Jung and Merleau-Ponty

Contents
Introduction 1
Jung's world 1
The shadow in therapy 2
Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge 3
Anima and Animus in therapy 4
Merleau-Ponty's Other 4
Bibliography 5

Introduction

In this essay I will give a brief description of Jung's psychic topology. This will lay the ground work, for looking at some ways in which the Jungian concept of shadow and anima\animus can be used in therapy. Lastly I will look at how Merleau-Ponty (MP) can challenge Jung's thought.

Jung's world

Out of unconscious so we emerge. I want to chart Jung's psychic topology and to look at the development of the individual psyche and that of society. To do this I will have to be a tad circular to look at the mother raising the child and the child's psyche developing which will then show how the mothers psyche in turn was developed. During the child's life the development of their psyche will be looked at such that we can see how society develops to provide the context in which the child is borne. So all a bit circular but necessarily so.
The mother has union with a man. There is a guiding light to this relationship and that is the anima\animus aspect. The anima\us links the ego to the deepest layers of the psyche that is to the image and experience of self. "The natural function of the animus (as well as of in the anima) is to remain in place between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious" (Memories dreams and reflections p392) "As to the character of the anima, my experience confirms the rule that it is, by and large, complementary to the character of the persona. The anima usually contains all those common human qualities which the conscious attitude lacks" (Jung collected works Vol 6 par 804).
What then is the persona? The personas are the roles that the individual uses to engage with the world, they are social constructs so that you would get the policeman, the neighbour, the busy bee for instance.
The anima/us is then the unconscious part of us and can form a very strong driver for attraction to others, as what we are looking to do is to reclaim a lost part of ourselves. The child then can represent the unity of self for both adults.
As the mother brings up the child she does this through engagement with the archetypes of mother and child, the variety of personas which she adopts, e.g. carer, home organiser and her complexes. That would beg the question what are archetypes and what are complexes.
An archetype is a universal pattern of behaviour which can be encompassed in an archetypal image.
"Man possesses many things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors.. [..] he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and he owes to millions of years of human development. [..] These inherited systems correspond to the human situation that has existed since primeval times: [..]sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious. For them they are only the habitual functioning of instincts that were performed long ago" (Jung Coll. Wks. Vol 4, par728)
Archetypes are handed down from generation to generation as are personas. Archetypes are unconscious whereas personas are conscious. Personas are far more dynamic than archetypes, changing through the ages whereas archetypes are far more solid, although unless you see an archetype as a necessary condition for consciousness, then they must have themselves developed as did personas. Archetypes however are primarily unconscious structures, with conscious representation
Complexes are unconscious structures. They are composed from repressed memories, fantasies, images, thoughts and symbols and contain a level of psychic charge within them. They are generally created by highly charged emotional events or traumas and are made unconscious as there is too much affect for the ego to deal with, such that the effects of a domineering mother maybe pushed into the unconscious as a complex, and any hint or reminder to this complex will mean that the ego can be flooded by the latent psychic energy in the complex.
As the child develops then he confronts the external world and is frustrated by it. Those frustrations that are small enough can be assimilated into his ego, those which can't be will form into complexes. Likewise as he grows up and becomes aware of value, those things that he is that are morally repugnant will form his shadow, the unconscious structure of all that I am, but that is unacceptable. As the child develops and interacts with archetypes and personas thus he affects them and provides the context in society into which their children will be born and influenced.

The shadow in therapy

The notion of shadow is useful to therapy. For Jung "there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole less good than he imagines himself [..]. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.[..]if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness."(Psychology and Religion, CW, par 134)
Thus one aim for therapy is to make a person aware of their shadow such they can make choices about it and not be overwhelmed by it.
"Close examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow –reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive, or better, passive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weaker, and at the same time, they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. (The Shadow Aion CW 9 ii, par 15)
Here Jung is taking quite a radical stance, when we have emotions about ourselves, e.g. I'm happy that I finished my essay, then this is the indicator of shadow and the existence of a lower level of personality. Likewise when you have emotion about someone else, I'm annoyed because he's a greedy person having eaten all the pies, then this is a projection of the shadow onto the other.
To justify this, let's look at the two examples. I'm happy that I finished my essay, this could tie up with the following shadow aspects of myself;

1. The small boy who needs approval to feel good about themselves
2. An egotistical person, who now has achieved yet another thing, such that they can look down on the weakness of others

