Jung and Deleuze

[SanteriSatama]

I prefer Owen Barfield's much less abstract take on the living essence of Schizophrenia, as well as Jung's:

The Jung quote was not the best he can offer, and Barfield was about guilt. A very good take on guilt, especially this:

All are responsible for everything. That does not mean that accepting responsibility and coping with in positive way are easy. Guilt tripping blame games and nurturing victimhood are obvious counter-productive traps, which originate from Shadow, and refusal and/or inability to deal with Shadow integration. Including the deep collective Shadow stuff of traumatic psychopathologies of class society, from where the constant enacting of superiority-inferiority complex and it's games comes from. The deeply collective superiority-inferiority complex in it's Oedipal forms make it also very difficult to learn and benefit from experience of others on peer-to-peer basis. We are peers as sovereigns, but that does not mean we are equals in every aspect of experience. But on the other hand, blind trust in experience of others leads to the trap of authoritarian following and turning more experienced into objects of worship. Steiner tried to speak about that, but could not avoid becoming object of worship by some of his followers and their dogmatic quarrels about who is the most orthodox authoritarian follower of Steiner. Finding good balance in that complex texture is far from easy, but it also makes life interesting and worth living. There is no end to learning.

[AshvinP]

I prefer Owen Barfield's much less abstract take on the living essence of Schizophrenia, as well as Jung's:

The Jung quote was not the best he can offer, and Barfield was about guilt. A very good take on guilt, especially this:

All are responsible for everything. That does not mean that accepting responsibility and coping with in positive way are easy. Guilt tripping blame games and nurturing victimhood are obvious counter-productive traps, which originate from Shadow, and refusal and/or inability to deal with Shadow integration. Including the deep collective Shadow stuff of traumatic psychopathologies of class society, from where the constant enacting of superiority-inferiority complex and it's games comes from. The deeply collective superiority-inferiority complex in it's Oedipal forms make it also very difficult to learn and benefit from experience of others on peer-to-peer basis. We are peers as sovereigns, but that does not mean we are equals in every aspect of experience. But on the other hand, blind trust in experience of others leads to the trap of authoritarian following and turning more experienced into objects of worship. Steiner tried to speak about that, but could not avoid becoming object of worship by some of his followers and their dogmatic quarrels about who is the most orthodox authoritarian follower of Steiner. Finding good balance in that complex texture is far from easy, but it also makes life interesting and worth living. There is no end to learning.

I should have clarified, the Jung excerpt was a summary of an entire chapter he wrote and not actually a quote from him. Maybe I will post a direct quote later which is more detailed. There is a game frequently played on this forum which I only now thought of how to articulate - "don't dispute a philosopher's position so you have to argue against it, rather appropriate that philosopher to your position and confuse unfamiliar people enough so they have no idea whether it actually is there position". FB did it at quite some length with Steiner and Barfield, and you are beginning to do it with Barfield as well, by pivoting from his criticism of "collective guilt" to criticism of class society, which is exactly the sort of "collective guilt" he wants Western society to avoid in that quote. Then it morphs into repositioning of Steiner with implication that he wanted his "followers" to basically be welcoming of all spiritual beliefs of all cultures. That should have been completely dispelled by my quotes from Knowledge of Higher Worlds. Steiner also goes on at length in other places that past spiritual traditions and practices should not simply be migrated into our current frameworks and how dangerous such things can be on our spiritual path. It would better for all involved if you guys could simply admit, "I disagree with Steiner or Barfield or Jung or whoever" and then make your case. Although I can understand the impulse not to do it that way - I would not want to be arguing against Steiner or Barfield either.

[SanteriSatama]

by pivoting from his criticism of "collective guilt" to criticism of class society, which is exactly the sort of "collective guilt" he wants Western society to avoid in that quote.

Enough of intentional misreading and hostile interpretation. Please stop it.

It's a well founded and very reasonable empirical observation that class society produces psychopathology of superiority-inferiority complex, which hinders meaningful communication and mutual learning. It's a sociopsychological mechanism and by becoming aware of how it works, by knowing, the mechanism gradually loses it's causal force.

If you don't agree that class society produces superiority-inferiority complex, please say so and present your arguments. Or if you disagree that that superiority-inferiority complex is not a problem, and on the contrary it's our collective responsibility to maintain and support that mechanism, please make your case.

I don't know what Barfield says about class society and it's sociopsychological mechanisms, if anything, so this is not about Barfield. I know that Tolkien was a spiritual and metamorphic anarchist, with his superficially weird but spiritually deep "anarchist royalism" where Aragorn bows to the hobbits, to the meek of the Earth.

