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Abstract
This paper contextualizes Jung's method of amplification within the larger history of philosophical hermeneutics and most particularly within the relational ethics of the post-modern, post-phenomenological and post-Heideggarian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. While finding the epistemological assumptions (foundationalism) of subject formation guiding Jung's interpretative method incompatible with the extra-ontology perspective of Levinas, this paper underscores the necessity for revitalizing our theory and practice by bringing back the unthought in Jung's corpus so that the truly ethical dimensions of life and analytic work are in alignment with our present epoch. Finally, one enigmatic analytic moment demonstrates how the radical Levinasian primacy of ethical experience in subject formation can emerge in a contemporary clinical encounter. The Levinasian sensibility will be shown to open up new perspectives that contrast with the formulaic ways in which we tend to understand the effects of counter-transference, transcendence, time and ethics.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ladson Hinton, MD, who first introduced me to the philosophical ethical dimensions of analytic work.
Notes
1. Hinton and Mills decisively critique Jung's core notion of the Unus Mundus (one world). Jungian psychoanalyst and theorist Ladson Hinton III with his three esteemed sons in a panel presentation at the 2010 IAAP Congress in Montreal, cogently addressed the misguided longing in Jungian culture to adhere to uncritically held foundational ideas that have destructive and unforeseen ethical dangers in many cultural dimensions (Hinton Citation2011). In this issue of International Journal of Jungian Stuides philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills asks compellingly, ‘… In other words, do we need to appeal to an ancestral past [collective unconscious] in order to explain present experience? Do we currently occupy a spirit(ual) world emanating from a central ubiquitous Source that is responsible for the collective development of the human race?’ (Mills, Citation2012).
2. Jungian theorist Christopher Hauke's (Citation2000) Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities offers the reader a compendium of post-modern themes in an attempt to underscore the validity of classical Jungian modernity in a post-modern world. Hauke's approach does not recognize the irreducible gap between the respective ontologies of Jung and post modernity. Neither does he describe the pivotal influences of philosophical phenomenology on post modernity (people such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas), and he only mentions Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in passing.
3. Although Jung claimed epistemological allegiance with the Kantian irreducibility in division between empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena, in actuality he shows closer alignment with the dialectical unity between opposing opposites, which is rooted in German Idealism. I am grateful to Jon Mills for elucidating this important distinction (personal conversation, June 2012).
4. Roger Brooke has authored a number of papers and texts on the topic of the commonality and differences between philosophical phenomenology (primarily focusing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and analytical psychology, most notably ‘Jung and Phenomenology’ (Citation1993). Brooke's reading of ‘hermeneutics’ tends to emphasize the polysemic and commensurable aspects of classical Jung and philosophical hermeneutics, emphasizing Jung's ontology, while I tend to underscore their incommensurability due to Jung's foundationalism. Jung simply, in my mind, because of his foundationalist presuppositions, did not make the ‘turn’ from knowledge viewed as a product of the mind to Heidegger's ‘fundamental ontology’, which focuses on a non-Cartesian understanding of the presencing of being in everyday social and historical contexts. There are evidences however, that Jung anticipated such a turn most noted in his phenomenological descriptive approach developed early in his career in his association test researches (see Austin, Citation2009; Vezzoli et al., Citation2007) and in his immanent critique of such emerging phenomena from the patient. For a contemporary application of this crucial insight, see Cambray, Citation2006; Cambray, Gaillard, Gibeault, Gastelumendi & Kast, Citation2011.
5. See Heidegger, Citation2001 for a full and rich discussion from Heidegger's own lips regarding his objections to fundamental premises inherent in Freud's psychoanalysis.
6. Dilthey's fundamental basis for philosophy was itself, or the lived experiences of the human being embedded in its environment (Lebenswelt). Phenomenological research for Husserl required a careful description of the phenomena or experience without imposing one's presuppositions or judgments about the implication of the experience.
