Dr. Evans: One of the very fundamental ideas of the original psychoanalytic theory was Freud's conception of the libido as a sort of broad,
psychic sexual energy. Of course, we all know that you began to feel that Dr. Freud might have laid, perhaps, a little too much stress on
sexuality in his theories.When did you first begin feeling this?
Dr. Jung: In the beginning, I had naturally certain prejudices against this conception, and after a while, I overcame them.
I could do that from the weight of my biological training.
I could not deny the impulses of the sexual instinct, you know.
Later on, however, I saw that it was really one-sided because, you see, man is not only governed by the sex instinct; there are other instincts
as well. For instance, in biology you see that the nutritional instinct is just as important as the sex instinct.Although in primitive societies
sexuality plays a role, food does much more.
Food is the all-important interest and desire.
Sex—that is something they can have everywhere —they are not tried. But food is difficult to obtain, you see, and so it is the main interest.
Then in other societies—I mean civilized societies— the power drive plays a much greater role than sex. For instance, there are many big
business men who are impotent because their full energy is going into money making or dictating the roles to everybody ‐ else. That is much
more interesting to them than the affairs of women.
Dr. Evans: So in a sense, as you began to look over Dr. Freud's emphasis on sexual drive, you began to think in terms of other cultures, and
it seemed to you that this emphasis was not of sufficient universality to be assessed primary importance.
Dr. Jung: Well, you know, I couldn't help seeing it, because I had studied Nietzsche.
I knew the work of Nietzsche very well.
He had been a professor at Basel University, and the air was full of talk about Nietzsche; so naturally I had studied his works.And from this I saw an entirely different psychology, which was also psychology—a perfectly competent psychology, but built upon the power drive.
Dr. Evans: Do you think it possible that Dr. Freud was either ignoring Nietzsche, or had perhaps not wanted to be influenced by Nietzsche?
Dr. Jung: You mean his personal motivation?
Dr. Evans: Yes.
Dr. Jung: Of course it was a personal prejudice.It happened to be his main point, you know, that certain people are chiefly looking for this
side, and other people are looking for another side.
So, you see, the inferior Dr. Adler, the younger and weaker, naturally had a power complex.
He wanted to be the successful man.
Freud was a successful man; he was on top, and so he was interested only in pleasure and the pleasure principle, and Adler was interested in the power drive.
Dr. Evans: You feel that it was a sort of function of Dr. Freud's own personality?
Dr. Jung: Yes, it is quite natural; it is one of two ways how to deal with reality.
Either you make reality an object of pleasure, if you are powerful enough already; or you make it an object of your desire to grab or to possess.
Dr. Evans: Some observers have speculated that the patients whom Dr. Freud saw in the Vienna of this period were so often sexually
repressed that they may have been representative of a cultural type; or, in other words, since these patients were a part of a Viennese
society, believed to have been a rather "repressed" society, Freud's patients, perhaps, demonstrated an undue tendency to react to sexual
frustration, reinforcing his ideas of a sexual libido.
Dr. Jung: Well, it is certainly so that at the end of the Victorian age there was a reaction going over the whole world against the sex taboos,
so-called.One didn't properly understand any more why or why not; and Freud belongs in that time, a sort of liberation of the mind of such
taboos.
Dr. Evans: There was a reaction, then, against the sort of tight, inhibited culture he was living in.
Dr. Jung: Yes, Freud, in that way—on that side, really belonged to the category of a Nietzschean mind.
Nietzsche had liberated Europe from a great deal of such prejudices, but only concerning the power drive and our illusions as to motivations of our morality.It was a time critical of morality.
Dr. Evans: So Dr. Freud, in a sense, was taking it from another direction—
Dr. Jung: Yes.And then, moreover, sex being the main instinct and the dominating instinct in a more or less safe society, when the social
conditions are more or less safe, sexuality is apt to predominate because people are taken care of.They have their positions.
They have enough food. When there is no question of hunting or seeking food, or something like that, then it is quite probable that patients you meet have more or less all some sexual complex.
Dr. Evans: So the sex drive is potentially the drive in that particular society most likely to be inhibited?
