‘TWO SOULS ALAS…’: JUNG’S TWO PERSONALITIES AND THE MAKING OF
ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Mark Saban
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex
August 2019
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‘TWO SOULS ALAS…’: JUNG’S TWO PERSONALITIES AND THE MAKING OF
ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Mark Saban
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex
August 2019
Table of Contents
- Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………
- Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………
- Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………
- Introduction .........................................................................................................................
- Footnotes…………………………………………………………………………………
- Chapter One: Jung’s ‘personal myth’ and the two personalities ………………….……..
- Jung’s personal myth……………………………………………………………..
- Jung and the personal…………………………………………………………….
- The split…………………………………………………………………………..
- The two personalities……………………………………………………………..
- Personality No. 1…………………………………………………………………
- Personality No. 2…………………………………………………………………
- The interactional process…………………………………………………………
- The storm lantern dream……………………………………………………….....
- A United Stream……………………………………………………………….....
- Return to the personal myth……………………………………………………...
- ...and its problems………………………………………………………………..
- Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………....
- Chapter Two: Jung and the dissociated psyche………………………………………….
- Winnicott’s review of Memories Dreams Reflections …………………………...
- The dissociationist tradition………………………………………………………
- Freud and dissociation……………………………………………………………
- Jung………………………………………………………………………………
- Complex and Dissociation……………………………………………………….
- Footnotes…………………………………………………………………………………
- Chapter Three: Secrets and Lies…………………………………………………………
- Jung’s secret……………………………………………………………………...
- Jung and Freud…………………………………………………………………...
- Jung’s love for Freud…………………………………………………………….
- 1909 —a turning point……………………………………………………………
- Secrets dreams and lies…………………………………………………………..
- Father and son……………………………………………………………………
- The Lie…………………………………………………………………………...
- A dream of disenchantment……………………………………………………...
- Conclusion………………………………………………………………………
- Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………..
- Chapter Four: Erasure and Interiorisation………………………………………………
- Intimate relationships…………………………………………………………...
- Mother-Wife…………………………………………………………………….
- Anima-Soul……………………………………………………………………...
- Ghostly analysis…………………………………………………………………
- Four women……………………………………………………………………..
- Helene Preiswerk……………………………………………………………..
- Sabina Spielrein………………………………………………………………
- Maria Moltzer………………………………………………………………...
- Toni Wolff……………………………………………………………………
- Anima figures…………………………………………………………………...
- Inner and Outer…………………………………………………………………
- Analysis—inner or outer……………………………………………………….
- Jung’s interiorisations…………………………………………………………..
- Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………..
- Chapter Five: Inner and Outer………………………………………………………….
- Jung and interiority……………………………………………………………..
- 1913-1917: Four texts…………………………………………………………..
- The Red Book …………………………………………………………………...
- The two spirits and enantiodromia……………………………………………..
- Midlife?...............................................................................................................
- Psyche and History……………………………………………………………..
- The killing of the hero………………………………………………………….
- A typological interpretation……………………………………………………
- Introversion and extraversion………………………………………………….
- An extraverted hero…………………………………………………………….
- The introversion of Jung’s psychology………………………………………...
- Two kinds of balance…………………………………………………………..
- The Schmid-Guisan dialogue………………………………………………….
- The Transcendent Function……………………………………………………
- Inner and Outer in 1916………………………………………………………..
- Adaptation and collectivity…………………………………………………….
- Soul…………………………………………………………………………….
- Footnotes……………………………………………………………………………….
- archetypal/personal split………………………………………………………………. Chapter Six: From Wotan to Christiana Morgan and back again: the limits of the
- Jung’s two models of psychotherapy……………………………………………
- Therapy and synchronicity………………………………………………………
- Jung’s countertransferences……………………………………………………..
- Universal and particular…………………………………………………………
- Pauli……………………………………………………………………………..
- The need to compartmentalize…………………………………………………..
- Alchemy etc……………………………………………………………………..
- The Yellowing…………………………………………………………………..
- Wotan…………………………………………………………………………...
- Jung and his patients……………………………………………………………
- For example, Christiana Morgan……………………………………………….
- The Visions……………………………………………………………………..
- The climax of a folie-à-deux …………………………………………………...
- The limits of interpretation……………………………………………………..
