Philosophical implications in psychological concepts regarding powerlessness and enhancement

ABSTRACT

Therapeutic practice is based on theories displaying different profiles, which imply philosophical traits. My main concern is to discover these traits, in my eyes a neglected issue. The question of what sort of psychology helps for enhancement also depends on the inherent philosophical approach, including an idea about human nature. I try to identify philosophical features in two main psychological concepts: in the empirically founded psychoanalytic one dealing with psychic mechanisms, which could be observed in patients; and the so-called analytical one based on a philosophy of nature, I call an ontological perspective. For characterising these two features, it seems appropriate to me to go back to the founder figures Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. It is open for discussion and interests which theory both representatives and their followers developed will be used for practice or research.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological concepts
• philosophical implications
• human nature
• philosophy of empiricism
• philosophy of nature

Introduction

Firstly, I want to disclose the background of my reflections and studies: All therapeutic practices aim at reducing powerlessness and foster the enhancement of psychic and mental resources. In any case, they employ different psychological concepts, which imply, more or less apparent, various philosophical ideas, for instance, presuppositions about human nature.¹ I am reminded of Gordon W. Allport’s statement quoting William Stern: the type of psychology one chooses to follow reflects inevitably one’s philosophical presuppositions about human nature’.² In a similar way Antoine Vergote, a representative of the psychology of religion, states: ‘Psychology of religion necessarily presupposes a philosophical anthropology’.³

Psychology considers itself up until the present day as an empirical science, which explores ‘how things are’ and does not, like for instance theology, normatively state ‘how things ought to be’. In the result of this self-understanding, and when psychology started to become a well-accepted academic discipline, it had to separate itself from theology and from philosophy, too, regarding them to be mere speculation. Nevertheless, more or less apparent philosophical presuppositions about human nature can be discovered in psychological concepts. Also, empirical research rests on definitions not having been derived from empirical material alone.

Creators as well as recipients of psychological theories and research are not ‘naked’, because their perception and thinking are always clad with several layers of clothing representing social and cultural backgrounds, personal and ethnic history, bodily constitution and temperament and not least individual or political interests. Theory formation cannot be derived directly from biographical or historical data but is affected by an individual’s interests and worldviews also influencing the preference of one theory over another.

According to my observation, such as of the reaction of my students, psychological concepts sometimes are taken as empirically proven facts instead of theories, which try to create a path through the wide range of phenomena, for no theory is able to grasp the whole of reality. Psychology deals with human experiences, but these are events that had become conscious through interpretation otherwise it would not be possible to communicate about them. Psychological concepts do not dwell in the realm of facts but have to do with plausibility. According to the philosopher Willi Oelmüller plausible is ‘what can be justified before oneself and others with a sufficient number of examples […] and not what compels acknowledgement by authority, by habit and custom, or by empirical proof ’.⁴ Be that as it may, also plausible theories can provide valuable insights into the complexity of the human psyche.

For the following reading of texts on psychology I will employ the theory of aesthetic reception as represented by Wolfgang Iser. For him, the reality of a text is a response to reality already shaped by personal ideas and insights an author had previously gained⁵. My emphasis is on the theories developed by Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung while trying to depict the philosophical traits in their theoretical guiding principles. I take these both as basic paradigms for two main and different ideas about human nature having an ongoing significant impact on various following concepts of the psyche. Of them, I will single out Donald W. Winnicott and Carl R. Rogers for dealing with them to a lesser extent. The philosophical implications are quite diverse, and discovering them may help to more precisely conceive the self-understanding of a theory and how this may contribute to overcome powerlessness.

