Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015, 60, 1, 114–121
Another serious misunderstanding, indeed! a response to Mark Saban Marco Heleno Barreto, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Mark Saban’s article—‘Another serious misunderstanding: Jung, Giegerich and a premature requiem’—surprised me negatively. I regard Saban as one of the intelligent minds at work within the Jungian field. But the argument he offers in his paper is not only constructed on the basis of misinterpretations and lack of understanding of the complex thought of Wolfgang Giegerich and of my own paper (some of which I will address in a moment), and—horribile dictu—even of Jung, but it also reveals a hidden goal, which would not be justifiable to an open-minded scholarly forum of Jungian studies such as the Journal of Analytical Psychology. Hence, I would like to start my response to his paper by exposing its deeper nature. Saban declares that his intention is, ‘merely to show that, contrary to Giegerich’s repeated protestations, the “rigorous notion” at [the] centre [of his psychology] finds no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’ (Saban p. 95). This rigorous notion is the notion of soul, which has as its corollary another fundamental notion in Giegerich’s thought, namely that of psychological difference. Now, let us suppose for a moment that Saban would have succeeded in accomplishing his initial goal. Let us grant hypothetically that Giegerich would, in fact, be mistaken in his claim of assuming Jung’s notion of soul to be the conceptual matrix of psychology as the discipline of interiority. Then let us read the verdict presented at the end of Saban’s paper as its final conclusion: Giegerich’s psychology is irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’, as my paper succeeds ‘triumphantly in demonstrating’ (ibid., p. 110). And this irrelevance is presented as a natural consequence of the supposed exteriority of Giegerich’s psychology (and my paper) to their Jungian foundations. But, on the other hand, Saban seems to acknowledge critiques coming from ‘an honestly and clearly established external position’ (ibid., p. 95, my italics), such as Slavoj Zizek’s. As a matter of fact, these external critiques apparently are not irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’, who take them into account and honestly engage with them. Due to the praiseworthy amplitude of the
0021-8774/2015/6001/114
© 2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12131
A response to Mark Saban
115
editorial line adopted by the Journal of Analytical Psychology, we can find a rich dialogue and engagement of Jungian scholars with psychoanalytical, philosophical, scientific and theological standpoints that are external to Jung’s psychology. I believe that Saban would not object to the relevance of these intellectual efforts, otherwise we would have as a consequence the immunization of Jungian thought against any serious dialogue with standpoints other than Jung’s, and thus the avoidance of the possibility of a truly radical critique of its most cherished assumptions. But this would not be appropriate for ‘modern Jungians’. So, why does Saban exclude Giegerich’s thought as irrelevant (and consequently as not deserving of any attention from Jungians) simply because it supposedly is not grounded in Jung’s notion of ‘soul’? Here, the real (unconfessed) goal of his paper reveals itself: it is intended to rule out Giegerich’s psychology from the Jungian field at large. Saban’s piece is thus a kind of excommunication act: no need to take into consideration Giegerich’s thought, because it is irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’. But to a serious and unprejudiced Jungian scholar who is not only interested in exegesis, in ‘what Jung really said’, but is devoted to examine Jung’s thought critically and thinkingly, Giegerich’s thought is not irrelevant, even if his delimited interpretation of Jung’s notion of ‘soul’ found ‘no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’. By restricting himself to the ‘who owns Jung’ or Jung dixit argumentative style in his paper, Saban completely misses the point, and worse than that: the true guiding spirit of his piece leads to typically narrow-minded fundamentalism, with its claim of exclusive possession of the sole true interpretation of a text, and thus to a closed and immunized self-satisfaction with its own interpretation. Saban seems to be morally outraged by Giegerich’s claim of taking the base and starting point for psychology as the discipline of interiority from Jung’s thought, because he implies that this is dishonest on the part of Giegerich, by contrast with Slavoj Zizek who criticizes Jung ‘from afar, from an honestly and clearly established external position’ (ibid., p. 95, [my italics]). He extends this outrage to me by stating that, in equating ‘soul’ with ‘objective psyche’ I am being ‘disingenuous’ (ibid., p. 100), implying that I am concealing some hidden intention from the reader. Thus Saban is accusing me of consciously manipulating different concepts (‘soul’ and ‘objective psyche’) and, while knowing that they are different, presenting them as equivalent in order to deceive the reader. Instead of simply stating that I was mistaken, why did he prefer to charge me with being ‘disingenuous’, a word that implies dishonesty, insincerity, dissimulation? The personal moralistic slant of Saban’s critique looms up in his choice of words: all of a sudden, I am not just a mistaken psychological theorist, but a manipulator moved by a hidden intention. Giegerich is guilty of dishonesty for claiming that his is an immanent critique of Jung’s thought; and my paper highlights not simple intellectual failures, but—amazingly!—the ‘ethical pitfalls which can bedevil
116
Marco Heleno Barreto