- Anonymity……………………………………………………………………...
- Back to the split………………………………………………………………...
- What is active imagination?.................................................................................
- And back to Wotan……………………………………………………………...
- Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………..
- A Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………
- References
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to my two supervisors, Roderick Main and Matt ffytche. Despite (or because of) their lightness of touch, I have never found their wise and scholarly interventions less than wholly helpful. Without Kevin Lu I would never have started teaching at the University of Essex and I would never have thought to embark upon a PhD. I owe him a great deal and I am proud to count him as a friend. The book would not have taken the direction it has without Andrew Samuels. He involved me (against my will!) in the organisation of the first Analysis and Activism Conference in 2014, and the editing of the book that came out of it, and eventually even I couldn’t avoid appreciating the crucial importance to Jungian psychology of the relational and the political. I have a great deal to thank him for.
Dedication I dedicate this thesis to my darling wife, Penny, the love of my life. Without her help and support this thesis couldn’t have been written. Without her presence in my life I would not be the person who could write it.
Of course, when Jung pointed to the status of his psychology as subjective confession, he certainly didn’t mean to suggest that it was “nothing but” an expression of his personal equation. What he meant was that the only way to create the conditions necessary for true communication was to acknowledge the personal, subjective nature of our perspective and thus become aware of the differences between our own perspective and the perspectives of others. In order to write a thesis about Jung and his psychology, I needed to open up a potentially transformative field of negotiation between me, the reader/writer, and Jung, the reader/writer of his own life. Jung’s own meetings with (and reading of) both inner and outer
others—Philemon and Freud, Salome and Spielrein—are paralleled, therefore, in my own
meeting with (and reading of) Jung and his two personalities. The primary aim of such a meeting is not to learn something or absorb something or appropriate something that can at
some later point be instrumentally utilised—though that may happen. More importantly, it is
the very event of engaging with (conflicting with, even being wounded by) the other that constellates (and performs) the event of transformation. The examples of this that we will be focusing upon here are Jung’s meetings with his inner (and as we will see outer) others. But my point is that the same has been my experience of meeting (reading/writing) Jung. One of the things I aim to show is that this notion of the transformative encounter with the other underlies Jung’s psychology, and it particularly underlies the individuation process, which I take to constitute the core of that psychology. As I intend to show in the first few chapters, Jung’s experience of the two personalities led him to an understanding of how he was (and we are) made by that process. All Jung’s psychological work, it seems to me, even that which predates the moment when Jung and Freud went their separate ways, revolves around and explicates the workings of the dynamic, energetic logic of individuation. The particular way in which Jung developed these ideas and these practices was inevitably
conditioned by his own personal equation, or as he it puts it in several places, by his personal myth. Although the experiential dimension of this personal equation is what lends his psychology both energy and focus, it is also the factor that limits and confines it. Jung famously said, “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian!” (quoted in Hannah 1976, p.78). He meant that since he was the creator of Jungian psychology, he was also, in a sense, free of that burden of Jungian dogma that the rest of us have to carry. No line can be drawn between Jung’s individuation process and the individuation of his psychology, and that fact reprieved Jung from being a Jungian. He didn’t have to wrestle with the paradoxical situation by which one individuates (becomes one’s truest self) through a psychology that takes its shape and its content from someone else’s individuation process. Jung may (or may not) be a genius, but your (and my) individuation process will always be yours (and mine) and not his! However, there is a further problem with this idea. If Analytical Psychology, the psychology that Jung created, is to outlive him, if it is to remain alive and to continue to interact meaningfully with the culture, history, and politics of the 21st century, then it must itself continue to individuate, and that means changing, transforming, reacting to, and engaging with the world around it. What will get in the way of that process (and I will argue that this is exactly what has occurred) is the sedimentation and hypostatisation of Jung’s ideas, as formulated in his published texts. As soon as we say or assume that Jung has said everything there is to say about psychology, then we have created a closed system. Under these circumstances, to be a Jungian means merely to know how to apply this ready-made system to new clinical and cultural situations. However fruitful such a process may be, the closed nature of the Jungian system, i.e., its reliance upon a set of fixed hermeneutic terms such as “archetype” or “trickster,” means that the transformation or renewal of these very notions (the archetype, the trickster, etc.) is
