revitalize the way in which we theorize and practice. Theories are not cast in stone for as Jung famously declared: “One could as little catch the psyche in a theory as one could catch the world. Theories are not articles of faith, they are either instruments of knowledge and of therapy, or they are no good at all” (1954, para 198) If we are to be able to go beyond Freud and Jung we need to come to terms with the fact that our theories do not, and indeed cannot, represent absolute truths, but are merely heuristic devices that allow us to map our paths in the meanders of the unconscious. As Warren Colman writes, “They are like metaphorical maps to the ever-shifting territory of the psyche, subject to the idiosyncratic descriptions of the mapmakers and only roughly applicable to the particular psychic territory which the analyst is likely to meet” (2009, p. 200)

Over the years there have been many important changes in the theoretical edifices and in the clinical practice of both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, changes that are all too often rejected in favour of a dogmatic adherence to the gospel of our founding fathers. Nevertheless, as Giuseppe Civitarese notes, in a 2011 article on the paradigmatic shifts in psychoanalysis, analysts are now beginning to speak:

a completely different language from Freud’s original meta-theory. While in theory retained, they are actually shattered into a kaleidoscope of new concepts that call for the continuous adoption of new points of view. Moreover, by virtue of the subtle interplay of cross-references, identifications and differentiations in which they are suspended, and of their deliberately unsaturated character, they demand from the analyst the constant exercise of doubt and critical attitude towards any form of school-related dogmatism. (2011, p. 279)

Following the work of Fordham and the developmental school however, as I noted in a previous paper, “many Jungians now have integrated models of practice and training that place a much greater emphasis on boundaries, frames and on working in and with the transference, just as the emphasis on object relations and on a relational model of clinical practice has further modified our theories and practice” (Connolly, 2015, pp. 186-187) Today however, we run the potential risk of losing the specificity of the Jungian method with its insistence on the importance of the image and of the use of analogy and metaphor in the elucidation of clinical material. As Richard Carvahlo underlines, fantasy is an image-creating function “whose aim is one of revelation, to render whatever it is that we call ‘mind’ as if it were visible to itself in analogical form so that it is available to the subject for symbolic manipulation and scrutiny” (Carvahlo 1991, pp. 331-2)

If the psychodynamic approach is to survive, it has become essential to open ourselves up to theoretical and clinical cross-fertilizations between the different psychoanalytical schools and between depth psychology and other related disciplines. Even more importantly however, we need to be ready to accept the challenge posed by the exchanges with other cultures that have a very different approach to the psyche, no matter how unsettling and disturbing these may be. In the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

It is the asymmetries….between what we believe or feel and what others do, that makes it possible to locate where we now are in the world, how it feels to be there, and where we might or might not want to go. To obscure those gaps and those asymmetries by relegating them to a realm of repressible or ignorable difference, mere unlikeness…..is to cut us off from such knowledge and such possibility: the possibility of quite literally, and quite thoroughly, changing our minds. (1986, p.114)

In the present chapter I will be looking at two such shifts that have been influenced by the revaluation of the image and of aesthetics in philosophy, in cognitive psychology and linguistics. On the one hand this has led to the emergence of the new discipline of cognitive aesthetics, the idea that aesthetic experience plays an important role in the production of new knowledge and of scientific discoveries. As a scientist Robert Root-Bernstein noted, “aesthetic considerations are in and of themselves, ways of thinking about scientific ideas and that sensual experience is the basis of the intuition we bring to our work” (2003, pp.33-50) On the other, the revaluation of aesthetics is also instrumental in the iconic turn or the return of the image in psychoanalysis and in the aesthetic turn in analytical psychology. First however, it is necessary to define what we actually mean when we talk about the image. I will therefore begin with a brief excursus into the history and the phenomenology of the image.

