Friday Essay — Freud, Jung and Popper: Acceptance, Transformation and Science
Some Friday reflections on psychology, philosophy and science. An examination of the differences between Freud and Jung in their approach to psychopathology reveals something more than an analogy to Plato and Aristotle. Freud offers a dark theory of the acceptance of damnation and one’s place within a world-order, Jung offers a hopeful theory of personal transformation, flourishing and salvation based on an acute observation of the world. Would Sir Karl Popper have rejected psychoanalysis as fundamentally unscientific so devastatingly had Jung occupied a greater position in its canon relative to Freud?
One of the fun things you can do when you’re a psychological economist rather than strictly a behavioural economist is to delve deeply into psychology. Recently I’ve found myself engrossed in the psychoanalysts while working my way through Jordan Peterson’s monumental Maps of Meaning, which draws heavily on Jungian psychology. One of the things I’ve increasingly been struck by is the difference between Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) and Jung (his great rival), especially on the dangerous question of psychopathology. To my mind it is reminiscent of the fundamental break between Plato and Aristotle in Western Philosophy, which suggested an interesting question to my mind: would Karl Popper have made so devastating a rejection of psychoanalysis for being fundamentally unscientific had psychology accorded a greater place to Jung in its canon?
The question is relevant, because as Peterson notes in the conclusion of his monumental work, Jung is curiously underrepresented in the psychological sciences. To be sure, his personality typology lives on as the basis for the famous Myers-Briggs personality typology, and his Introversion-Extroversion axis is considered one of the Big Five personality traits, but his psychology of the non-conscious mind is curiously underrepresented. What I wonder is whether this is because of Jung’s difficult and frightening view that psychopathology is an opportunity for personal transformation which it is the responsibility of the individual to seize, relative to Freud’s more comforting view that it is a trauma which is neither the fault of the individual nor something they can do anything about but accept.
Freud and Jung: Darkness and Light, Acceptance and Transformation
As a good entry point to these two great psychologies, I would strongly recommend, in Freud’s case, his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and (since the former was written before Freud’s discovery of the Superego) his later Civilization and Its Discontents, while for Jung I would strongly recommend his “Tavistock Lectures”, collected in Analytical Psychology. What one will see here, I think, is what I have characterised as the fundamental “darkness” of Freud’s theory relative to the fundamental “lightness” of Jung’s. I think one will see that Freud’s theory offers at best a form of acceptance of damnation, where Jung’s offers a form of salvation through transformation. And I think something more than an analogy exists between these and the totalitarian theory of Plato in The Republic that the path to happiness lies in acceptance of one’s place in the social order relative to Aristotle’s theory in The Nichomachean Ethics that the path to human flourishing lies in the learning of how to practice “excellence” in one’s own individual actions.
Both Jung and Freud were great Medical Doctors in their own right (rather different to the order of Doctors of which author is part!). Their entry into the realm of psychology was stimulated by their deeply humanitarian desire to help people suffering from afflictions clearly of a mental origin — neuroses and psychoses.
What was revolutionary about their theories was Freud’s realisation, which Jung immediately incorporated, that these afflictions of the mind arose from the interaction between the conscious and the non-conscious (subconscious and unconscious) mind. Our non-conscious mind knew something was wrong with the way our conscious mind oriented us toward our world and how to act in it and this caused us discomfort (which, I would hypothesise is an early variant of Leon Festinger’s magnificent theory of Cognitive Dissonance). This, as Jordan Peterson says, is what lends the eeriness to the psychoanalysts’ theories: our minds know something which we do not know and there is something which is not us which thinks in us. And this something can cause us pain.
The first challenge then, in dealing with afflictions of the mind (without resorting to psychopharmacology or attempting hypnosis) is to understand what it is that the non-conscious mind knows about how our conscious mind is not approaching the world in the “correct” manner. But how does one come to know something which, by definition, one does not consciously know? How does one become conscious of one’s non-conscious mind? This is where the imaginative genius of Freud is utterly unparalleled. For he realised that we do interact with our non-conscious mind. The medium in which we interface with our non-conscious mind is the dream. In the dream we are unconscious and our non-conscious mind is what is thinking, and yet on some level we are conscious of this process.
So one way to discover the complexes which are guiding the thoughts of our non-conscious mind (not the only way — Freud and Jung also developed extensive theories of word-association as a means of uncovering these complexes) is to figure out what our dreams are telling us. If we can interpret the dream, we can discover what our non-conscious mind knows about what is wrong with the way our conscious mind is orienting us toward the world and our behaviour in it. It is in the theory of this interpretation that we find the origin of the great divergence of Freud and Jung.
