Well, Matt, that was a mouthful. I see that you have likely visited my blog site and if you have, you will have begun to sense that I don't exactly fall all over post-Jungians. In my opinion, it is vital to actually read Jung's works first hand without a translator such as Hollis, Sharp, von Franz, Edinger or others. Each is a disciple and as such are not open to going past/through/around what they consider to be classical Jungian ideology as they were taught in their trainings. Still, it is fruitful to read these authors along with Jung, along with humanist-school psychologists, existentialists and anything else that might turn on a light bulb or two in the recesses of one's psyche.
I concur. My relationship with the Jungians (post or otherwise) has always been rocky and generally dissatisfying. When I mentioned "post-Jungian" in my previous post, I really meant those (often British) schools that are most inclined to label themselves "post-Jungians". The developmental school, as Andrew Samuels called them. I had been more familiar with the classical school Jungians like the ones you mentioned (perhaps because I'm American, and there is a strong, Zurich-bred, classical or quasi-classical vein of Jungians in the States).
But with the exception of a few scattered books, I've found this classical Jungian writing to be largely derivative and often either fluffy or muddled. Jung's own writing has always most appealed to me and influenced me. Although I have no school/tribe affiliation as a Jungian, I still feel an affinity with Jung and find that my own attitudes and perspectives are rooted in his.
In my own way, as I read through Jung's works and those of others, I am in search of a singular truth, that of "self" in the small sense as well as the large sense. I guess one could say that I am being selfish in that I am not really into debate of fine points of any psychology that doesn't touch some deep nerve, that doesn't give me a sense of being filled.
I don't see anything wrong with that. For the most part, my orientation to Jungian thinking is similar. It's only over the last few years that I have become more interested in "Jungian studies" . . . and in truth I don't find this all that stimulating in and of itself (i.e., as a scholarly field). But I have been reading a lot of "post-Jungianism" in order to better understand the social psychology of the Jungian tribe. As you said, there is still a substantial identity concern in this pursuit. I feel that some part of my identity is "Jungian", so I am interested in the identity-making factors of Jungianism. Therefore, I tend to study Jungianism as a tribal entity, a group that has both conscious and unconscious relationships with their identity-making factors, their beliefs, dogmas, totems, ideologies. To be a member of the Jungian tribe is both to choose such membership and also to participate mystically and unconsciously.
Most of the Jungians I've run into aren't willing to look at their participation in Jungianism in that way. They seem to feel that their own participation is wholly conscious and directed/controlled. Those "other Jungians" might be caught up in a Jungian participation mystique . . . but not them. This just strikes me as naive. But the result of this naivete is that no one is really studying the depth psychology of Jungian sociality.
In any case, my orientation to much Jungianism has been organized through the lens of observing and analyzing Jungian tribal sociality lately . . . so I am trying to understand the roles of various Jungians in the greater tribe and the way they construct their identity in relation to the tribe. In other words, Jungianism or Jungian texts are no longer directly a "Self-pursuit" to me. Indirectly, but not directly. The Self-pursuit (which I've been calling the Work) in my life has found a new vehicle, one that is more creative and personalized. I don't think my ego/Self relationship has been illuminated by reading a Jungian text in many years . . . and I have long since stopped expecting any such illumination from these texts. I tend to be a bit cynical about Jungian literature, but I suppose that's not really fair . . . because it may still be functional for those who want to use it to bolster their Self-pursuits.
I wonder at the long spells of silence here. As someone who was a listowner of a Jungian discussion group for a number of years, I am seeing the same thing happening in so many other places. The desire to communicate, to listen, to learn is there. But, also there is a fear present that has grown as people have begun to realise that once written, the words are there forever and that is something that tends to reduce intent to silence. No one wants to be exposed, there is a fear that in becoming transparent, others will confirm that one is worthless, flawed and not a good candidate for a relationship. It takes almost too much courage or else naiveté to brave speaking out in an Internet forum. This is why I switched to a blog where the need for sustaining a dialogue with others disappears. One is forced to begin a dialogue with self.
