I have essentially developed my revisionary theories as a treatment of this very disease. The larger struggle that remains where these theories are concerned is a matter of convincing Jungians to take seriously that they actually have a disease or complex like the one I have described.
I'm not clear about what you mean here, Matt.
Hi Marian,
I didn't see your post until a few days ago (and I've been bit swamped at work and home the last couple weeks). Apologies for the slow response.
What I call the "Jungian disease" is fairly complicated. Using this term is a "knowing poeticism". That is, I am looking at a set of superficially diverse and seemingly unrelated phenomena about Jungianism and calling it a "disease" in order to 1.) group it into something singular and interrelated, a pattern, 2.) draw attention/conscious reflection to it, and 3.) suggest that it is modifiable through some kind of "treatment" and that this makes it easier to approach for Jungians, many of whom are trained psychotherapists and therefore "experts" in the treatment of psychological diseases.
As far as I know, I am the only Jungian who would call these related phenomena a "disease" or who has recognized this whole pattern as a singularity (although many Jungians and non-Jungians have noticed the various symptoms individually). In essence, I am making a creative diagnosis and proposing a way to move forward in Jungian thought, suggesting a potential path that a "progressive Jungianism" might take (beginning in self-analysis).
I won't go into the details of my diagnosis due to how extensive the analysis and pattern recognition are. I have been concocting an idea for a book for a number of years now that I'm calling "Memoirs of My Jungian Disease". The idea is to explain this diagnosis while grounding it in my personal observations and self-analyses (as a "diseased Jungian") . . . and then to propose ways of treating that disease.
As above, I see Jung's personal complexes as the "genetic code" this disease developed from. My feeling is that Jungian failures to understand exactly how Jung's complexes worked and affected his thinking and behavior have meant that the disease was inherited by Jungians as a side effect of their Jungian indoctrination. This is another reason that psychoanalytic techniques would, if properly applied, prove useful to the treatment of the disease. I.e., it is an unconscious or subconscious habit that has psycho-logical structures that can be understood psychoanalytically.
As for the "disease" itself, perhaps the most predominant symptom is a kind of self-righteous inflation . . . not unlike the "spiritual disease" that afflicts many spiritual seekers and seekers of enlightenment, transcendence, and various peak experiences. The primary result of this symptom is a relational impairment that throttles various aspects of the self/other relationship for Jungians. In short, Jungians have a very "monotribal" sense of identity, which means (if that monotribalism manifests unconsciously and unintentionally) that strict lines are drawn between an Us and a Them. This strict differentiation prevents sufficient interaction between and mutual influence of the Us and the Them.
In more Jungian terms, the designated Them are the objects of shadow projection. They are scapegoated and discounted. Regrettably for Jungians, the Them tend to be healthier and more functional in the modern environment (which I call "polytribal" or made up of many different part-tribes, none of which is whole unto itself). I see most of Jungianism's problems as stemming from its unconscious, simplistic, and compulsive monotribalism and its unintentional march toward a kind of romantic monotribal ideal. In this compulsion or complex, Jungians lose their capacity to be psychological (i.e., to think analytically about the psyche, their psyches, as objects). Instead, they fall into what Jung liked to call
abaissement du niveau mental (a lowering of the threshold of consciousness) and "participation mystique". Participation mystique is, I feel, the natural state of premodern monotribal sociality. Jung reserved the term for "primitives", but I think it is just the natural, default, habitual sociality for our species.
There is an inherent problem in Jungians (who are supposedly "psychologists", psychotherapists, and those interested in psychology) becoming un-psychological. It makes them non-adaptive as a tribe and dysfunctional as a "school of thought" or intellectual organization. We might say that being un-psychological means that Jungians live in "Bad Faith", because their psychological-ness should largely define them (as it did Jung). We might also call this (to use a term Jung also liked) a "loss of soul" for the Jungian tribe, because that "Bad Faith" works to dissociate Jungianism from its tribal "soul" or sense of healthy, adaptive, survivable identity.