Sigmund freud

Freud’s (1856–1939) oeuvre was a work in progress, but basically he understands himself as an empiricist, in the beginning in close relationship to the English sensualists and their philosophy of empiricism. He draws on several components from John Locke and David Hume, of whom he is especially fond. For them humans are not endowed with an innate reason, idea or other kind of potential as all knowledge is founded in experience: What is going on in the mind, on the one hand, is performed by sensory impressions stemming from the body, on the other hand, by perceiving the operation mind itself carries out, called reflections and resulting in ideas. The empiricists coined the term representation applied on ideas that ‘represent to us Things under those appearances, which they are fitted to produce in us’.⁶ Later representation becomes a key issue for Freud and his theory of bodily stimuli and instincts, which become known to the mind only by their aims, showing up in physical representations, such as fantasies and images of desire and satisfaction.⁷

In accordance with Locke Freud also refuses moral principles to be an innate capacity of the mind as good or bad ‘is nothing but barely pleasure or pain’. Therefore all humans strive for ‘happiness and that alone’,⁸ says Locke. Hume follows that line but is more intensively occupied with sentiments, feelings and passions while assuming an original instinct, which draws an individual toward pleasure and away from pain. ‘All sentiment is right’ he states, ‘because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself’.⁹ Freud’s concept of the psyche largely corresponds to that kind of empirical approach. For him, the ”dominance of the pleasure principle’ makes up the primary processes: humans are determined by the tension between pleasure and pain searching for pleasure and avoiding pain and uneasiness.¹⁰ Freud also refers to Thomas Hobbes, who called man an ‘asset wolf to man’, a dictum Freud cites and comments upon.¹¹

However, Freud is aware of not only relying on empirical material. In 1915, he writes in Instincts and their Vicissitudes about ‘abstracts ideas’ being of importance for theory formation: ‘We have often heard it maintained that the sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact, no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. […] Even at the stage of description, it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material at hand, ideas derived from somewhere and other, but certainly not from new observations alone’.¹² Before that, already in 1896 Freud speaks of a ‘double order: factual arguments and arguments derived from speculation’.¹³

I focus on Freud’s later studies, those written after 1920, when Freud, after the catastrophe of the First World War, was faced with growing antisemitism as well as his palate cancer. Then, he gave ‘free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long, to speculation’.¹⁴ At the same time, he tries to avoid overgrowth of speculation¹⁵ by ongoing patients’ observation.¹⁶ What Freud calls speculation could be understood as a heuristic principle, ‘an attempt to follow an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it would lead’.¹⁷

Looking back on his life in 1937 he states that ‘without metapsychological speculation and theorizing – I had almost said phantasying – we shall not get another step forward’.¹⁸ In search for ideas Freud draws from philosophers like Plato and Kant, from literature and poetry, which display pleasure and pain of humans and their mental conflicts. He wanted to discover the ‘right abstract ideas’¹⁹ which can make the reality of human existence perceivable, including the ‘dark traces’ in the psyche, and thus wanted to solve the ‘riddle of life’.²⁰

After 1920 Freud developed two main theories: the two classes of instinct, namely Eros and Thanatos, and the division of the human psyche into id, ego and super ego. He himself was sure after that not having contributed anything of importance to psychoanalysis. Referring to Plato Freud calls Eros the ‘life instinct’, a part of which are sexual components directed towards love-objects.²¹ As the ‘the preserver of all things’²² Eros strives ‘for ever closer union,’ and Thanatos, the ‘instinct of destruction’,²³ results in aggression against others and occasionally against oneself. For Freud, these antagonistic tendencies, he allocates to what he calls secondary processes, produce ambivalent feelings of love and hate, which he exemplifies by the Oedipus-complex.²⁴

Ego and super-ego, according to Freud’s other theory, are not entities in an ontological sense separated from the id, but connected with the vital instincts from which they draw their power. Since humans are unable to live in isolation, a statement he got from the English empiricists, Freud introduces the ‘reality principle’ which imposes rules and prohibitions on an individual. These limit the power of instincts, cause distress and pain and may lead to the repression of drives resulting in mental illness. Freud discerns repression from renunciation of drives, the latter being a moderate, non-excessive way of dealing with one’s inner forces. Freud assigns this task to the super-ego as an inner impetus that emerges when limiting powers become unconsciously internalised by identification with impressing authorities.²⁵