With regard to the first of these assumptions it needs to be acknowledged that, as Sonu Shamdasani, and Alan C. Elms have established, much of MDR was produced by
Aniela Jaffé—cobbled together from earlier writings, seminars and interviews with Jung—
and that MDR as a whole cannot therefore be described accurately as a text by Jung (Elms, 1997, Shamdasani, 1995). As far as I am aware, no-one has suggested that the first three
chapters—those that contain the account of the two personalities—were not written by Jung
alone, though it is possible that the process of “auntification” has brought about some distortion of the narrative The second assumption is harder to justify, since, as James Heisig puts it, “one has little choice but to accept Jung's account of events to which there could be no other witnesses.” (Heisig, 1979, p.94) My own position is that, whether Jung is in MDR accurately setting down memories of his childhood, or creating a re-imagined personal myth, or concocting a mixture of the two, what is beyond doubt is that he is telling us something important about the way in which he saw his life and his work. The question of autobiographical accuracy is therefore irrelevant to my project which is to use Jung’s account of the two personalities as a lens to re-vision his psychology. What I am not doing is making the reductive suggestion that everything in Jung’s psychology can be traced back to a specific set of childhood experiences As far as I am aware my own approach has not been attempted before. However, it is certainly the case that numerous commentators have drawn attention to a link between the two personalities and various aspects of Jung’s psychology. In Jungian and post-Jungian literature it is not uncommon to find a direct mapping of personality No. 1 and personality No. 2 onto concepts drawn from the mature psychology. An influential example is that of Marie Louise von Franz, who suggests in C. G. Jung: His myth in our time, that No. 1 “was [Jung’s] human ego” and that no 2 was “the activated, and therefore perceptible,
unconscious.” (von Franz, 1998, p.38) We can see another form of this kind of direct identification in Anthony Stevens’ book On Jung (Stevens, 1999) Stevens agrees with von Franz in mapping No. 1 onto Jung’s ego, but he identifies no 2 with “the Self” (Stevens, 1999, p. 66). I shall argue that while this kind of reductive approach to the two personalities is not completely misguided, it is nonetheless overly limiting, not only because the two personalities presage for Jung a wide range of ideas, motifs and images that far outstrip these notions, but also because the nature of the dynamic interaction between the personalities is far more significant than the particular relations of ego to unconscious, or ego to Self. Paul Bishop has contributed to our understanding of the two personalities by noting that Jung’s persistent interest in the divided mind can be traced back to his experience of the two personalities (Bishop, 1999, p. xiv). I expand upon this idea in my chapter on the importance of dissociation for the development of Jung’s psychology.^1 Lucy Huskinson’s book, Nietzsche and Jung: The whole self in the union of opposites , comes as close as any to a full-length work on the opposites. However, she inevitably ties Jung’s interest in the opposites closely to Nietzsche’s more philosophical concern with the notion of polarity. Along the way she does note the relation between Jung’s experience of his two personalities and his reception of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Huskinson, 2004, pp. 135ff). In chapter 3, I take up this topic by concentrating upon Jung’s terror of becoming Nietzsche, and how this fear influenced his tendency toward secrecy, which I associate with his No. 2 personality. In an article on Jung’s Red Book , V. Walter Odajnyk has drawn a connection between Jung’s experience of the two personalities, as recounted in MDR, and his ability to dialogue with unconscious figures during his confrontation with the unconscious (Odajnyk, 2010, p.440). However, apart from a brief outline of this idea he does not take the notion any further. In my chapter on the Red Book, I follow up the links between Jung’s need to engage with inner persons and the on-going dynamic interaction between personality No. 1 and
