Chapter 3 Interpretation Dilemmas Relating to Carl Gustav Jung’s Concept in the Context of the Sociological-Anthropological Tradition

In: Collective Structures of Imagination in Jungian Interpretation
Author:
Ewa Kwiatkowska
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Abstract

Owing to its multidimensional nature, C.G. Jung’s concept can be interpreted in a variety of ways, occasionally contradicting each other. The Jungian categories are sometimes used inconsistently and eclectically in disciplines far removed from analytical psychology. This applies in particular to the attractive category of archetype, which is often used without much reflection, without taking into account its unique theoretical background. Attempts to adapt the Jungian categories to social sciences and cultural studies are not justified. Pointing to, on the one hand, naturalistic and on the other, metaphysical consequences of Jung’s concept is an effective way of repudiating these attempts.

Placing Jungism in the context of the French School of Sociology and referring to the criticism of Jung’s concept by Claude Lévi-Strauss highlight the reasons which make it impossible to consistently use such Jungian categories as “archetype” or “collective unconscious” in social sciences and anthropology. Despite the apparent links between the concept of the collective unconscious and, for example, Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective representations or Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of mystical participation (participation mystique), the perspectives of Jungism and social sciences are by and large contradictory, and Jungism can be not so much a rival of social sciences in explaining collective phenomena but a unique subject in these sciences.

An analysis of the notion of archetype reveals a connection to features of the numinosum category as understood by Rudolf Otto; the process of individuation has features of self-salvation, while the concept of synchronicity has metaphysical qualities. In view of the above, Jung’s concept with the accompanying therapeutic practices can be viewed as one of the manifestations of the social process of the shift of religion from primary to secondary institutions and its privatization, a process understood as described by Thomas Luckmann.

At present the Jungian concept and the themes presented in it are also subject to naturalist interpretations (of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and potentially epigenetics), which, from the point of view of cultural and social sciences, has reductionist consequences.

Therefore, can the Jungian concept be in any way a point of reference for cultural studies today? Can the categories of the collective unconscious and archetype be used as, for example, heuristic tools in these studies?

It seems that an interesting perspective is provided by the distinction between the iconic and the linguistic interpretation of the unconscious as well as by the comparison of Jung’s concepts and Lacan’s concepts as their paradigmatic examples. Inspired in his concept by the assumptions of Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, Lacan implicitly continues Lévi-Strauss’s criticism of the assumptions of Jungism.

In Jung’s concept the collective unconscious is manifested primarily through symbolic archetypal (matrical) images with a mythopoeic potential. From the point of view of the juxtaposition between the iconic turn and the linguistic turn, this reveals the heuristic significance of the Jungian tradition to culture studies. It is among those that, by raising the value of the symbolic image, have contributed to the development of research into the cultural imaginarium. This significance of the iconic interpretation of the unconscious is recognizable only today, in the context of the iconic turn.

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