For Freud, the renunciation of the drives is the precondition for individuals to perform higher cultural and intellectual accomplishments: ‘An advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception in favor of what are known as the higher intellectual processes – that is, memories, reflections and inferences’.²⁶ The ‘primacy of intellect’ is Freud’s ‘psychological ideal’, for we have ‘no other means of controlling our instinctual nature but our intelligence’.²⁷ Powerlessness could be overcome, if instinctual energy is transformed into the pursuit of higher cultural aims.²⁸

The renunciation of drives gains increasing importance for Freud. His vision is a political and social culture in which separate individuals become united ‘into a community bound together by libidinal ties’.²⁹ At the same time, he confesses a lack of explanation: ‘Thus we are faced by the phenomenon that in the course of the development of humanity sensuality is gradually overpowered by intellectuality and that men feel proud and exalted by every such advance. But we are unable to say why this should be so’.³⁰

However, Freud is moved by the question: why could culture and humanness not become sustainably established over the course of human history? This question lets him find an ally in Immanuel Kant. For enhancement of humankind, Kant attributes nature using a kind of trick by letting individuals and peoples fight against each other until the distress becomes unbearable and compels them to discipline themselves – for Kant an interesting empirical argument. According to Kant, this ‘secret mechanism’ in nature then will effectuate the evolvement of reason, but that development will go far beyond an individual’s lifespan and will become realized ‘only very late, after many fruitless attempts’, and after ‘an immense series of generations’.³¹ Freud picks up Kant’s idea that nature ‘operates in a compulsive fashion’ beyond ‘any conscious motives’.³² But a main difference remains: for Kant, intellect is inherent in human beings forced by nature to evolve, whereas Freud assumes that during the course of phylogenetic processes an intellect will develop.³³ Also for Freud, this will only happen ‘after a countless succession of rebuffs’ and ‘in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one’.³⁴

According to Freud, human nature is caught between two poles; the one is made up of the drives, ‘the core of our being’³⁵; the other reveals an intellect, which cares for enhancement of morality and culture provided that the individual, regardless of humankind’s fate, is able to master his or her urges and passions to the best of their ability.

Donald W. Winnicott

The English child psychiatrist Winnicott (1896–1971), a representative of the ‘Object Relation Theory,’ follows Freud’s concept but with significant variations in anthropological presuppositions. Winnicott does not assume an ‘obscure id’ as ‘the core of our being’³⁶ but a ‘psyche-soma scheme’, stating: ‘There is no id before ego’.³⁷ He did not shy away from the idea that all human beings are endowed with reason, which he considers ‘a special case of the functioning of the psyche-soma’, slowly developing according to the enfolding functions of the physical brain.³⁸ Winnicott traces this development back to a ‘life-force potential’ inherent in all humans³⁹ which makes a ‘continuity of the going-on-being’ possible.⁴⁰ This continuity he calls the ‘true self’ which is experienced as ‘a sense of self and being’⁴¹: ‘On the basis of this continuity of being, the inherited potentials gradually develop into an individual infant’,⁴² if all goes well.⁴³

In order for everything to develop well, the self-evolving of natural potentials must not be inhibited but fostered by an enhancing environment, supplied by a ‘good enough mother’ or an attachment figure who actively adapts to the infant’s needs.⁴⁴ In the case of a reliable environment, the infant’s sense of self and being can be maintained. This does not only apply to children but also to adults during their lifespan.

