For many years well-known British Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels has been a perspicacious, and often provocative, commentator on the present and future of Jungian psychology.

For many years well-known British Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels has been a perspicacious, and often provocative, commentator on the present and future of Jungian psychology. He was also among the first contributors to the Review and has been one of its earliest supporters. In this interview with contributing editor of The Round Table Review Claudette Kulkarni, he offers his most recent thought about this "strange Jungian world" in which he says he has " found happiness, friendship, and acceptance"and that he "will stick up for it to the bitter end."

Kulkarni: Like it or not, the term "post-Jungian" is now part of the Jungian lexicon even though there seems to be no real consensus about what the term means. When you coined this term (1985), you wrote that you intended it "to indicate both connectedness to Jung and distance from him." In your most recent writing on this topic (1998), you refine this definition, adding that this "distance" from Jung should be a "critical" one. Yet, in that same essay, you leave the door open to the idea that maybe "everyone nowadays is a post-Jungian." Was that your intent?

Samuels: You are right to intuit that I really believe that it is not possible for Jungians to be anything other than post-Jungian. If we take your own work for example, you want to be in that general Jungian tradition, but you also want to include the philosopher Gadamer and the current thinking in psychoanalysis on questions to do with homosexuality.

The inadequacies of basing a professional discipline on one man have meant that Jungians have started to split off in two diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand, the impossibility of doing everything in Jung's own terms has led to an idealization of other therapeutic approaches ( Object Relations, etc.), and especially psychoanalysis. On the other hand, there has been a retreat into a sort of last ditch adherence to the letter of Jung's writings and a slavish imitation of what is thought to be his pattern of life.

I call the first tendency "merger with psychoanalysis" and the second tendency "Jungian fundamentalism." I am equally worried about both.

Kulkarni: Your concern about these two tendencies seems to emerge from your concern about the very survival of analytical psychology. That is, if post-Jungians truly want to thrive, they must take a stance that includes some critique of Jung without abandoning their roots in Jung's work and thus allow, in Jungian terms, a constellation of the transcendent function which might take us "beyond" Jung. So, can you say more about the dangers inherent in these two "opposing" tendencies and how they might inhibit the survival of the post-Jungians? And do you have a vision of what a viable post-Jungian psychology might look like?

Samuels: The main danger of the merger with psychoanalysis is that the many good features of classical Jungian clinical work will be lost, notably the stress on the interpersonal dimension of therapy, the non-literal understanding of symbols of infancy and childhood, and the analyst's disciplined use of self-disclosure. Moreover, sad though it might be, if the hidden aim of merger with psychoanalysis is to get the approval of the psychoanalytic world it simply will not work. They need us as a tribal enemy far too much for that.

Oddly, I have myself found acceptance in the psychoanalytic world. I was elected a scientific associate of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and have guest edited special issues of Psychoanalytic Review and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. But I have also been very active in critiquing psychoanalysis. For instance, I have written about the reactionary social and political attitudes contained in much object relations theory. Also, I led a campaign in Britain to remove obstacles to lesbians and gay men becoming psychoanalytic candidates. Could it be that it is because of these positions rather than in spite of them that the psychoanalysts are interested in what I have to say?

The main danger of the fundamentalism I referred to is that people will get hurt by it — potential candidates as well as clients. Like all fundamentalisms, Jungian fundamentalism is cruel, morally supercilious and deaf to reason.

I realize no one is going to admit to membership of either of these two extreme factions as I have described them. But, having just returned from a trip to France, where the Jungian community seemed to know very well what I am getting at, I feel encouraged to continue to press for greater debate of the issues I am raising.

I hope it is clear that I still retain a pluralistic standpoint in relation to our field. But neither the merger people nor the fundamentalists strike me as prepared to extend tolerance to other people with other ways of doing things.

Kulkarni: There certainly is something intriguing about the way you have been accepted among psychoanalytic practitioners in spite of (or, as you say, maybe because of) your critiques of psychoanalysis. My sense is that you have not been as readily received among Jungians. That is, while most Jungians regardless of their persuasion hail Jung and the Post-Jungians as the defining text in demarcating Jungian schools of theory and practice, most contemporary Jungians seem reluctant to take up the profound critique of Jungian thought contained in it and in your later writings (including your recent warnings about the dangers of merging with psychoanalysis or retreating into fundamentalism). How do you feel about this and what sense do you make of it?

