What I think happens all too often with Jungian writing (even Hillman's poetically emotive valuations of soul) is that praise of the totemic gods, that ecstasy of participation in belief, is mistaken for having a real "feeling perspective" on these totems or on the contents and forces of the psyche. The problem with this sort of praise is not that it isn't Eros. It is. But it is the Eros of participation mystique. It is unconscious. It has nothing to do with the problem of relationship between a self (the ego) and an Other (the Self). The ego is dissolved into the mystique and doesn't differentiate itself . . . and so it doesn't achieve a kind of perspective on the Other that is characterized by tension, difference. Without a genuine sense of difference, there is no ethical burden on the ego . . . and it is such an ethical burden (of the valuation and differentiation of Otherness) that the "feeling" or valuating intelligence is defined by. This, Jung understood. And even though Jung was not (it seems) a feeling type, he had more connection to his feeling intelligence than most Jungians do. It was the product of individuation work . . . and it meant incorporating a lot of shadow (in the form of "affect"), which could rub other people the wrong way at times. And this is precisely what Jungians have not done well in general. They have not been able to incorporate much affect-shadow and allow differentiated feeling to permeate their intellectual constructions and fantasies.
This is, I think, why the Jungian notion of soul has very little weight to it and why biology can only be seen derisively as "biologism". Feeling can only be seen as the ecstasy of participation in the numen of or belief in the totem. The darker or earthier aspects of feeling are not allowed into Jungian thinking. We do not know how to listen to such dark feeling or how to derive orientation from it. And why? Because such feeling always grounds one in what is perceived as "base" instinct by spiritualistically inclined people. Anger, frustration, grief, reflex, eruption, depression, etc. We do not have a Jungian method that allows us to effectively utilize these things. Instead, we have a spiritualistic attitude that in transcendent enlightenment these nuisance "affects" disappear. We do not think that human beings and many other species have survived for millions of years on the "wisdom" of such affects (we instead assume that we have persisted "heroically" by staving off these affects, conquering them, mastering them). They bring energy and direction into our action . . . and for the Jungian mindset, they represent mana, which we both fear and covet. This feeling-mana is foreign to us. In making it our enemy, we have effectively lost our soul . . . or lost the earthiness and weight of the soul. And we are nowhere near body or instinct so long as we do not utilize soul as a transitional object that weighs down our ego-spirit, dissolves it, decomposes it in the earth. Soul that does not pull the ego-spirit closer to the body is dead, illusory.
Hillman reads the narratives of the soul like they are prehistorical cave paintings and imagines himself into ancient ecstasies. But the soul doesn't become real or heavy in this approach, and it never pulls the ego-spirit down into dissolution. Such dissolution is remarked upon (by Hillman and others) because it is portrayed in the cave paintings that are the object of an academic fascination. But it is not wrestled with as if it were an ethical dilemma. Yet for Jung, the dissolution was an ethical dilemma, specifically because it tended to throw up inflation fantasies, which the ego had to reckon with and not entirely succumb to. I don't think Jung completely mastered this wrestling (because he doesn't seem to fully or consistently realize that in any wrestling of angels, we must be defeated and accept survival over victory), but he made more note of it than other Jungians have. In Hillman's soul fantasies, there is no ethical dilemma. It is mostly play. You can't lose your life or even have your hip thrown out (the wound to the sexual/creative instinct and drive) when you are merely fantasizing about cave paintings.
Stamper doesn't seem to understand Jung's emphasis on the ethical dilemma. She writes:
Jung distinguishes between intellectual understanding, aesthetic experience, and the subjective meaning. He also distinguishes between the realization of subjective meaning of something and the moral demands made by it. It is my belief that Christou’s “psychological experience” is equivalent to Jung’s realization of subjective meaning, but does not include Jung’s moral and ethical requirements. Psychological experience comes first, and one may or may not convert it into Jung’s famous ethical/moral obligations.
