Presentation time:
75 min
Lead author:
Andrew Samuels (SAP)
I have been attending Congresses since 1974 in London when I was 25. For several years, I was the youngest Jungian analyst in the world. Now, I offer some late-career reflections that both are and are not ‘personal confessions’.
At that first Congress, a mighty row broke out between Michael Fordham and various members of what I later came to call the Classical School (in Jung and the Post-Jungians). As a result, a group called the International Association of Jungian Trainees and Recently Qualified Analysts came into being. At the subsequent meetings of this grouping, it really became clear that significant clinical and theoretical – and even ethical - differences did exist.
One question posed by this talk is whether these differences are still in place today. Or have we moved to a model of a ‘generic Jungian analyst’? A global analyst who transcends the differences of tradition and school, whose lecturers do not continue to dominate their approach.
A further delicate question is whether the answer to these things matters at all?! Maybe it is our relations with the outer social world, with the planet, with psychoanalysis, and with each other that are more important?
I think I am not the only Jungian who has spent a lifetime wondering if I am really a Jungian, and what it means to be a Jungian. I have worked other fields, such as politics and relational psychoanalysis. I have called for Jungians to give up on their esotericism (as I see it) and become more promiscuous, going for EXOtericism.
I think the question of our various relations to Jung will not go away. As time passes, it gets ever more differentiated. So, by now, the matters of Jung’s anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, elitism and so on are no longer issues that are located within ‘Jung’. They are our issues.
One theme in the talk will concern whether it is possible to practice Jungian analysis without a firm rooting in the development of the individual from infancy. I was schooled to believe that it was not possible. Now, I feel differently, and am deeply interested in what one might call ‘the constitutional personality’ of the individual.
Mention of ‘the individual’ will lead me to propose a new and different conception of the individual than the one produced by either liberal humanism or post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Can we do this? Yes, I believe we can. And this new working of what it means to be an individual is what I see as a crucial task for Jungian analysts of all varieties in the years ahead.
The paper will be in the spirit of Lao-Tzu: ‘All are clear, I alone am clouded’. Jung repeats this at the end of MDR. But, in the spirit of Tricksterish enquiry, I wonder: ‘Did these wise old guys really mean what they said? Or was it brilliant and disarming disinformation?’