Freud’s theory: darkness, acceptance and damnation
Freud’s remarkable theory, outlined first in the extraordinary Interpretation of Dreams and developed over his many years of practice, is that the dream is the arena in which the “Ego” (from the Latin for “I”) observes the struggle between the primitive, quasi-barbaric “Id” and our morally judgmental, socially conditioned “Superego”. In the dream, the Id yearns to reveal something to the Ego. It seeks to reveal a wish that the individual yearns to fulfill. But this wish, reflecting the barbaric and primitive nature of the Id is unacceptable to the social morality of the Superego, which sets up an “internal censor” to suppress it. It is this suppression which creates neurosis, for we cannot then be conscious of our wishes and orient ourselves properly to the world. The Id is then forced to reveal this wish in symbolism which subverts the internal censor. Quite a violent theory.
The nature of this wish is what we now remember Freud for. He theorised that Id was always trying to make us aware of a wish always of a sexual nature sufficiently perverted relative to social norms for the Superego to seek to suppress it. Desires to commit incest (the famous Oedipus complex and the lesser-known Electra complex), indulge in homosexuality (fin-de-siecle Vienna was rather “heteronormative”, as we would now say), even to engage in necrophilia were wishes the Id was trying to bring to our attention. One can see why Freud to this day arouses strong and not entirely unwarranted emotions.
Freud argued that society could probably stand and probably should stand lightening up on sexual mores somewhat, and by doing so did immeasurable service to Western Literature at the very least. Without Freud we would not have the supreme beauty of DH Lawrence’s writing about the need for sexual intimacy between men and women in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Women in Love and Sons and Lovers. We could possibly even argue that he helped to usher in tolerance of homosexuality. But Freud was no fool, and realised that we really must not act out the more barbaric of the wishes the Id was presenting to us (the Superego exists for a reason after all). The best we could do then was to become aware of our perverse sexual wishes, and accept them for what they were. The road to mental health, in Freud’s theory, was the acceptance of our damnation to be tormented by perverse sexual wishes which we must not fulfill. It is, to my mind at least, a very dark theory.
Jung’s theory: light, transformation and salvation
Jung’s path to his theory was brilliantly portrayed by Michael Fassbender in A Dangerous Method. It originates, very simply, in his skepticism that the origin of neuroses were unfulfilled sexual wishes alone, based on his own extensive clinical practice. The patients he was treating, and the (literally) thousands of dreams he was interpreting simply did not seem to always be lending themselves to Freudian interpretations.
Gradually he came to develop his own perspective on the interpretation of dreams, which is legendarily subtle and complex but nonetheless based on an extraordinarily simple proposition. Jung found that he could interpret dreams far better (on the whole) and in a manner useful for restoring mental health if he interpreted them as compensations. The dream was an attempt on the part of the non-conscious mind to communicate to the conscious mind an excess or deficiency in the way the person oriented themselves toward the world and how to act in it. The dream, Jung thought, was where a presence within (the unconscious), was doing its utmost to communicate to you what you were doing which was hurting you and how stop the hurting.
So if something was not going well in your life, and you were developing neuroses as a result of your conscious mind not being able to make sense of it and how to respond to it, Jung thought the non-conscious mind would seek to inform you of what to do about that in your dreams. The unconscious in Jung’s theory is almost friendly. It’s trying to help you. It’s trying to suggest to you how you might transform in order to function better in the world. The unconscious speaks to us in the dream and suggests the path to happiness.
In one sense then, Jung might have said that we should be grateful for psychopathologies. When our minds begin to hurt us, it’s a sign that we need to transform something in our thinking and orientation toward the world and how to act in it, and our non-conscious mind will point out the way to so transform it. M Scott Peck famously called this the “healthiness of depression”. Aleksandr Solzenitsyn too said as much in his extraordinary “Ascent” chapter within The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2. He was grateful for having been thrown in the concentration camps, with all the mental anguish and threat of death that brought with it, because it forced him to look over his life and thought, identify what he had done wrong, and transform himself to do wrong no longer. One is reminded of that terrible truth in Hebrews 12:6 — “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth”.
Jung’s extraordinary body of work hinges on this realisation that the non-conscious mind seeks to urge us toward transformation in the face of adversity. The strangeness of dreams and the need for their interpretation, to his mind, arose not because the dream needed to outwit an internal sensor, but because the concepts it was trying to communicate were so incredibly subtle, and in fact pre-linguistic, beyond ancient. The non-conscious mind, originating in times beyond all recollection and language, could only speak to us about how we ought transform ourselves in symbols. Beginning with Symbols of Transformation Jung would progressively weave together a vast system for understanding the archetypes which such symbols represented — complexes deep within the non-conscious mind which guided thinking about how the individual ought go about the process of transforming themselves.
