I want to begin my contribution to this panel with a disclaimer: I should not be here. For years I have been looking for a reference on the influence of the French psychology of the late nineteenth century on Jung's thought. I found not one article, but four, and all by the same person: John Haule in Boston.

Panel Discussion on Psychological Authority at the October 26-30, 1994, conference of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts at Asheville, North Carolina

Presented by Gary V. Hartman, Dipl. Jungian Analyst (St. Louis, Missouri)

Foreword

I want to begin my contribution to this panel with a disclaimer: I should not be here. For years I have been looking for a reference on the influence of the French psychology of the late nineteenth century on Jung's thought. I found not one article, but four, and all by the same person: John Haule in Boston. I got the articles, read them, and was so excited I called Tom Kelly to suggest inviting John to present to the Society in Asheville. Without taking up too much time, let me say simply that Tom exercised some magic or other on me and here I am.

This is a scholars nightmare: I propose to talk, in part, about a topic primarily from secondary sources. I have not read the dissociationists. I cannot read French. I have not taught Janet. John could answer "yes" on all three counts. For those of you interested in pursuing this topic further, I would highly recommend John Haule and his articles.

I propose to examine not my own psychological "authority" or "authorship," but Jung's. Although I am addressing the question posed for this panel obliquely, I would not be interested in this material if it did not represent my own sense of the source and nature of psychic authority as I have experienced it.

Introduction

In 1871, a conflict took place in central Europe which historians refer to as the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussians, under Bismarck, won the war and consolidated the German nation in the form in which we know it today. At about the same time another conflict occurred. This one, though, was psychological rather than geographical or political. It concerned perspectives of the psyche and took place between the associationists and the dissociationists. I like to think of the two groups as the "Germans" and the "French," respectively. Again, the "Germans" won, consolidating an egocentric model of the human psyche. That model has colored the perception of other images of psyche, including Jung's. It is my contention that this is a misreading, at least as far as Jung is concerned, and I will explain why.

Background of the Dissociationists

If you are like me, you probably came out of training with something of the standard party line on the origins of Jung's thinking. Aside from the German philosophers like Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and Carus whom I did not really understand, I had the impression that Jung's thinking developed out of Freud's model of the psyche. I perceived Jung as a further elaboration of Freud's thinking. To use a national analogy, I had the sense that Jung was a "German," that his tradition, like his grandfather's, C. G. Jung, the Elder, was traceable directly to influences "east of the Rhine." As Haule points out, though, Zurich lies west of the Rhine — as does France!1

I propose that we forget for a moment our existing notions of Jung and Jung's thought. I ask that we consider the hypothesis that the major influences which "authored" Jung's psychology were not Freudian or "Wundtian" or "Kraepelinian", not German, in other words, but French. To be more specific, I would suggest that Jung was a dissociationist, his thinking following the tradition of Mesmer, Puysegur, Azam, Binet, Flournoy, and Pierre Janet. (I can make this assertion without being accused of an undue French bias, because my family name at one time was "von Hartmann.")

To begin with we need to bear in mind that psychology evolved out of philosophy. Pierre Janet, for example, completed his doctorate in philosophy before doing his work in medicine. William James and Karl Jaspers are known as much for their philosophical contributions as for their psychology. In philosophy, then, the Cartesian initiative of questioning how we know what we know, reached its ultimate development in the eighteenth century with the "radical associationism" of David Hume.2 (De-constructionism is the form that questioning has taken in our century.)

Hume limited himself to the facts of the conscious stream of images and ideas "conceived on the model of Newtonian physics."3 He reduced knowledge to the formation of ideas, to how simple ideas formed complex ideas.4 (I suspect, incidentally, that Jung's term, "complex," owes its origin to this philosophical discussion.) Hume questioned the "'associating quality by which one idea naturally introduces another.'"5 He concluded "that there were three associating qualities: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect."6

Despite "several generations of magnetizers and hypnotists"7 (Mesmer and Puysegur, for instance), the "associationists" "rather narrow and mechanistic foundation for psychology"8 (something Freud has been accused of) held sway over the secondary trend of what would become known as "dissociationism." When the backlash came in the 1880's, it was volcanic! There was the widespread incidence of hysteria, the founding of the Societies for Psychical Research in England (1882) and the United States,9 the work of Jean Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere (ca. 1880-1890), Freud and Breuer's work with hysteria, and a "young classical scholar, Frederick Myers,"10 who described what he called, "the mythopoetic function [of the unconscious], . . . the unconscious tendency to weave fantasies."11 The year 1889 saw the appearance of two works which encapsulated the perspective of dissociationism: Pierre Janet's doctoral dissertation, Psychological Automatism (L'automatisme psychologique)12 and Mental Activity and the Elements of the Spirit (L'activité mentale et les éléments de l'esprit) by the philosopher, Frederic Paulhan.13