Samuels: I think my problem is that I've made so many criticisms that people may experience me as a bit of a pain. Tant pis, as our French friends would say. To give a top-of-the-head list of problems I've tried to explore:

(1) I am uncomfortable with the theory of archetypes in either its universal images mode or its underlying structures separate from manifestations mode. I am not sure that, even as a theoretical model, the structural approach works these days. For me, an approach to archetypes based on affects works better. I was reading the other day still more about how people in all cultures can recognize the basic affects. What this means is that whatever is archetypal lies in you or me as persons in a lived world and not in parts of that world such as an image or theme or pattern or developmental phase. The archetypal is redefined as the capacity to experience affect of a very powerful and profound kind.

(2) Jung's theories of gender do not suffer from out of date and culture-bound generalizations so much as from a weddedness to binominalism so that each sex has attributes which in some miraculous way turn out to be the opposite of the other sex's attributes. If men are rational, then woman must be ... surprise, surprise, irrational. (This method screwed Jung up when he tried to do cultural psychology in the 1930s because he made Jews and Germans into the two halves of a binomial pair.)

(3) The whole anti-Semitism issue.

Now if you add to just those three the accusation that some Jungians are cruel fundamentalists and others have ceased to be Jungians, I'd have to be remarkably Panglossian to expect to be very much appreciated. It takes time. Ask Fordham or Hillman, not that I would compare myself to them, but because the two of them really did modernize Jungian psychology.

People do not like the term post-Jungian because they want to be either (a) Jungian, (b) themselves, (c) eclectic. But the more I work on this word — and answering your questions is part of it — the more I realize that it is getting harder and harder for anyone to escape the Janus nature of post-Jungian: back to Jung and forward to . . . what, exactly? I guess even the fundamentalists look forward — to more Jung. The psychoanalyst Jungians look forward to psychoanalysis.

I think the problem, as many have argued, is an identity one. Are the Jungians a profession, a community, a movement — even a cult? And what exactly is our history? How reliable can the Ur-texts of analytical psychology (post-Shamdasani and the others) be .

Please don't misunderstand me. To paraphrase Phillip Toynbee's review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I do share Jungian emotions. Just to give one example, my religion —Judaism — is becoming for me a core and more of an introverted phenomenon. I think that Jung was really the inspiring figure in the move of the religions into the private spaces inside of an individual. How many people say that they are Christian but with a small "c" and never go to church. I don't know what the theologians would say, but I think that the impact of (Jungian) psychology on religion has been to facilitate this introversion of religious sensibility. The negative or down side of it is that the public contribution of religion (for example, a morally inflected debate on the issues of the day) will get muted if religion goes on, so to speak, only on a private basis.

Kulkarni: This reference to religion brings to mind something I've wondered about for a long time: the seemingly odd evolution of your interests. You began by analyzing our inheritance from "Jung the man," helping us especially to recognize his flaws in the areas of gender and sexuality (1985) and then you engaged in a process of critiquing the legacy of his ideas in those and other areas (1989, 1991). That seems to have taken you into the very "unJungian" arena of politics (1993), where you have vigorously challenged the Jungian tendency to see boundaries where there are none (i.e., between the so-called external and internal worlds), insisting that many things we had thought were purely psychological actually "have political roots" and "are not as 'internal' as they seem." And now, in some of your most recent work (1998), you are making forays into the area of spirituality, arguing for a link between spirituality, psychotherapy, and politics. It would seem that you are driven by an intense desire to bridge the gaps between disparate arenas of human life. What has brought you to spirituality at this point?

Samuels: The short answer is that I realized how many variants of spirituality there have always been and that many of my interests and the sort of thing that moved me could be understood in terms of variants of spirituality. This helped me to see why I got so impossibly passionate about many things, to the point where I felt filled with feelings and images on the most unlikely topics: country music, social issues, food and so forth. I had not realized that I was having spiritual experiences because I had 'learned' that these were not supposed to be spiritual experiences.

So I got to theorizing about it and came up with the idea of there being three basic kinds of contemporary spiritualities.

The first I called social spirituality. I don't like the idea that spiritual people come together to do things in society, things that improve the lot of others. For me, it is the act of coming together in society that ushers in the spiritual dimension. That is to say, this kind of spirituality is enfolded into what looks like its opposite: social action and political organizing, for example. I think this is rather a Jewish take on spirituality but I have a hunch it is getting more valid. Maybe we are seeing the rise of the religious left! Spirituality is not subverted when social action is on the agenda, it is enhanced.

The second kind of spirituality I call craft spirituality. This has to do with the recognition, not only that craft matters, but also that spirituality has to do with artifice and not only with things deemed to be "natural." We make spirituality, that's the point. Not only literally in manufacture but also in our making of relationships, of culture, and of everything else that stands for the human. It has been hard to get over to people this particular vision: that spirituality is a contrived and artificial business.

