On what "grounds" do we establish our clinical authority? The question of what "grounds" our understanding of the processes of personality is one of the central questions in all of depth psychology.
Paul K. Kugler, Ph.D., Jungian analystFirst published in Quadrant XXIII:2
On what "grounds" do we establish our clinical authority? The question of what "grounds" our understanding of the processes of personality is one of the central questions in all of depth psychology. Every clinician must implicitly adopt a first principle on which to build his or her understanding of human personality and its characteristic psychopathology. The specific issue I wish to address is how this first principle acquires its authority.
Our Western modes of clinical interpretation have been unconsciously wed to a belief in some "ultimate" with a fixed, unimpeachable meaning. This "ultimate" acts as the unquestionable "ground" from which to diagnose, interpret, or explain all aspects of the clinical case. Depth psychology has traditionally grounded clinical diagnosis and therapeutic understanding on "absolutes," such as Truth, Reality, Archetype, History, Self, Center, Unity, Context, Origin, the Analytic Frame, and so on. To understand a symptom we look to one of these absolutes to give authority to our diagnosis and interpretation. For example, we look for the "origin" of the symptom, or we attempt to discover what "really" happened in the patient's "history," or we view the symptom from the perspective of the "Self" and its innate tendency to "center" or bring "unity" to the personality. For these "absolutes" to perform their diagnostic and interpretative function, they must themselves transcend the very clinical phenomenon they seek to explain.
But how is this transcendence accomplished? How do we "bootstrap" the clinical material to a therapeutic interpretation? The bootstrapping is accomplished by temporallyor spatially positing the "absolute" as being anterior, posterior, or other to the clinical material being interpreted. The meaning of the clinical phenomenon is then either causally derived from, or teleologically moved toward, this first principle.
Consider, for a moment, how we approach a dream analytically. To understand its significance we interpret the dream according to a posited a priori or a posteriori absolute. If the therapist is committed to a priori ultimates, the significance of the case material comes about through a reduction to such absolutes as drives, the Oedipus complex, biochemistry, the environment, family systems, childhood traumas, the analytic frame, and so on. Notice how all these absolutes are temporally located in the past. But the authority for the clinical interpretation might also be grounded in a posited absolute located in the future. For example, the dream might be interpreted as moving toward and referring to a posteriori ultimates such as the Self, archetypes, wholeness, unity, spirit, soul, death, and so forth. These a priori and a posteriori "god"-terms function as the lynchpins for our Western theories of clinical interpretation.
In the process of constructing a therapeutic hermeneutic, even one "purely" phenomenological and descriptive in nature, one term in this category of privileged elements functions as the "origin" of all the other terms. For example, in traditional Jungian psychology the "Self" performs this function, whereas in classical Freudian theory it is performed by the concept of "drives." Once the "origins" question is evoked, it is difficult to think of an origin without further asking about the origin of the posited origin! Just here we experience how we have subtly become trapped inside the logic of the "origins" metaphor, unconsciouslyelevating the term to a transcendental status that now attempts to account for all the other terms. The originary, explanatory principle explains everything except itself, and, therefore, is not the ultimate explanatory principle. This same problem exists for absolutes given teleological status. We are simply not able to account for the authority of our "absolute," the miracle on which we build our hermeneutic. And the more we attempt to account for the authority of our "ultimate," the Deus absconditus, the more the absoluteness in our god-term begins to deliteralize, dissolve, and disappear.
The dissolution of absolutes in our theories of knowledge had already begun at the end of the last century with Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead." Nietzsche wrote (1882):
We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from the sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. (p. 97)
The process of factoring time into a phenomenological understanding of clinical hermeneutics discloses that the grounds of therapeutic interpretation, the "horizon," the "sea," the "sun" all lapse into temporal regress or progress. These "absolutes" are not the eternal structures we once thought them to be, but rather temporal and spatial byproducts resulting from the metaphorical nature of language itself. Any such transcendental term is a fiction, heuristically and clinically valuable perhaps, but nonetheless fictional. For there is no linguistic concept exempt from the metaphorical status of language. No mode of discourse, not even clinical reports, can be literally literal. All writing is by its very nature ironic, simultaneously literal and figural. Language of any sort be it literary, clinical, or scientific does not allow for a transparent view to the so-called empirical world. Consequently, our psychological theories of interpretation have no location outside language, are neither objective nor empirical, and can never be a ground, only a mediation.
Until recently, therapeutic analysis focused primarily on patients, their symptoms, histories, and dreams, as well as on transference and countertransference reactions. It is time we extend our focus to include the role language plays in theory construction as well.