Therefore, the "treatment" for the Jungian disease is a kind of "soul retrieval" . . . a shamanic work that tries to re-mythologize the narrative of Jungian selfhood (as in "the talking cure"). So, it is as if Jungians have the tools of treatment at their disposal, but they are wearing blinders and can't see where to apply these tools. That blindness is a complex and it is a facet of the Jungian disease.
I like your description of the Jungian true-believers, sycophants, or whatever one may call them, as a or the "tribe." It is for this reason I am not wanting to affiliate myself too closely to the Jungian writings themselves.
When I first started using the term tribe to describe modern groups like Jungians, it was another "knowing poeticism" touched with hyperbole, but the more I read and thought about human sociality, the more I came to feel it was simply an accurate and scientifically viable term. Still, "tribe" by itself is something of an abbreviation and can still engender confusion. What I mean by tribe is "monotribe" (a term I have been using increasingly), and not merely "monotribe", but "modern monotribe".
I am seeing a monotribe as a social group that survives and adapts in a given environment as a whole or a kind of super-organism. It is "one", and the sense of identity constructed within this group is characterized by a singular notion of what is OK and what isn't behavior- and identity-wise (although different subgroups, like children/adults or men/women, have some different standards).
A premodern monotribe is more like the traditional tribe that most Westerners only know through the eyes of anthropologists. Even the most reclusive and non-technological monotribes still surviving today are probably not to be considered as true premodern monotribes because they have been irreparably transformed by their contact with moderns (even if they strive to preserve their tribal cultures against modernism). The truth seems to be that these monotribes have overlapping environments with modern polytribes, so there is competition for certain resources. The fact that modern polytribes outcompete monotribes in these overlapping environments leads to specific cultural developments in the monotribes. The best known examples in the U.S. are, of course, the Native Americans and the construction and constriction of their reservations . . . not to mention the identity-altering history of white atrocity, aggression, and theft.
As much as many Americans romanticize Native American cultures and ideas, those cultures and ideas continue to struggle mightily just to persist in the environment shared with and affected by moderns.
By
modern monotribe, I mean to differentiate a kind of social group from more traditional monotribes. A modern monotribe lives almost entirely in the modern environment and is composed entirely of modern individuals. Modern individuals are polytribal, i.e., they have affiliations and allegiances with many groups and subgroups (from their families to their nations and many beyond and in-between). But a modern monotribe is different than most polytribes because it seeks (albeit more or less unconsciously) to restore some sense of premodern monotribalism where a singular sense of identity and belief accounts for all one needs to identify oneself or believe.
That striving can never be fulfilled entirely because the modern polytribal environment does not support it. Modern monotribes, therefore, tend toward fundamentalism and seek to repeal various aspects of modernism. This is an effort at the employment of the traditional human adaptive technique of manipulating one's environment to fit the tribal identity rather than adapting the identity or behavior to fit the environment. Often this effort in modern monotribes is harmless enough, but where a monotribe gains too much power, this regressive fundamentalism can become extremely dangerous to the modern environment. We see this writ most large in the 20th century totalitarian movements like Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism. Many millions of "others" were killed so that various monotribes could experience the "pure" environments they desired.
Christians rarely like to think of it like this, but early institutional Christianity (Roman Catholicism) operated in exactly the same way. It proved to be the world's most successful modern monotribe, and it achieved this through a combination of ideological concessions (to various pagan traditions and ideas) and the brutal repression and destruction of those who would not "convert". To this day, Christianity is the primary model of modern monotribalism we are all familiar and infused with (believer or non-believer).
But today, modern monotribes don't compete as well as polytribes, and their power has been reduced. It still remains to be seen whether the advanced modern world will be able to avoid sliding back into a monotribal fundamentalism that disrupts the environment for everyone. There are strong modern monotribal movements in American (almost always with a Christian ideology at their base) that would love to conform all others to their ways of seeing the world.
I would like to be clear, though, that I do not see "monotribalism" as a pejorative in general, nor do I mean to completely negativize monotribal inclinations in modern individuals. Monotribalism is something that I think we all need on some level in order to be completely healthy and functional individuals. It is an instinct and a fundamental structure of human identity construction. It would be pointless to try to eradicate or to overly condemn this instinctual predisposition. The problem I think we should address is how to adapt this instinct to the modern environment.