psychology’ (ibid., p. 108 [my italics]) when one adopts the principles which I have adopted. This criticism is clearly made from a moral standpoint. Consequently, Saban places himself in the position of the champion-saviour of a chemically pure Jungian consciousness, who unmasks its bad-faith opportunistic users or dishonest interpreters. This is sheer fundamentalist misrepresentation. By contrast with the moralist-fundamentalist tone of his paper, Saban once wrote a review of Giegerich’s (2012) What is Soul? in which he stated that: … for me, Giegerich’s great and overriding value lies in the consistent challenge he offers to the intellectual complacency of the Jungian world: he provokes us to disagree. The difficult task for anyone who accepts this challenge will be to find arguments that rise to the level of vigour, intelligence and invention that Giegerich offers in this book. (Saban 2013, p. 111)
This is a much more intellectually sound stance. After all, even while being in disagreement with Giegerich, Saban here acknowledges the ‘great and overriding value’ of his thought, instead of simply discarding it as irrelevant on the grounds of its supposed exteriority to Jung’s psychology. But it seems that Saban believes he has found a single argument that can by itself render Giegerich’s challenge all of a sudden irrelevant, and my paper the substantiation of this irrelevance. Therefore, let us now examine some of the statements which are the bedrock of his argument. Trying to prove his central point, namely, that in Jung one cannot find the self-referential character of (at least some) soul phenomena, Saban has recourse to a quote from Jung’s (1938/1940) Psychology and Religion. But his choice works against his claim. For Jung states that the two dreams he chooses to interpret are about religion. Well, according to Jung, religion is not an ‘external referent’ (Saban 2014, p. 97) to those dreams, as Saban maintains: Jung states that religion (in his sense) is a psychic function, so that in a dream of religious motifs soul is expressing this natural function, its own religious instinct. Jung presents those two dreams ‘as an example of how dreams reveal the unknown inner facts of the psyche and of what these facts consist’ (Jung 1938/1940, para. 38). Furthermore, Jung takes the dreams as being about religion, and not about the personal stance of the dreamer. Saban claims that inclusion of the reference to the individual subject is absolutely essential to understanding any soul phenomena. This is a personalistic theoretical presupposition, indispensable to a Freudian approach, but not to a psychological stance that defends the real independence of collective unconscious activity with respect to the ego (here equivalent to ‘conscious mind’). Jung does have other dream examples, as a rule envisaged in their relation to the so-called personal unconscious, in which the personal situation of the dreamer seems to be a central focus of the dream. Saban has chosen precisely the wrong ones to refer to in order to prove his point that there is no source in Jung for a self-
A response to Mark Saban
117
referential activity of the psyche. Concerning the two dreams interpreted in Psychology and Religion, we now know that the dreamer is the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. But this personal referent is irrelevant to Jung’s interpretations, which focus on the images themselves, and not on their relation to the life of the dreamer. If Saban were right, Jung could not have analysed the two dreams in Psychology and Religion without giving us a full account of the dreamer’s personal context, as his interpretations would necessarily require such information in order to become intelligible. And the interpretations would necessarily have to be loaded with reference to such personal material—and they are not. Jung does not take a personalistic psychoanalytical stance in viewing those dreams: he is interested only in revealing their archetypal (‘soul’) meaning. Hence, in Psychology and Religion, Jung envisages the dreams as soul expressions of itself, and not of the private life of the dreamer. To approach them with the personalistic theoretical presupposition that they refer to the individual, Wolfgang Pauli is not necessary for interpreting their religious meaning. And anyway, that’s not what Jung does. Therefore Saban’s absolute exegetical claim that Giegerich’s standpoint ‘finds no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’ (Saban 2014, p. 95) is untenable in the light of his own chosen example. Jung himself adopts an approach based on the tautological principle. Saban describes Giegerich’s psychological approach as being ‘monocular’ (Saban 2014, p. 100). If, by that, he means that Giegerich is only interested in understanding psychic phenomena exclusively in terms of the notion of ‘soul’, which Saban characterizes as a ‘single lens’, then there would be nothing to object to (despite the fact that such terminology tends to convey the false impression that Giegerich’s approach is deficient and impoverished, when actually it only wants to be rigorously differentiated from other possible approaches, especially the personalistic one). Giegerich explicitly acknowledges the wealth of perspectives constituting Jung’s thought, ‘There are several quite different aspects to Jung’s psychology’ (Giegerich 2013, p. xii). But he is interested mainly in that Jung who had ‘a real notion of soul in contradistinction both to “psyche” (the behaviour of the organism) and to “civil man”, the “empirical personality”, or “the ego”—soul as a reality in its own right and as objective soul (whose “greater part is outside the body”, that is, outside the human individual)’ (Giegerich 2013, p. xiii). However, Saban’s non-negotiable point, without which the declared intention of his paper fails, is that such notion finds no source at all in Jung’s psychology. And, as we saw in examining the testimony of Psychology and Religion, Saban’s claim is inconsistent with Jung’s actual procedure in analysing the dreams of Wolfgang Pauli, which presupposes the self-referential or tautological dimension of the archetypal material. This is enough to show the fallacy of the thesis that there is no implicit or explicit source in Jung to Giegerich’s notion of ‘soul’, and to the consequent approach methodologically rooted in it.
