Jung's Lament

Abstract

This article has two premises. First, that depth psychology is more an art than a science, and second, that expanding imagination is the primary method of therapy. Both Jung and Freud considered themselves scientists, yet both had ambivalent relationships with artists and writers. Freud was given the Goethe award for literature and never the Nobel Prize for medicine, whereas Jung was confronted by both his anima and Herbert Read concerning his devaluation of his own artistic direction as well as of modern art generally. I am proposing through the article's fictional style, that in this age of evidenced-based medicine, we, as therapists, have much more to learn from writers and their fictional stories than from the abstract fantasies of science. I believe we have made an error in our field by turning so completely to developmental theories and object-relation theorists for our method. Jung hinted as early as 1916, in his paper “The Transcendent Function,” that there was a way of engaging the soul directly and allowing its voice and character to emerge. I am proposing that if we truly believe that the psyche is autonomous, then all therapy should be an encounter with “the other.” If this were the case, then active imagination could be developed as a wider and more inclusive method.Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.―Sigmund Freud