Dissociationism accepted the theory that ideas and images join in aggregates, but it broadened the theory of the associationists. Taking as their guiding images the phenomena of multiple personality and spiritualism, the dissociationists held "that every aggregation. . . possessed, in some measure or other, its own personality"14 (emphasis Haule's). In two of their more noteworthy cases, that of "Estelle" reported by Despine and that of "Felida X" reported by Azam, these groupings took on the quality of secondary personalities, the so-called, "dedoublement de la personalité." These personalities were not only free of the neurotic symptoms of the host, but replaced the original personality. Keep this in mind until the later discussion of Jung's dissertation, "The Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena."

The Newtonian causality of the associationists was replaced with a principle of teleology.15 This principle was summarized in Paulhan's L'activité mental in three laws:

1. "The Law of Systematic Association" described how the personalities came together around a common goal. ['Every psychic fact tends to enter into partnership with and to give rise to psychic facts which can harmonize and cooperate with itself toward a common goal or toward compatible goals which can comprise a system.' (p. 88)]

2. "The Law of Inhibition" described the mutual exclusivity of the groupings. ['Every psychic phenomenon tends to impede the manifestation and development of or to banish from sight the psychic phenomena which it can assimilate according to the law of systematic association, that is to say the phenomena which it cannot assimilate in the interests of a common goal.' (p. 221)]

3. "The Law of Contrast" identified the tendency of the various groupings to alternate on the basis of opposition. ['A psychic state tends to be accompanied (simultaneous contrast) or followed (successive contrast) by a state which opposes it or which at least in some respects is its contrary.' (p. 315f) 16 ]

What strikes me as amazing about these laws is how much of Jung's thinking they prefigure. The first two suggest Jung's theories of complexes (grouped around a common feeling tone), of the purposive and teleological notion of psychic functioning, and of the energic inter-relatedness of psychic entities. Paulhan's third law, though, I find most mind-boggling. It directly states Jung's theory of enantiodromia17 and it implies his theory of the opposites and the psyche's self-regulating nature. There is little evidence that Jung had much direct knowledge of Paulhan's work, but he was probably exposed to the various laws through his reading of the early Janet.18

Jung addressed the question of the contrasting reaction at various times in his pre-Freud years. In 1907, he wrote that, ". . . even simple processes of volition are always blindly converted into their opposite,"19 At this time he discussed the notion in reference to Bleuler's work on negativism in schizophrenics. Jung, therefore, often referred to the principle as "negative suggestibility."20 This is the case in Dementia Praecox as well as in the later paper more specifically entitled, "A Criticism of Bleuler's 'Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism.'"21 Dementia Praecox contains one of the few direct references Jung made to Paulhan's work. Footnoting his statement that. "They [negative suggestibility and contrast associations] form very close relationships," Jung writes that "the following express themselves in a similar manner: Paulhan, L'activité mentale et les éléments de l'esprit. . . "22

To return to the dissociationists, we know that they assumed the existence of an "unknown fluid" which they later "replaced by the concept of mental energy."23 We also know that, based on the model of multiple personality, they recognized the psyche's tendency to "personate" or "personify," as Jung was later to call it.24 Therefore, the only fundamental theories of Jung's not implied by the dissociationists are the universal nature of the archetypes and his theories of order, individuation and the Self — and we could argue those! What did Jung need with Freud and the Germans?

Jung speaks of being "convinced of the truth of Freud's theory,"25 but the only one he mentions, specifically, in his "formative years" is repression.26 The only other Freudian influences I can think of are the importance of dreams and the topographical model of the psyche. The reason that Jung split with Freud or vice versa was that, as Jung put it, "Freud is blind to the dualism of the unconscious."27 Freud's objection to Symbole der Libido (1912), according to Jung, was that Freud "took the greatest exception [to] my contention that the libido is split and produces the thing that checks itself."28 Can we not hear in that statement Paulhan's third law? Moreover, can we not hear in that statement Jung's identification of himself as a dualist and a dissociationist?