118
Marco Heleno Barreto
Saban further disputes the rootedness of Giegerich’s tautological principle in the thought expressed in Mysterium Coniunctionis: ‘Above all, don’t let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image has “everything it needs”’ (Jung 1955/1956, para. 749). Saban declares that Giegerich’s interpretation of this passage misses the point, and tells us that, ‘What Jung is trying to emphasize is the radical otherness of the unconscious, and he therefore seeks to encourage the conditions in which that alterity may be best encountered on its own terms’ (Saban 2014, p. 97). But precisely what Giegerich’s tautological principle aims at is exactly to safeguard ‘the conditions in which that alterity [Jung’s ‘unconscious’; Giegerich’s ‘soul’] may be best encountered on its own terms. This alterity or otherness is represented, in Giegerich’s thought, by the psychological difference between soul and ego. Ego precisely ‘does not know and does not understand’ that which dreams are seeking to express, and can ‘interfere with unconscious material’, not allowing it ‘to come to the surface on its own terms’ (ibid., p. 97). In Saban’s concept of ego or ‘conscious mind’, there is no room for the distinction between a pragmatic perspective of consciousness and a psychological one. Both are lumped together. Giegerich, on the other hand, distinguishes between ego (the pragmatic I, concerned with survival in a broad sense) and the psychological I, which is soul itself and the organ of soul-making. Having overlooked this fundamental distinction presented in What is Soul?, Saban is unable to see that, in speaking to itself, soul needs the psychological I, and thus he totally misrepresents Giegerich’s stance. The ego as pragmatic orientation of consciousness is, by definition, unable to reach the perspective of soul, to understand it. Giegerich’s proposition of this avertedness between ego and soul corresponds to Jung’s view about the disorientation of ego/‘civil man’ when confronted with the realities of the collective unconscious, ‘Heaven and Hell are fates meted out to the soul and not to civil man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem’ (Jung 1934/1954, para. 56 [trans. modif.]). Saban proposes too quickly and superficially a ‘conceptual chasm’ between the ‘single lens’ of the notion of soul from which Giegerich’s psychology proceeds, and Jung’s position, from which he (Jung) sees ‘in all that happens the play of opposites’ (Saban 2014, p. 100). Saban avoids mentioning that, in Giegerich’s dialectical standpoint, soul’s activity is conceived as fundamentally self-contradictory. This omission permits him to simplify and impoverish the real point of divergence. Giegerich starts with Jung and pushes off from him: Jung’s ontological oppositionalism is dialectically sublated into the logical relation of opposites. This new position is only reached precisely by pushing off from Jung. But its basis, what is negated and therefore is fundamental to the achievement of the new stance, is precisely taken from Jung. As such, the new position will always and essentially refer to Jung, exactly in diverging from him. Consequently, the psychological perspective
A response to Mark Saban
119
that ensues from this dialectical sublation of Jung’s positions is in its own right legitimately and immanently related to analytical psychology, despite Saban’s protests to the contrary. Now, coming to my interpretations of Jung’s catastrophic material, Saban starts by reproaching my omission in articulating it with the personal subjective dimension. But the personal elements, though as a rule present explicitly or implicitly in most psychic events, were not the decisive factor in the 1913 visions. It is not the ‘combination of personal echoes with an evidently cultural/collective dimension that lends the vision its depth and impact’, as Saban claims (2014, p. 107), but the cultural/collective dimension by itself. There is no need to highlight the ‘personal echoes’ present in this vision to convey its meaning. Moreover, in my paper, I am not interested in the person of the human agent, who attended to the summoning of the objective soul and proposed analytical psychology as an answer, but in analytical psychology itself. I do not dispute that the human agent—Carl Gustav Jung— was necessary and relevant in this process. I only focus on its objective side: I propose the analogy of ‘Jung’ in the third dream and the priest in the Mass, thus drawing attention to the objective function of ‘Jung’ in the dream, and not to the personal idiosyncratic aspects of the empirical dreamer. This function is that of the psychological I, according to Giegerich’s thought. But Saban completely misses this crucial notion. In terms of the catastrophic material: ‘Jung’ was necessary to distribute the ‘life-giving healing grapes’ (and, no doubt at all, ‘Siegfried’—the son of Sigmund—had to be killed in order for this new position be reached). On the other hand, firmly sticking to the image, these ‘grapes’ were not produced by Jung as ego or even as psychological I; as Jung learned from his experience, ‘there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life’ (Jung 1963/1989, p.183). The same