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Jungian thought Integrated with Freudian, Refreshing, October 5, 2006
This review is from: The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination (Paperback)
The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination by Michael Adams (Brunner-Routledge) Contemporary psychoanalysis needs less reality and more fantasy. It needs a new principle - what Michael Vannoy Adams calls the "fantasy principle."
Freud insists that we conform to the reality principle. He assumes that there is only one reality and that we all define it in exactly the same way. Reality, however, is not given. There are many "realities" and they are constructed from fantasies that occur in us continuously. Fantasy, Adams declares, is what transforms consciousness.
This book is distinctive: it radically affirms the centrality of imagination. Adams challenges us to exercise and explore the imagination. He shows us how to value vitally important images that emerge from the unconscious, how to evoke such images, and how to engage them decisively. The Fantasy Principle explains how to apply special Jungian techniques to interpret images accurately and to experience images immediately and intimately through what Jung calls "active imagination."
The Fantasy Principle argues for the recognition of a new school of psychoanalysis -the school of "imaginal psychology." As Jung says, "Image is psyche." The school of imaginal psychology emphasizes the transformative impact of images.
Excerpt: I was privileged to be the director of the Psychoanalytic Studies program for the first three years of its existence. The curriculum that I designed allotted equal time to both the Freudian and Jungian traditions (Adams 1993). In addition to courses on Freudian and post-Freudian analysis and Jungian and post-Jungian analysis, that curriculum included such courses as "Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies" and "Psychoanalysis and Social and Political Thought," as well as a lecture series of guest speakers from all of the different schools of psychoanalytic thought.
The cartoon of Jung and Freud sitting together, the one smoking his pipe, the other smoking his cigar, was my idea. The artist William Bramhall drew the image beautifully, brilliantly, with all the humor that I had imagined. (Free associate, if you will, to that very phallic cigar, with Freud's fingers so ready to flick red-hot ash right into Jung's lap!) For me, the cartoon is an especially apt illustration for this book because it evokes a fantasy of just how imaginative (and just how much fun) psychoanalysis might have been had Jung and Freud remained colleagues. Just imagine!
The New School University used the cartoon of Jung and Freud to promote the Psychoanalytic Studies program in advertisements with the headline "Earn the Degree of Your Dreams." Not everyone, however, appreciated my effort to establish a Freudian-Jungian program. Eventually, I was replaced as director of the program, and the curriculum was redesigned, effectively to exclude Jung. Sadly, the program has been defunct for the last few years. The Graduate Faculty offers occasional courses on psychoanalytic topics and now plans a psychoanalytic concentration in the Philosophy department, but it does not currently grant a degree in Psychoanalytic Studies. Perhaps one day it will again. As for me, I continue to
teach psychoanalytic courses at Eugene Lang College of the New School University, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to do so.
Freud never taught at the New School University, nor did Jung, although many other analysts have done so over the years. Sandor Ferenczi was the first, in 1921. Alvin Johnson, the first president of the New School University, recounts the following anecdote, which includes an ironical commentary on the law-and-order priorities of that period in New York City:
Anyway, Ferenczi proved to be a most charming, cultivated gentleman, and his course drew such a fleet of limousines to Twenty-third Street that the local police captain felt called upon the investigate. He was an upstanding young fellow, attended by half a dozen ordinary cops. He explained to me that, seeing such a lot of limousines, he wanted to know what was going on, perhaps a lecture on physics or -- or
`Birth control," I suggested.
"Yes, that is what I suspected."
"Well, it's nothing of the kind, but a lecture on psychoanalytic psychology. Come in and hear it."
Soon the police captain and his squad retired to the door. "Pity that old boy can't speak English. I couldn't understand a word he said."
(Johnson 1952: 284-5)
A few of the many analysts who have taught at the New School University include: Alfred Adler, A. A. Brill, Fritz Wittels, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, Clara Thompson, Ernst Kris, Melitta Schmideberg, Robert Waelder, Sandor Rado, Peter Blos, Gregory Zilboorg, Theodor Reik -- as well as these Jungian analysts: Eleanor Bertine, Frances Wickes, Edward F. Edinger, and Edward C. Whitmont.