Jung, I might note, was wrong about Freud's "blindness" to the split in libido. Freud saw it quite clearly! As early as 1894, Freud and Breuer wrote,

". . . the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the well-known classical cases under the form of 'double conscience' is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria. . . a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness... is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis."29 (emphasis Freud's and Breuer's).

Freud saw the split — he considered it pathological and pathogenic! This fact explains his characterizing introversion (he called it "narcissism") as pathological in his 1914 paper, "On Narcissism."30 Freud was a monist!31 Jung regarded the "split" as normal, the natural prerequisite for the movement of psychic energy.32

Jung's Historical Connections With The Dissociationists

It goes without saying that Jung's first major work, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,"33 is purely dissociationist. Like the other researchers before him, Jung has "his" medium, "S. W." While she was no Friedericke Hauffe (Kerner's "Seeress of Prevorst"34 ) or Blanche Wittman (Charcot's "reine des hysteriques"35 ), she provided Jung with some interesting instances of somnambulistic phenomena. The most remarkable of these was the somnambulic character, "Ivenes," a more mature, sophisticated, and socialized aspect of "S. W." It is of "Ivenes" and similar figures that Jung writes, "It is not therefore unthinkable that these phenomena of double consciousness are nothing but character-formations for the future personality, or their attempts to burst forth."36 Jung continues that "the future character takes on a marked teleological meaning. . ."37 Aside from the obvious parallels to Paulhan's laws of dissociation, these statements also prefigure one of Jung's usages of the concept of Self — some twenty years before the fact.

With the exception of two or three references to Freud,38 all of the researchers cited in this work are dissociationists and, aside from a few like Morton Prince and Weir-Mitchell, all of them are French. The most interesting one, however, is Theodore Flournoy, for it was Flournoy's work which gave Jung's dissertation its title, "So-Called Occult Phenomena." If Freud's is the first name that comes up when we think of the early influences on Jung's thought, Flournoy's does not come up at all!

Flournoy is mentioned by Jung extensively in "Occult Phenomena" in conjunction with parallels between the experiences of S. W. and those of Flournoy's "medium," Helene Smith.39 Flournoy is referred to in the Foreword to the 1924 Swiss edition of Symbole der Libido (1912) as, "my respected and fatherly friend."40 In the German version (not the English version!) of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, there is a two-page remembrance of Flournoy.41 There Jung also refers to him as a "fatherly friend." "I could," Jung writes, "talk to him about all sorts of problems that occupied me scientifically, somnambulism, parapsychology, and the psychology of religion, for example"42 (translation mine), the stuff of the dissociationists, in other words.

In about 1898, Flournoy published a work entitled, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia.43 In the book, Flournoy "showed the ancestral and extraterrestrial existences of his medium . . . to be the work of the subconscious creative imagination fueled by cryptomnesias."44 Flournoy discredited the claims of spiritualists and occultists by offering a psychological explanation for the somnambulistic experiences of the medium, "Helene." The book made a "great impression" on Jung and he wrote to Flournoy volunteering to translate it.45 Clearly, the "So-Called Occult" in the title of Jung's dissertation is derived from Flournoy's work and suggests that there are psychological explanations for the phenomena, not simply occult ones.

Jung makes what I believe to be a further nod in Flournoy's direction with one specific choice of content. One of the passages in "Occult Phenomena" which has left readers scratching their heads are the parallel stories of hunting rabbits on an island which Jung tells as an example of cryptomnesia.46 One of the versions comes from Nietzsche's, Zarathustra, the other from Justinus Kerner's, Notes from Prevorst (Blätter aus Prevorst). I believe that Jung includes this passage as a recognition of Flournoy's book in which cryptomnesias figured so prominently. What is truly fascinating about this example of forgotten memory is that Jung refers to it again —in 1961, in "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams,"47 the last article he wrote in his life! We could accurately say that Jung began and ended his writings with Flournoy—and with the dissociationists.

Flournoy appears yet again as an influence in Jung's early writings. He appears with that fabled work, Symbole der Libido, which, as legend has it, marks Jung's separation from Freud. Flournoy's, From India to the Planet Mars, stirred much indignation among the spiritualists and occultists who came to the assistance of the "betrayed" medium, "Helene." Coming to Flournoy's assistance, a young American student at the University of Geneva offered him "an article, based on self-observations, that vindicated his work against the spiritualists."48 ". . . Her intention," according to Flournoy, "has been precisely to make clear the phenomena of subconscious imagination which unfold themselves to mediums, by analogous cases. . . that she has observed in the fastnesses of her own mind."49 The mediumistic phenomena, therefore, "had not a hint of the miraculous about them."50 The title of the article, written originally in French, was "Some Instances of Subconscious Creative Imagination."51 The author of the article was Miss Frank Miller.

