Let me first clarify that I am not very knowledgeable about object relations theory. I won't pretend to understand its intricacies. I have an intuitive-emotional reaction to what I have seen of it (mostly as used by Jungians) that is distinctly negative, and I wish to meditate on that while also pondering the attraction of some Jungians to object relations ideas. I am thoroughly unqualified to make a scholarly study of the relationship between Jungianism and object relations at this time. And although I generally don't like to rely so heavily on gut reaction for my criticism, this is generally based on my sense of propriety (yes, I do have one!) and not on the error rate of my intuitions. My experience with my intuition is that it is never entirely wrong, but it is also never entirely accurate. So in the following, I intend to open a can of worms and have no expectation to solve any problems or offer any solutions. I simply find the relationship of Jungianism to object relations theory very curious, probably suspicious, and maybe indicative of a complex or dysfunction. There will no doubt be a higher than average margin of error in my assessment of this situation, for which I apologize. I can only hope to learn more about this from trial and error (this is how I always learn). Although I don't expect anyone to correct my errors (no one ever does, regrettably), I am certainly not opposed to that. My goal is to learn and understand, not to declare or control knowledge to my personal benefit. But, of course, I have an antagonistic method of self-education. It has generally served me well even if it hasn't won me many friends, so I'll stick with it.
Before I get to the relationship between Jungianism and object relations theory, I'd like to remark upon a particular past experience with psychoanalysis. Although I have never been a Freudian and was indoctrinated into some of the same anti-Freudian prejudices that other Jungians have been, I have read at least half of Freud's works (although it's been a while). I had a course in Freud in graduate school taught by a Freudian analyst, and although I was branded as "The Jungian" by her from the first day and told that Jung was a Nazi (and by implication, I was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer for this reason . . . in a class where I was one of only two students that weren't Jewish) and "Freud's disappointing son" . . . I found Freud's writing very interesting. He was a great writer of literary merit (as was Jung) and a pleasure to read. I also identified very much with Freud's bravado and desire to turn everything on its head. Perhaps this was also a shortcoming, such as when he insisted that "we must make an unshakable bulwark of the sexual theory" . . . but I very much sympathize with his innovative urge and ability to voice these innovations from within the intelligence of the shadow. Of course, I have a similar method of thinking and writing.
For my course on Freud, I wrote my final paper on the Freud/Jung Letters (as my professor requested I do). The premise of that paper was that both Freud and Jung were stuck in and thought from the position of conflicting complexes. Freud's complex was paternal (not a "father complex", but a complex in which he over-identified with the persona of the Father), patriarchal, and distinctly Jewish (in his Mosaic way of bringing his psychoanalytic commandments heroically down from Mt. Sinai and roaring ferociously at any who disobeyed them). Jung's psychology (as he himself essentially admitted, e.g., when he mused about Freud meaning "pleasure" and Jung meaning "youth" and each of their psychologies reflecting this synchronocity) is a psychology of the Son, of the puer aeternus. It is obsessed with the issues and attitudes of the Son (just as psychoanalysis is obsessed with the issues and attitudes of the Father). Jungian analytical psychology is distinctly Christian, and Jung's reaction to Freud (that facilitated their split) was the reaction of a Christian or even Christ-identified son to the Pharisaic law of the Fathers.
The "diseases" each man suffered were the diseases of their respective Jewish-Father and Christian-Son complexes (Jung's
Answer to Job is an excellent expression of Jung's personal psychology on this matter). Freud was paranoid about overthrow and very controlling of his disciples, his flock. He felt that his most precious thing was his authority, and he sought to defend this at all costs. Which means that he could not very well bend, certainly not if that bending was suggested by others. Only if the Word of God came out of the burning bush calling for change could Freud manage to change (and he did so on a number of issues throughout his life). Jung's disease (which I have been calling the "Jungian Disease" in my book in progress,
Memoirs of My Jungian Disease: The Anima Work and the Individuant's Inflation) was the Christian disease of inflation and the conflict with the self-deification taboo. Jung's academic and personal spiritual interests were largely directed at self-transcendence, attainment, becoming. The devil for Jung is inflation and the model of the hero is not Moses but Christ. Christ was persecuted and put to death for his inflation, as the story goes. He declared himself a king (or was accused of such an offense by his enemies) and threatened the power of Rome and the Pharisaic high priests.