problem occurs when it comes to the topic of the conservative dimension of analytical psychology: Saban distorts personalistically my argument, misreading my interpretation as if I had said that the renewal motif in the third dream was ‘further evidence for Jung’s retrogressive conservatism’ (Saban 2014, p. 108, [my italics]). Apart from the fact that there is no place in my paper where I use this expression, my interpretation is more subtle than Saban’s distorted rendering of it. I state that the resulting healing effect (‘life-giving grapes’) will be distributed from within a psychological space preserved from the destruction, but affected by it. This is why Jung’s project, wholly committed to and expressive of his founding vision and dreams of 1913-1914, is at once catastrophic and anti-catastrophic. Saban seems to disagree with me that Jung’s psychological project is a kind of ‘reform by retrogression’. Well, this is not my judgment, but Jung’s (see Jung 1963/1989, p. 235-37). The words ‘conservative’ and ‘retrogression’ may sound politically incorrect to a leftist sensibility, but it was Jung himself who used them in describing the reformative intention of his work. And Jung in
120
Marco Heleno Barreto
this self-evaluation was wholly consistent with his visions and dreams; ‘Switzerland’ being preserved from the destruction gives support to the conservative aspect, and the renewed ‘life-giving grapes’ substantiate the reformative nature of his self-designated ‘reform by retrogression’. Not Jung’s, but soul’s conservative thrust is seen in the preservation of ‘Switzerland’ from the catastrophe. But, considering himself a ‘modern Jungian’, it seems that Saban cannot feel at home with the conservative and retrogressive character of this reform; he has to save Jung’s catastrophic material from itself. As he needs a scapegoat to blame for such an unacceptable aspect of Jung’s material, he creates one by distorting my interpretation and accusing me of ‘stubbornly’ construing the third dream as evidence for ‘Jung’s retrogressive conservatism’. Finally, after criticizing my interpretation of Jung’s visions and dreams of 1913-1914, Saban makes the bizarre assertion that I suggest ‘that their actual and sole referent is the obsolescence of analytical psychology’ (Saban 2014, p. 108). That is not what I state in my paper. My thesis of the logical obsolescence of analytical psychology is based only on the 1961 vision, and not on the catastrophic material of 1913-1914. But Saban simply considered Jung’s final vision to be ‘dubiously documented’. Either he suspects that Marie-Louise von Franz is not a reliable testimony in this case, or he thinks that the content of Jung’s vision (the last 50 years of humankind) is insufficient to be worked out in terms of its meaning. Be that as it may, he simply ignored my treatment of the last vision and contended that I was playing ‘fast and loose with [historical] contexts’, lumping together ‘visions and dreams which are situated in the collective and individual events of 1913-14 with the (dubiously documented) visions of a dying old man at the height of the cold war’ (ibid., p. 107). Again, the lumping together is only in Saban’s misreading. He simply constructed an argument that is not mine, and attributed it to me. This is a regrettable flaw in his assessment of my text, for in the end he simply failed to grasp the meaning of ‘requiem’ as it is used in my essay. Having in mind exclusively the article to which I have responded here, I submit that it is actually a fundamentalist act of excommunication. And we know that, from a psychological point of view, fundamentalism is a defence mechanism; it suppresses a certain content or idea which is threatening to the fundamentalist beliefs, negating it as being in reality its own other. Saban’s attempt to characterize Giegerich’s thought as irrelevant to modern Jungians (and the consequent dismissal of my paper) precisely negates it as analytical psychology’s own other. This act may give a dubious relief to a rigidly traditional Jungian stance which is challenged by Giegerich’s critical thought. But certainly it is not acceptable to truly ‘modern Jungians’. On the basis of this surprising piece, I will conclude my response by saying that, if Saban has failed in demonstrating that Giegerich completely and dishonestly misreads Jung in what refers to the notion of ‘soul’, he has triumphantly succeeded in showing us what Jungian fundamentalism is all about.
A response to Mark Saban
121
References Giegerich, W. (2012). What is Soul? New Orleans: Spring Journal and Books. ——— (2013). Collected English Papers. Vol. V, The Flight into the Unconscious: An Analysis of C.G. Jung’s Psychology Project. New Orleans: Spring Journal and Books. Jung, C. G. (1934/1954). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. ——— (1938/1940). Psychology and religion. CW 11. ——— (1955/1956). Mysterium Coniunctionis. An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. CW 14. ——— (1963/1989). Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffé, Trans. Richard & C. Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Saban, M. (2013). Review of ‘What is Soul?’ International Journal of Jungian Studies, 5, 1.