The third kind of spirituality was profane spirituality (after the famous book Mysticism Sacred and Profane by Zaehner). I felt it was time to revisit the linkages between spirituality and sexuality, meaning sexual pleasure and not just I-thou relationships. But there's more than sexuality in profane spirituality; there's also the whole spiritual component in popular culture and even in what we must also condemn as materialism and consumerism.

Kulkarni: I find myself fascinated by this very creative way of thinking about spirituality. You seem, in effect, to be trying to reclaim the concept of spirit by seeing it as constellated in ways that do not require a mind-body split. It could be argued — reasonably, I think — that Jung tried, though not always successfully, to avoid that split by theorizing the transcendent function. Are you suggesting a variation on that idea?

Samuels: I hadn't thought of this before you raised it, but what you say feels right to me. I will borrow the idea. Often, the shape of Jung's theorizing turns out to help immensely even if some of the detail and the evaluative elements are a tad more problematic.

Kulkarni: And that kind of appreciation for some of Jung's work seems to tie in with something that has always struck me about your work: namely, your insistence that we (Jungians) move our focus away from Jung the man and onto ourselves. That is, that we examine how Jung's various flaws (like the three you identified above) are "not his problem, but our problem" because we have inherited a body of Jungian theory which continues even today to be permeated with Jung's various prejudices. Your intent here, it seems to me, is to push us into imagining ways of getting beyond those aspects of Jung's theory which are androcentric, or culture-bound, or which keep us confined to a rather narrow and "inner" world and to find ways of making Jungian theory more relevant to more people. You've argued, for example, that we must be more willing to get our hands 'dirty' by becoming more involved in the world and its problems — for example, the challenges presented by multiculturalism, capitalism, the market economy, anti-Semitism, etc. This is really the cutting edge of Jungian thought. Are there other Jungians there with you? And what are the most pressing areas facing Jungians today?

Samuels: For me, the most important thing is that we Jungians, and indeed other schools of analysis or therapy, do not try to do anything at all in the outer world on our own. I am fond of saying that we should try to get a therapist on every policy committee, just like they have a statistician, but at the other end of the spectrum. But for god's sake let's not have a committee of therapists — that would be hell!

So multidisciplinary work is the key here. Now, let me make a seeming detour to make an important point. If we want to engage others to work with us in a multidisciplinary way then we have to clean up our act about all the difficult issues we have been discussing: anti-Semitism, sexism and so forth. Or else, why would anyone want to work with us Jungians at all?

I think there is also a problem with what I call Jungian pseudo-expertise. By this I mean when one of us — it could be me in relation to politics! — gets into an area that is foreign to our main areas of expertise. And then we start to write with authority which is not exactly real. The worst offenders are the literary critics and anthropologists amongst us though, as I say, many people including me fall into this. I don't really know what the solution is. Some of us were experts in an area before becoming analysts, but then the problem is that we get out of date.

The problem I'm trying to address is about how to be credible partners in serious inter or multidisciplinary enterprises. For some Jungians maybe that doesn't matter too much but, for me, it does.

Kulkarni: Many Jungians do seem hesitant to take up this challenge to get more involved in interdisciplinary approaches to psyche, approaches which would inevitably get us more involved not only in the world but also with others. Some fear that such a commitment to the "external world" could lead us to dilute Jungian theory or to lose our focus on the "internal world" and the individuation process of individuals. How do you respond to such concerns?

Samuels: I don't disrespect those people who have these worries, though I think there is no need to worry about it. First, because it is truly not a case of either-or, but of trying to link both perspectives. The trouble is that a pluralistic approach is very hard to adhere to and one slips into the inner or the outer perspective very easily.

When I am supervising clinicians I find it useful simply to take up the opposite perspective form the one the therapist is currently using so that if the work is very intrapsychic I wonder about cultural issues and vice versa.

Personally, I have trouble with the holistic resolution of these issues that some can manage. I think there are differences between spheres and realms of existence and different aspects of the universe such as the inner world and the world of politics. Sometimes, judicious holism is the way to go. But I get dismayed at the amount of cheap holism that is around and the way it is used to settle the anxieties that living in the modern world engenders in us.

Kulkarni: By "cheap holism," I assume that you are including much of what goes under the rubric of the "new age." It seems to me that many Jungians have been co-opted by this popular movement — some perhaps for fame and financial gain, but others because they feel it is a way to "get the message" to a larger audience. Do you see this as problematic?