Jung’s quest to understand these archetypes of the collective unconscious would lead him to discover that religion, and its precursor, myth, were not, as Freud had made them out to be, systems of repression. In fact, Jung discovered that the intellectual systems of the great world religions, and the archaic stories of myth were our attempts to express the prelinguistic archetypes, theories of how transform in the face of adversity, to each other by stories and examples. The classic archetype is, of course, the Hero, who voluntarily faces chaos and danger and pain (i.e. adversity in life) and in the struggle with this great Evil (observing the world and speaking the truth to it and oneself) triumphs and makes a better world out of the struggle (by discovering more of the logos — the “logic” of life). Joseph Campbell studied this archetype at length in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as has Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning. Jung even discovered a highly original theory of alchemy, realising upon a close reading of the great alchemical texts that the alchemists seeking to transform base metals into gold were actually acting out the archetypal ideas within them about transforming from something base into something of higher value.
What is remarkable for me at least, is how Freud’s relentless focus on sexual theory in dreams gets to be a bit boring relative to Jung’s focus on archetypes manifesting in dreams. His famous Case of Hysteria (the “Dora” case), borders at times on the pornographic, yet I found it really rather uncompelling compared with Jung’s case studies presented in Dreams. I will readily admit, however, that this is likely a matter of personal preference — I find Jung’s insistence that the psychopathology of the individual is a signal pressing them toward transformation far more exciting and liberating than Freud’s theory of acceptance.
The road to mental health in Jung’s theory then is to recognise (in a sort of gratefulness) that our mental illness is indicating something is wrong with the way our conscious mind is orienting itself to the world and our behaviour, and then to reflect on the data available in the world and our dreams to work out what our non-conscious mind knows about how we should transform our thinking in order to live a better life. It is a theory which offers salvation through transformation. It is an immensely liberating and hopeful psychology.
Jung’s theory is, however, terrifying on another level. Because where Freud offers us absolution (we need only accept that we’re broken and perverse and submit to that), Jung places responsibility on us. Our neuroses manifest when we’re doing something in the world which is making us unhappy, and it is our responsibility, and ultimately ours alone to reflect on the data presented to us in the world and in our dreams and it is our responsibility, ultimately alone, to embark on the journey of transformation of our minds in their orientation toward the world and how to act in it. At best this process will be as harrowing as that of Christian at times in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress or Frodo in Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings or Harry in Harry Potter. And perhaps that terrifying vision (so brilliantly portrayed in that radical sermon from Jesus of Montreal) that nobody is coming to save us, that God the Father is only there to point the way, and that it is ultimately up to us to take responsibility for our own flourishing as human beings, is why we tend to prefer Freud’s absolution in accepting submission to Jung’s call to fight for freedom.
Karl Popper: The Radical Anti-Totalitarian
To my mind, we can draw something more than an analogy between Freud and Jung and Plato and Aristotle. Freud is to Jung in psychology as Plato is to Aristotle in the philosophy of happiness.
In Freud’s theory of acceptance of damnation to eternal torment caught between sexual perversity and the social order I think we find whispers of Plato’s Republic, in which is advanced a theory of justice (conflated with happiness) whereby the individual must submit to (accept their place within) the perfect State, which is a rigid Fascist State ruled by philosopher-Kings at the apex of its sociopolitical hierarchy. There is a One World Order and Truth which exists beyond the varieties of everyday existence (the Theory of Forms in Plato, the Sexual Theory of Freud) to which all must submit. Happiness is found in submission to the world order and acceptance of our place within it.
In Jung’s theory of salvation through transformation in the face of adversity I think we find whispers of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, in which is advanced a theory of happiness as human flourishing brought about by each individual person taking charge of their own life and acquitting their actions in the world with “excellence” (the untranslatable Greek word arete) based on observation and experiment. Aristotle famously says that “vice as virtue taken to extremes” and that vice is what hurts us, so if we’re hurting mentally, we know it’s because of some excess or deficiency in our approach to the world. Happiness is to be found in observing the world, surveying the data, and listening to what it suggests about the transformation toward better living by acting “properly” in the world.
The question then presents itself to my mind: what if Karl Popper had seen Jung as occupying a greater place in the psychoanalytic literature?
Popper’s formative years were spent in a Vienna buzzing with excitement over Freud’s theories and Rot Wien. Jung was, for all intents and purposes, a world away in Switzerland still developing the core of his theory in the aftermath of his traumatic break with Freud. The question presents itself because if I am right, and there is something more than an analogy between Freud and Plato, then there might be another dimension to Sir Karl Popper’s root and branch rejection of psychoanalysis as unscientific.