Defining The Image

As Paul Kugler notes, “In the history of Western thought, the psychic tendency to construct images has been portrayed primarily in two different forms: a) as a reproductive process portraying some more primary reality and b) as a productive process which creates original entities” (2005, p. 3) In general however, until relatively recently, the image, art and aesthetics were regarded as inferior ways of accessing reality and of creating knowledge and new meanings. As Mark Johnson argues in The Meaning of the Body:

From the very beginning of Western philosophy, art was never taken seriously as an essential mode of human engagement with and understanding of the world. The Platonic notion that art was mimesis, a form of imitation of the real, consigned it to a derivative and dependent status as a sources of images and second-rate understanding, not a direct presentation of reality. (2007, p. 210)

When the first homo sapiens began to sculpt out the geometric shapes of cupules, dots, lines and zigzags into rocks and when the Paleolithic hunters began to decorate the walls of caves with the beautiful paintings that still speak to us today, we can hypothesize that for them, these images were at one and the same time reproductive, productive and operative, that is to say, capable of changing reality. As Eliade says, “ we may regard the Paleolithic representations as a code that signifies the symbolic (hence magico-religious) value of the images and at the same time their function in the ceremonies connected with various ‘stories’”. (1978,p.23)

The idea that images are merely reproductive was first introduced by Plato when he suggested that poetic and artistic images are imitations of natural objects which in turn are inferior imitations of the forms of transcendent reality. This Platonic distrust of images became profoundly rooted in Western culture and over the centuries, erupted into moments of profound iconoclasm. Nevertheless, running parallel to official culture, there remained a subterranean belief in the productive and performative power of images incarnated in movements such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Jewish Kabala and alchemy, movements which came together in the Renaissance to produce an explosion of iconophilia. What all these thought systems have in common is the belief in the efficacy of images and their capacity to transform reality, both inner and outer, typified in the writings of figures such as Ficino and Giordano Bruno. For these men, images were seen not as a mere reflection of reality, but more as a means to open the way to accessing the invisible or the transcendent. In the words of the art historian Barbara Maria Stafford, “From the iconophilic perspective, the earthly or natural image establishes a temporary resemblance with a hidden mystery that one cannot otherwise see. All of analogies simile-generating figures are thus incarnational. They materialize, display and disseminate an enigma that escapes words” (2001, p. 24)

With the iconoclasm of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the whole imaginal culture of the Renaissance came to an end and the effects of this on the role of images have lasted up to, and indeed have intensified, in our present culture, despite the essentially ineffective attempts on the part of Romanticism to re-establish the creative role of imagination. The final blow against the power of images took place in the 18th century when, aesthetic experience and perceptual apprehension were declassified as subjective and therefore inferior categories of knowledge. The result is that today we live in a world where we are bombarded by images but they are deprived of any representative, productive or operative power, pure simulacra to use Baudrillard’s term. Modern science too has tended to enforce this idea of the irrelevance of images with devastating effects on how we have come to view human subjectivity, leaving us only with a de-personalized and de-imaged brain- mind. It is to Jung’s credit that he was one of the first to diagnose and seek to rectify this ‘disease of the imagination’ typical of modern culture, but his efforts have been all too often vitiated by the problems in his theorizations on the image.

All images whether considered mere copies of existing reality, reproductions of a more primary reality or productive creations of something hitherto unknown, share a common denominator however: they are linked to acts of representation. As Elio Franzoni, an Italian professor of aesthetics, states:

The multiple meanings of the term ‘image’ are in fact evidenced by the past and present history of the philosophy of the artistic experience and theories which nevertheless reveal a common denominator: the image is always linked to ‘representational’ acts and when it is not in itself ‘representation of’, it is the mediation that makes it possible. (2001, p. 1)

While, for Freud, the image is merely a sign (a representation of something known even if repressed), for Jung the image is above all a potentially productive symbol, a means or mediatory process through which it becomes possible to represent and gain access to something invisible and unknown.