Samuels: Well, we'll know the answer to this when David Tacey's book on Jung and the New Age comes out!! Seriously, I truly don't mind what seem like some of the excesses and wackinesses of the New Ager - and the striving after spirituality of the New Agers might not be very different from mine or yours. If a Martian came to earth, would she or he really be able to tell the difference between Jungians, New Agers and psychoanalysts? I doubt it. What has concerned me is the apparent lack of interest in social issues on the part of New Agers, but this has started to shift in recent years — in relation to ecology, for example. I do have concerns about the idealization of indigenous peoples which reminds me of Jung's writings about so-called "primitives." On the one hand, how marvelous to have seen through Western civilization! On the other hand, it can be patronizing and contribute to the material disadvantage of such groups to idealize them for their wisdom whilst not effectively standing up to those interests, mainly in the West, that threaten to destroy the indigenous peoples of the world.

Kulkarni: I'd like to go back now to something you mentioned earlier — about being uncomfortable with the prevailing theories of archetypes. I think many of our readers would be interested in hearing more about your ideas on this. For example, are you saying, in effect, that Jung mistook our experiences of powerful (and numinous?) human affects for universal "archetypes"? Would this not be even closer to "instinct" than what Jung allowed? And how do you then understand or use concepts like imago?

Samuels: Yes, you are right to hear me as saying that it is in the area of the affects that I can find what is meant by archetypal. I usually argue that nothing at all in the universe is archetypal, nothing! But everything has the capacity or potential to excite an archetypal level of emotional excitement in us. This means that archetypes are truly in the eye of the beholder and as likely to be found in the ordinary and everyday as in the official areas where we are supposed to find them - such as religion or early life.

I can't buy any longer the idea of a sort of a scaffold from which things hang, which is one way of imagining the irrepresentability of the archetypes; that they are formal and empty unless filled by some property, pattern or phenomenon.

I think we Jungians have to accept that theories of cultural diffusion and migration drive a coach and horses through the idea that there is an ahistorical and universal set of imagery. Similarly, those who want to thrust the archetypes into the biological area have to explain why our particular concept adds anything to what the biologists and ethnologists are doing already.

The hard part seems to be to keep the archetypes as a psychological concept or construct. I have been guilty of this in Jung and the Post-Jungians when I went in for a long list of comparisons and analogies between archetypes and ideas from all manner of other disciplines.

It is a power word, archetype, and tends to get misused. However, most people seem to link it up with emotion which helps in my own project of trying to do just that but in a fully theorized way. Louis Stewart's work on the affects comes to mind here and is really quite excellent at introducing the affective dimension. Stewart was an academically trained psychologist and long-time Jungian analyst in the Bay Area.

Kulkarni: You've made a couple of references to "the Jungian community" and that leads me to a variation on a question you yourself have raised: What are we? — "a profession ... a community ... a movement?... a cult?" It seems to me that one of the unique and distinguishing features of the Jungian community has been its capacity to create spaces and organizations in which both lay people and professionals could meet and learn together. However, this seems to be changing. In many Jungian circles there seems to be a growing elitism, one which not only discourages lay people from being actively involved, but also widens the split between the "official" Jungian community of "insiders" (i.e., analysts and analysts-in-training) and the broader but unofficial Jungian community of "outsiders" (i.e., non-analyst professionals whose work — often the most provocative work being done today — typically goes unacknowledged in the official Jungian world). What do you think is going on here?

Samuels: In a paper on the history of the Psychology Club of Zurich I said that I thought that the professionalization of analytical psychology meant that we had lost something incalculable. The clubs still can function as spaces where analysts and non-analysts can meet, but the snag is that the Clubs have a lot of true believers therein. That makes life a bit difficult for those having a critical attitude to Jung. Ideally, as the founders of the Analytical Psychology Club of London had it, the clubs could be "universities of analytical psychology."

Which leads me to my current great love, which is the Western academy in all its glorious contradictions. The role of analytical psychology in the academy could be very interesting. For instance, we are witnessing a huge epistemological shift in which not only does the observer-observed divide blur in the way the physicists have taught us it does, but the very sources of knowledge shift their locus. They shift from one place to another in the world and in ourselves. I call this the subjectification of knowledge and others call it the femininization of knowledge, or intuitive knowledge, or soft knowledge or tacit knowledge and so forth.

This epistemology has dangers because the slogan 'in your heart you know he's right' was used of the dictator Mussolini. So I would not want an approach to knowledge exclusively based on this kind of epistemology. But, pluralistically as ever, I would say that subjective knowledge is as valid as other sorts.

