Freud, Jung and the Fictions that Heal
2014, thieves tried to steal the urn containing the ashes of Sigmund Freud and his wife located in a crematorium in north London, not far from where I was born. The urn, decorated with an image of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry, dated from the 4th century BC.
I have wondered what Freud, often called the “Father of Psychoanalysis,” would have made of such an abortive attempt to steal ashes and urn. The man who made a science of self-analysis, discovering hostility towards his father and sexual feelings toward his mother, later formalized as the Oedipal Complex, would have plenty of ammunition at his disposal. After all, among other things, he taught us a few things about defense mechanisms, including displacement, projection and sublimation. He had the temerity to describe the psyche as a combination of the Id, Ego and Superego. These concepts would inform the study of psychology up to the present day and significantly influence the work of Carl Jung, a Freud student, until a messy “breakup” in 1913 over views on dreams and sexuality, as well as personal matters. Psychology is better for these developments.
James Hillman, a third-generation psychologist in the spirit of Freud and Jung, provides a compelling account of both men in his “Healing Fiction,” about how they wrote their lives, biographies, and psychologies. Hillman refers to these strategies, techniques and poetics as healing fictions or fictions that heal.
Hillman recalls an interview that Freud gave in 1934 in which he acknowledged that everyone thinks that his principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. Freud calls this a terrible error. He admits being a scientist by necessity and an artist by nature. He says that “my books, in fact, more resemble works of imagination than treatises on pathology.”
Freud acknowledges that he has been able to win his destiny in an indirect way. He has become a man of letters while still in appearance a doctor. He also acknowledges that “in all great men of science there is a leaven of fantasy.” His literary heroes are Heine, Zola, and Mallarme, all united in him under the patronage of his old master, Goethe. Freud won the Goethe prize for literature.
As Hillman notes, these remarks seem a significant departure from conventional views of Freudian theory and underscore that psychotherapy is actually a work of imaginative retellings of messages from the soul or psyche in a kind of poetic manner. Hillman expands on Freud’s remarks, suggesting that a psychology of soul is also a psychology of the imagination, “one which takes its point of departure neither in brain physiology, structural linguistics, nor analyses of behavior, but in the processes of the imagination. That is, a psychology that assumes a poetic basis of mind.”
Freud provides further evidence of his thinking, writing in 1905 on the publication of his famous “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (the Dora story),” that he was aware many physicians “choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of neurosis, but as a ‘roman a clef’ designed for their private delectation.” Freud also imagined nonmedical readers turning to the story. Clearly, they are part of his imagined audience. As Hillman notes, Freud was already imagining himself as a writer of novels and his different audiences were two figures in Freud’s own fantasy.
Hillman asks the obvious question: why would Freud get himself in a tangle between the medical and the literary when writing psychological case reports. “Was he not struggling with a form of writing for which there were no existing models?” Hillman suggests that Freud was in the process of inventing a genre, a vehicle that would carry his vision into the world because his psychoanalysis could make no further headway in the world of medicine, unless it could find a suitable form of “telling” that suggested medical empiricism. For Hillman, Freud tangled the two because “he was engaged with both at once, fiction and case history, and ever since then in the history of our field, they are inseparable, our case histories are a way of writing fiction.”
Freud follows fictional devices in his story of Dora. The tale is a story, a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence. A story often contains suspense, hints, concealments, and a setting that evokes curiosity. Freud also seems to understand the incoherence of a story and provides the narrative voice to piece it all together and make sense of the leading character, Dora.
Hillman finds that Freud uses other fictional devices, such as the humble, reassuring narrator in the background, reducing the temperature of the tale. Freud also collapses time frames and embraces omniscience when it suits. He will also tell and develop facts of the story from memory, freeing him from the scrutiny of experts. This is the author as apologist, a polite nod to the medical profession.
Hillman suggests that Freud plots were absolutely economical: no loose ends. Every Freudian narrative comes out the same way and usually has one answer to the question why. For example, “The mystery is repression, followed by passion, crimes, and miseries,” then involvement of the physician, recognition by the patient and the denouement of ending therapy.
Jung would come to think of Freud’s psychology and approaches too simplistic. In Hillman’s reading, Jung was criticizing Freud for his plotting, given the fact that human lives don’t unfold neatly alongside a simple plot line. Freud can only answer this existential question in terms of time sequences: “what happened first and what happened after that.”
Jung came at his psychological canvas from a richer, archetypal perspective, asking what myth is at work in the story. Jung would look at the intentionality of characters. In Hillman’s words: for Jung each character “carries his own plot with him, writing his story, both backwards and forwards, as he develops psychologically. Jung gave far more weight to individual character than either to narrative or plot.
Jung’s plot or his theory of archetypes has many shades, forms, and structures. The human path, the journey towards individuation or wholeness has many guises, no prescribed momentum, and may come to no happy ending. At times Freud’s approach might seem more dramatic and exciting than that of Jung who held a more complicated view of the fictional path we travel.
In their approaches to dream interpretation Freud and Jung reveal their psychoanalytical techniques. According to Hillman, “Jung did not accept Freud’s fiction of the dream; it was both too contrived and too simplistic. For Jung the dream was not allegorical — a narrative description of a subject under guise of another, in which character, actions and scenery are systematically symbolic. The dream is metaphorical, speaking in two tongues at once, a throwing together of two dissonant strains into a unique voice. The difference between Freud and Jung is the difference between allegory and metaphor; between two schools of psychology and understanding of soul.
Jung would go farther than Freud when he said the dream has a dramatic structure. To quote Hillman: “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions; it is a theater.” This is when the Greek god Dionysus shows up. Jung suggests, if psychotherapy means to understand the dreaming soul from within, it should turn to theatrical logic. In this sense the dream is not a coded message but a display with the dreamer playing a part, perhaps as an actor, perhaps as a member of the audience. We wear masks. Our case studies are archetypal dramas.
Dionysus plays a central role in this theater of healing. For Hillman “Healing begins when we move out of the audience and onto the stage of the psyche, become characters in a fiction, and as the drama intensifies, the catharsis occurs, we are purged from attachments to literal destinies, find freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered, Dionysian, never being whole but participating in the whole that is the play. And the task set by the play and its God is to play a part with craft, sensitively.”
For Jung to place dreams with drama and Dionysus means he didn’t place them with Apollo and the oracular tradition, as in reading the dream as a prophetic message of how to behave; dream interpretation as counseling for daily life. The dream is about masks, not messages. Dionysian logic is mystical and transformational because it understands events as masks. It is movement, dance and flow. Dreams are theater and a stage; and in our time we will play many parts.
Freud gave us the case history in psychology as a psychic event, a genuine expression of soul. Jung enriched this insight, providing more psychic depth and symbolic import to psychotherapy and the healing process. For Jung this was soul work.
As Hillman puts it, healing fictions are a way into our psyche, our soul; they represent our task and our fate.
And Freud started us on this royal road. It is no accident that the god Dionysus decorates Freud’s burial urn. Or the last book he read before his death was by Balzac, named “Peau de Chagrin” or “Skin of Sorrow.”
