A review; an opinion
The seminar today was about Jungian psychology - now called 'depth psychology' in conjunction, or rather advocated in congruence, with the contemplative tradition in Christianity; often advocated by the stories of the saints, a tradition championed by Luther and the ensuing European theologians like Schleiermacher and Otto. Playing on Jung's psychoanalysis and use of myth, archetypes, and definition of soul and self, the speaker fused this into the Christian tradition of contemplation towards the path to, or union with, God. The presenter advocated for self-knowledge, and the discovery of self (which she considers the soul) as the mode by which one becomes closer to God. As she was a union psychologist conducting therapy of a sorts, she seemed to promote the contemplative tradition as the vehicle for which internal struggles of everyday persons to "transcend" toward a mystical union with God. Her claim to natural psychology and a kind of empiricism was via Jung - which...to me becomes problematic.
Albeit that this was a talk centered around Christianity and the use of Jungian psychology, I couldn't help but think that while the focus on self-knowledge and internal "journeys" can be found across various cultures, the way in which she essentialized and universalized how the psyche is with any person made this picture questionable. I kept thinking: this is a western remedy to a western construct of problematizing the psyche. In other words, the west has created this pathology of darkness, despair, "the shadow", and in turn created its resolve by intellectualizing and mythologizing, even mystifying the human psyche. It could be argued that Freud and Jung, despite their own positions on religion, Christianized the discipline of psychology. Framing a pathology of the soul eventually leads to a solution in the same terms. How both figures used the psychoanalysis tradition to convey what is happening in the psyche paved a way for a Christian psychology, in a similar way that Plato paved a way for Christian philosophy.
In response to this, two thinkers came to mind: Foucault and Luhrmann. Michel Foucault talks about how mental health, the determination of who is and is not mentally ill, as an act of moral judgment. It is a politically correct way to rid an aberrant person, to the norms of a society, from society and shun them in a white building. Labeling them as abnormal is a method of shovelling away those outside of what is normative. In a way, I feel like this is what this tradition is doing. By talking about a path to God and the soul and bringing further awareness to one's self about one's self and dealing with "the shadow" or one's "inner demons" is a way of pathologizing what can be normal thoughts and behaviors. The solution, cure, remedy, what have you, is then framed in this way using a Chritian-oriented approach as the method of the self to deal with these struggles appropriately. One must find self-knowledge and reach into the depths of one's unconscious and discover one's soul , pray and meditate and focus on God and love and etc. etc. etc. - the romantic mystical Christian stuff. However, as mentioned, this is essentializing a cultural construct of pathology and essentializing another cultural construct as remedy. The reality of such things only go so far before they turn into metaphors and myths of how to deal with existence and being in the world.I find this all too apparent with Jungian psychology and the place of archetypes, the hero's journey, and so on. While, there are concepts from the psychoanalysis tradition that has become useful (ego, unconscious, conscious, defense mechanisms and so on), it later transforms into projected metaphors within theoretical endeavors about the human psyche. Freud and Jung dealt primarily with patients with 'Neurosis', which may or may not be a cross-cultural mental ailment. The impression was that this kind of hybrid of Jung and the contemplative tradition, was a precursor to an evangelical (proselytizing) aim of conversion by statin that this was the "truth", or the way it is, with the human psyche and therefore one should convert to Christianity or therefore Christianity is the true religion. She didn't say that, but it was very close to it.
Despite some of the tones and how she approached the subject, we can acknowledge that there is a resounding motif about self-knowledge. Another postgrad said that this was similar to the Sufi tradition. The Buddhists would have also talked about this same process or seemingly same process (the union toward God), but in terms of enlightenment at which point there is no crossroads or union with a deity but a heightened state of personhood and transcending attachment. In the Neo-Confucian tradition, there is a saying: if one knows one's self and knows one's enemy, one wins a hundred of a hundred battles (지피지기 백전백승). There is also the saying that if I know myself and am proper, my family will also be proper, and then the state can be managed and the universe will be calm... or something like that (수신제가치국평천하). There was a question about the evolutionary purpose of something like this. She said that it was an embodiment of greater engagement. While this is vague, it is not entirely inaccurate either. Defeating one's enemies and enabling the purpose of family, is an advantage in evolution. The focus on self-knowledge and its importance has been mentioned in all areas of the world. However, as I said, it becomes problematic to universalize this process couched in Christian terms aka soul and God. If she acknowledged that this was the Christian frame of discussing the process of self-knowledge it would have been fine. If she advocated the "all religions are one" theory, "we are all on different paths towards the same mountain peak" theory, then she might have had a stronger position. However, the attitude was the advocacy of the Christian tradition as the correct and true. While there are parallels and similar motifs, it would be dangerous to simply classify them all under a Christian process to reaching a union with God or with one's soul. Doing so creates a rigidity of something that is radically dynamic and malleable to culture.
A good point of reference with Foucault about the casting of moral judgment in a particular cultural framework and then dealing with that from within such a cultural framework of consructs, is a study done by Tanya Luhrmann who investigated schizophrenia in the U.S. and in a region in Africa. While schizophrenia is typically associated with negative thoughts and hearing negative voices that plague one's behavior and self-esteem, she found that in a different cultural world schizophrenics were surrounded with people that cared for them and the voices the schizophrenic heard were not particularly negative voices but rather voices of other spirits and ancestors and so on who would have different things to say, which are not neecssarily negative. The voices that were negative, by interacting with those voices as opposed to shunning them, led to those voices changing into positive and constructive. So if schizophrenia is essentialized with hearing negative voices and then given prescriptions or therapeutic methods of dealing with these negative voices, the paradigm is still within the negativity and the "darkness" which eventually leads to a solution of "seeing the light" and "becoming at one with God". Another example, is "depression" and how this is dealt with. Depression is almost always seen as a negative phenomenon or mental disorder. However, if depression is seen as a positive and a spiritual time this does not cast a negative pathological framework upon a person experiencing the "depression", which can be regarded as something he/she has to do as a person on a journey. I may be wrong, but I vaguely remember that this was how Native Americans have considered "depression".
In a way, this is a criticism about essentializing, or universalizing, a particular cultural construct of the psyche onto a broader category while lacking more concrete data and evidence. When such evidence is absent, views about the psyche become susceptible to mystification, mythologies, and other metaphors to understand psychology. If a cultural construct of viewing the human psyche, laden with mystifying elements, becomes essentialized and reified as such then we have a path of casting moral judgments and subverting others who do not operate under this frame of thinking. And well, we have seen this happen before...
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