Some commentators who have chosen to take up a critical approach to Jung have employed the conflict between personality No. 1 and personality No. 2 in order to support a polemical argument that Jung’s personality No. 1 was a limiting factor in his psychological work. Such an approach suggests that Jung was held back by personality No. 1 and that his psychology would have been more ‘Jungian’ if he had committed himself wholeheartedly to personality No. 2 (Hillman and Shamdasani, 2013, p.66, Giegerich, 1998, p.54). I counter this position in my chapter on the Red Book , and my overall argument sets out to show that such a reading betrays a misunderstanding of the dynamic nature of Jung’s psychology, which depends upon a tension between both personalities. As far back as 1980, in his doctoral thesis, Renos Papadopoulos showed a keen interest in the significance of Jung’s early experiences in the context of the development of his psychology. He has continued to develop these ideas in a series of papers in which he has paid close attention to the two personalities in the context of an investigation of what he calls the “problematic of the other” in Jung’s writings (Papadopoulos 1980, 1991). Papadopoulos traces the importance of Jung’s early experiences as recounted in MDR in the context of a developing notion of self and other, a notion that achieves its most complete form in the shape of the ego-Self relationship. He sees the experiences of the two personalities as an important stage in this development. Although Papadopoulos’ central point is different from my own, I have been influenced and inspired by his careful scholarship. Finally, I have, myself, written various papers that have prefigured and foreshadowed the arguments I make here. In a 2011 paper I used the two personalities to introduce a discussion of Papadopoulos’ problem of the other in the context of Levinas’ philosophy (Saban, 2011). In a 2012 paper I suggested that the tension between the two personalities shed light upon the question of enchantment and disenchantment in Jung’s writings (Saban, 2012). A book chapter written in 2013 utilises the two personalities as a means of
approaching the topic of ambiguity in Jung’s opus (Saban, 2013). In a 2015 paper I emphasised the tension between the two personalities as central to Jung’s psychology and contrasted this approach to that of Wolfgang Giegerich (Saban, 2015). In a 2016 paper (an early version of chapter 2) I looked into the importance of dissociation in Jung’s psychology (Saban, 2016). 2017 saw the publication of a paper (translated into Italian) on the question of the secret in analytical psychology (Saban, 2017a) (a different version of which is to be found in chapter 3) and also a chapter which attempts to apply the logic of the two personalities to the realm of politics (Saban 2017b). However, my consistent focus in this thesis on the centrality of the dynamic of the two personalities within every aspect of Jung’s work, and the utilisation of this notion in order to provide an internal critique of Jungian psychology take my own previous arguments in a new direction. As the reader will discover, the second part of the thesis, (particularly chapters 5 and
- utilises the findings of the first half as a means of critiquing Jung’s psychology as found in the collected works. Rather than bringing to bear a critical model that originates outside of
Jung’s psychology—such as, for example, psychoanalysis—I use what I understand to be
Jung’s own model of individuation to provide an internal critique of the particular version of Jung’s psychology that has come down to us, and remains fundamental to Jungian training organisations throughout the world. I am, in effect using Jung to critique Jung. In Chapter one I perform an initial survey of Jung’s experience of the two personalities and bring it into tension with his notion of the personal myth. Having set the scene in this way, in chapter two I examine the ways in which Jung set about developing a model of the psyche within which the dynamics of the two personalities can be properly understood. Chapter three looks at Jung’s attempt to process an encounter with personality No. 2 via his crucial relationship with Freud, why that relationship failed and what that
- (^) Bishop’s works on Jung and Weimar classicism highlight the important links between
Jung’s two personalities and his reception of Goethe’s Faust (Bishop, 2007, 43ff). My own researches have not enabled me to devote space to this topic, though it does deserve attention, particularly in the context of Freud’s relation to the Faust legend.
Chapter One Jung’s ‘personal myth’ and the two personalities
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen:Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen. In me there are two souls, alas, and their Division tears my life in two. One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds Itself to her, clinging with furious lust; The other longs to soar beyond the dustInto the realm of high ancestral minds. Goethe, Faust part one, lines 1112- (English translation: Goethe, 1987, p. 35-6)
When Jung came, at the end of his life, to write what he described as his “so-called autobiography,” Memories Dream Reflections (Jung,1989), his intention was not merely to offer the reader a chronological itemisation of significant experiences and memories. He also wanted to throw some retrospective light upon the psychology he had created by offering the reader some fresh insights into those events of his life in which, as he put it, “the imperishable world irrupted into this one.” (Jung, 1989, p. 4) He knew perfectly well that he was thereby enabling his readers to deepen their understanding of the fundamental concepts that make up the psychology he created (to become known as Analytical Psychology) by providing them with a subjective account of the personal experiences that lay behind that psychology. The reader of MDR discovered, for example, that the anima archetype was not merely an abstract idea or concept dreamt up by Jung but emerged instead from the specific event of