In these days when biomedical explanations of affect and behavior threaten to overshadow our collective interest in the meaning of human experience, it is refreshing to be reminded that epistemological certainty is unattainable. In this excellent collection of essays, theoretical and philosophical assumptions about world and mind are held up for scrutiny as contributors explore areas of intersection and incompatibility between existential phenomenology and analytical psychology.
Since its origination with the philosophical works of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology has aimed at descriptions of occurrences, events, experiences—in short, of world—that are not obscured by theoretical, philosophical, or cultural assumptions. C.G. Jung claimed to have based his discoveries on this approach. He insisted that he was an empiricist, and that his psychology constitutes a record of his observation of psychic phenomena as they presented themselves to him. The theoretical components of his psychology—the idea of the objective psyche with the archetypes as organs of the collective unconscious, for example—he considered postulates based on his observations of the effects of the unconscious on consciousness.
Several contributors approach the topic by comparing works by phenomenologists (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, in particular) with works of analytical psychologists (such as Neumann and Hillman). These articles promise to challenge readers who have limited exposure to phenomenological tradition and language. The collection also contains articles by Jungian analysts and scholars that approach a range of phenomena—Eros, play therapy, memory, even television—from a phenomenological perspective. These works of phenomenological psychology portray areas of intersection between the two traditions as fertile ground for the re-envisioning of psyche and for the enrichment of consulting-room culture.
Take, for example, Mark Welman's “Thanatos and Existence: Towards a Jungian Phenomenology of the Death Instinct.” Welman applies a hermeneutics that navigates a course between purely literal and purely metaphoric expressions of meaning. He relates the impulse toward death to forms of experience that led Jung to posit the Self, not just as an organizing center of psyche, but as something that transcends the individual: a transpersonal ground residing in all things and where all things reside. Descriptively linked with the phenomena of the Self, death, in Welman's formulation, “is the proper home to the imagination,” something encountered when one is free of the rationalizations of the ego and where “images can emerge in their own light.”
Rejecting radically subjectivist views of perception, phenomenologists set their sights on the meeting place between consciousness and world. Of particular concern is the severance of self and world implicit in any psychology that uses the construct of projection. This is the topic of an especially inspiring piece by Robert Romanyshyn, “Alchemy and the Subtle Body of Metaphor: Soul and Cosmos.” The author notes that in his early works Jung accepts the Cartesian separation of the knower and the known; indeed, Jung insists there is nothing that is directly experienced “except the mind itself.” Romanyshyn asks us to be mindful of the consequences of an overemphasis upon projective processes, noting that the Cartesian dream of reason has us placing all animation in the mind and thereby robbing the world of its soul. He shows how Jung's later studies in alchemy lean toward a mending of the mind/matter separation in his psychology. Romanyshyn then develops the theme of the subtle body, relating this alchemical notion to imaginal processes. Taking the products of imagination on their own terms rather than reducing them to “mental products,” he points to metaphor as a space “between things and thoughts.” The implications of his approach for the practice of analysis are vast: through the imaginal, we enter a cosmology where “soul finds its home again in the order of creation.” In Romanyshyn's view, this journey is the heart of Jung's psychology.
Considering the complexity and importance of archetypal theory to analytical psychology, an essay exploring in depth phenomenological critiques of Jung's essentialisms would be useful. As Professor Brooke notes in his introductory essay, the phenomenologists' search for the immutable “essence” of a phenomenon has shifted to an interest in the contextual and historical constitutions of meaning. To this end, Jung's archetypal theory has been subject to criticism for “substituting hypostasis for meaning” and “failing to understand the historical horizons in which the phenomena occur in the way they do.” On the basis of the works included, it is not clear whether critics of archetypal theory have grasped the distinction between archetype as a structuring organ and the representations it organizes. To posit the archetype as an unconscious structuring factor does not imply that the meaning derived by a perceiving consciousness resides in the structuring organ itself. Indeed, archetypal theory acknowledges the role of the personal, cultural, and historical in the composition of representations as well as in the derivation of meaning.
This collection of essays is to be commended, however, for eliciting such concerns. It is sure to leave theorists as well as psychotherapists wanting more, not because of its omissions, but because the inclusions are stimulating and imaginative. Contributors do more than remind us that we cannot overestimate the impress of ontological and epistemological assumptions on psychotherapeutic practice; they inspire us to re-envision experience as the meeting ground of consciousness and animate world.
Footnotes
Dr. Costello holds a Ph.D. in the history and literature of religions from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute–Zurich. She practices as a Jungian analyst in Alexandria, VA, and in Washington, DC.