Freud Versus Jung: Analysis Versus Synthesis Elizabeth Kaluaratchige
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Freud Versus Jung: Analysis Versus Synthesis Elizabeth Kaluaratchige To cite this version: Elizabeth Kaluaratchige. Freud Versus Jung: Analysis Versus Synthesis: Eastern religion and con- flict in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Recherches en psychanalyse, Université Paris 7- Denis Diderot, 2011, Perspectives contemporaines / Current Perspectives, 1 (11), pp.99-108. 10.3917/rep.011.0285. hal-01504283 HAL Id: hal-01504283 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01504283 Submitted on 13 Jun 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Recherches en Psychanalyse – Research in Psychoanalysis 11│2011 11│2011 – Current Perspectives Perspectives contemporaines History Freud Versus Jung: Analysis Versus Synthesis Eastern religion and conflict in the history of the psychoanalytic movement Freud versus Jung : Analyse versus Synthèse Le début d’une conflictualité inspirée des religions occidentales et asiatiques dans l’histoire du mouvement psychanalytique. Elizabeth Kaluaratchige Abstract: This article discusses the main causes of the disagreement between, on the one hand, Freud, who approaches psychical activity by analyzing its different components and develops a theory of the paternal law governing verbal thinking, and, on the other hand, Jung, who elaborates a notion of a psychical totality associated with “the maternal” and inspired by Eastern religious traditions. Résumé : Cet article traite de la cause majeure de la discorde entre Freud, le théoricien de l’analyse des activités psychiques dans ses diverses composantes, qui développe sa théorie de la loi paternelle de la pensée- parole, et Jung, qui développe la notion de totalité psychique associée au maternel inspiré des religions asiatiques. Keywords: Buddhism, the paternal function, mother, mysticism, analysis, synthesis Mots-clefs : Bouddhisme, fonction paternelle, mère, mysticisme, analyse, synthèse Plan: The mythical answer: the father of the horde and feminine jouissance The Hero’s Dream Resistance Against the Sexual The “Unifying” Force Versus Otherness The Self and the Collective Unconscious Versus the Ego and Collective Ideals Atheism, Religiosity and Esotericism Theory and Technique The Challenge 100 Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies. Hosted by the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, Paris Diderot at Sorbonne Paris Cité University. Recherches en Psychanalyse – Research in Psychoanalysis 11│2011 In 1908, Freud writes to Karl Abraham about religious doctrine,6 Freud insists that the Carl Gustav Jung: “[…] it was only by his mystical and oceanic striving is the result of a emergence on the scene that psychoanalysis movement towards the mother, associated with was removed from the danger of becoming a the impossible, and of the subject’s distancing Jewish national affair.”1 Freud is convinced that from the collective illusion based upon speech 7 Jung represents a new opportunity for and the love of the father. psychoanalysis, its chance to spread beyond the Jewish context. How ironic it was when he The mythical answer: the father of the discovered that Jung, the psychoanalyst most horde and feminine jouissance dear to his cause, was engaged in a kind of spiritual, mystical and occult quest. In 1911, As he begins work on Totem and Taboo, Freud Jung makes his intentions clear: “For a time I feels that his relationship with Jung is growing must get drunk on magic scents, to fully cold due to the latter’s resistance to Oedipus understand what secret the unconscious hides and the father complex;8 against his will, Freud’s in its depths.” Freud sounds the alarm: “You will own work also hastens their separation.9 Freud be accused of mysticism, but the reputation you argues that Oedipus was originally a phallic won with the Dementia will hold up for quite daemon, like the Dactyls of Mount Ida, whose some time against that. Just don't stay in the name means “erection.” He incites Jung to tropical colonies too long; you must reign at become interested in the Dactyls, then in home.”2 In other words, Freud wants Jung to Oedipus, Hamlet and Leonardo da Vinci, and to abandon his search for meaning in the Indian distance himself from self-castration, the spiritual realm, which would lead him too far punishment of the attachment to the maternal, away from psychoanalysis. We should which is in fact a denial of symbolic castration understand this inaugural moment of the by the father. As Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor points conflict between Freud and Jung as a out, questions of “the relations between fathers “theoretical and technical” war between two and sons” are a recurring theme in Freud and fundamentally