But it is absolutely "Jungian" to assume that the ethical/moral obligation of soul material and psychic experience can be hacked off and discarded. Valuation is not equivalent to belief or faith. Such faith is actually a failure to valuate the Other or object, because belief absolves the believer of having to deal with the dangerous Otherness of the Other. Real valuation seeks to understand the Other as it is, on its own terms, from its own perspective. There is no doing this without ethical and feeling-based tension (or affect). There is no confrontation with Otherness without the confrontation with and transformation of affect from within. Otherness presents itself to us through affect, which is a form of Eros, a conduit for relationship between one thing or person and another. Affect is typically muddy and overwhelming, but it contains more truth about the Other than any other form of perception. That truth is mixed up with our unconscious reaction to it (and to the Other), and what we mostly perceive (especially if we have not very well differentiated our feeling intelligence) is our reaction. The Other makes me feel violated, stung, penetrated as it presents itself to me . . . and so I assume that the Other is a violator and aggressor. But this is not necessarily the case. When we feel this, in most cases, we have hung our own shadow on the Other. It is our own prejudice and fear of difference and Otherness (within) that we paint the Other with.
But the Jungian (as non-feeling type) attitude toward such shadowy affects typically holds that they are "true intuitions" of the Other. That is, Jungians tend to conflate intuition with somewhat dysfunctional feeling. And when they call it intuition, they have carte blanch to absolve themselves of ethical self-scrutiny and differentiation. Intuition (for a Jungian) after all is "divine perception". It is "gnosis". It cannot be wrong. Call any prejudice "intuition", and it washes our hands from confronting it as an ethical burden. We don't have to self-reflect. This is how the feeling-wounded person behaves . . . and such people are terrified of the strong emotions of conflict. Participation ecstasy is fine, but conflict ecstasy is the devil. This dissociation or disease (in my experience) holds just as true for those Jungians who call themselves "feeling types" as it does for the intuitive and thinking types (one of many examples of why the Jungian typology system is dysfunctional as psychology and only indicates an affiliation to the Jungian tribe).
The kind of "feeling type" that Jung describes with his idea of the ethical burden of psychic experience is nothing but a phantom or alien in the Jungian tribe. And it should therefore be of no surprise to us that such a splendid harbinger of the Jungian shadow like Richard Noll is a regular white whale of affect and ethical aggression. It is what we bring upon ourselves by taking too little responsibility for our own ethical obligations, our own feeling intelligence. Noll gave us a shadow mirror.
To return, then, to a "science of soul" . . . it would seem impossible to construct such a thing so long as our concept of soul is both damaged and essentially religious. Therefore, the first step I would propose is the revisioning of the soul as both a vessel and a transitional object. That would mean the relinquishment of the soul as totem or god to be worshiped. This could put us one step closer to seeing the soul for what it is (i.e., seeing the soul as something that
is, even as it is also imaginal and transitional). To know the soul as transitional and to know it as a vessel or pact between multiple parties is to know it a little better . . . and to know it better is to valuate it more. This is something we Jungians have fallen away from: the notion that to know a thing for what it is is to valuate it. To valuate and not to conquer, possess, or own it. The feeling-based drive behind knowing or gnosis is valuation. To want to know what something is is to want it to be
as it is rather than as we want it to be or as it relates to us. The desire to afford Other things presence begins with an ethical obligation to them. And that means a more ethical scrutiny of ourselves. That scrutiny is done out of respect to the Other. We withdraw, or better comprehend, our projections. We cease to conquer and "assimilate" Otherness. We let it be. This attitude is inherent in the scientific method . . . but it is also reflected in the Taoist wu wei. Wu wei (to modernize the language a bit) would mean to stop trying to will things and Others into the shape we want to construct them. They are not actors in the divine drama of which we are the protagonist. The deflation of narcissism. And with this deflation, everything that we relate to is much more tangible. They are allowed to affect us as what they are. And in turn, we learn to accept the space they occupy and to become flexible in relationship to it.
To "do without doing" then is to abide by the river of instinct which not only supplies its own current (libido), but also winds its way through the world, directed by the landscape, rather than cutting a straight path like a juggernaut rolling over everything else.