I hadn't really considered that fear of exposure was a factor in low traffic at Useless Science. Not that such a fear doesn't abound. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by "long spells of silence here" . . . if pertaining to my own writing, it has always come in bursts (due to the patterns of time available to me for writing). I'm thinking that's not what you meant, because there is hardly any fear of transparency in my own overly-exuberant, flood-like writing
!
I have been seeing low traffic on the site as primarily the result of two main factors. Mostly, there just isn't much of an audience for Useless Science, a forum with intentions to be Jungian, intellectually sophisticated and rigorous, scholarly, and progressive. There just aren't many people attracted to Jungianism for these things. Most of the people who get into Jung that I have run into online do so because Jung seems to enable them. They take whatever they can from Jung, and they do so on their own terms . . . but they never feel like they have to give back. Jung is an inexhaustible natural resource. I am pretty critical of that attitude, and have really tried to design Useless Science to "give back" to Jungianism, even if that giving is often antagonistic in a superficial sense.
But people drawn to Jung often have issues with being egocentric. If they "get" Jung well enough, this egocentricity might eventually subside. Jung doesn't really enable pathological egocentricity if you take everything he wrote and said to heart. But Jung is often bastardized and abbreviated in New Agey ways so that his ideas can be commodified for the self-help market. And that market is sustained by relatively quick but false fixes that stroke but do not transform the ego. If rigorous and "true" Jungian methods and philosophies were applied to either treatment or individuation, analytical psychology would be much more esoteric and unrepresented than it is.
Certified Jungian analysts have a strange relationship with the New Agey, self-help oriented lay Jungians. Many of them gripe about the new Age reputation of Jungian psychology, yet the alternative is to tighten up the Jungian belt and "lay down the law". And not only are most analysts not inclined to do this, there is also some shadowy recognition that the New Age and self-help hunger for Jung pays the bills of the professional analysts. Not only would they no longer be able to sell as many books if they made efforts to wean this audience, but much of their clientele would dry up. So the Jungians have gotten themselves in a serious bind due to their own willingness to (to put it crudely) "sell out" the rigor and complexity of Jung's theories for more public recognition and revenue.
A major factor of this is the dumbing down or truncating of Jung, who then becomes stylized as a mystic or guru figure (his rationalism, skepticism, intellectuality, and desire to be scientific stripped away). Much of the hoopla over the recently published Red Book banks on the promotion of Jung as mystic in order to sell more copies and inflate the importance of Jung to non- and quasi-Jungians.
The other reason I suspect there is low traffic here is that I am often both overwhelming as a writer and a bit of a bastard (at least I prance around in a bastard outfit). I have set the bar for participation here increasingly high as I have become increasingly dismayed with the lay Jungians I've encountered online. I am not an enabler. My objective is to subject theory to criticism and analysis, and most lay Jungians merely want to find their true tribe and some comforting, enabling ideologies. This is a factor of the non-scholarly audience, I suppose. People don't want to study or even understand Jung, they just want to touch his robes and be healed. Which is understandable . . . but that's not my own orientation or the orientation of this forum.
As a forum host, I am not the false senex that many Jungians pretend to or desire to be. There is a lot of creative/destructive energy at Useless Science . . . and it is with that kind of energy that I prefer to engage in life. I don't really think that my attitudes are that far out or even really antagonistic. If I was participating in the way I have been in various other fields, the signature antagonism of my approach would seem insignificant. Because criticism and intellectual rigor are considered functional in those fields. In Jungianism, there is much searching for mystical answers, but there is not much discipline in thought, very few ego-sacrifices are made. The people want to be fed, and they want to be fed on manna. Jung seems like a pretty good manna chef, so they camp out like beggars at his door.
You can't have a scholarly or "scientific" field that operates on these kinds of principles. So, in my opinion, Jungianism operates in bad faith. I try to operate in good faith as a Jungian, but this tends to shove me toward antagonism.