Another serious misunderstanding, indeed! a response to Mark Saban Marco Heleno Barreto, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Mark Saban’s article—‘Another serious misunderstanding: Jung, Giegerich and a premature requiem’—surprised me negatively. I regard Saban as one of the intelligent minds at work within the Jungian field. But the argument he offers in his paper is not only constructed on the basis of misinterpretations and lack of understanding of the complex thought of Wolfgang Giegerich and of my own paper (some of which I will address in a moment), and—horribile dictu—even of Jung, but it also reveals a hidden goal, which would not be justifiable to an open-minded scholarly forum of Jungian studies such as the Journal of Analytical Psychology. Hence, I would like to start my response to his paper by exposing its deeper nature. Saban declares that his intention is, ‘merely to show that, contrary to Giegerich’s repeated protestations, the “rigorous notion” at [the] centre [of his psychology] finds no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’ (Saban p. 95). This rigorous notion is the notion of soul, which has as its corollary another fundamental notion in Giegerich’s thought, namely that of psychological difference. Now, let us suppose for a moment that Saban would have succeeded in accomplishing his initial goal. Let us grant hypothetically that Giegerich would, in fact, be mistaken in his claim of assuming Jung’s notion of soul to be the conceptual matrix of psychology as the discipline of interiority. Then let us read the verdict presented at the end of Saban’s paper as its final conclusion: Giegerich’s psychology is irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’, as my paper succeeds ‘triumphantly in demonstrating’ (ibid., p. 110). And this irrelevance is presented as a natural consequence of the supposed exteriority of Giegerich’s psychology (and my paper) to their Jungian foundations. But, on the other hand, Saban seems to acknowledge critiques coming from ‘an honestly and clearly established external position’ (ibid., p. 95, my italics), such as Slavoj Zizek’s. As a matter of fact, these external critiques apparently are not irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’, who take them into account and honestly engage with them. Due to the praiseworthy amplitude of the
0021-8774/2015/6001/114
© 2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12131
A response to Mark Saban
115
editorial line adopted by the Journal of Analytical Psychology, we can find a rich dialogue and engagement of Jungian scholars with psychoanalytical, philosophical, scientific and theological standpoints that are external to Jung’s psychology. I believe that Saban would not object to the relevance of these intellectual efforts, otherwise we would have as a consequence the immunization of Jungian thought against any serious dialogue with standpoints other than Jung’s, and thus the avoidance of the possibility of a truly radical critique of its most cherished assumptions. But this would not be appropriate for ‘modern Jungians’. So, why does Saban exclude Giegerich’s thought as irrelevant (and consequently as not deserving of any attention from Jungians) simply because it supposedly is not grounded in Jung’s notion of ‘soul’? Here, the real (unconfessed) goal of his paper reveals itself: it is intended to rule out Giegerich’s psychology from the Jungian field at large. Saban’s piece is thus a kind of excommunication act: no need to take into consideration Giegerich’s thought, because it is irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’. But to a serious and unprejudiced Jungian scholar who is not only interested in exegesis, in ‘what Jung really said’, but is devoted to examine Jung’s thought critically and thinkingly, Giegerich’s thought is not irrelevant, even if his delimited interpretation of Jung’s notion of ‘soul’ found ‘no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’. By restricting himself to the ‘who owns Jung’ or Jung dixit argumentative style in his paper, Saban completely misses the point, and worse than that: the true guiding spirit of his piece leads to typically narrow-minded fundamentalism, with its claim of exclusive possession of the sole true interpretation of a text, and thus to a closed and immunized self-satisfaction with its own interpretation. Saban seems to be morally outraged by Giegerich’s claim of taking the base and starting point for psychology as the discipline of interiority from Jung’s thought, because he implies that this is dishonest on the part of Giegerich, by contrast with Slavoj Zizek who criticizes Jung ‘from afar, from an honestly and clearly established external position’ (ibid., p. 95, [my italics]). He extends this outrage to me by stating that, in equating ‘soul’ with ‘objective psyche’ I am being ‘disingenuous’ (ibid., p. 100), implying that I am concealing some hidden intention from the reader. Thus Saban is accusing me of consciously manipulating different concepts (‘soul’ and ‘objective psyche’) and, while knowing that they are different, presenting them as equivalent in order to deceive the reader. Instead of simply stating that I was mistaken, why did he prefer to charge me with being ‘disingenuous’, a word that implies dishonesty, insincerity, dissimulation? The personal moralistic slant of Saban’s critique looms up in his choice of words: all of a sudden, I am not just a mistaken psychological theorist, but a manipulator moved by a hidden intention. Giegerich is guilty of dishonesty for claiming that his is an immanent critique of Jung’s thought; and my paper highlights not simple intellectual failures, but—amazingly!—the ‘ethical pitfalls which can bedevil
116
Marco Heleno Barreto