opposing and/or complementary Jung’s relationship.10 Freud hopes to respond to operations. This allows us to grasp the Jung via the scientific myth of the primal horde, disagreements that drew Jung away from from which he deduces that the dead father Freudian psychoanalysis due to his attraction to remains concealed in the totem and in the the idea of psychical “totality” “made up of plurality of gods, and foregrounded in monotheism consciousness and the infinite ocean of the soul through the concept of the single God.11 The 3 on which it floats” and inspired by Christian and primal father, Urvater, is transformed into the Indian religions, primarily by Tantric Buddhism. glorified dead father or the inner father, from Jung marks the beginning of a chronic conflict whom Oedipus must break away in order to gain with psychoanalysis, which we can locate in a independence and freedom. This is how we particular current of the emerging Western should understand the Freudian hypothesis. The modernity. This conflict has survived into the fantasy of totality and completeness is therefore st 21 century, in the form of bodily and spiritual an infantile one: becoming the “mother’s penis” Buddhist practices of Mahayana worship in order to “make her complete”. originating in Asia.4 Freud encounters these The primitive instinct, such as the one argued spiritual phenomena, foreign to the mysticism for by Jung, can only be a fantasy of satisfying a of Western monotheism, not only through Jung, primitive desire - to abandon one’s organ, the his favorite disciple, but also through his friends, mark of symbolic castration – and a hope for a for example through Romain Rolland, a believer possible existence “outside sex.” Freud also 5 in the oceanic feeling. Seeing it as an isolated speaks about the subjection of “castrated” sons striving, only retrospectively integrated into the to the power restored to the females during the 101 Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies. Hosted by the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, Paris Diderot at Sorbonne Paris Cité University. Recherches en Psychanalyse – Research in Psychoanalysis 11│2011 transitional period between the murder of the mana,19 a collective male figure.20 The latter is father and the symbolic pact between the only a preliminary condition for the formation of brothers.12 Freud’s argument suggests that in the idea of God,21 instead of being an essential terms of phylogenesis, the castrating primal cultural characteristic, as Freud would have it. father is relayed by the castrating females (the Jung sees the power of the male essence in the Great Mothers), who then return as the God-man and heroic figures in the mana instigators of the fantasy of self-castration in the personality, simultaneously conscious and ontogenesis of a subject unable to resolve his unconscious, or rather neither conscious nor Oedipal complex. The Freudian argument is unconscious. To end this confusion, yet to avoid based on self-castration and self-punishment spiritualizing the masculine and feminine practiced among the monastic Vestals, where principles, Freud explains that in his singularity, castrated priests lived alongside virgins, the God-man is situated by a type of “keepers of the sacred fire” referred to in the relationship to the individual and the New Testament and represented by the collectivity, based on the vicissitudes of the “terrible virgin” Saint Agatha of Sicily. When paternal complex. Freud speaks about Diana of Ephesians, he does not exclude the existence of a cult of the Great The Hero’s Dream Goddess, “unassailable and out of reach,”13 which was later reintroduced by its cultural Freud studies the human desire for descendants.14 He also shows that, like Athens, completeness by examining the first possible Rome too has left behind a few traces of this human myth, the heroic legend. The hero greatly desired virgin mother, for example in the separates himself from the group and only form of the Temple of Minerva in the city of returns to it in the form of the peerless member 15 Rome. of the culture. He is perhaps the youngest son, The Indian cult of self-castration is attested to the mother’s favorite and chosen one. The hero by the tradition of the eunuchs Hijra and by the in turn becomes the father of the horde. He worship of the goddess Durga or Bahuchara claims to have alone killed the father, which Mata. Based on the idea of a dialogue between only the horde as a whole would have ventured Shiva and the power known as Shakti and upon. In the Freudian theorization of the hero represented as a divinity, Tantra calls for the figure, the Jungian concept of the union spiritual search for unity. The word Tantra, resembles an Oedipus dream, before the end of through its Sanskrit roots of tanta or tanntr, his journey.