Jung in Context
Neafsey, James
The social, religious, & personal matrix JUNG IN CONTEXT PETER HOMANS Univ. of Chicago, $15, 234 pp. James Neaf sey IN THIS BOOK Peter Homans takes a fresh approach to Jungian studies free of...
...Jung's experience of religion forms a second context which influenced his mature thought...
...The third factor which influenced the making of Jung's psychology is the social situation of mass man in a mass society...
...Jung's estrangement from Freud plunged him into a deep psychological and intellectual disorientation—a period Jung refers to in his autobiography as his confrontation with the unconscious...
...The painful breakdown of the old identity led to a successful breakthrough to a new identity as original psychologist, social critic and re-interpreter of traditional religion...
...Through naming his own personal experiences during these crisis years Jung created a unique system of psychological ideas...
...His "contextual approach" requires a continuous interweaving of social, religious and personal factors which I found consistently illuminating as well as frequently repetitious...
...It is particularly effective for those suffering from over-identification with a rigid persona characterized by extroversion and extreme rationality...
...4 July 1980: 413...
...Homans works from the assumption that great and innovative psychologists create their systems of thought "partly as a response to social conditions and partly as a response to their intellectual heritage, as the two forces are mediated through the double movement of experience and reflection in their personal lives...
...The core of Jung's mature thought is an attempt to reconcile these three factors in theory and therapeutic practice...
...But inwardly Jung cultivated a private, mystical sense of religious experience with roots in the numinous dreams of early childhood...
...Homans attempts to carefully unravel these threads that Jung has woven together...
...They provide a rootedness that is inwardly rather than institutionally based...
...What I found most original and Commonweal: 412 thought-provoking about the book is the new paradigm that Homans employs skillfully...
...The growing popularity of Jung's works during the "me decade" which has now drawn to a close suggests that an increasing number of people find that Jung's experiences reflect their own...
...Modernity is characterized by rootlessness, depersonalization and either isolation or submission to authority...
...His method is to locate the genesis of Jung's original psychological ideas in their social, religious and personal contexts...
...The individuation process is Jung's attempt at a cure for mass-mindedness...
...On the one hand, Jung was influenced negatively by his father's traditional Protestant Christianity...
...He focuses his analysis on issues of self-esteem, idealization, the relationship between pathology and creativity, and the formation of an independent, cohesive sense of self...
...The archetypes constitute a kind of innate tradition ingrained in the human psyche...
...During those years Jung developed a complex stance toward religion which repudiated traditional, institutional forms of Christianity while affirming the archetypal meaning of its symbolism...
...The conflict between these modes ran through the entire first half of life reaching a kind of climax in the crisis years...
...Such fundamental intuitions of a creative thinker are difficult to define, and the problem is compounded in Jung's case by the volume, complexity and notably unsystematic style of his work...
...Homans believes that the emergence of Jung's uniquely "Jungian" ideas can be traced to the "creative illness'' which beset Jung from 1913-1918...
...Homans argues that Jung's relationship with Freud was a kind of "narcissistic merger" characterized by a great deal of unconscious projection and grandiose 4 July 1980: 411 fantasy by both men...
...Reading the book is like trying to follow the pattern in Celtic interlace...
...The final stage of the individuation process was the formation of the self through the successful resolution of an encounter with a god-image...
...James Neaf sey IN THIS BOOK Peter Homans takes a fresh approach to Jungian studies free of both anti- Jungian polemics and worshipful Jungian fundamentalism...
...According to Homans Jung found himself at the intersection of two cultures: traditional Christian culture and modern secular culture...
...Thus Jung's theory of individuation both explained the private, mystical mode of religious experiences, and also re-interpreted the traditional mode in terms of the individuation process...
...His popularity can be expected to increase as the forces of depersonalization in modern culture and the decline of traditional religion reach the crisis point in individual lives...
...When the relationship ended, Jung was faced with the task of reconstructing a new identity...
...Homans is after the "keystone"—the synthetic insight that holds together the essential structure of Jung's system...
...In a sense, the self is a mid-point which mediates between inner and outer demands...
...Therapy consists in dissolving the persona, assimilating the archetypal contents which emerge, and gradually developing the inward perspective of the self...
...Homans analyzes Jung's internal conflicts in terms of the psychology of narcissism...
...It provides a unique and personal perspective to counterbalance the tendency toward uncritical social conformity so dominant in modern culture...
...It is as if Homans were trying to recreate that uniquely Jungian insight in his readers...
...The book circles a single, fundamental intuition at the base of Jung's thought...
...Homans distinguishes two religious modalities in Jung's experience...
...I also found Homans book a valuable resource for assessing the "hazards and hopes" of the age of narcissism...
...As with his stance toward religious experience, Jung's relationship" to modernity is not simple acceptance or rejection, but rather a complex synthesis which attempts to integrate traditional values with secular culture...
Vol. 107 • July 1980 • No. 13