In this paper on the Freud/Jung Letters, I discussed how this Jewish/Christian drama played out between Freud and Jung (and their respective schools) much as it did in the history of the religious conflict between the two faiths. Both men behaved as if they were thoroughly entrenched in or even possessed by their respective Jewish-Father and Christian-Son complexes. The Letters read like an archetypal drama. And even if such complexes or archetypes possessed both Freud and Jung during their relationship, what's at least as interesting is that each psychological "faith" continued very much along the same lines as the complexes of these founders would suggest. That is, each school has a long and complicated shadow based in the elements of its complex that were never sufficiently reckoned with. Jung managed to move on from the almost whiny petulance that characterized some of his letters to Freud to exhibit some degree of public respect and decorum when writing about the value of Freud's influence (this respect was of course not reciprocated). But the shadow of the Child or Son has never been adequately dealt with in Jungian psychology.
This issue seems to have relevance to the topic of this post (thanks to my intuition for steering me through a digression toward meaning). Primarily because the introduction of object relations theory into contemporary Jungianism most likely came as a result of a gaping hole in Jungian theory where a developmental psychology might be. I.e., Jungianism had no real psychology of children . . . and this was felt (by many Jungians) to be an Achilles Heel, maybe even a fatal flaw, a shameful wound. I think it's reasonable to say that Jungians had (and may still have) something like an "inferiority complex" regarding their deficient developmental psychology. The interest in filling in the developmental gap in Jungian theory seems to have begun with a feeling that "we really
should have some kind of credible developmental theory". [I never got around to reading Michael Fordham, who is probably the original bridge between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology and the father of the movement to introduce a developmental psychology to Jungian thinking. He's on my list for future reading.]
My concern is that it is very slippery to begin any such gap-filling in a pre-condition of inferiority or shame. That pre-condition assures that the gap can only be adequately filled with intense and probably painful self-reflection and self-reckoning, with a movement of individuation and a significant amount of shadow work. Without such analytical efforts, we can be assured that what fills the gap will have neurotic or pathological qualities, that it will be, at least in part, complex-driven and an article of Bad Faith. I haven't yet come across any writing in the Jungian canon that addresses this problem. It almost seems as if a group of Jungians gobbled up object relation theory without asking any existential or self-analytical questions about the implications of adopting a theory that is 1.) associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, and 2.) essentially contradictory to the Jungian theory of adult psychology.
There
was tribal splintering in the Jungian societies around the time that object relations theory was being incorporated, and although one (like myself) who isn't in the know about the inner goings on might well conclude that the object relations issue might have been one of the divisive factors (whether consciously or unconsciously), I have yet to find any clear indication of this in the literature I've read. Andrew Samuels (
Jung and the Post-Jungians [1985]) proposed that the Jungian splinter tribes could be loosely classified as the Classical school, the Developmental school, and the Archetypal school. My own Jungian indoctrination (perhaps like that of many others) did not fit neatly into this division. One could say that I was oriented toward the Classical school, because I put a great deal of emphasis on Jung's own writings (which were significantly more meaningful to me that the writings of other Jungians). But since the Classical school that Samuels proposes is a
Post-Jungian school, and I never had all that much interest or respect for Jung's immediate and closest followers (with occasional exceptions), I suppose I am not really Classical. In fact, much of my criticism is aimed at the Classical school's ideas of Jungianism. But in my choice to criticize this school more than the others, I essentially align myself with its specific shadow. I am in this sense a heretic of the Classical school.