psychology’ (ibid., p. 108 [my italics]) when one adopts the principles which I have adopted. This criticism is clearly made from a moral standpoint. Consequently, Saban places himself in the position of the champion-saviour of a chemically pure Jungian consciousness, who unmasks its bad-faith opportunistic users or dishonest interpreters. This is sheer fundamentalist misrepresentation. By contrast with the moralist-fundamentalist tone of his paper, Saban once wrote a review of Giegerich’s (2012) What is Soul? in which he stated that: … for me, Giegerich’s great and overriding value lies in the consistent challenge he offers to the intellectual complacency of the Jungian world: he provokes us to disagree. The difficult task for anyone who accepts this challenge will be to find arguments that rise to the level of vigour, intelligence and invention that Giegerich offers in this book. (Saban 2013, p. 111)
This is a much more intellectually sound stance. After all, even while being in disagreement with Giegerich, Saban here acknowledges the ‘great and overriding value’ of his thought, instead of simply discarding it as irrelevant on the grounds of its supposed exteriority to Jung’s psychology. But it seems that Saban believes he has found a single argument that can by itself render Giegerich’s challenge all of a sudden irrelevant, and my paper the substantiation of this irrelevance. Therefore, let us now examine some of the statements which are the bedrock of his argument. Trying to prove his central point, namely, that in Jung one cannot find the self-referential character of (at least some) soul phenomena, Saban has recourse to a quote from Jung’s (1938/1940) Psychology and Religion. But his choice works against his claim. For Jung states that the two dreams he chooses to interpret are about religion. Well, according to Jung, religion is not an ‘external referent’ (Saban 2014, p. 97) to those dreams, as Saban maintains: Jung states that religion (in his sense) is a psychic function, so that in a dream of religious motifs soul is expressing this natural function, its own religious instinct. Jung presents those two dreams ‘as an example of how dreams reveal the unknown inner facts of the psyche and of what these facts consist’ (Jung 1938/1940, para. 38). Furthermore, Jung takes the dreams as being about religion, and not about the personal stance of the dreamer. Saban claims that inclusion of the reference to the individual subject is absolutely essential to understanding any soul phenomena. This is a personalistic theoretical presupposition, indispensable to a Freudian approach, but not to a psychological stance that defends the real independence of collective unconscious activity with respect to the ego (here equivalent to ‘conscious mind’). Jung does have other dream examples, as a rule envisaged in their relation to the so-called personal unconscious, in which the personal situation of the dreamer seems to be a central focus of the dream. Saban has chosen precisely the wrong ones to refer to in order to prove his point that there is no source in Jung for a self-
A response to Mark Saban
117
referential activity of the psyche. Concerning the two dreams interpreted in Psychology and Religion, we now know that the dreamer is the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. But this personal referent is irrelevant to Jung’s interpretations, which focus on the images themselves, and not on their relation to the life of the dreamer. If Saban were right, Jung could not have analysed the two dreams in Psychology and Religion without giving us a full account of the dreamer’s personal context, as his interpretations would necessarily require such information in order to become intelligible. And the interpretations would necessarily have to be loaded with reference to such personal material—and they are not. Jung does not take a personalistic psychoanalytical stance in viewing those dreams: he is interested only in revealing their archetypal (‘soul’) meaning. Hence, in Psychology and Religion, Jung envisages the dreams as soul expressions of itself, and not of the private life of the dreamer. To approach them with the personalistic theoretical presupposition that they refer to the individual, Wolfgang Pauli is not necessary for interpreting their religious meaning. And anyway, that’s not what Jung does. Therefore Saban’s absolute exegetical claim that Giegerich’s standpoint ‘finds no source in Jung’s psychology, implicit or explicit’ (Saban 2014, p. 95) is untenable in the light of his own chosen example. Jung himself adopts an approach based on the tautological principle. Saban describes Giegerich’s psychological approach as being ‘monocular’ (Saban 2014, p. 100). If, by that, he means that Giegerich is only interested in understanding psychic phenomena exclusively in terms of the notion of ‘soul’, which Saban characterizes as a ‘single lens’, then there would be nothing to object to (despite the fact that such terminology tends to convey the false impression that Giegerich’s approach is deficient and impoverished, when actually it only wants to be rigorously differentiated from other possible approaches, especially the personalistic one). Giegerich explicitly acknowledges the wealth of perspectives constituting Jung’s thought, ‘There are several quite different aspects to Jung’s psychology’ (Giegerich 2013, p. xii). But he is interested mainly in that Jung who had ‘a real notion of soul in contradistinction both to “psyche” (the behaviour of the organism) and to “civil man”, the “empirical personality”, or “the ego”—soul as a reality in its own right and as objective soul (whose “greater part is outside the body”, that is, outside the human individual)’ (Giegerich 2013, p. xiii). However, Saban’s non-negotiable point, without which the declared intention of his paper fails, is that such notion finds no source at all in Jung’s psychology. And, as we saw in examining the testimony of Psychology and Religion, Saban’s claim is inconsistent with Jung’s actual procedure in analysing the dreams of Wolfgang Pauli, which presupposes the self-referential or tautological dimension of the archetypal material. This is enough to show the fallacy of the thesis that there is no implicit or explicit source in Jung to Giegerich’s notion of ‘soul’, and to the consequent approach methodologically rooted in it.
