A Lecture given by Angela Maffeo before the Boston Chapter of Psychological Type
The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts
The genesis of this program sprung from a conversation I had in Boston during the winter of 1997 with Lisle Baker, a professor from Suffolk Law School. Lisle wanted the Boston Chapter for Psychological Type to offer a program that addressed the reasons behind the disparate academic standings of Freud and Jung. Since I had personally experienced this phenomenon up close and very personal while studying at Harvard University, just a few years back, I agreed to do this program.
INTRODUCTION
One of Carl Jung’s profound contributions was his focus on the psychological experience of midlife and the developmental tasks it evokes. He wrote about a psychology of the morning and a psychology of the afternoon. Murray Stein, a Jungian analyst, captured my own experience in his book entitled Midlife. About it he says:
"When the unconscious erupts at mid-life, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of the personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. Life still clings strongly to them. And actually, the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention. (Stein, 1983, p. 78)"
I am an ENFJ (1st. Extraverted Feeling; 2nd. Introverted Intuitive; 3rd. Extraverted Sensing; 4th. Introverted Thinking.) My 4th function is introverted thinking, and I have no doubt that its eruption at midlife, led directly to a decision to attend Harvard University in 1989 -- where I studied nights at the Extension School for the next five years. I concentrated on psychology, and, because I had a passion for psychodynamics, I was exposed to many lectures about Sigmund Freud -- considered by most whom have studied him seriously, as a maker of the modern mind. Why such a distinction? Because he attempted to apply a scientific gaze to the human psyche. He was a bold and courageous pioneer, mapping the unconscious. In the end, however, he failed because the biological assumptions upon which his theory rested proved fallacious; and, because, like most enlightenment thinkers, Freud believed there was a subject (the Self) on the one hand, and an Object (the empirical sensory world on the other hand), and all valid knowledge consisted in making maps of an empirical pre-given world. In this worldview, if the map is accurate and actually represents the objective world, “truth” has been discovered. The fallacy of this simplistic worldview, as the post-modernists have asserted, is that mapmakers are neither microscopes nor machines. They are living beings situated in their own life context and developmental experience. Thus the maps they draw have as much to do with their unique lenses as it does with the objective world they map. This was Freud’s Achilles’ heel. He left himself out of the equation and assumed that his psychoanalytic theory could be applied universally to all human beings when, in fact, it was a theory that reflected only the psyche of Sigmund Freud, and those like him. Most theories in the end reflect the theorist who proposes them and appeal to people who share their experience. After all, we are here tonight because of Carl Jung wrote Psychological Types out of what he said was:
I concentrated on psychology. And, because I had a passion for psychodynamics, I was exposed to many lectures about Sigmund Freud -- considered by most whom have studied him seriously, as a maker of the modern mind. Why such a distinction? Because, before anyone else, he attempted to apply a scientific gaze to the human psyche. He was a bold and courageous pioneer, attempting to map the unconscious. Most believe he failed,for at least two reasons: The first and most obvious reason is that the biological assumptions his theory rested upon were fallacious; and the second reason was his limited worldview. He, like most enlightenment thinkers, believed there was a subject (the self) on the one hand, and an object (the empirical sensory world on the other hand), and all valid knowledge consisted in making maps of an empirical pre-given world. In this worldview, if the map is accurate and actually represents the objective world, “truth” has been discovered. The fallacy of this simplistic worldview is that mapmakers are neither microscopes nor machines. They are living beings situated in their own life context and developmental experience. Thus the maps they draw have as much to do with their unique lenses as it does with the objective world they map. This was Freud’s Achilles’ heel. He left himself out of the equation and assumed that his psychoanalytic theory could be applied universally to all human beings when, in fact, it was a theory that reflected only the psyche of Sigmund Freud, and those like him. Most theories in the end reflect the theorist who proposes them and appeal to people who share their experience. After all, we are here tonight because of Carl Jung wrote Psychological Types out of what he said was:
“…his need to define the ways in which his outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s. In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment. My book therefore was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual to the world, to people and things.” (Jung, 1921, p. v. )
One of the fascinating courses I attended early on at Harvard University Extension School was called the "Madness of Crowds." It attracted students from far and wide. Recently, I heard that a student actually flew in every weekend from California, just to attend the class. The professor, William Henry Anderson, was a brilliant psychiatrist, with a Darwinian bent, who once described Carl Jung as “crazy” during a class. He thought Jung might have had a mental illness because he wrote so many books. I must confess that the class intrigued me. While I truly admired the professor, I also truly admired Carl Jung, so I had no difficulty dismissing Anderson's opinion as typical of lop-sided scientific thinking; attending college at midlife has such advantages. I was already familiar with the work of Jung and, like him, chose to follow that inner impulse he describes so eloquently as “Individuation.” I related very personally to Jung’s work and knew the meaning of his work both intellectually and experientially.
Henry Thompson in his book about Jung’s Function-Attitudes states that there are many Extraverted thinkers in academic positions of authority. He describes them,
“as driven to logically organize the external world around them and prescribe defining principles of cause and effect. He said “they create a mechanistic world of orderly, logical and structured processes. Charles Darwin (1859) in The Origin of the Species, applied Extraverted Thinking in such a convincing manner that his theory has been accepted as fact, and mounting evidence against it continues to be suppressed. Thompson goes on to say “This might occur because there are so many extraverted thinkers in academic positions of authority who have a need for a guiding principle like the one Darwin proposed.”