I have also been distinctly influenced by James Hillman, and although I have sympathies with the Archetypal school (e.g., I like Hillman's heretical or anti-Classical forays), I have never been in any way a Hillman groupie and have maintained a clearly equivocal stance on Hillman's ideas. I like Hillman as a critic of Jungian Classicism but I'm not much influenced by Hillman as an original theorist.
But the Developmental school, I freely admit, was never on my radar. It has only been very recently that I have been noticing its ideas and personalities in Jungian thought. Perhaps this is due in part to my academic interest in Jungian psychology being a fairly recent trend in my life. For years, my interest in Jungian literature was entirely practical. If I could apply it to my life and healing, use it as a tool or an aid to help give language to my experience, then I consumed it ravenously. But the many Jungian books (mostly from the Classical school) that I started reading and found non-plussing were books I merely filed away on my shelf and never returned to.
I would like to think that I am a more or less non-affiliated Jungian, and that my criticism comes from a non-affiliated perspective. I would suspect that any criticism of one splinter school by another is inherently tainted (although not necessarily invalid). Probably, each school is a more or less functional critic of the others . . . but not of itself. And to the degree that aspects of Jungianism are shared across all splinter tribes, each tribe would be relatively unaware of its shadow (the Jungian shadow). As I am neither a critic nor a follower of Freud. I have not concerned myself with criticizing Freudian or post-Freudian ideas. But with the strong Freudian influence on the Developmental school of Jungianism, this Freudianism (as it pertains to and affects Jungianism) must be taken into account.
What's more, in Andrew Samuel's revisitation of Jung and the Post-Jungians in an article entitled "Will the Post-Jungians Survive?" (published in
Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology [1998]), he proposes that the state of the splinter tribes has developed even further and produced a fourth school.
As I see it, now, there are four schools of post-Jungian analytical psychology. The classical and the developmental schools have stayed pretty much as they were. The archetypal school has been either integrated or eliminated as a clinical entity - perhaps a bit of both. But there are two new schools to consider, each of which is an extreme version of one of the two hitherto existing schools, classical and developmental. I call these two extreme versions Jungian fundamentalism on the one hand and Jungian merger with psychoanalysis on the other. The four schools could be presented on a spectrum: fundamentalist, classical, developmental, psychoanalytic.
This would imply that my intuition that the re-introduction of Freudianism to Jungianism has come in an un- or under-analyzed manner may be quite valid. That is, if Jungianism has an increasingly Freudian branch that has polarized with an increasingly fundamentalist classical branch, we could suspect this to be indicative of a dissociation in the collective Jungian psyche. Why, for instance, has Jungianism polarized (between 1985 and 1998 at least) if it is not in some sense "sick", if it does not have a shadow issue clogging up its ability to integrate and function as a healthy interrelated system?
There are various reasons that a reintroduction of Freudianism would make the Jungian collective body ill or dissociated. For one, it is like a return to the Father that the Son defined himself by rejecting. It is the myth of the Prodigal Son, but from the Father's perspective. "You have strayed and fallen, but now you have returned to the fold. Now the son has become the father and is ready to live as the father or under the father's wing." This is not the kind of prodigality that changes the prodigal utterly. It's a kind of regression. The Prodigal Son turns into the Good Son. That transformation would seem to invalidate all the reasons for the Son leaving the Father's tribe in the first place. Prodigality (from the perspective of the Good Son) is only a mistake, a period of temporary insanity that can be cured only by a complete repentance and return to square one. In this fantasy of the Good Son (and the Father that urges that Goodness), the Father doesn't have to change. Father and Son do not mutually move toward a synthesis. Father assimilates son. Such assimilation of the Son is extremely Freudian and has no real place in the Jungian mindset (except as pathology).