As with many social adaptations in our species, I suspect this adaptation would have to come through some kind of reconceptualization rather than through a genetic mutation. That reconceptualization process began or became reignited with Enlightenment humanism and the modern humanistic philosophy of the individual as the unit of most significance in society. That is, the idea of the individual as entitled to various rights, as inviolable, worth protecting by the state, worth promoting and nurturing. This humanistic idea conceptualizes that in the "tribe" of individuals, all are equal and all are valid and fully "human". That is, everyone is an Us.
As long as we conceptualize everyone we interact with as an Us (rather than a Them), we are likely to treat them respectfully and sympathetically and not violate or abuse their "rights". That is fairly Utopian, but our species has actually done surprisingly well with this philosophy, which may have once seemed logically impossible to institute. Of course, this modern humanistic "equality" is easier shouted about from pulpits than practiced in the street, and there are innumerable obstacles (our genes being one of the largest).
But just as people are predisposed to make radical differentiations between an Us and a Them and to dehumanize the Them, we are equally predisposed to feel sympathy and empathy, to cooperate (usually strategically or via reciprocal altruism), to care for those in need. We have genetic hurdles to get over, but we also have all the right tools to build a healthier modern, polytribal world.
It would probably seem much easier to many people to just do away with monotribalism altogether. Once you recognize the flaws of monotribalism, it can be difficult to recognize the more subtle positives. The primary one I can think of is that the human personality or sense of identity (which is what each individual needs to operate well enough in order to be socially and evolutionarily functional) is structured monotribally or around a sense of oneness or integrity. That is there is, I believe, an overarching organizational principle to identity construction that promotes integration and inter-association of parts into one complex system. I think the basic principle of psychic health is homeostasis (or homeorhesis, as some prefer to specify). The singular organizational principle of the individual psyche is one that seeks a homeostatic "flow".
We can recognize this when we think about the things that thwart our sense of selfhood. Anxiety is the primary one. Our psychic and physiological systems are designed to incorporate a certain (not insignificant) degree of anxiety, but where anxiety levels reach too high (for whatever reason), our systems start to de-cohere and crash. Anxiety is the disruption of homeostatic maintenance in the psychic system. Where we seek to adapt to increases in anxiety, we seek more coherence and homeostatic flow . . . that sense of everything we are coming together in an integrated and functional way. That means being adaptable within our specific environments (and the primary human environment is culture).
Jung's idea of the Self as a kind of organizational principle of the psyche is very apt here, I think. Jung sought to understand this phenomenon of the Self psychologically (for the most part). But in Jungianism, the Self is more a totem of identity construction than a psychological (or even spiritual) object. What I mean is that the Jungian concept of the Self is not really about understanding (psychology) or serving (spirituality) this autonomous object/other, it is about a group of Us's differentiating themselves from groups of Them's by what they worship and extol. So in Jungianism, it is conventional to proclaim the virtues of the Self and praise its wondrousness and meaning, but what this really serves is the establishment of tribal identity. There is no relationship with an Otherness in the Jungian construction of Self. Jungian Self-talk is merely an affectation or manner of self-presentation that helps Jungians identify as Jungians and helps them identify other Jungians and know who might be a non-Jungian.
This totemic usage of Jungian concepts like Self and individuation is (not surprisingly) unrecognized and unacknowledged by Jungians. But this is how tribal identity construction (and its characteristic "participation mystique") conventionally operate. That is, it is "taboo" (in a tribe) to look into the psychological and more mundane makeup of any tribal identity totems. Part of being a member of a monotribe is defending these totems. The only members of monotribes who are granted the right to modify the tribe's identity totems are shamans, and because they alone are burdened with this duty, shamans (and their methods) are themselves tabooed. Shamans, that is, are granted totemic status in the tribe and are not "seen through".
This is why traditional shamans wore incredibly elaborate costumes and masks. These shamans are (for their tribes) who they appear outwardly to be: workers of divine magic and persuasion. My suspicion is that the emergence of tribal shamanism was a very clever "workaround", a kind of social technology that allowed monotribes to adapt to changes in their environments without realizing that they were altering their core sense of tribal identity to do so. The tribal shamanic system has many failsafes built in so that tribe members do not have to be burdened with seeing through their identity totems.