Once we have begun to understand the soul as a fantasy vessel and not something literalized (spiritualism tends to literalize soul as well as conflate it with spirit), we are on our way to keeping tabs on the egoic factor, the tendency to personalize and project ego into a transference object. But if we don't understand where volition and ego enter into a fantasy, then we cannot really differentiate ego from Self in that fantasy. We have to know what ego is and how it behaves in order to "factor it out" as a margin or error. If we don't understand ego, then we have no chance to understand soul or Self, as self and Other cannot be adequately differentiated. If we understand soul as a functional fantasy, we know that we must be projecting ego into it. But if we persist in the belief that soul is an entirely autonomous thing, free from our projections and constructions, real in itself and quasi-literal (spiritualized), we essential disown or forget ego into it. We lose consciousness by constructing soul this way, and when we meet that ego reflected back at us, we confuse it for something with divinity or mana, something archetypal. That confusion tends to open the door for inflation.
After we have accounted for our own influence on the construction of soul, we can begin to redefine the nature of this influence by implementing a kind of ethical approach or heroic devotion to what is truly Other.
Another stumbling block we lay for ourselves where a science of the soul is concerned regards our generic misunderstanding of science. Science for us has become a personified being that behaves rather like our collective shadow. It aggravates us. We look down on its narrow-mindedness. It is "neurotic", stunted, it worships the wrong god. It is unenlightened and non-transcendent. But science is no more one mindset than religion is or business or politics or activism. Also, science is essentially a method of observation and not a religious doctrine of belief. One of the core tenets of the scientific method is (to use the derogatory term many Jungians often apply) to seek a "detached perspective" from that which is being observed, to not be in participation with it, to know the object from the observer. This tenet is just as valid in Jungian psychology and was often noted by Jung as what he called the "personal equation" . . . what I have been calling the egoic factor. Yet I have often read Jungian writings in which "scientific detachment" is looked down upon. Scientific detachment doesn't have to mean not caring about what you are observing or not being invested in your research, creation, or "soul-making". It merely has to mean that you attempt to recognize your own egoic input (including your shadow, as much as is possible) and try to adjust your observation to account for your own egoic fingerprints. A better word for scientific observation than "detachment" would be "self-awareness". And the implication of this self-awareness is that it is an ethical burden. We "detach" so as not to violate or contaminate what we observe.
If Jungians mean to issue a declaration that their "psychology" requires no self-awareness, then it obviously can make no claim to being scientific. Calling self-awareness "detachment" (in its most negative connotation), is merely a propagandistic spin, a PR maneuver. If Jungianism means to disown science entirely, then it is a religious. But of course, Jungianism also disavows its religiosity. Here, we have a conflict of identity. And certainly, despite our religiosity, we don't really want to do away with all scientific rigor. It would be radically irresponsible to claim we don't have to test our ideas or revise them, that we merely have to believe. After all, Jungian analysts are expected (by their patients and the standards of their profession) to maintain an ethical attitude toward their method. Analytical method isn't belief; it's science. That is, it is based on formulating hypotheses, collecting data, testing that data, and revising hypotheses accordingly. If we renege on this agreement with the patients of analysis, we are deceiving them, manipulating them, defrauding them. Patients expect their analysts to be trained practitioners. But if we don't continue to take a scientific perspective toward our methodology, we fail ethically.
The fact that we can divorce our sense of ethical obligation from our devotion to testing and revising our methodological hypotheses is, again, a failure our our "feeling intelligence". This is why Jung's rule of thumb for dream analysis (and analysis in general) was to forget (or put aside) everything one thinks one knows before attempting an analysis. Analysis is best directed by the instinctual unconscious itself and not by theories. But this doesn't mean we should not bother with building and revising theories. It really means that the final authority is the data itself and not the thinker's or constructor's desire to make things fit into preconceived notions. Jung's seeming dismissal of methodological theory is actually an advocation of the scientific method. In science, the hypothesis is meant to explain the data and must therefore conform to the data as much as possible. The data is not collected only to serve a hypothesis or philosophy. Of course, scientists bungle this in all fields . . . not only psychology. The scientific method is an ideal and a star to steer by.