Another major incompatibility between Freudianism and Jungianism involves (perhaps the most important psychological issue at hand) the focus on infantile psychology vs. the focus on adult psychology respectively. It may very well be true that Jung's theory did not adequately address developmental psychology, but it can equally be said that Freud's psychology did not adequately address adult psychology. One gets the impression from the Freud/Jung Letters that Jung wanted to "grow up", even if he didn't yet know how. He did not want to be a Son assimilated by the Father and forever reduced to an infantile psychology. Of course, in his petulance and puerism, he (from the Freudian perspective) merely confirmed that he was indeed still immature (perhaps in some sense "infantile"). That is, he did not behave like a man in his correspondence with Freud, but like an adolescent who wanted desperately and vaguely to leave the nest but didn't know how to accomplish this without burning everything around him to the ground.
Jung always strove for the elaboration of an adult psychology in compensation for Freud's infantile emphasis. But Jung and his followers have never overcome the Core Complex of the Jungian Son psychology. Jungian psychology never completely rose to the level of an adult psychology, and its pretensions to declare itself a psychology of mid-life are (as I have argued elsewhere) the product of inflation. More accurately (as I have also written about elsewhere on the forum on various occasions), Jungian psychology is a distinctly adolescent psychology . . . and it flounders at the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. It is rich in transcendent fantasies, but poor in the realm of more earthy initiation. It's adoration and emulation of the senex wise man and woman is awkward and fraught with delusions that betray its shadowy puer nature. But as an adolescent psychology, it does attempt to address a more mature perspective than Freud's infantile psychology.
Yet, the adolescent remains in unconscious conflict with the infantile. The Infant plagues the adolescent mind, oscillating between the role of ball and chain and the role of comforting retreat under the skirts of the Mother. The Infant is a problem and a temptation to the adolescent mind that initiation into adulthood is meant to resolve. As I've written elsewhere (and have been reformulating for my book), the animi work is the archetypal or instinctual process of such an initiation or transition. And the failure of Jungians (of all schools) to adequately understand and implement the animi work has marked what could be perceived as the victory of the Dark Infant over the Adolescent with an initiation hunger. This can be perceived from the perspective of the Freudian Father or Good Son disciple as a glorious victory. It indicates an "I Told You So" moment of sub-conscious gloating. "You thought you could break away and go learn how to become a man! Well, look at you now . . . you are still the infant you always were and could never accept because you were too proud!"
To the Father, the Fall of the puer is an indication that the Infant is the destiny and grounding of rebellious, adolescent ambition. This Father sees adulthood as a failure of adolescence to escape its infantilism followed by a resignation to that infantilism, which is then repressively controlled by strict paternalism. This is very much the Freudian attitude. Freud and his followers have always seen the attempts of other people (Jungians included) to transcend their infantilism or infantile appetites as foolish and misguided denials of the Truth. This is the method that Freud used to remain uncritical of his own sexual theory. It's a purely emotional and irrational attitude that basically states that any disagreement with the infantilism of Freud's theory is a product of the too-proud individual's refusal to see how lowly his psychic roots really are. It's a one size fits all response to dissent, and it never requires reflection on the part of Freudians. It's a dogma, a Law, a Mosaic Law. It is taboo and to question it. This is probably the most powerful element of the Freudian shadow.
But when we try to examine this shadow dogma from the perspective of a Son psychology that has failed to transition from adolescence to adulthood, that has failed to "conquer the Infant inside it", the Father dogma of Freudianism is a terrible threat and curse. It threatens to possess the uninitiated puer with shame. This shame is easily mistaken for grounding, for "realism", even at times for science or materialism. A failure of the adolescent to find a real threshold of initiation into adulthood can only be understood in Freudian Father psychology as an indication that the transcendence (or passing through) of initiation is impossible. Psychologically, and on the level of feeling, this amounts to a succumbing to and assimilation by the Father. The puer Son tried to ascend, while the Father screamed out, "You stupid runt! Don't you know you can never get away from the Mother, from the Breast?! You are nailed to your fate like Oedipus, and you can only become the Father that I am, only repeat the cycle of fate where your failure becomes a dark secret that shames you and keeps your nose to the grindstone. You can never escape, and any attempt to do so is nothing but a delusion."