For Winnicott, the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up’.⁴⁵ Therefore, ‘any impingement, or failure of adaptation, causes a reaction in the infant, and the reaction breaks up the going-on-being’. He speaks of ‘a serious interference with the natural tendency that exists in the infant to become an integrated unit, able to continue to have a self with a past, present, and future’.⁴⁶ On the one hand, children need to experience that their aggression is not able to destroy a holding environment. On the other hand, this environment needs to get disturbed now and then but not too heavy by the outer reality, in early life by the attachment figures, in order to enable children to slowly distinguish a ‘Me’ from a ‘not-Me’ – for Winnicott a precondition for engaging in satisfying object-relations.⁴⁷

Freud considers the relation between inner and outer reality a battlefield, with fighters robbing each other of power, while an enhancing intellect lies in a distant future of mankind (not for himself, not for Plato or Kant or other ‘great men’). Whereas Winnicott’s concept of an inherent ‘life-force potential’ includes all human capacities – physical, psychical, intellectual – which tend to evolve. This also excludes the Freudian death-instinct – ‘I have been never in love with the death instinct’, he says.⁴⁸ The outer reality, the environment, is considered a kind of partner, and the interaction between nature’s intention and good-enough human relations work for overcoming powerlessness.

Winnicott assumes a ‘potential space’ situated between the inner psyche and the external reality, a space for playing with all what a child experiences – from inward fantasies and outward objects. A person must learn to distinguish between these two realities. But there is ‘a relic of the intermediate substance in cultural life’, including philosophy, arts and religion.⁴⁹ This productive capacity and activity due to a healthy self for Winnicott constitutes the most powerful factor for enhancement.

Carl Gustav Jung

Winnicott’s theory evokes the Aristotelian idea of the human psyche as forma corporis and of development as a purposive entelechial process, if all goes well. The self-evolvement of inner potentials given by nature, which cares for enhancement is also the basis of Jung’s so-called Analytical Psychology. But Jung (1875–1961) developed his own peculiar concept after Freud had separated from him in 1913 and, unlike Freud, introduced a collective unconscious that he characterises with terms like ‘potential,’ ‘essence’, ‘entelechy’ or ‘energy’ which display traits of ancient ontology.⁵⁰ Several times Jung mentions Aristotle and Plato, but contrary to Freud and Winnicott he sees reason or intellect as an obstacle for self-realisation resulting in rendering individuals powerless.

Jung identifies his unconscious with a self-regulating energy calling it ‘a purely natural process without design’, but having ‘that potential directedness, which is characteristic of all energy processes’.⁵¹ He distinguishes a personal unconscious, that ‘contains lost memories’, from a collective and ‘transpersonal’ one⁵² he considers to be ‘an independent, productive activity’⁵³ consisting of ‘natural processes that lie outside the sphere of the human personality’.⁵⁴ Jung’s unconscious contains ‘nothing but the silent, undisturbed sway of nature’⁵⁵ and provides ‘a superior analysis or insight or knowledge’ which consciousness is not able to produce.⁵⁶ This deeper and ‘inborn’ layer ‘constitutes a common psychic substrate of a supra-personal nature being present in all humans, thus ‘identical in all men’.⁵⁷

Jung employs the term entelechy since for him the unconscious is an ‘invincible power’, a ‘driving force’ and ‘in essence [only] an urge towards self-realization’.⁵⁸ He calls his own life ‘a story of self-realization of the unconscious’ as every personality ‘desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole’.⁵⁹ He compares life with ‘a plant that lives on its rhizome’: ‘What we see is the blossom [the actualised potential] which passes; the rhizome remains’.⁶⁰ In a letter dated from 1957 Jung postulates that ‘beyond the psychic structure, there is something – a substrate, an ousia’.⁶¹ Behind these terms the act-potency-theory can be discovered.