7. See Zahavi, Citation2008, pp. 1–29 for a fertile discussion on this topic.
8. See Jacque Derrida's early essay on ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, which is an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, for an engaging deconstructive discourse of the early work of Levinas as it is contrasted to that of Heidegger and Husserl (Citation1978). A compelling companion text to this work is Derrida's later text – ‘Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas’ written on the occasion of Levinas's death and delivered at the cemetery in Pantin on 27 December 1995. ‘Adieu’ is a moving ‘meditation’ on the work of his dead friend or ‘master’ and serves as a point of convergence and departure in their thought with regard to Levinas's later works into the realm of ethics and the political.
9. There are many critiques on the complex relationship between Levinas and Heidegger, not the least of which is the aforementioned essay on ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ by Derrida. In this paper, I will only peripherally focus on Levinas's inversion of ethics to being and later on Levinas's distinctive view of time as is contrasted to Heidegger's view of temporality. See Critchley's (Citation1999) chapter –‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity’ in Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity for a dense discussion on this topic.
10. See Critchley's robust critique of Levinas's ‘lamentable understanding of Freud’ (Critchley, Citation1999, pp. 186–195).
11. See Lucy Huskinson's critical reading of Jung's view of subjectivity as it is compared and contrasted to that of Levinas (Huskinson, Citation2004, pp. 57–58).
12. See Lear Citation2000 for a thoughtful deconstruction of the teleological view in Aristotle and psychoanalysis. Also see, Wallwork (Citation1991) and Askay and Farquhar (Citation2006) on Kant's influences on Freud's epistemology to include a teleological perspective. See Brooks (2011), Bishop (Citation2000) and Huskinson (Citation2004) for further and varied in depth discussions on Jung's misappropriations of Kant's ideas as well as neo-Kantian influences on his epistemological basis for the psyche.
13. For book length analyses of Heidegger's ethical stance see Lawrence Vogel The Fragile “We’ Ethical Implications of Heidegger's “Being and Time” (2003); and Joanna Hodge's Heidegger and Ethics (Citation1995).
14. For richly nuanced discussions on their readings of Levinas, autonomy and heteronomy, see Simon Critchley (Citation2007), Catherine Chalier (Citation2002) and Jacques Derrida (Citation2000, pp. 135–155).
15. See McGrath's rigorous discussion on Schelling's distinction between ground and existence that so interested Heidegger (McGrath, 2012).
16. See Emmanuel Ghent's seminal paper on his analyst surrender (Ghent, Citation1999).
17. See Smythe and Baydala (Citation2012) for their reading of the early stirrings of Jung's method of amplification.
18. Mills' assessment is similar. He elaborates: ‘Here archetypes take on a hypostatized quality, to the point that they may be viewed as supernatural structures inherent in the cosmos rather than a psychic faculty that allows for experience to materialize, such as Kant's categories, Fichte's principles (Grundsät) as transcendental acts of mind, or Hegel's dialectic (Aufhebung)’ (Mills, 2013). For an alternate view arguing that the assertion that Jung was an essentialist is a mischaracterization, see Miller (Citation2011, pp. 36–39). On another note, Schelling anticipated Jung's collective unconscious or what he referred to as the ‘universal human consciousness’ and the allegorical interpretation of mythology (see McGrath, Citation2012, pp. 163–165).
19. I refer the interested reader to more in-depth discussion on the convergences and disparities between the thinking of Lacan and Levinas to include Barnard (Citation2002), Critchley (Citation1999) and Neill (Citation2011).
20. It is well beyond the scope of this paper to include a review of compelling feminist critique of Levinas's problematic use of the feminine. I direct the interested reader to Chatner (Citation2001).
21. I am grateful to Ladson Hinton for his clarifying comments about the ideas in this passage.
22. See Frie (Citation2011) for a contemporary perspective on psychological agency.
23. Franco Scabbiolo is a Meltzer trained psychotherapist residing in Oxford UK. His forthcoming text presently only in Italian is titled: Una bussolo estetica-psicoanalitica interna (Citation2012).