118
Marco Heleno Barreto
Saban further disputes the rootedness of Giegerich’s tautological principle in the thought expressed in Mysterium Coniunctionis: ‘Above all, don’t let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image has “everything it needs”’ (Jung 1955/1956, para. 749). Saban declares that Giegerich’s interpretation of this passage misses the point, and tells us that, ‘What Jung is trying to emphasize is the radical otherness of the unconscious, and he therefore seeks to encourage the conditions in which that alterity may be best encountered on its own terms’ (Saban 2014, p. 97). But precisely what Giegerich’s tautological principle aims at is exactly to safeguard ‘the conditions in which that alterity [Jung’s ‘unconscious’; Giegerich’s ‘soul’] may be best encountered on its own terms. This alterity or otherness is represented, in Giegerich’s thought, by the psychological difference between soul and ego. Ego precisely ‘does not know and does not understand’ that which dreams are seeking to express, and can ‘interfere with unconscious material’, not allowing it ‘to come to the surface on its own terms’ (ibid., p. 97). In Saban’s concept of ego or ‘conscious mind’, there is no room for the distinction between a pragmatic perspective of consciousness and a psychological one. Both are lumped together. Giegerich, on the other hand, distinguishes between ego (the pragmatic I, concerned with survival in a broad sense) and the psychological I, which is soul itself and the organ of soul-making. Having overlooked this fundamental distinction presented in What is Soul?, Saban is unable to see that, in speaking to itself, soul needs the psychological I, and thus he totally misrepresents Giegerich’s stance. The ego as pragmatic orientation of consciousness is, by definition, unable to reach the perspective of soul, to understand it. Giegerich’s proposition of this avertedness between ego and soul corresponds to Jung’s view about the disorientation of ego/‘civil man’ when confronted with the realities of the collective unconscious, ‘Heaven and Hell are fates meted out to the soul and not to civil man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem’ (Jung 1934/1954, para. 56 [trans. modif.]). Saban proposes too quickly and superficially a ‘conceptual chasm’ between the ‘single lens’ of the notion of soul from which Giegerich’s psychology proceeds, and Jung’s position, from which he (Jung) sees ‘in all that happens the play of opposites’ (Saban 2014, p. 100). Saban avoids mentioning that, in Giegerich’s dialectical standpoint, soul’s activity is conceived as fundamentally self-contradictory. This omission permits him to simplify and impoverish the real point of divergence. Giegerich starts with Jung and pushes off from him: Jung’s ontological oppositionalism is dialectically sublated into the logical relation of opposites. This new position is only reached precisely by pushing off from Jung. But its basis, what is negated and therefore is fundamental to the achievement of the new stance, is precisely taken from Jung. As such, the new position will always and essentially refer to Jung, exactly in diverging from him. Consequently, the psychological perspective
A response to Mark Saban
119
that ensues from this dialectical sublation of Jung’s positions is in its own right legitimately and immanently related to analytical psychology, despite Saban’s protests to the contrary. Now, coming to my interpretations of Jung’s catastrophic material, Saban starts by reproaching my omission in articulating it with the personal subjective dimension. But the personal elements, though as a rule present explicitly or implicitly in most psychic events, were not the decisive factor in the 1913 visions. It is not the ‘combination of personal echoes with an evidently cultural/collective dimension that lends the vision its depth and impact’, as Saban claims (2014, p. 107), but the cultural/collective dimension by itself. There is no need to highlight the ‘personal echoes’ present in this vision to convey its meaning. Moreover, in my paper, I am not interested in the person of the human agent, who attended to the summoning of the objective soul and proposed analytical psychology as an answer, but in analytical psychology itself. I do not dispute that the human agent—Carl Gustav Jung— was necessary and relevant in this process. I only focus on its objective side: I propose the analogy of ‘Jung’ in the third dream and the priest in the Mass, thus drawing attention to the objective function of ‘Jung’ in the dream, and not to the personal idiosyncratic aspects of the empirical dreamer. This function is that of the psychological I, according to Giegerich’s thought. But Saban completely misses this crucial notion. In terms of the catastrophic material: ‘Jung’ was necessary to distribute the ‘life-giving healing grapes’ (and, no doubt at all, ‘Siegfried’—the son of Sigmund—had to be killed in order for this new position be reached). On the other hand, firmly sticking to the image, these ‘grapes’ were not produced by Jung as ego or even as psychological I; as Jung learned from his experience, ‘there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life’ (Jung 1963/1989, p.183). The same