For Jung, this ”unconscious substrate” is centered in the ‘self’ that includes the ego consciousness, a ‘late-born descendant of the unconscious psyche’.⁶² Together they form a ‘totality’.⁶³ Thus, the self is supra-ordinate to the ego, which ‘stands to the self as the moved to the mover’⁶⁴ and is supposed to revolve around the self like the earth revolves around the sun.⁶⁵ Sometimes Jung calls the self the ‘God within us’ because the self transcends human ‘powers of comprehension’ and works as an extra nos.⁶⁶ For him, the whole of the psyche is an enhancing ‘self-regulating system’,⁶⁷ and everything will go well as long as the ego does not deviate from its archetypically structured unconscious foundation⁶⁸ by adopting ‘a false or pretentious attitude’ against the self. In such a case, the self will start an ‘inimical or ruthless bearing towards the conscious’ which results in powerlessness and psychic malaises.⁶⁹

According to Jung, the world exists only because opposing forces [are] held in equilibrium’.⁷⁰ For the purpose of balance, the unconscious sends messages to the ego in the form of symbols, Jung calls archetypical images. For him, the archetype in itself ‘is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation, which is given a priori’,⁷¹ respectively, a causa efficiens ‘charged with a specific energy’.⁷² The archetypes comprise the ‘residues of ancestral life’,⁷³ and Jung compares them with the ‘είδoς concept of Plato’ which means for him the ‘primordial images stored up in a supra-celestial place as eternal, transcendent forms’.⁷⁴ The archetype receives its content when manifesting itself concretely in the individual’s conscience by images that stem from the material of experiencefor instance, from religions,⁷⁵ showing up in dreams or visions. For the sake of physical balance, the conscious mind needs to follow the archetypes’ messages.⁷⁶

Therefore, Jung demands that we should never identify ourselves with reason’, Jung demands.⁷⁷ And he criticizes the ‘European ego-consciousness’ for trying ‘to swallow up the unconscious’ that cannot be swallowed or suppressed.⁷⁸ For Jung, the collective unconscious, which he often calls irrational, with all its implications is the central powerful agent in the mental structure, which consists of ‘opposites – day and night, bright and dark, positive and negative’,⁷⁹ also containing the ‘specific virtues and vices of humanity’.⁸⁰ Therefore, Jung sees morality as an ‘instinctive regulator of action’.⁸¹

Everything imposed on an individual from outside, such as stipulated moral laws, for Jung only are disturbing factors, which upset the unconscious. Reason should not become ‘the arbiter of right and wrong, of good and evil’.⁸² In such a case, Jung states, the unconscious fatefully ‘seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation) […] and enthusiasm in good and evil alike’.⁸³ Consequently, guilt means for the individual that the conscious splits off its primordial ground so that ‘the paradise of the collective psyche comes to an end’.⁸⁴

Jung’s concept represents an ontological understanding of the difference between good and evil: good is what could develop, independent from cognitive mental activities, according to the balance of the conflicting inner agents. Jung always wanted to become acknowledged as an empiricist, but at the same time admits to being a kind of philosopher: ‘I can hardly draw a veil over the fact that we psychotherapists ought really to be philosophers or philosophic doctors – or rather that we already are so’.⁸⁵

However, Jung’s perception of humankind does not be more hopeful than Freud’s, albeit he employs different arguments. Jung attributes mankind (excluding himself) being ‘psychologically still in a state of childhood’, because humans have not yet put the collected unconscious ‘in the place of conscience’.⁸⁶

Carl R. Rogers

Lastly, a glimpse at Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) who regards Jung as a pioneer for Humanistic Psychology. Rogers follows Jung’s ontological footsteps but represents a teleological vitalism drawing from modern sources like neo-vitalist Hans Driesch or holist Jan Christiaan Smuts, which he explicitly mentions.