Popper’s fervent anti-totalitarianism (in the aftermath of the Anschluss he moved to New Zealand, literally the end of the world relative to Vienna) is rooted in his radical repudiation of Plato, the father of Western Philosophy which, on display in the less-popular Volume 1 of The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper chose the softer targets of Hegel and Marx for Volume 2) borders almost on disgust. Did he (perhaps subconsciously) see whispers of Plato in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories? Was he reacting to the suggestion that one must submit to a form of totalitarian hierarchy in Freud?
We know that the connection between Freudian theory (less so Freud himself) and Marxist theories is not non-existent — the Frankfurt School drew on both, as does Slavoj Zizek in the modern era. Was Popper rejecting the political suggestions in Freud’s work, so reminiscent (at least to my mind) of Plato’s, which Popper reviled so viscerally? What would he have said were Jung’s theory of the salvation of the individual through their own voluntary work at transformation in the face of adversity (and falsification of worldview) granted a greater place in the psychological canon relative to Freud?
Further, we know, of course, that Popper’s ostensible objection to psychoanalysis was not political in nature, it had to do with the philosophy of science. In his revered (though often naively read) Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper advanced a theory of knowledge that we could only discover more of the nature of the world through failure. Popper held (and even this is somewhat too naive reading of him) that only by advancing “powerful” theories which were powerful in proportion to the degree that they ruled certain courses of events out could we discover greater knowledge of the world, either by their refutation by observing those courses of events, or non-refutation by courses of events conforming with the theory.
Though Freud strenuously defended his scientific credentials (and we must take him at face value), and in fact broke with Jung ostensibly over the latter’s perceived anti-scientific mysticism, Freud’s work and especially his letters (where his dogmatism reveals itself) does reveal a personality which makes it difficult to hold to a Popperian scientific outlook (I know, because I have one myself). If we were to put it in terms of the “Big Five” traits, Freud would have been less Open (to new experience), more Neurotic and more Disagreeable than many. To put it crudely, there were to be no refutations of Sexual Theory. The tendency in Freud and his disciples was to diagnose that either one’s neuroses were caused by repressed unfulfilled sexual wishes, or one was repressing the knowledge that one’s neuroses were caused by repressed unfulfilled sexual wishes (which, undoubtedly was in a number of cases, but not all, true). As we tend to say (vulgarly), Freudian psychoanalysis was “unfalsifiable”.
Jung, on the other hand, would have been, as Jordan Peterson says, “off the charts” in terms of trait Openness. We can see this displayed in the open mind with which he approached “occult phenomena”, the way he approached alchemy, the way he approached Eastern religion and his thinking on what we would now call “transgender studies” in his studies of the feminine aspect in men and the masculine aspect in women. There are not merely whispers of Aristotle in Jung’s psychology, but also in his entire approach to psychology. Though highly introverted, we can see in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections that he was constantly, as Aristotle was, driven to theorise to understand the world around him in terms of the world around him rather than by reference to a “World of Forms”, and develop his theories by reference to new discoveries. Ironically perhaps, Jung would be quite honest about when he himself felt he might be stepping outside the boundaries of science in his quest (always) to understand the phenomena presented to him by the world, as we can see on display in, for instance his (actually fairly scientifically rigorous) essay on Synchronicity.
Jung does, even, offer a powerful theory with a testable implication, though, as with all theories, it is possible to weasel out of even devastating refutations by re-tweaking the theory. Jung says that if in the face of a neurosis, we engage in a careful analysis of our life and especially our dreams to discover paths for personal transformation and act on thay knowledge, then our neuroses will lessen and our lives will improve.
Incidentally, it is striking how, when one puts it in this way, we see that Jung is actually espousing an almost Popperian scientific approach to life! One should be grateful for failures and neuroses, for they demonstrate the limits of our knowledge of how and why to act in the world and offer us the opportunity to learn something new about what we did not know. Jung is, if we were to put it in a very simplistic way, advocating that we approach the living of good lives as scientists!
What would Sir Karl Popper, the greatest of all philosophers of science, as well as one of the great philosophers of liberty, have said about this attitude of the great psychologist? Did he even know about Jung to any great extent? Would he have been as damning of psychoanalysis as fundamentally unscientific if he did? I’m not sure. But I can’t help but wonder that given there exists something more than an analogy between Freud and Plato, and Jung and Aristotle, that the history of psychology and the history of ideas in the West might have been quite different if Jung’s hopeful, yet absolutely terrifying theories of salvation through transformation had been accorded a greater place relative to Freud in the canon of psychology. Maybe the interaction between the two great schema of psychology would have been as fruitful (and maybe it will be as fruitful in the future) as has the great, two and a half thousand year old debate between Plato and Aristotle which has given birth to Western Philosophy, one of the great jewels and gifts of human civilization.