Applied Dissociationism

Finally, I will offer you my notion of dissociationism a la Jung. I understand "dissociation" to be a state of not being connected with something. That "something" is what we call, ego or ego consciousness. If I am to work from a dissociationist model, then, I would have to attend primarily to those aspects of psyche not connected with or dissociated from the ego.

Let me note parenthetically that my preference would be for Janet's notion of "the idea of me" (la idée du moi), a subjective quality that attaches to certain experiences.52 Freud reified "the I" (das Ich) and A. A. Brill further objectified it with his translation into the Latin, ego.53 While Janet's approach would be more phenomenological, my thinking in terms of "ego" is too ingrained. I cannot get out of my own mental skin.

Attending to what is dissociated from ego, we first encounter the "unconscious." "Unconscious" is an associationist's term, implying that what is conscious is limited to the ego. This I know not to be the case. There are all kinds of consciousnesses of which my ego consciousness is not conscious. Jung, for instance, referred to "splinter consciousnesses," "scintillae," and "unconscious personalities." I want to return to the more descriptive, "I" and "not I" of Mary Esther Harding. I would thus constantly remind myself of the dissociated quality of that which is other than my "I." What, then, would the combination of attending to the Not-I and the personifying nature of psychic contents look like in everyday practice? I have a personal story by way of illustration.

Some time ago I got a little, gray kitten. I tried calling it different names, but none of them seemed to fit quite right. I decided to just live with the cat and its nameless ambiguity and to wait for a name to emerge as I got a better sense of its personality. One propensity it had (and all you cat owners will be sympathetic) was to avoid using its litter box. Instead my cat availed itself of favorite pieces of my furniture and corners of the carpet in lieu of the appropriate place for such activity. This was definitely "Not I" behavior. In addition, the cat literally climbed the walls, leaving indelible marks on drapes and wall-paper. This was also "Not I" behavior. In addition, this made me angry. In popular parlance, we would say that it "pissed me off." Combining the two "Not I" behaviors, it became apparent what I should call the cat: she is now firmly christened, "Pissy."

The two principles of applying a dissociationist perspective would be:

1. Recognizing and attending to the "Not I" and,
2. Allowing the time necessary for the characteristics and personality of the "Not I" content to emerge.54

Conclusion

Let me summarize the dissociationist/associationist duality as it applies to Freud and Jung. Characteristic for Freud's thinking is the expression, "Where id was, let ego be." Characteristic for Jung's thinking is the notion that the center of consciousness should move toward a mid-point between the "I" and the "not I." Jung referred to this variously as the transcendent function and as the Self.55 The direction in Freud is toward the "I;" the direction in Jung is toward the "Not I." Freud is an associationist, Jung a dissociationist.

Jung never was an associationist. He never was a Freudian nor a German. The historians and we, to some extent, have it all wrong. Recognizing this fact would give all Jungians a more solid, less amorphous sense of their psychic authority. So how about doing it right this time? How about the French, not the Germans, winning the Franco-Prussian war this time around? Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the French: Vive la France!

Copyright © 1994 Gary V. Hartman. All rights reserved.