For Rogers, the basis of Humanistic Psychology is a ‘formative directional tendency in the universe’⁸⁷ which also human beings participate in. He speaks of an ‘underlying flow toward constructive fulfillment’, of the inherent possibilities of an organism ‘toward wholeness, integration, a unified life’.⁸⁸ Rogers also uses the terms ‘actualizing tendency’ and ‘self-realization’,⁸⁹ and compared to these powers human consciousness ‘is but a fragment of a cosmic consciousness’.⁹⁰ As nobody can control or change the way a sunset occurs,⁹¹ nobody should try to control humans by intervening from the outside, but trust in the ‘potent constructive tendency’ towards balance.⁹²

Rogers perceives nature as aiming at a ‘fully functioning person’ who is centered in the ‘real self’ and enabled to ‘fully experiencing whatever is organismically present’, if the environment does not intervene destructively.⁹³ For him, a central force of energy’ is at work in the human organism, a ‘tendency toward fulfillment, toward actualization, fostering not only the maintenance but also the enhancement of the organism’.⁹⁴ Not free from an evangelizing style, Rogers propagates a new mankind in a new world in which all this will become true.⁹⁵

Concluding remark

Psychological concepts vary in many respects, departing either from bodily urges and a helpless mind or from the mind’s innate potentials, which develop out of themselves in the course of life. They vary in seeing the environment either foster and enhance or disturb and weaken the development of the psyche. Awareness for philosophical implications may support a better understanding of psychological concepts and avoid superficial conclusions such as calling the empirical thinker Freud a pessimist and the ontological thinker Jung an optimist. Not last, being aware of philosophical implications may help for deciding on which concept of the psyche to prefer not only for therapeutic purposes but also for scientific research.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanne Heine

Dr SusanneHeine is a full professor em. for Practical Theology and The Psychology of Religion at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna, prior to that at the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich. She is also engaged in Christian-Muslim-Dialogue and published a book on that together with Muslim authors: Christen und Muslime im Gespräch. Gütersloh: Verlagshaus 2^nd ed. 2016. In 2007, she was awarded the Wilhelm Hartel-Prize presented by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Notes

1. These implications I dealt with in my book: Heine, Grundlagen, 2005.

2. Allport, Person in Psychology, 271.

3. Vergote, Neither Masterly nor Ancillary, 164.

4. Oelmüller, Unbefriedigte Aufklärung (Introduction), VIII–IX; translation of the quotation into English by S.H.

5. Iser, Appellstruktur der Texte, 232.

6. Locke, Reality of Knowledge, Book IV, Chap. 4, § 4,535

7. Freud, Instincts and Vicissitudes, 122–123. Representation plays a significant role already in The Interpretation of Dreams.

8. Locke, Of Power, Book II, Chap. XXI, § 63 and § 42, 245, 231.

9. Hume, Standard of Taste, Essays I, No. XXIII, 229.

10. Freud, Beyond Pleasure Principle, 57; see also Freud, Civilization and Discontents, 23–24.

11. Hobbes, De cive, 1 (dedication); Freud, Civilization and Discontents, 58.

12. See note 7 above Freud, 117.

13. Freud, Heredity and Aetiology, 143.

14. Freud, Autobiographical Study, 57.

15. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 151.

16. See note 14 above, 59.

17. Freud, Beyond Pleasure Principle, 24.

18. Freud, Analysis Terminable, 225.

19. See note 15 above, 81; cf. note 14 above, Postscript, where Freud adds (p. 72): “My interest, after making a lifelog détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”

20. See note 17 above, 61 (footnote 2, p. 60)

21. Ibid., 40, 49–50.

22. Ibid., 52.

23. Freud, Psycho-Analysis, 265.

24. See note 17 above, 53–54. For Freud, the two kinds of instincts usually “are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions”: Freud, Civilization and Discontents, 119.

25. Freud calls the ego a “seat of anxiety” (Angststätte), because of often failing it’s task to care for mental balance: Freud, Ego and Id, 57. Heinz Kohut or Erik Erikson for instance attribute much more power to the ego.

26. Freud, Moses, 117–118.

27. Freud, Future of Illusion, 48.

28. Freud, “Civilized” Sexual Morality, 193. Freud points to that also in Civilization and Discontents, 94, 97.

29. Ibid., 139.

30. See note 26 above, 118.

31. Kant, Idea for Universal History, 11, 15, 16, 19, 21. For Kant only in the end mankind will realise that persons never are a means to an end, not an instrument of one’s own interest, but for themselves an end: Kant, Conjectures on the Beginning, 225–226.