The universities are starting to realize this, but they are faced with a great problem which is that they have absolutely no storehouse of theoretical approaches to accommodate such approaches to knowledge. In fact, they have usually been against that kind of thinking.

The way in which therapists and analysts have learned over the years to use their subjective knowledge in an objective quest for the well-being of the patient or client is a very useful model for people in the social and human sciences to borrow. I think that, in a way, one of our greatest contributions to thinking will be this idea that the entitiy, person, or theme that you confront in a controlled space sort of sends you messages which you can receive and decode in what in the clinical context is called the countertransference.

Kulkarni: I think you are making an extremely important point here, one that argues in effect for a feminist and relatively postmodern take on the concepts of "subjective" and "subjectivity" — an understanding that I would call hermeneutic (in the Gadamerian sense). From a Gadamerian perspective, there is no such thing as pure subjectivity because none of us can be that independent of our "tradition" (that is, of the matrix of our collective culture, theories, ideologies, history, customs, beliefs, etc., — all of which permeate and condition us and, therefore, affect and shape the interpretations which allow understanding). In that framework, all understanding results really from an interplay between the forces of tradition and the experiences of the individual. This allows for a less subjectivistic attitude without entirely abandoning the concept of subjectivity. And this all seems to me to be connected to your desire to deconstruct archetypes and to re-ground us in affect. Which leads me to ask another question: You seem to want to remind us that embodied affect is at the core of human life and from there to link us back to community through politics and, now, through spirituality. Is that is your mission?

Samuels: Well, the word mission embarrassed me when you used it. I don't know about mission. But I understand why I might make you use the word!

Kulkarni: Actually, I use it gladly since I experience you as someone who not only exhibits a great passion for what he believes in, but who also is concerned with some profound philosophical questions. I would say about you, as someone has said about Gadamer, that "it has been [your] lot to return to the yet more basic practical and political question about the right way to live" (Frederick G. Lawrence in "Translator's Introduction" to Hans-Georg Gadamer: Reason in the Age of Science, 1981, p. xiv) — except that I would say that you come at it psychologically.

So that brings me to my last question: Who are the individuals being trained to be analysts today and what is training all about? That is, most Jungians have heard the apocryphal stories about how Jung was glad he was Jung and not "a Jungian" and how he was reluctant to get involved in establishing a formal program for the training of "Jungian" analysts. In spite of any misgivings, however, Jung did get involved in establishing an institute in Zurich and since then many other institutes and training programs have been formed all over the world. The procedures for entry into, and completion of, these programs seem to be the subject of some controversy: What is the purpose of training? Some believe that training programs have become vehicles for preserving orthodoxy or for establishing an elite class of analysts who make up some kind of elite club to which they will invite only others like themselves. What do you think? Are these criticisms valid?

Samuels: Well I have argued for an affirmative action program in which we make it easier for different types of people to train to be analysts because I feel this is necessary in terms of social responsibility and also because I feel analysts are born not made. But the tide is against this view and the requirements even to apply to train get more and more rigid.

This is one reason why I like working with the IAAP (International Association for Analytical Psychology) in frontier areas, where one simply cannot make the same sort of demand that one makes in the West. I have learned such a lot on my travels to places where I have been supposed to teach.

To get back to your question, I think that one reason why many of today's training programs are so depressing as places to be is that they are over-suffused with psychoanalytic zeal (as opposed to Jungian zeal). This tends to lead to the monochromization of the field. And yet it is by no means a dull field, and eccentrics and one-off, sui generis types abound.

I have found happiness, friendship, and acceptance in this strange Jungian world, and I will stick up for it to the bitter end.

References

1985: Jung and the Post-Jungians

1987: "Affect and archetype in analysis," in Archetypal Processes in Psychotherapy. eds. Nathan Schwartz-Salant and Murray Stein. Wilmette , IL: Chiron Publications.

1989: The Plural Psyche

1991: "National Socialism, National Psychology, and Analytical Psychology" in Lingering Shadows

1993: The Political Psyche

1998: "And If Not Now, When?: Spirituality, Psychotherapy, Politics" in Psychodynamic Counseling 4:3.

Andrew Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at London University. He is a Jungian training analyst, a lecturer and a political consultant. His books include Jung and the Post-Jungians, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, and The Plural Psyche. The Secret Life of Politics will be published in 2000.

Claudette Kulkarni is a psychotherapist in private practice /and/ at Persad Center (a mental health agency serving the "sexual minority" and HIV/AIDS communities and their families), Pittsburgh, PA. She is the author of Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A Post-Jungian Perspective, and "Radicalizing Jungian Theory" in Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities. She is a contributing editor to The Round Table Review.

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