I am glad to say that in my personal experience many contemporary analysts in the Freudian tradition are pluralists who have a very positive, inclusive attitude toward Jungian psychology. It especially pleases me that I have many good friends who are Freudian analysts. Unfortunately, however, in many universities (all too often from either ignorance or prejudice) Jung is persona non grata. Jungian psychology remains marginal as an academic subject. (A new organization, the International Association for Jungian Studies, seeks, in part, to redress this situation.) In addition, very few psychoanalytic institutes in the Freudian tradition offer any courses in Jungian psychology. I hope that this book will encourage more psychoanalytic dialogues between Freudians and Jungians.
Although I am a Jungian analyst, I respect all of the other schools of psychoanalytic thought, including the Freudian school. As Michael Eigen says: "We all stand on the shoulders of the giants Freud and Jung" (1986: x). Eigen makes psychoanalytic use of an aphorism that many individuals -- among them, most famously Isaac Newton -- have used, usually as a demonstration of modesty. Robert K. Merton, who has written a marvelously ironical book that attempts to trace the origin of the aphorism, quotes Newton as saying: "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants" (1965: 9). The aphorism itself, to which Newton alludes, may be rendered as follows: "Pigmies standing on the shoulders of giants see farther than the giants themselves." Other translations substitute "dwarfs" for "pigmies." In effect, Eigen says that in the history of psychoanalysis we are all pigmies or dwarfs in comparison with the giants Freud and Jung and that only by standing on their shoulders may we see farther than they did.
Merton lists 47 individuals who have used the aphorism for one purpose or another. The last individual on the list is Freud himself, who modifies the aphorism into a sarcastic retort against Wilhelm Stekel. Ernest Jones reports that Stekel felt that "he had surpassed Freud" in the ability to interpret symbols. Jones continues: "He was fond of expressing this estimate of himself half-modestly by saying a dwarf on the shoulder of a giant could see farther than the giant himself. When Freud heard this he grimly commented: 'That may be true, but a louse on the head of an astronomer does not-- (1955 2: 136). From a Jungian perspective, what is a louse? Marie-Louise von Franz says:
The louse in symbolism usually carries the meaning of a completely autonomous thought; something that sticks in your mind, though you don't want it, and sucks your blood. It is a beautiful symbol for thought obsession: an idea that stays in your mind, obsesses all your other thoughts, and at the same time sucks your blood, takes away your psychic energy.
(Von Franz 1995: 44)
Psychoanalytically, the louse is a small parasite (a "complex," Jungians would say) that consumes the "libido" of a larger host.
Are we all pigmies or dwarfs who see farther than the giants Freud and Jung? Or are we merely so many immodest lice? It seems to me that if we have any aspirations to be far-sighted analysts, we need properly to acknowledge the gigantic contributions of both Freud and Jung. Otherwise, we are just lousy analysts, whether we be Jungians or Freudians.
As the subtitle of the book indicates, this is a study in what I call psychoanalysis of the imagination. Among the various psychoanalytic psychologies, Jungian psychology is an imaginal psychology. What is unique about Jungian analysis is its emphasis on images, as well as its methods for interpreting and experiencing those images -- the techniques of explication, amplification, and active imagination. Psychoanalysts who master these three Jungian methods and apply them with the necessary discipline are in an enviable position accurately to analyze the images that emerge spontaneously and autonomously from the psyche.
To me, the purpose of psychoanalysis (including Jungian analysis) is simply to increase consciousness. In that respect, this book is an attempt to demonstrate the practical value of contemporary Jungian psychology, both clinically and culturally. Among the topics that I discuss are fantasy, dream interpretation, archetypes and archetypal images, mythological knowledge, sex and gender, racism and multiculturalism, fathers and sons, cannibalism and suicide, and blasphemy. Some of these are issues that I have addressed in my previous two books, The Mythological Unconscious (Adams, 2001) and The Multicultural Imagination: "Race," Color, and the Unconscious (Adams, 1996). What is distinctive about this book, however, is its radical (and deliberately provocative) emphasis on the utter centrality of the imagination in psychoanalysis.
"A curious thing," James Hillman says, "is that there's never been a single piece of true doctrinal dispute, theoretical dispute, among the Jungians." He conjectures that Jungians are not disputatious (at least about...
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