The tribal shaman was responsible for developing creative technologies that adapted tribal identity on one hand with a core principle of organization (the Self system) on the other. The shaman or shamans had to make the tribal identity work, and the art of shamanism is partly an art of "ethical" deception and misdirection, a "performance" that symbolically works to restore the soul.
This was later recaptured in ancient theater (e.g., in Greece), and even to this day we "know" (even when we don't consciously know) that partaking in a performance or recitation of a healing narrative "restores the soul" and keeps us feeling fully "human". This is all the more effective in a monotribal environment where identity is more strictly controlled and less variable. There aren't an infinite number of ways to "restore soul" in a premodern monotribe (like there are in modern polytribalism).
But although that stricter determination of monotribal identity feels oppressive to most moderns, we suffer the opposite problem of "soul" being much more nebulous, ethereal, and intangible. It is hard to "fix" that mercurial "soul" in a modern individual whose sense of selfhood is extremely polytribal and lacks any strong sense of singular organization or integrity. The demand on a modern individual to find a novel technology that "restores soul" is enormous. The tendency is to gravitate toward monotribalism, because monotribalism feels more "soulful", more integral, and approximates the sense of wholeness or oneness we seek. But modern monotribes (unlike traditional ones) are not self-sufficient and independently sustainable. They are not their own super-organisms adapting to and surviving within a specific environment. Even the most robust modern monotribes exist only at the expense of the modern polytribal life support system.
For instance, it is only because some members of a modern monotribe have wealth acquired through modern means that a monotribe can be (temporarily) maintained in a modern environment. In psychotherapies (which are often quite monotribal), the occupation of psychotherapists can only be maintained with support from insurance companies or state subsidization. Original psychotherapists like Freud and Jung were depended on very wealthy patients, many of whom became great patrons of their doctors. Christianity established itself in exactly the same way (i.e., by converting wealthy people who funded the Church).
Traditional monotribes are not subsidized like this. My hypothesis is that this self-sustaining singularity of traditional monotribalism was reflected in the core sense of tribal identity . . . that this allowed tribal identity to make a good reflecting pool for Self. And therefore, the natural human equation is that the tribe IS the Self and vice versa. Only with modernism is the concept of Self abstracted and individualized, because tribes could no longer be self-sustainingly whole. And so the sky god who lives mysteriously above it all becomes the new model for the Self . . . and people are forever looking up into the sky or into some immaterial beyond for the tether of their identity. And they aren't really finding it . . . not unless they happened (coincidentally) to live in a monotribe.
But what happens then is that the individual (with his or her abstract, anthropomorphic, individualized notion of God) keeps looking for God and the orientation of selfhood in the model s/he expects to be valid and never realizes that the "relationship with God" is ultimately dependent on living and finding identity within a monotribe. It is not "faith" that "redeems the soul" in these situations, it's society . . . monotribal society. And one's God is only as valid and as functional (or "powerful) as one's tribe is in the larger environment. As a result, no differentiation is made between the promotion of the tribal God and the promotion of the tribe as a social entity.
That is what we see in the U.S. with the relatively new political interests of Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups. Any pretense that Christianity was about a kind of introverted "faith" is thrown out the window. Christianity is about establishing oneself and one's tribe socially, about obtaining tribal power and influence to control one's environment. And this is all entirely in line with the instinctual predispositions of human sociality. It is not "salvation" through faith, but genes doing what they were meant to do. But the particular expression of these genes is at odds with the modern environment. Either the environment will have to give in to that archaic expression of the genes or the expression of the genes will have to be adapted to the environment.
Jungians are in the same predicament, except they have essentially no power or influence on any modern front. The struggle for Jungianism, then, is the struggle with extinction. It is "dying out" and will eventually vanish if it cannot find a way to adapt.