As for Steiner, you told that he considered his most important writing the piece where he advices to verify by experience instead of taking the word of an authority. That was what was referred to, as well as the empirical fact that Steiner's followers have their dogmatic quarrels about orthodox interpretation of his writings. Which is a very widespread phenomenon not limited to Steiner or any specific religion or ideology.

Or maybe you disagree with Aljosha, accepting responsibility for all? If that is your opinion, just say so and tell why you consider separation and distancing from inclusive responsibility better.

[SanteriSatama]

PS: a thread-relevant quote from Jung, from the first chapter of 'the Undiscovered Self':

Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual man and, indeed, all individual events whatsoever suffer a leveling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favour of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitibly replaced by the policy of the State (raison d'état). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is inreasingly deprived of moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is rules, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accomodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgement, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.

[AshvinP]

If you don't agree that class society produces superiority-inferiority complex, please say so and present your arguments. Or if you disagree that that superiority-inferiority complex is not a problem, and on the contrary it's our collective responsibility to maintain and support that mechanism, please make your case.

I don't know what Barfield says about class society and it's sociopsychological mechanisms, if anything, so this is not about Barfield. I know that Tolkien was a spiritual and metamorphic anarchist, with his superficially weird but spiritually deep "anarchist royalism" where Aragorn bows to the hobbits, to the meek of the Earth.
...
Or maybe you disagree with Aljosha, accepting responsibility for all? If that is your opinion, just say so and tell why you consider separation and distancing from inclusive responsibility better.

Why is it not about Barfield - because you decreed it to be so, Sauron? You post quote about schizophrenia, I post quote from Barfield directly relevant to that topic, then you respond with complete non-sequiturs about "class society" as usual. There is no chance I am playing that game. I agree with Alyosha and Barfield's point about Alyosha, which is that coerced "responsibility for all" by the preachers of "equality" is less than worthless. I will give you credit for at least posting a great Jung quote which is a criticism of your entire "class oppressor" post-Marxist metanarrative.

Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual man and, indeed, all individual events whatsoever suffer a leveling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favour of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitibly replaced by the policy of the State (raison d'état). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is inreasingly deprived of moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is rules, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accomodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgement, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.

[JustinG]

Regarding Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's attack on Freud is partly based on the premise that desires produce bodies rather than the other way around. This has strong panpsychist/idealist connotations and could perhaps be related to BK's ideas on alter formation.

Here is what Claire Colebrook says about desire in her introductory book on Deleuze (https://www.amazon.com/Gilles-Deleuze-R ... 0415246342):

Colebrook wrote:
Desire for Deleuze, is not to be reduced to sexual relations between persons. On the contrary, 'persons' are formed through the organisation of
desire. I become a body through a relation to other bodies, eventually investing, perhaps, in an image of myself as an enclosed ego.

The crucial challenge of Deleuze's theory of desire, against psychoanalysis and against common sense is the idea that life and desire do not begin
from bounded organisms. There is a flow of life or genetic material, the 'intense germinal influx', which passes through and across bodies. In its
original and differential power life is not organised into bodies; bodies are formed from investments, or from active and ongoing interactions of
becomings. I do, however, think of myself as a closed and autonomous being, bounded by death: but this is because of a long history in which we
have invested in the organised and enclosed human individual.... Life does not begin from the bounded organism but from flows.

[AshvinP]

Regarding Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's attack on Freud is partly based on the premise that desires produce bodies rather than the other way around. This has strong panpsychist/idealist connotations and could perhaps be related to BK's ideas on alter formation.

Here is what Claire Colebrook says about desire in her introductory book on Deleuze (https://www.amazon.com/Gilles-Deleuze-R ... 0415246342):

Colebrook wrote:
Desire for Deleuze, is not to be reduced to sexual relations between persons. On the contrary, 'persons' are formed through the organisation of
desire. I become a body through a relation to other bodies, eventually investing, perhaps, in an image of myself as an enclosed ego.

The crucial challenge of Deleuze's theory of desire, against psychoanalysis and against common sense is the idea that life and desire do not begin
from bounded organisms. There is a flow of life or genetic material, the 'intense germinal influx', which passes through and across bodies. In its
original and differential power life is not organised into bodies; bodies are formed from investments, or from active and ongoing interactions of
becomings. I do, however, think of myself as a closed and autonomous being, bounded by death: but this is because of a long history in which we
have invested in the organised and enclosed human individual.... Life does not begin from the bounded organism but from flows.