Freud, Jung and the Image

Freud, reflecting his life-long commitment to science and to rationality, was profoundly ambivalent about the value of the image. Nowhere is this more clear than in his theorizing on dreams. The dream elements are produced by the transformation of thoughts and words into visual images and in this way, they represent a movement from more evolved ways of thinking to the more regressive and archaic pictorial language of infancy and of primitive man. As he writes in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, dreams, “hark back to states of intellectual development which have long been superseded–to picture language, to symbolic connections, to conditions, perhaps, which existed before our thought-language had developed” (1915, p. 199) Furthermore, Freud demonstrates a marked distrust of the authenticity of dream images which he saw as something inauthentic and to be regarded with suspicion: “The conception of dream elements tells us that they are ungenuine things, substitutes for something else that is unknown to the dreamer (like the purpose of a parapraxis) substituting for something the knowledge of which is present in the dreamer but which is inaccessible to him” (1915, p. 113) As Christopher Bollas states, “this leads him to regard the dream text as a pernicious and deceitful representation” (Bollas, 1987, p. 68) For Freud dream images are purely reproductive and therefore incapable of producing new meanings. The task of the analyst therefore was merely one of translating back the image back into words so as to render intelligible the meaning of the dream. For Donald Meltzer the result was that, “Freud views the problem of understanding symbols as one of re-translation, since symbol-formation itself is seen as a process of translation, movement in form without alteration or increment in meaning” (1983, p. 20) Freud concentrated all his attention on the dream text. He did this as Bollas notes, “specifically to identify the dream thoughts that sponsored the dream – in order to translate the image back into words” (Bollas, 1987, p. 69) He ignored the importance of the dream as an experience with its own particular qualities; an experience which according to Bollas, “brings us into contact with our own internal and highly idiomatic aesthetic: that aesthetic reflected by the ego style typical of each of us” (idem, p. 81)

In contrast with Freud’s suspicion of images, for Jung the visual image was always primary to the word and to language, for as George Hogenson states, ‘Even the casual reader of Jung will be struck by his fascination with figural representations, the work of art, the pictorial……for Jung the visual image is as important as language is to Freud’.(2009, p. 333) Jung distinguished clearly between signs and symbols and he believed that dream images are symbolic in as much as they, ‘represent an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be’. (C.W.7, §494) Images are therefore productive of new meaning and they cannot be translated but only amplified though analogy in an attempt to elucidate some of their possible meanings. Despite this however, Jung’s need to find a scientific justification for his theories on the collective unconscious and on the archetype, led him to neglect the role of aesthetics in the creation and in the psychological function of images. As Paul Bishop says with reference to alchemical symbols: ‘Placing emphasis on the importance of intuition (Anschauung) Jung recognized the aesthetic appeal of such symbols, although he was reluctant to go one step further and regard this appeal in itself as central to their psychological function’. (2009, p.87) Symbolical images work therefore through analogical processes and analogy, according to Stafford is, ‘a vision of ordered relationships, articulated as similarity in difference. This order is neither facilely affirmative nor purchased at the expense of variety’. (2001, p.9) The difficulty in analogy therefore is finding enough similarity to warrant giving a common name to disparate items while acknowledging their significant variations and analogy should not be confused with establishing identity or isomorphism. This however is exactly what Jung did when he conflated images taken from very different cultural and historical contexts, as I have shown in a previous paper on Jung’s approach to alchemical imagery. (Connolly, 2013) This led him to believe that what changes in only the content of the image; the form can be reduced to a limited number of uniform and eternal patterns. As the Italian philosopher and Jungian analyst Mario Trevi, writes, ‘Jung’s mistake was to hypothesize a repetitive, and in any case improvable, fixity in that rich world of forms where eventual similarities are based not on improbable a priori structures but on the all too human relative constancy of man’s needs’. (1993, p.62 ) If the form of the image is therefore in some way innate and unchanging, aesthetics could have no relevance in the creation and function of images. Jung in fact always tends to oppose aesthetic formulation to understanding, insisting that, ‘aesthetic formulation, when it predominates, leaves it at that and gives up any idea of discovering a meaning”. (Jung, 1916/ 1953, §180)