In any case, I came to a similar position as you (if not for precisely the same reasons). I decided that there was no community out there that I had imagined for Useless Science. It's a shame that there isn't, but there isn't, so I can't go on trying to get blood from a stone. Therefore, I too have switched to a blog format. In that format, I am not really looking for collaboration, debate, or feedback (although I would be happy to receive it). I don't even have comments turned on and have laid out the blog in a literary (table of contents) rather than a chronological format. This forum is still open, but it is not very active, and I am not making any new attempts to promote it. But it will remain open if people ever do want to use it.
Regarding transparency, of course people are afraid of it. But transparency is a tricky beast, I think, because we don't control it. It is non-egoic. It's an expression of the objective Self as perceived by other people. We can exercise some kind of exhibitionism intentionally, but then we are only exposing what we understand about ourselves (or think we understand). We only expose what we are in control of. Although, not uncommonly, such public exposures are also exposing the pathologies we would rather still conceal . . . usually some kind of narcissism or grandiosity. That is no doubt the product of thinking that oneself (or one's Self) is the ego's to expose and express to others. We thing it is a kind of precious family jewel we can take out to show to others to impress them or tell them something important about ourselves. But it doesn't really work that way.
In genuine transparency, one simply is as one is. No attempt is being made to expose anything . . . but no real attempt is being made to conceal anything either. Such transparency invites people to misunderstand it, to judge it, to criticize it. It is socially tabooed. One is supposed to conceal and misdirect, to fortify and defend and ward off intimacy, to be strong and silent. People who have a lot of transparency are bound to upset others with their rawness. Personally, I like people like that. They have psychic mass. One gets sick of tiptoeing around everyone's complexes, hang-ups, and neuroses. So many people that I've met (in the Jungian community) are enormously fragile . . . although often full of bluster and posture and senexy wisdoms. They have never really come to terms with their puers and puellas and figured out how to make use of them. Many of these Jungians devote vast amounts of neurotic energy to concealing (and at times beating) their puers. It makes for very top-heavy personas.
Jungians feel they have to appear wise, balanced, individuated, enlightened . . . but the Jungian model for achieving these things is simplistic and impractical. It casts a large shadow. There is something refreshing about the occasional young (usually 20 something) people I see stumbling into Jungian thought. They are still swallowed in a kind of adolescent mania and despair, dripping delusion and grandiosity. But they haven't been conditioned into pretending to be senexes yet. Chiseling through that senexy fortification at midlife is incredibly difficult . . . perhaps because one feels that one should "know things" or be wise at that age, and it feels shameful not to.
As a Jungian, my late teens and twenties were very productive. Crazy and terrifying, but productive. I still benefit from the richness of those years. The notion that Jungian psychology is a mid-life philosophy is, I feel, erroneous. It's part of the inflation of the signature Jungian disease. Jungianism turns around the axis of adolescent issues like "true identity" and the animi and shadow. These are the essential foundations of a functional adult psychology. The quintessential midlife Jungian is often the person who managed to muddle through life with a more or less functional artificiality or persona until the "natural resources" of the Self were exhausted. But coming to psychic movements like the animi work at midlife is very tricky, because one is often tempted to deny and mistreat the puer. But in reality, something essential in the ego/Self relationship stopped growing in adolescence, and so the Jungian midlifer is reduced to an "adolescent psychology" if she or he wants to proceed.
And that is asking a lot of our pride. I don't mean to criticize Jungians or Jungianism for this scenario. It's the way our society works. No real rites of passage, no real understanding of what it means to be an adult (not the kind of understanding that derives from the ego/Self relationship). Coming into the residual turmoil of adolescence at midlife is simply inevitable. The problem is that Jungians are too proud and too willing to promote Jungianism as a midlife philosophy (and to encourage the Jungian audience and patient population to do the same), and this positions them in bad faith on the issues of adolescence, puerism, adult responsibility to groups and others, and the animi.
In any case, what I mean to say is that I think this is where signature Jungian lack of transparency is typically found. This is what Jungians are afraid could be exposed. Although, I get the impression from most that I've met that they are not very aware of this predicament. When the buttons of this particular complex get pushed, some clever (or not so clever) rationalization is utilized to mask the real wound and need. i my opinion, Jungianism will flounder and eventually fail if it can't figure out how to confront this issue of its persona/identity.
Best,
Matt