These are fascinating things to consider. I am seriously not trying to impose my own favorite thinkers onto another person's ideas - I am of the genuine opinion of what I referred to before, i.e. the postwar (WW2) philosophers in the circle of Deleuze are abstractly critiquing what has already been critiqued concretely by phenomenologists prior to them. Steiner's lectures on psychoanalysis, and specifically his comments on re: Freud, Adler, and Jung, are great examples of what I am referring to. I have no idea to what extent and detail Deleuze & Guatarri go into the nature of this "theory of desire" but, if my suspicions are correct, all of that detail will be in the hyper-abstract manner we can see from the book review quoted above. We are given the lowest possible resolution concepts on "desire", "bounded organism", "investments", "germinal influx", "differential power", etc. Contrast that with Steiner (or even Jung) below:

Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is wrong [about sexual desires as root cause of psychic pathology]; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong [about "power" as root cause of pathology]; what he observed is also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”

That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.

Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals — it must add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point — that is not to be denied!

Steiner does go on to critique Jung's abstract intellectual approach as well, but the point is this - can you sense the difference in resolution there? The way in which Steiner's elaboration (in 1917) points us towards the concrete realities that all of these different people were speaking of? And that is just one small section of the first lecture in a five-part lecture series on psychoanalysis. It only gets more concrete and detailed from there. Jung, who was writing at the same time as Steiner, is much more concrete than any later post-modern critics of reductive psychoanalysis (of which Jung certainly was not one), and Steiner is really no comparison. He felt Jung, Bergson, and many others were speaking way too abstractly about these things (although if he had known about Jung's visionary experiences and how that informed his empirical research, he may have been less critical). In the post-modern age, especially, abstract vs. concrete language can change the entire meaning of what is being said. Steiner's criticism of that sort of abstraction is more relevant today than it ever was in his day.

[AshvinP]

Regarding Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's attack on Freud is partly based on the premise that desires produce bodies rather than the other way around. This has strong panpsychist/idealist connotations and could perhaps be related to BK's ideas on alter formation.

Here is what Claire Colebrook says about desire in her introductory book on Deleuze (https://www.amazon.com/Gilles-Deleuze-R ... 0415246342):

Colebrook wrote:
Desire for Deleuze, is not to be reduced to sexual relations between persons. On the contrary, 'persons' are formed through the organisation of
desire. I become a body through a relation to other bodies, eventually investing, perhaps, in an image of myself as an enclosed ego.

The crucial challenge of Deleuze's theory of desire, against psychoanalysis and against common sense is the idea that life and desire do not begin
from bounded organisms. There is a flow of life or genetic material, the 'intense germinal influx', which passes through and across bodies. In its
original and differential power life is not organised into bodies; bodies are formed from investments, or from active and ongoing interactions of
becomings. I do, however, think of myself as a closed and autonomous being, bounded by death: but this is because of a long history in which we
have invested in the organised and enclosed human individual.... Life does not begin from the bounded organism but from flows.

These are fascinating things to consider. I am seriously not trying to impose my own favorite thinkers onto another person's ideas - I am of the genuine opinion of what I referred to before, i.e. the postwar (WW2) philosophers in the circle of Deleuze are abstractly critiquing what has already been critiqued concretely by phenomenologists prior to them. Steiner's lectures on psychoanalysis, and specifically his comments on re: Freud, Adler, and Jung, are great examples of what I am referring to. I have no idea to what extent and detail Deleuze & Guatarri go into the nature of this "theory of desire" but, if my suspicions are correct, all of that detail will be in the hyper-abstract manner we can see from the book review quoted above. We are given the lowest possible resolution concepts on "desire", "bounded organism", "investments", "germinal influx", "differential power", etc. Contrast that with Steiner (or even Jung) below:

Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is wrong [about sexual desires as root cause of psychic pathology]; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong [about "power" as root cause of pathology]; what he observed is also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”

That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.

Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals — it must add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point — that is not to be denied!

Steiner does go on to critique Jung's abstract intellectual approach as well, but the point is this - can you sense the difference in resolution there? The way in which Steiner's elaboration (in 1917) points us towards the concrete realities that all of these different people were speaking of? And that is just one small section of the first lecture in a five-part lecture series on psychoanalysis. It only gets more concrete and detailed from there. Jung, who was writing at the same time as Steiner, is much more concrete than any later post-modern critics of reductive psychoanalysis (of which Jung certainly was not one), and Steiner is really no comparison. He felt Jung, Bergson, and many others were speaking way too abstractly about these things (although if he had known about Jung's visionary experiences and how that informed his empirical research, he may have been less critical). In the post-modern age, especially, abstract vs. concrete language can change the entire meaning of what is being said. Steiner's criticism of that sort of abstraction is more relevant today than it ever was in his day.