The primary terms in our theories play a significant role in structuring our perceptions and clinical judgments. The point is that our psychological notions are governed by laws so deeply embedded in our language and conceptual structure that we are barely conscious of appealing to them, nor can we easily render them explicit.2 More often than not, we become so fascinated by what we see in our patients that we are no longer conscious of the theoretical structures that we are seeing through. The "objective content" of our observation stands forth and we lose sight of the linguistic factor in consciousness that makes this content visible, foregrounded, tn the first place. What we see is, in part, the objectification of our own figures of speech, unconsciously imported into the case material by means of our theory and methodology. Becoming conscious of this dimension does not undermine the clinical perspective. On the contrary, it strengthens it by making us more aware of our epistemological, ontological, and methodological limitations, and, therefore, of what is possible within those limitations.The realization that our clinical grounds are not as absolute as we once thought them to be does not lead to a radical relativism nor to a nihilism. It leads, instead, to a psychological realism based on the awareness that all systems of clinical interpretation gain their authority through a grounding in a god-term, a transcendental "ultimate." But this "ultimate" is no longer so absolute, so ultimate, so psychologically inflated through an unconscious identification with the Deus absconditus. In therapeutic analysis we still must, on one level, believe in our god-term, and use it as if it were the ultimately explanatory principle. But on a deeper level, we know that it is not. And it is precisely this deeper level of awareness that prevents our psychological ideologies from becoming secular religions and differentiates professional debates from religious idolatry. For the " bottom line," the ultimate ground of depth psychology is not a known god-term, but the ultimately unknowable, the unconscious itself. And this is the "ground" that gives authority to all schools of depth psychology.
Paul K. Kugler is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute at Zurich, an analyst in private practice in the Buffalo area, and director of training for The Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is currently a member of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts, SUNY, Buffalo. He is author of The Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982) and numerous articles from post-modernism to experimental theater to contemporary psychoanalysis.
Notes
1. When Jung was directly asked about the "origin" of instinct in the Houston films, he responded by saying, "Nobody knows where instincts come from. It was a story played out millions of years ago. There sexuality was invented, and I wasn't there so I don't know how this happened. Feeding was invented very much longer ago than even sex, and why and how it was invented I don't know. I wasn't there. So I don't know where instinct comes from" (Jung 1977, p. 284). Later the interviewer again asks Jung an origins question, this time about the ego, and again Jung responds with the same joke: "I wasn't there when it was invented!" (p. 285) Jung's attitude toward the "origins" question was characteristic of science in general during the first half of this century. Jung was content to start with drives and archetypes as a priori givens and proceed from there to study their transformations and dysfunctions. Einstein also chose to begin with an a priori structured universe and to work from there to discover the laws defining its transformations. What Jung and Einstein did not do was to address how the psychic and physical universes became structured in the first place. Although this question was not a central focus for science during the first half of this century, it has become a primary concern during the second half of this century as witnessed in the current work on chaos and self-organizing systems in science, and the critique of the originary problematic in deconstruction and post-modern critical theory.
2. For example, consider the logic deeply embedded in our clinical use of causality. The principle of "causality" is so basic to the idea of etiology and clinical thinking that rarely is it called into question. Since Newton, the Western mind has taken for granted that causality implies a logical and temporal priority of cause to effect. But Nietzsche, in The Will to Power (1930), cogently argues that his idea of causal structure is not something given as such but rather the linguistic byproduct of a precise tropological operation, a "chronologische Umdrehun" [chronological reversal]. Suppose, for example, a patient feels a pain. This prompts the patient or doctor to look for a cause. Seeing a traumatic event in the patient's historical past, the doctor posits a link and reverses the perceptual or phenomenal order, pain—traumatic event, to produce a causal sequence, traumatic event—pain. Nietzsche concludes: "The fragment of the outside world of which we become conscious comes after the effect that has been produced on us and is projected a posteriori as its 'cause.' In the phenomenalism of the 'inner world' we invent the chronology of cause and effect. The basic fact of 'inner experience' is that the cause gets imagined after the effect has occurred" (Werke 3:804; translation and italics mine). The causal scheme is produced by a metalepsis, a substitution of cause for effect. Causality is the product of a tropological operation, not an indubitable foundation.
Let us be as specific as possible as to what this simple example implies for clinical explanation. It does not lead to the conclusion that causal explanations are invalid and should be avoided as explanatory principles. (Curiously enough, the DSM-III-R does avoid reference to causal etiologies.) On the contrary, causality is an archetypal image essential to the nature of the Western psyche. Although we cannot escape it (except through forms of neurotic denial), we can go through it, deepening our own consciousness by psychologizing the image. Archetypal psychology has shown how every image brings with it the hermeneutic by which it can be interpreted. This also holds true for the image of causality. Notice how the very act of deliteralizing (psychologizing) the image of causality relies itself on the notion of cause: The experience of pain, it is claimed, causes the discovery of the trauma and thus causes the production of the cause. To deliteralize causality one must operate with the notion of cause and apply it to causation itself. The deliteralization appeals to no higher principle or superior reason (for example, the Self), but uses the very image it deliteralizes. The concept of causation is not an error that psychology could or should avoid, but is an indispensable image, as long as it is understood to be the linguistic result of a tropological operation.
References
Jung, C. G. 1977. C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Ed. William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series XCVII. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nietzsche, F. 1882. The Gay Science. In The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and tr. W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1968, pp. 93-102.
Nietzsche, F. 1930. The Will to Power. In Werke,Volume 3. Ed. Karl Schlechta. Munich: Hanser, 1966, p. 804.
Copyright 1994 Paul K. Kugler. All rights reserved.
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Speakers and guests including Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi at the Clark University Psychology Conference, September 1909 in Worcester, Massachusetts, (photo: Clark University Archives).
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