I would rather that it didn't. I still see value in Jungianism, but that value is consistently diminishing as Jungians blindly follow their habits and complexes and do not seek to modify their identity, beliefs, and attitudes in functional ways. The Jungian tribe has splintered into sub-tribes and each of these is shooting farther in its own direction away from an integral core. From the perspective of this core, these Jungianisms are each "diluted" in their particular ways. This is a natural process. Jungianism is like a species that is no longer adaptive in its environment. But various mutations have some chance of surviving in their respective new environments. So the old species dies out while the new species become creatures of their new environments.
I'm not opposed to this in general, but I feel that in the case of Jungianism, there are core elements that have been lost that are still valid. In fact, those lost elements of Jung's approach to the psyche are actually the most modern and robust ones . . . and they have been lost because of Jungianism's penchant for monotribalism and its component negligence of its "tribal soul" and identity. Jung had the preliminary workings of a recipe for adaptation of the monotribal sociality instinct to modern polytribal society. He also had a number of personal and cultural resistances and complexes that hindered the fuller development of this recipe. The recipe was actually like a kind of antibody Jung developed against these complexes that didn't come to full fruition. That is, I think it worked fairly well for him (as a self-treatment), but it did not become something reproducible that others could adopt. It did not, in other words, become a "technology" modern society could use.
This is why I would prefer to bring back the "Jungian disease"
as a disease. We need to get back to the project of developing the necessary antibodies. But, understandably, Jungianism today is more concerned with alleviating the symptoms than with treating the cause. It seeks to live "symptom free", but not necessarily "well". It's a short term solution, and not a very good one at that.
By gnosis do you mean "Intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths" [freedictionary] or do you mean the esoteric type of knowledge sought by the Gnostics specifically. And now that we're on that subject, I thought I might find something worthwhile in Gnosticism at one time, and went to a Gnostic Sunday service, if that's the right word. It was so like Catholicism I was quite put off.
It's interesting that you felt (modernized) Gnosticism was like Catholicism. Originally, they were the bitterest of enemies. I lean to the (minority) opinion that something like "Gnosticism" (or variations of proto-Gnosticism) was the first form of "Christianity", and that what eventually became Roman Catholicism was in many ways a reaction to and against Gnosticism. It is conventional in early Christian studies to see this reaction in the opposite way (Gnosticism as a reaction to Catholicism), but I feel that is based too much on "history being written by the winners".
My use of small-g gnosticism is definitely closer to "intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths", except I don't hold that there are such things as "spiritual truths" and "intuitive apprehension" is not the medium I would promote. Science is a small-g gnostic methodology, also, albeit one that is generally unconcerned with spirituality and other intangibles. For me, the gnostic impulse is very generally that drive to know rather than believe In that pursuit, one takes whatever means necessary to differentiate knowledge from belief and to falsify beliefs that have no logical or objective bases.
I see that as fully compatible with psychology's investigation of psychic phenomena as objective rather than subjective. That is, a psychologist can never fully trust a belief or intuition, but must always keep asking, "But why did his or her or my mind construct that image/idea/feeling in that particular way?" There are no "truths" among psychic phenomena, only representations with logical structures. The psychologist and the small-g gnostic sacrifice the comfort of "truths" in the pursuit of knowing . . . which interestingly is a lot like a spiritual discipline or faith. The gnostic is always pursuing the object/other in order both to know it and to allow it to be autonomous, to be what it naturally is, not to usurp it. This becomes an ethical stance, perhaps a focused version of scientific ethics in research methodology.
The gnostic doesn't have to sacrifice the valuation of the object/other. That valuation has only to be recognized as a psychic phenomenon itself. Value is attributed; it is a relational and subjective quality, not an inherent and objective one. It is essential to the relationship with the object/other, but not to the object/other itself. In other words, we could say that one's faith is not essential to God itself, but it is essential to one's relationship with God as a medium of valuation. But where faith becomes more about the believer's needs than the object, it can actually impair the valuation of object. That, in a very small nutshell, is why I am an atheist. I have found belief (at least in my case) to stand in the way of the valuation of what many would call God. So belief for me was a sacrifice made in the name of my "faith" or insistence that the valuation of the object/other was the most important thing to pursue (as opposed to, say, my identity as a believer or any sense that my identity was "saved" or protected by my beliefs).
Best,
Matt