The same has been said about the appeal of Freud’s work by Anthony Storr: He said:
“Uncompromising reductionism [reducing everything to one thing -- like childhood origins] has a considerable emotional appeal. Any system of thought which is called ‘scientific’ and which promises a new understanding of human nature by getting down to a few basic essentials, is likely to appeal to those people who pride themselves on being hard-headed realists, undeceived by talk of altruism, self-sacrifice, disinterested love, or clap-trap about morality. Freud was expert at reducing all human striving to the lowest common denominator.”
Marie Louise von Franz, the great Jungian analyst refers to this quality as inferior extraverted thinking. Jung would have described this as “nothing but” thinking, a term taken from William James description of negative extraverted thinking types. In Psychological Types, Jung says:
Above all it shows a distinct tendency to trace the object of its judgement back to some banality or other, thus stripping it of any significance in its own right. The trick is to make it appear dependent on something quite commonplace.
Alan Watts, the brilliant teacher of Buddhism referred to this kind of thinking as a “gigantic putdown approach of the universe.” He felt that wonder and awe have no place in their mechanistic world.
The professor who taught The Madness of Crowds would often repeat the words:
“Everything is hierarchy and territoriality, and the rest is detail.”
He was a Darwinian and I believe his statement is accurate about man’s basic animal nature. But, for some of us, there are increasing levels of consciousness that are attainable, and knowledge based only on our lower biological levels is bound to be sterile and devoid of meaning. I know that statement is probably true about apes and I know it is also probably true of the academics I observed while working at MIT. But is that really true about everybody? It didn’t seem to be true about Thoreau, Gandi, Martin Luther King, or all the other great leaders that have had the courage to transform society.
I couldn’t help but notice two types of thinking all through my academic experience. There was Plato and Aristotle; Locke and Rousseau; Freud and Jung.
One of my more memorable experiences was a class on psychotherapy and included a discussion of Freud’s theory about little girls who suffered from penis envy. I asked the professor (a clinical psychologist) if he had ever actually talked to a little girl who exhibited this behavior.
He couldn’t answer that he had, and I was congratulated immediately by a feminist friend after class. Soon after, however, I was actually confronted with such a little girl -- now occupying the body of one of my classmates. She confided to me that, in fact, because she had been the only girl with 3 or 4 brothers, she had, in fact, wanted a penis just like her brothers. Obviously, Sigmund Freud is not so easily dismissed.
The professors teaching Women Studies treated Freud in the most irreverent fashion imaginable since so many of his major blind spots had to do with women. The first that comes to mind is his lack of appreciation or understanding of the mother’s role in the infant’s development. To Freud the infant’s development was an internal process barely connected with the interaction of the mother or other caretakers. Mothers were considered relievers of the infant’s tensions and not “perceived as persons with whom the infant actually interacted with emotionally and who provided stimulation and opportunities as well as the relief of tension. The interpersonal nature of the relationship totally escaped Freud because his focus was usually on the intrapsychic nature of the infant. What was happening inside the infant.” If a brilliant and trained scientist can be so blind about the obvious, perhaps it is because he sees what he expects to see, as we all do, instead of the actual events before him.
Jung said:
"The effect of the personal equation begins already in the act of observation. One sees what one can best see oneself. Thus, first and foremost, one sees the mote in one’s brother’s eye. No doubt the mote is there, but the beam sits in one’s own eye --- and may considerably hamper the act of seeing. I mistrust the principle of “pure observation.” (1921, p.9)
Feminist teachers had great fun with Freud and provoked hysterical laughter most of the time. The most profound experience I had studying women’s psychology was a class with, of all people, Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter Sophie Freud. The class was called Perspectives on the Psychology of Women. When she talked about her Grandfather, she would smile, and say, “Well, what can you expect from a man?” She writes in her book “My Three Mothers” that the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud had no knowledge of sexual matters until she was 13.” About her famous aunt, Anna Freud, she said, “When I was a young woman her words were gospel to me; later I lost my faith in that religion.”
The religion she speaks of is psychoanalysis. A strange word to describe a scientific theory but a word used all the time by its critics. The other vivid memory I have of is her repeated use of the phrase “Life is round.” The only other time I heard those words spoken out loud was by an Italian guide in Florence who described Italians as “round” and Americans and Germans as squares. Perhaps that is why so many great artists and thinkers have traveled to Italy from time immemorial. During Freud’s most creative period, he traveled to Italy 5 times in 3 years. Regrettably, Jung was never able to see Rome because he felt the experience would overwhelm him emotionally. Jung was “round.” There was no question about it. The central archetype of his system is always spoken of in circular terms -- as both the center and circumference of the psyche. In Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he said that if the goal of psychological development is the Self, then “there is no linear evolution (except at the beginning of life; there is only the circumambulation of the self.”
There were only two classes where Jung was discussed as a serious thinker. The first was a class called the Biopsychology of Waking, Dreaming and Sleeping. The professor was J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and the author of “The Dreaming Brain.” He said that Jung’s dream theory emphasized transparency [the dream is not disguised] and creativity, in contrast to Freud’s emphasis on obscurity and psychopathology. He went on to say that his approach to dreaming and other related mental processes was more positive than Freud’s, and [he] has appealed as a psychologist to artists, mystics, and religious thinkers, but has not commanded the respect or interest of scientists or psychiatrists, as had Freud.” Hobson went on to say that perhaps his dream theory, which echoes Jung’s may help to “redress this imbalance.” I would recommend this book to anyone interested in dreaming.
In a class called the Dynamics of Psychology and Religion taught by Dorothy Austen, Jung’s book, Memories, Dreams & Reflections was required reading. A Jungian analyst was a guest lecturer and the teaching assistant came straight from the Divinity School. Jung’s thinking was a balm in the melding of these two subjects because Jung looked at the world through the lens of the Self while academia, for the most part, looks through the lens and world-view of the ego.