Likewise the feeling annoyed about him being a greedy person can show that really I am a greedy person but I cannot admit it to myself, otherwise looking at him eating all the pies, would be an emotional neutral event, such as looking at the desk in front of me.
The techniques in therapy to look at the shadow would be getting the client to investigate their emotional reactions and why they had them as opposed to neutral ones and also to look for other instances where they have shown the same behaviour they project onto another

Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge

MP sees behaviour not as the outcome of conscious\unconscious causes but rather as a form of Gestalt, a relationship of significance or meaning. Thus behaviour is the result of the Gestalt that contains intentionality and phenomenal objects. He sees emotion as the structure of behaviour not the content of it. To understand an emotion, is "to ask oneself how it functions in human life and what purpose it serves" (SNS:53). There is a disruptive nature of emotions. Thus when a child is jealous at the arrival of the new born, he is rigidly attached "to the situation of the 'latest born' which was hitherto his own" (PrP:110). Likewise weeping for a lost one, symbolises ones struggle to adapt to the loss of a loved one, to move to a place where there is no more, or an acceptable attachment to the lost one.
"Anger, shame, hate and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types of behaviour or styles of conduct that are visible from the outside" (SNS 52-3)
For MP then the example Jung gave of shadow is as follows:

1. Being happy that I have finished my essay
   1. This would move me to a new piece of work as I can get happiness out of writing essays, or it might move me to new projects as this one is done
2. Being annoyed at someone being greedy and eating all the pies
   1. This would move me to stop the person eating all the pies, or to restricting the amount of pies I eat, or others around me eat as I think there is an optimum amount of pies that should be eaten

Anima and Animus in therapy

These are our relations to the collective unconscious for Jung. Their effects can be via projection into people that we love or hate "when anima and animus meet. The animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, singe the two are equally likely to fall in love" (The Essential Jung P112). Their effects can also be integrated into consciousness, the animus in Logos, the anima in Eros. Logos being the capacity for reflection, deliberation and self knowledge. Eros being the functions of relationship and relatedness.
Anima\Animus therefore provides two major aspects, energy and balance. The energy comes from the collective unconscious and the balance comes as the unconscious provides a balancing function to the ego.
"It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating functions of the unconscious ensure that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided." (The Essential Jung P117)
Thus for Jung an engagement with the unconscious can provide energy and balance to a person's life. The access to this, to reintegrate, anima/animus to the ego, for the client is 3 fold

1. In projection, through seeing that your views of the other are yours and can differ from their behaviour
2. In dreams through looking at what the images with strong emotional content say to you

Merleau-Ponty's Other

Whilst Jung has the Other as the balancing representation for the unconscious via projection, he has self and other as independent entities, which can only be reunited by an engagement with the collective unconscious and a return to the Self. Jungs position is then of a world of independent objects of self and other, that have lost their primal relation which is defined in the Self.
For MP the self is something that I discover in the world.
"Of the consciousness which I discover by reflection [..]it cannot be said that this is myself. My self is arrayed before me like any other thing, and my consciousness constitutes it and is not enclosed within it" (PP p417)


He sees that there is an initial experience that is had within the world, this subjective experience is the raw material that science then uses to objectify. Our bodies are intentionally related to the world and are the interface, if you like between the subject of ego and the object of the world. This isn't the body that we see by looking in the mirror but rather the body that receives sensation, the body that receives sight and has a perspective in the world.
To move from experience to consciousness is to allow experience to show itself from its ground.This ground is multifarious, it is the ground of society, of language, of temporality and of other people. Society is something we are thrown into and in which we understand ourselves. Temporality is the history that informs our present and the future of our projected plans. Language is the tools we use to demarcate our experience as our other people. MP's position is that we have a pre-reflective engagement with these grounds such that we develop conscious out of our pre-reflective engagement with them.
Thus our engagement with the other is dual fold. They constitute me, thus
"The objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed" (PP 413)
Thus MP would challenge Jung's understanding of the ego as distinct from the other, seeing that the latter is a transcendental constituent of the former. Indeed as the prior quote implies, without this, the notion of therapy,where the Other can know me, where I can't, would be impossible
Theres more I would like to say on MP, but alas the shortness of this essay prevents me. I will leave you with two quotes from MP on the Other.
"We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity" (PP p413)
"I borrow myself from others, I create others from my own thoughts" (Philosopher and his Shadow p 111)
In short self and other are transcendentally co-constituting in an ambiguous relationship.

Bibliography