The curse of the Demonic Father in this case is torment to the puer so long as the puer remains stuck in the puer complex. If he accepts the full extent of his puerism, both the light and the dark, he can find his way to the threshold. At the threshold, he can face the Infant in him and let go of it enough to pass through. But if he remains terrified and ashamed of his infantilism to an extreme degree, so terrified that he can't even look at it directly, then he will be imprisoned in the puer complex. In that imprisonment, he will yearn for the fantasy of the senex, the wise and evolved man who has mastered the Infant (and in Jungian language also the anima), and he will construct this fantasy of wisdom, transcendence, and maturity in the way that an adolescent imagines such qualities and states of being. That is, the adolescent fantasy of the senex lacks the earthiness of real maturity, wisdom, and initiation. It imagines the senex too perfectly as a conquerer of his "lesser self" (or Infant or anima or Parent), as one who never falters, who doesn't suffer because he "Knows". In other words, the senex has supposedly overcome the weakness or impotency of the puer. This is, of course, ridiculous. It would be much more accurate (although overly simplistic) to say that the initiated adult has accepted his or her impotence rather than conquered it. Accepted but not made a secret, repressive totem of this impotence, which tends to produce an inflated egoism. Our impotence can be lived through "heroically" in a way that doesn't involve repressing or conquering it. It is the conquering egoic fantasy that is sacrificed at the threshold of initiation, not the true, more vegetal potency that comes from a healthy and functional ego/Self relationship, from an acceptance of the necessity of facilitating instinct.
Freudian and Jungian thinking fall into similar traps at the threshold of initiation, but each mindset takes a different attitude toward that initiation failure. The Jungian clings to identification with the Child/adolescent and harbors a secret inferiority regarding his or her failure to stop loving the Child's position and sense of romantic hope (and illicit Mother-desire). The Freudian more fully represses the romantic puerism and harbors no real hope for its transcendence or escape from the Mother. Freudianism essentially denies the adolescent drive to break away from both Mother and Father. The Freudian sees the inner world in terms of the Infant imagined to have id-like drives that can only be dealt with repressively. That is, there is no hope in the Freudian paradigm for the Infant's maturation. The Infant is a fixture of the psyche and cannot be transformed, only bargained with in a parental fashion, fed or starved, rewarded or punished. The Infant remains like an animal that can at best be domesticated and leashed. It never grows up, never develops real intelligence or sophistication.
But the failure of initiation in the Jungian mindset and the twilight recognition and fear of the resultant inferiority feelings . . . this whole puer/senex complex provides the Freudian Father with an ace in the hole. And of course I mean the Jungian shadow fantasy of such a Freudian Father. This Father can castrate (shame) the Son because of the complex . . . and this metaphor also plays directly into Freud's construct and language, seemingly supporting his theory. But this mythic or archetypal dynamic cannot be admitted to by Jungians as it would require a confrontation with shame and a sacrifice of pride. It would melt our wax wings, and we are so desperately dependent on their success. Yet, without this admission, the adoption of Freudian infantile psychologies monkeys with the puer complex that Jungians have not dealt with, triggers its feelings of inferiority, and opens it up to possession by the archetypal or neurotic forces active in the complex. I would argue that Jungians are unconsciously seducible by this Freudian infantilism regardless of whether or not it has any psychological value.
This construction of the complex and the predicament would also give an explanation for why the Jungian tribe has been increasingly splintering and dissociating. Jungianism does not know what it has eaten, and what it has eaten is poisonous. It is not poisonous of itself or universally, but it is poisonous to Jungianism due to the baggage it carries and the unresolved puer complex the Jungianism suffers from.
