Edward Walker responds to Bobbie Stephens-Wright’s article on ‘The Occult: Freud versus Jung’ in Sofia 116.
Reading Bobbie Stephens Wright’s impassioned article comparing the work of Jung and Freud Sofia 116, June 2015), I wondered at her focus on the word ‘occult’, as if this expressed the main thrust of Jung’s ‘analytical psychology’. It was, of course, the issue which caused the break between the two men, but surely the strong emotions of the two – Freud delighted to find a non-Jew to be his ‘crown prince’, then feeling ‘betrayed’ when Jung disagreed with him; and Jung, delighted to find in Freud the strong father-figure that his own father had never been, flattered to be ‘anointed’ as his successor, then feeling that he must for the sake of his own integrity ‘strike the father dead’ – played their part. As in many (most?) divorces, there was not a guilty party, and to value only the insights of one party and ignore the value of the other seems to me to be a mistake. Freud had made Jung promise ‘never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it.’ Here was the crux. Anthony Storr’s brief study of Jung in the Modern Masters series puts it succinctly. ‘Freud undoubtedly attributed supreme value to the orgastic release of sex, whereas Jung tended to interpret even sexuality itself as symbolic; possessing “numinous” significance, in that it represented an irrational union of opposites, and was thus a symbol of wholeness.’ Storr returns to this theme at the end of his study. ‘Jung, with his emphasis upon the spiritual, as opposed to the physical, aspects of human nature, provides an important and necessary counterbalance to Freud’s obsession with the body.’ Storr, however, is no uncritical advocate, admitting (like Bobbie Stephens Wright): ‘I find it difficult to sympathise with his preoccupation with the occult, with his views on synchronicity, and with the ghosts and poltergeists which throng his autobiography.’ Nor can one overlook Jung’s notorious womanising. But Picasso’s womanising does not detract from the value and originality of his art. Is it really the case that Jung has attracted more ‘followers’ (whatever that may mean) than ‘poor old Freud’? And do we, in any case, have to choose between the two? Jung himself recognised Freud’s pioneering greatness. ‘Like an Old Testament prophet (he wrote in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections) he undertook to overthrow false gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesties and hypocrisies, mercilessly exposing the rottenness of the contemporary psyche. He did not falter in the face of the unpopularity such an enterprise entailed.’ Speaking personally, and with enduring gratitude to an inspirational Freudian analyst, whom I consulted over a period of six months some fifty years ago, I frequently return to that moving poem by W.H. Auden In Memory of Sigmund Freud: Of course they called on God; but he went his way, Down among the Lost People like Dante, down To the stinking fosse where the injured Lead the ugly life of the rejected. Turning from Freud to Jung, I don’t think the unspoken assumption that Jung shared with many of us ‘unconscious anti-semitic motives still resident in our psyche’ can be sustained. The editor of his Complete Works and of the two volumes of his letters, Gerhard Adler, was himself Jewish, and like Freud had to flee Nazi Germany in 1937. To Erich Fromm, another great Jewish figure in the development of the psychoanalytic movement, I feel I also owe a debt of deep gratitude, and in particular a remark he made in his Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950). The question is not religion or not but which kind of religion, whether it is one furthering man’s development, the unfolding of his specifically human powers, or one paralysing them. ‘Doing right in order to be rewarded in an afterlife’ belongs to a paralysing kind of religion, and finds no place in the work of Jung that I can see. Rather, the whole thrust of his work (as I understand it) is in the direction of what the Buddhist Eightfold Path refers to as ‘Right effort’. ‘The achievement of personality means nothing less than the best possible development of all that lies in a particular, single being. (It) is an act of the greatest courage in the face of life, and means unconditional affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of human existence, with the greatest possible freedom of personal decision.’ (C.G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, 1940). It is hardly a ‘fluffy bunny’ Jung that has drawn many to value his work, among them J.B. Priestley, who in an obituary described Jung as ‘a master physician of the soul in his insights, a profound sage in his conclusions. He is also one of Western Man’s great liberators.’ As much could be said, too, of Freud. I want to salute them both.
Edward Walker was an Anglican minister for 18 years, five of which he spent in apartheid South Africa. After returning to Britain he resigned from the ministry and became an RE teacher in schools and colleges. His book Treasure beneath the Hearth is reviewed in this issue.