More directly relevant to the Deleuze book:

Later, however, Jung came upon the fact that in many of the cases of genuine illness it cannot be proved, even if you go back to his earliest childhood, that the patient as an individual is suffering from any such after-effects. If you take into consideration everything with which he has come in contact, you find the conflict within the individual, but no explanation of it. So Jung was led to distinguish two subconsciousnesses: first the individual subconsciousness, concealed within the human being. If in her childhood the young woman jumped out of a carriage and received a shock, the incident has long since vanished from her consciousness, but works subconsciously. If you consider this subconscious element (made up of innumerable details), you get the personal or individual subconsciousness. This is the first of Jung's differentiations.

But the second is the superpersonal subconsciousness. He says: There are things affecting the soul life which are neither in the personality nor in the matter of the outside world, and which must be assumed therefore as present in a soul world.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to bring such soul contents into consciousness. That is supposed to be the healing method: to bring everything into consciousness. Thus the physician must undertake to extract from the patient, not only what he has experienced individually from his birth on, but also something that was not in the outside world and is of a soul nature. This has driven the psychoanalysts to say that a man experiences, not only what he goes through after his physical birth, but also all sorts of things that preceded his birth — and that all this creates disorder within him. A man who is born today experiences thus subconsciously the Oedipus Saga. He not only learns it in school; he experiences it. He experiences the Greek gods, the whole past of mankind. The evil of this consists in the fact that he experiences it subconsciously. The psychoanalyst must therefore say — and he does go so far — that the Greek child also experienced this but, since he was told about it, he experienced it consciously. Man experiences it today, but it only stirs within him — in the thoughts of the extraverted man, in the subconscious feelings of the introverted type. It growls like demons.

[JustinG]

I fully agree that post-structuralist theories can be overly abstract and unnecessarily obtuse. On the other hand, they cannot be dismissed just for these reasons. I think philosophies like Jung's and Steiner's (whose categories, levels and hierarchies are also abstractions) need to be updated to either incorporate, transcend or negate the post-structuralist critiques of essentialism and universalism. These critiques arose partially as a reaction against the effects of universalizing systems such as Stalinism and Nazism, so I think they are important.

[AshvinP]

I fully agree that post-structuralist theories can be overly abstract and unnecessarily obtuse. On the other hand, they cannot be dismissed just for these reasons. I think philosophies like Jung's and Steiner's (whose categories, levels and hierarchies are also abstractions) need to be updated to either incorporate, transcend or negate the post-structuralist critiques of essentialism and universalism. These critiques arose partially as a reaction against the effects of universalizing systems such as Stalinism and Nazism, so I think they are important.

I am not saying to dismiss the underlying argument they are making in this situation, but to dismiss the vehicle in which it is being delivered - their abstract writings. Let's consider the actual argument Deleuze seems to be making (I am just going off of what you posted, so I am open to expansion on that if you are more familiar with the details). He says in a nutshell, "the Oedipal myth, as Freud understands it, is much bigger than anyone's personal history - in fact, the myth speaks to a time when 'persons' in the modern sense did not even exist and were still yet coming into being." Beyond that, the abstraction prevents me from determining what reality he thinks the myth is actually pointing to. Is it a spiritual reality? What sort of spiritual reality? A merely psychic relational reality that somehow avoids spiritual implications? I have no idea and I doubt I would even if I read the book, but again I am open to considering it if you can shed more light on his arguments.

Jung, in contrast, discovered the exact same transpersonal quality of the Oedipal myth decades ahead of Deleuze, as briefly recounted in the Steiner quote above, and he further specified the entire mythic realm with his systematic discussion of types, archetypes, spiritual traditions, art, etc. This may sound "universalizing", but that, by itself, is no reason to dismiss the empirical data he was working with. You would need to specify how it is "universalizing" and why that is not warranted by the empirical data. Steiner reached these same conclusions even decades before Jung, and with even more empirical data. So we have Steiner, Jung, and Deleuze all saying the same (or very similar) thing about Oedipal myth. Steiner and Jung said it much earlier and much better, in concrete and detailed terms. So why even bother consideration of Deleuze on that particular topic?