Footnotes

1. John Haule, "From Somnambulism to the Archetypes: The French Roots of Jung's Split with Freud," Psychoanalytic Review, 71(4), 1984, p. 635.. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
2. Haule, "somnambulism," p. 636.
3. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
4. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 1. Cited in Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
6. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
7. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970, p. 110. See Chapter 2, pp. 53-109, in Ellenberger for the development of magnetism.
8. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
9. Ellenberger, p. 85.
10. Ellenberger, p. 313. Myers was a co-founder with William Barrett and Reverend Stanton Moses of the Society for Psychical Research in London.
11. Ellenberger, p. 314.
12. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 639.
13. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 636.
14. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 637.
15. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 637.
16. Haule, "Somnambulism," p. 637.
17. ". . . the view which maintains that everything that exists goes over into its opposite." Psychological Types, trans. H. G. Baynes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1923/1953, p. 541.
18. On page 13 of Dementia Praecox, trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1936, Jung discusses "contrast associations" and the "contrast mechanism" and he cites Janet's Les Obsessions, Vol. p. 60. In that passage, Janet discusses Paulhan's Law of Contrast!
19. Dementia Praecox, p. 12.
20. Dementia Praecox, p. 13, i.e., "The importance of negative suggestibility in every-day psychic occurrences explains why contrast associations are everywhere enormously frequent." (emphasis mine)
21. Collected Papers, pp. 200-205. Bleuler apparently wrote at least two papers on this topic. "Die negative Suggestibilitaet, ein psychologisches Prototyp des Negativismus," in 1904 [see p. 13 of Dementia Praecox] and the piece that Jung referred to in his article, "Zur Theorie des schizophrenen Negativismus," in 1910-11 [see "A Criticism. . ." in The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 197.]
22. Dementia Praecox, p. 13 and n. 53.
23. Ellenberger, p. 111.
24. I cannot locate the earlier use of the term. Jung elaborates on the tendency of the libido to "personify" in the 1952 edition of Symbols of Transformation, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. V, trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952/1976, par. 388.
25. C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, ed. W. McGuire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 14.
26. See also, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena," in Collected Papers in Analytical Psychology, ed. C. Long. New York: Moffat Yard and Company, 1917. p. 82. "S. W.'s behavior recalls vividly Freud's investigations into dreams which disclose the independent growth of repressed thoughts." (emphasis mine) [Original publication date, 1902.]
27. Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 21.
28. Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 24.
29. J. Breuer and S. Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. J. Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1955, p. 12. Stepansky claims that Freud credited Binet and the Janets only at Breuer's insistence. P. E. Stepansky, "A History of Aggression in Freud," Psychological Issues, 10(3), Monograph 39. New York: International Universities Press, 1977.
30. "On Narcissism." Jung's preliminary paper on typology, "A Contribution to the Study of Psychological Types," was originally published in 1913. See Collected Papers, pp. 287-298.
31. See Analytical Psychology, p. 24.
32. Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 79. "The opposition is a necessary condition of libido flow. . . "
33. in Collected Papers, pp. 1-93.
34. Ellenberger, p. 78.
35. Ellenberger, p. 99.
36. "Occult Phenomena," p. 84.
37. "Occult Phenomena," p. 84.
38. "Occult Phenomena," pp. 74, 82.
39. "Occult Phenomena," pp. 64, 69, 70, 72, 78, etc.
40. Symbols of Transformation, p. xxviii.
41. Along with remembrances of Richard Wilhelm (pp. 380-384) and Heinrich Zimmer (pp. 385-386).
42. Jung, Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken. Zurich: Ex Libris, 1961/1975, p. 378.
43. Des Indes a la planète Mars: Étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, Paris and Geneva, 1900.
44. Sonu Shamdasani, "A Woman Called Frank," Spring 50, 1990, p. 39.
45. Erinnerungen, p. 378.
46. "Occult Phenomena," pp. 87-88.
47. In The Symbolic Life, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. XVIII, trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 183-264. [The original was published in 1961.]
48. Shamdasani, "A Woman Called Frank," p. 39.
49. Th. Flournoy, "Introduction," to "Some Instances of Subconscious Creative Imagination," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, I (6), June 1907, trans. F. Miller, p. 289.
50. John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 273.
51. Frank Miller, "Quelques Faits d'imagination créatrice subconsciente," Archives des psychologie, Geneva, V (1906?), pp. 36-51. Foreword by Theodore Flournoy.
52. Personal communication from John Haule.
53. B. Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
54. It should not be surprising that this approach mirrors quite closely what Jung referred to as "my technique" in the "Commentary " to The Secret of the Golden Flower, trans. C. F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932, p. 83, and describes as "the art of letting things happen" and "watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy" (p. 90). Jung was later to designate this method, "active imagination."
55. "The Transcendent Function," trans. A. R. Pope. Zurich: Students Association, C. G. Jung Institute, 1957, p. 5. (Originally written in 1916. See p. 3). Jung initially described the transcendent function as arising "from the union of conscious and unconscious contents" (emphasis Jung's). Such a union arises from the mutually "compensatory or complementary" relationship between conscious and unconscious. One way Jung characterized the Self was as ". . . the desired 'middle point' of the personality, that indescribable something between the opposites, the reconciliation of the opposites. . . " "The Relation between the Ego and the Unconscious," in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and C. F. Baynes. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1928, p. 255. The first time Jung attached this description to the Self was in 1929, in his "Commentary" to Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 123: ". . . [the centre of gravity of the total personality] is located . . . in what might be called a virtual point between the conscious and the unconscious. This new centre might be called the self" (emphasis mine).

Copyright 1994 Gary V. Hartman.
All rights reserved.

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