problem occurs when it comes to the topic of the conservative dimension of analytical psychology: Saban distorts personalistically my argument, misreading my interpretation as if I had said that the renewal motif in the third dream was ‘further evidence for Jung’s retrogressive conservatism’ (Saban 2014, p. 108, [my italics]). Apart from the fact that there is no place in my paper where I use this expression, my interpretation is more subtle than Saban’s distorted rendering of it. I state that the resulting healing effect (‘life-giving grapes’) will be distributed from within a psychological space preserved from the destruction, but affected by it. This is why Jung’s project, wholly committed to and expressive of his founding vision and dreams of 1913-1914, is at once catastrophic and anti-catastrophic. Saban seems to disagree with me that Jung’s psychological project is a kind of ‘reform by retrogression’. Well, this is not my judgment, but Jung’s (see Jung 1963/1989, p. 235-37). The words ‘conservative’ and ‘retrogression’ may sound politically incorrect to a leftist sensibility, but it was Jung himself who used them in describing the reformative intention of his work. And Jung in
120
Marco Heleno Barreto
this self-evaluation was wholly consistent with his visions and dreams; ‘Switzerland’ being preserved from the destruction gives support to the conservative aspect, and the renewed ‘life-giving grapes’ substantiate the reformative nature of his self-designated ‘reform by retrogression’. Not Jung’s, but soul’s conservative thrust is seen in the preservation of ‘Switzerland’ from the catastrophe. But, considering himself a ‘modern Jungian’, it seems that Saban cannot feel at home with the conservative and retrogressive character of this reform; he has to save Jung’s catastrophic material from itself. As he needs a scapegoat to blame for such an unacceptable aspect of Jung’s material, he creates one by distorting my interpretation and accusing me of ‘stubbornly’ construing the third dream as evidence for ‘Jung’s retrogressive conservatism’. Finally, after criticizing my interpretation of Jung’s visions and dreams of 1913-1914, Saban makes the bizarre assertion that I suggest ‘that their actual and sole referent is the obsolescence of analytical psychology’ (Saban 2014, p. 108). That is not what I state in my paper. My thesis of the logical obsolescence of analytical psychology is based only on the 1961 vision, and not on the catastrophic material of 1913-1914. But Saban simply considered Jung’s final vision to be ‘dubiously documented’. Either he suspects that Marie-Louise von Franz is not a reliable testimony in this case, or he thinks that the content of Jung’s vision (the last 50 years of humankind) is insufficient to be worked out in terms of its meaning. Be that as it may, he simply ignored my treatment of the last vision and contended that I was playing ‘fast and loose with [historical] contexts’, lumping together ‘visions and dreams which are situated in the collective and individual events of 1913-14 with the (dubiously documented) visions of a dying old man at the height of the cold war’ (ibid., p. 107). Again, the lumping together is only in Saban’s misreading. He simply constructed an argument that is not mine, and attributed it to me. This is a regrettable flaw in his assessment of my text, for in the end he simply failed to grasp the meaning of ‘requiem’ as it is used in my essay. Having in mind exclusively the article to which I have responded here, I submit that it is actually a fundamentalist act of excommunication. And we know that, from a psychological point of view, fundamentalism is a defence mechanism; it suppresses a certain content or idea which is threatening to the fundamentalist beliefs, negating it as being in reality its own other. Saban’s attempt to characterize Giegerich’s thought as irrelevant to modern Jungians (and the consequent dismissal of my paper) precisely negates it as analytical psychology’s own other. This act may give a dubious relief to a rigidly traditional Jungian stance which is challenged by Giegerich’s critical thought. But certainly it is not acceptable to truly ‘modern Jungians’. On the basis of this surprising piece, I will conclude my response by saying that, if Saban has failed in demonstrating that Giegerich completely and dishonestly misreads Jung in what refers to the notion of ‘soul’, he has triumphantly succeeded in showing us what Jungian fundamentalism is all about.
A response to Mark Saban
121
References Giegerich, W. (2012). What is Soul? New Orleans: Spring Journal and Books. ——— (2013). Collected English Papers. Vol. V, The Flight into the Unconscious: An Analysis of C.G. Jung’s Psychology Project. New Orleans: Spring Journal and Books. Jung, C. G. (1934/1954). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. ——— (1938/1940). Psychology and religion. CW 11. ——— (1955/1956). Mysterium Coniunctionis. An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. CW 14. ——— (1963/1989). Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffé, Trans. Richard & C. Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Saban, M. (2013). Review of ‘What is Soul?’ International Journal of Jungian Studies, 5, 1.
