The dis/enchantment of C.G. Jung

Abstract

Jung's psychology is founded upon this problem: ‘Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons’ (Jung & Jaffé, 1977, pp. 61–62). I intend to read the disquieting tension of this problematic as haunting everything he wrote. My thesis is that Jung's perspective is both enchanted and disenchanted and, moreover, that this antinomial tension makes him and his psychology peculiarly modern. Utilising recent scholarship on the modern occult, which has placed enchantment at the centre of modernity, this paper argues for a peculiarly modern disenchanted enchantment that Jung's psychology both exemplifies and explores.

Keywords:

• enchantment
• disenchantment
• opposites
• antinomial
• occultism

Notes

1. With regard to the place of the enchantment/disenchantment binary in the modern world, Hanegraaff (2003) offers an interesting explanatory idea. He suggests that the problem is not to be located in the differentiation of an enchanted perspective from a disenchanted perspective, but rather in a particular dichotomising process, which historically occurred with the advent of modernity and the development of an ideology insistent upon instrumental reason as the only acceptable perspective on the world. Haanegraff suggests that instrumental and causal reason coexisted without friction in the pre-modern world with what he calls ‘participation’. This he develops from Levy-Brühl and describes as ‘an affective rather than rational stratum in human thought and action, which is more fundamental even than animism, is analogical rather than logical, and is not reducible to primary reasoning. It may be referred to as “spontaneous animism”’ (ibid., p. 374). It is this tendency to ‘participation’ that enables us to make sense of experiences of ‘enchantment’, although it will of course do so in ways that differ from those of instrumental reason. However, in modernity, under the harsh ideological light of enlightenment thinking, ‘participation’ rapidly became unacceptable and was pushed into the margins. By the time of late modernity, the hegemony of instrumental reason, in the form of the overwhelming dominance of the scientific worldview as ‘the way things are’ and the ghettoisation of phenomena of enchantment, which had become perceived as negative in all the ways I have outlined above, was almost complete. It is important to emphasise, however, that ‘participation’ and the manifestations and experience of ‘enchantment’ also underwent changes as a result of this process. The first and most significant of these was that they became visible at all. As Terry Castle has pointed out, it is only with enlightenment ‘disenchantment’ that phenomena of ‘enchantment’ become possible to thematise at all. So is born the peculiarly modern category of the ‘uncanny’ (Castle, 1995). One might argue that ‘enchantment’ can only be experienced as such subsequent to an experience of ‘disenchantment’!

2. For an excellent survey of the importance of the opposites in Jung's psychology, see Huskinson (2004).

3. This has led to confusion in the literature. In Brome's Jung Man and Myth the two sections are referred to as two separate dreams! (Brome, 2001).

4. Kerr points this out in ‘The devil's elixirs, Jung's “theology” and the dissolution of Freud's “poisoning complex”’ (Kerr, 1999).

5. This theme is developed at length by Giegerich in ‘The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man’ (Giegerich, 2003/10).

6. For a fair and revealing account of this episode. see Carl Gustav Jung : avant-garde conservative by Jay Sherry (Sherry, 2010). Sherry suggests that Jung was under the influence of a ‘Jewish’ complex in this period.