It is not easy to differentiate the egoic factor from our observation at any time, but it is especially difficult with psychology. But this difficulty doesn't excuse us from making every effort to accomplish this and to be perpetually dedicated to improving our ego recognition and accountability. Jung himself was very interested in collecting data . . . although of course, our data in depth psychology is a bit "soft" compared to many other sciences. Still, Jung's collection of data from various cultures around the world via the ravenous consumption of mythological and spiritual texts was in itself a Herculean effort and makes for a wonderful foundation to Jungian thinking. His comparison of this mythological and cultural data to dream and fantasy data from modernized Western analysands and patients marks one of the core Jungian hypotheses (i.e., what goes on psychically in every individual human regardless of culture or historical era demonstrates a high level of consistency). Around this observation, we have the hypothesis of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.
Jung's construction here is essentially (if not absolutely) scientific. His hypothesis might not be true, but it is a logical way of understanding the data and makes for a credible theory. I happen to think Jung's hypothesis is flawed in a few ways (and have written about this extensively elsewhere). But I had to analyze and reanalyze the available data Jung worked with as well as any subsequent data collected by Jungians, non-Jungians, and myself in relation to this hypothesis of Jung's extensively before I really felt that it started to break down. That is, I couldn't merely reason my way through it or think it out of existence. Jung's hypothesis is viable. Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, despite its possible flaws, the hypothesis of the collective unconscious is scientifically successful. Where we Jungians have failed with most of Jung's hypotheses is in the continuation of a scientific attitude toward them. We have not continued to analyze data effectively or revise hypotheses diligently and scientifically. Unlike most non-Jungians and many Jungians, I see Jung as a successful scientist. Even in most instances where we can now say with reasonable confidence that he was wrong, he constructed logical and data-based hypotheses. And, in fact, holding Jung to the standard of prophet and assuming he had to have a special handle on the Truth is unfair. Even if the vast majority of Jung's hypotheses were proved wrong, understanding why they were wrong would be of great benefit to us (as this would enable us to correct and revise Jung's mistakes). Jung did not construct his theories lightly (certainly not with the same negligence as many subsequent Jungians have constructed theirs). He was a powerful and generally an exceptionally balanced thinker. His capacity to look at phenomena from many different angles simultaneously marks him as quite a rarity even among scientific thinkers.
But for us to hold Jung to the standard of a prophet rather than a scientist is to abuse the memory and validity of the scientific work he did and to refuse to continue on in the same tradition. Being a Jungian, in my opinion, should not mean believing Jung to be a prophet who spoke the eternal and absolute truth. It should mean following the pursuit of knowledge of the psyche in the tradition that Jung himself established. This tradition was decidedly scientific . . . but it was also amazingly open to spiritual and psychological phenomena. Although a skeptic could see this openness as a flaw of Jung's approach, I would (even as a skeptic myself) say that this approach is only flawed to the degree that scientific observation was put aside in favor of the literalization and totemization of a belief-based theory. If we took some spiritualistic phenomenon and declared it truth without adequately testing it, this would violate the scientific ethic . . . but this abandonment of science was only very rarely done by Jung himself. And to give the man his due as the scientist he always claimed to be, his ability to put aside materialistic, modernist, and Western prejudices to better observe the psyche and valuate its phenomena marks him with a degree of scientific ethicality that well surpasses that of most naturalistic and materialistic scientists.
So, to reiterate (because it really needs to be done!), the value and credibility of Jung the scientist cannot be assessed by his "correctness", but by the manner in which he proceeded to observe and analyze and revise his thinking in accordance with data. It is on this issue that we have drastically failed to keep pace with and honor Jung. But if we had better valued Jung the scientist, we may very well have a viable "science of the soul" today. NOT the Truth! The Truth is not the real stuff of science. It is the pursuit and valuation of the pursuit of truth that science is concerned with. The possession of Truth is a religious, not a scientific matter.
We have done a credible job of continuing Jung's precedent of collecting cross-cultural data on myth, ritual, and belief. But we have increasingly ignored other related fields. Specifically biology (although our ignorance of biology is also rooted in Jung's precedent to some degree, see Shamdasani again). We have ravenously pursued some aspects of quantum physics in accord with Jung's interest in the field . . . but nothing substantial has come of this, and we have utterly failed to use our knowledge of psychology to assess the way quantum physics thinks about matter . . . which in my opinion would make an interesting and necessary study. Instead, when we have turned to quantum physics, we have done so in the hope that it will validate our flaky, spiritualistic appropriations of matter. That is, our attitude toward quantum physics is extremely unscientific . . . even as our interest in it is certain viable.