32. Freud, Totem and Taboo (Preface), XIII.

33. Freud follows the theory that ontogenesis repeats phylogenetic developments and refers to Charles Darwin’s theory of the primal horde. For him, the development goes from a tyrannical primal father and his subordinated clan to a cultural society: ibid., 122–125; cf. Freud, Group Psychology, 123: “At the very beginning of the history of mankind was the ‘superman’ whom Nietzsche only expected from the future.”

34. See note 27 above, 53–54; his italics.

35. Freud, Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 197.

36. Ibid.

37. Winnicott, Maturational Processes, 65. Winnicott acknowledges Freud’s theory of instances and the Oedipus complex, but for him elements of these can be observed at a very early stage of an infant and are not as important to him as to Freud: Winnicott, Collected Works, 326, 127–134.

38. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 243–254; cf. Winnicott, Human Nature, 12–14.

39. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 216.

40. Ibid., 245.

41. Winnicott, Home is, 25.

42. Winnicott, Parent-Infant Relationship, 595. Here, Winnicott gives the following definition (p. 591): ‘The central self could be said to be the inherited potential which is experiencing a continuity of being’.

43. Ibid., 592.

44. Winnicott, Human Nature, 155.

45. See note 38 above, 99, 221.

46. See note 37 above, 86.

47. See note 38 above, 215.

48. Winnicott, Psycho-Analytic Explorations, 242.

49. See note 44 above, 158.

50. Since antiquity, the term metaphysics was in use, but the term ontology coined much later in the 17th century. But both terms refer to the principles of being according to the philosophy of nature. Therefore, it is possible to see them as synonymous expressions (cf. Klein, Metaphysik, 8). I prefer the term ontology in order to avoid a still common misunderstanding of metaphysics indicating an afterlife in a theological sense.

51. Jung, Relations, 232.

52. Ibid., 66.

53. Ibid., 185.

54. Ibid., 234.

55. Jung, Archetypes, 24.

56. Jung, Psychology and Religion, 41.

57. See note 55 above, 3.

58. See note 51 above, 184; cf. note 55 above, 170.

59. Jaffé, Memories, 3.

60. Ibid., 4.

61. Jung, Letter Bernhard Lang, 372.

62. Jung, Basic Postulates, 350.

63. See note 51 above, 177.

64. Jung, Transformation Symbolism, 259.

65. See note 51 above, 240.

66. Ibid., 238.

67. Jung, Psychology of Unconscious, 61.

68. Jung, Conscious, Unconscious, 282.

69. See note 51 above, 215, 234.

70. See note 55 above, 94.

71. Ibid., 79.

72. See note 59 above, 352.

73. See note 67 above, 77.

74. See note 55 above, 33.

75. Ibid., 79.

76. Jung, Answer to Job, 460.

77. See note 67 above, 72.

78. See note 68 above, 288.

79. Ibid., 319.

80. See note 51 above, 149.

81. See note 67 above, 27; here he states against Freud, that “morality was not brought down on tables of stone from Sinai and imposed on the people.”

82. See note 55 above, 94.

83. See note 67 above, 70–71.

84. See note 51 above, 150.

85. Jung, Psychotherapy and Philosophy of Life, 79.

86. See note 51 above, 239; here Jung quotes from the bible: “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt 22,14).

87. Rogers, Way of Being, 133, 124–126.

88. Ibid., 128

89. Ibid., 117–120.

90. Ibid., 88.

91. Ibid., 22.

92. Ibid., 119.

93. Ibid., 128.

94. Ibid., 123. That idea Rogers stresses repeatedly in all his publications, e.g.: “The organism has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism”: Rogers, Client-centered therapy, 487.

95. See note 83 above, 356.