We have also largely ignored the thinking in social sciences (which have in turn ignored the thinking in both depth psychology and biology). Advocates of Hillman and Giegerich (as well as the "masters" themselves) have delved into postmodernist philosophies of language, but as one who has gone through the academic system in the field of literature, I see the efforts of writers like Giegerich and Hillman to adopt postmodern literary theorists' approaches to language and philosophy at once both dated and misguided. I spent my scholastic years deconstructing deconstructionism with Jungian ideas. Much postmodern literary theory is really a bastardization of psychoanalytic methods applied to language and literature. But where I (like many Jungians) feel Jung improved upon many of the flawed hypotheses of Freud's psychology, many postmodernists have only managed to employ an even more perverted Freudianism (or Lacanism). Despite the grandiose French neologisms, the core of a postmodernist method of analysis like deconstruction is psychoanalytic and was anachronistic even before it was originally elaborated. Jungian analytical ideas (applied to literary texts) actually deconstruct and improve upon Derridean and other poststructuralist approaches just as well as they do so for Freudian approaches. But Jungian methods of textual analysis are not employed or tolerated in academia for the most part. Jungian thinking (very poorly understood in literary theory tribes) is dismissed as "innatist" without any further consideration. That is, since Jungian theory assumes that aspects of psychology and personality are biological and inheritable, the literary theorists who have made a kind of religion out of cultural constructionism will have nothing to do with it.
In this rejected status, modern evolutionary biology sits side by side with Jungian psychology (and we would do well to take a hint from such "ignominious" company, in my opinion). The dominating wave of cultural constructionism in the social sciences has left little to no room form Jungianism to resurface in the universities in the last decades. But evolutionary psychology and biology as well as cognitive sciences (that advocate the nature of human psychology as predominately "unconscious" or autonomous) have steadily emerged and cut through the front lines of cultural constructionism. This charge and resurgence of scientific thinking in the social sciences and humanities has also opened a new door for advancement in Jungian thinking (so long as it can learn to valuate its biological cousins). Seen in this light, the embrace of French poststructuralist literary theory and philosophy by Jungians like Hillman and Giegerich amounts to an exercise in severe self-hatred. A kind of romantic fantasy of falling in love with one's abductor or violator. I see it as marking a level of intellectual lostness and impotence that surpasses the pathetic and dallies in the disgraceful. And this has come not from the flabby minds of New Agey Jungians taking a break from divination, but from two of the greatest minds in our field. If our greatest minds are willing to sell our family fortune to the traveling conmen of academic cultural constructionism, we are in very sorry shape as a field and a tribe. We are selling our vast ancestral land and history for beads and trinkets . . . simply because we believe that what we have is of no value.
But, if we are willing to take a page out of the alchemists' book, it is not devaluation that should mark our science of soul, but valuation. We should be in the business of valuating what has been left by others on the dung heap. In the case of cultural constructionism, what is left on the dung heap is biology and the systemic structure of human psychology that has evolved over millions of years to be adaptive, to help us survive. If we valued soul with ethical obligation and feeling, we would be better able to value instinct and matter. The lure of cultural theorists translated through Hillman and Giegerich is the appeal to our spiritualism (in postmodern culture theory, this is not expressed as a spiritualistic religiosity but as an abstract intellectualist religiosity), our disdain and devaluation of matter, our body shadow. It is a devil's bargain for us. We are considering selling our souls, our most valued objects, just to be rid of the problem of matter. Just so spirit can have its great day in the sun and declare victory over matter. But if that day ever comes, it will mark the end of the Jungian tribe as a survivable entity. We will lose our earth, our science, our adaptability . . . and will fall miserably into extinction.
Of course, one doesn't have to think about extinction if one's eyes are on the prize of the spiritual afterlife. Not that Jungians have formed a theory or belief of an afterlife (yet), but spiritualism tends to look forward and upward only and fails to see what is coming upon it from below.