Dr. Jung: Yes.It is a sort of finesse, almost, when you find out that somebody has a power-drive and their sex only serves the purpose of
power.
For instance, a charming man whom all women think is the real hero of all hearts; he is a power-fable, like a Don Juan, you know.
The woman is not his problem; his problem is how to dominate.
So in the second place after sex comes the power drive, and even that is not the end.
Dr. Evans: To proceed further, in the orthodox psychoanalytic view, as you well know, there is much attention paid to what Freud called
psychosexual development, in that the individual encounters a series of problems in sequence which he must resolve in order to progressively
mature. It appears that one of the earliest problems the individual seems to have centers around, you might say, primitive oral satisfactions;
or oral zone experiences, including weaning, represent some of the first frustrations for the infant.
Dr. Jung: I think, you see, that when Freud says that one of the first interests, and the foremost interest is to feed, he doesn't need such a
peculiar kind of terminology like "oral zone." Of course, they put it into the mouth—
Dr. Evans: Then you look at Freud's oral level of development in a less complicated sense without a sexual connotation?
Dr. Jung: Science consists to a great extent of meal talk.
Dr. Evans: In summary then, Dr. Jung, with reference to the oral level of development, you prefer to look at it rather literally, as a sort of
hunger drive or drive for nutrition. Another rather fundamental point in the development of the ego in the orthodox psychoanalytic view is that the oral level is followed by another critical level, an anal level of development.At this level another crucial, early frustration arises; that is, frustration centering around the problem of toilet-training. In Ego development and later character formation, Freud saw poor resolution of such problems as being rather serious.
Dr. Jung: Well, one can use such terminology because it is a fact that children are exceedingly interested in all orifices of the body and in
doing all sorts of disgusting things, and sometimes such a peculiarity keeps on into later life.
It is quite astonishing what you can hear in this respect. Now it is equally true that people who have such prevalences also develop a peculiar character.
In early childhood a character is already there.
You see, a child is not born tabula rasa as one assumes.
The child is born as a high complexity, with existing determinants that never waver through the whole life, and that give the child his character.
Already, in earliest childhood, a mother recognizes the individuality of her child; and so, if you observe carefully, you see a tremendous difference, even in very small children.
These peculiarities express themselves in every way.
First, the peculiarities express themselves in all childish activities—in the way he plays, in the things he is interested in.
There are children who are tremendously interested in all moving things, in the movement chiefly, and in all things they see that affect the body.
So they are interested in what the eyes do, what the ears do, how far you can bore into the nose with your finger, you know.
They will do the same to the anus; they will do whatever they please with their genitals.
For instance, when I was in school, we once stole the class book where all the punishments were noted, and there our professor of religion had noted, "So-and-so punished with two hours because he was toying with his genitals during the religious hour."
These interests express themselves in a typically childish way in children.
Later on they express themselves in other peculiarities which are still the same, but it doesn't come from the fact that they once had done such and such a thing in childhood.
It is the character that is doing it. There is a definite complexity, and if you want to know something about possible reasons, you must go to the parents.
In any case of a child's neurosis, I go back to the parents and see what is going on there, because children have no psychology of their own,
literally taken.
They are so much in the mental atmosphere of the parents, so much a participation mystique with the parents.
They are imbued by the maternal or paternal atmosphere, and they express these influences in their childish way. For instance, take an illegitimate child.
They are particularly exposed to environmental difficulties such as the misfortune of the mother, etcetera, etcetera, and all the
complications.
Such a child will miss, for instance, a father. Now in order to compensate for this, it is just as if they were choosing or
nominating a part of their body for a father, a substitution for the father, and they develop, for instance, masturbation. That is very often so of illegitimate children; they become terribly autoerotic, even criminal.
Dr. Evans: With reference to the role of the parents in development, one of the central parts of psychosexual development in orthodox
psychoanalytic theory is the Oedipal level of development.It is at this level that the problem of premature sexuality relating to the opposite
sex parent emerges.This problem, like the earlier ones mentioned, must also be resolved, or it will result in the formation of an Oedipus
complex.
Dr. Jung: That is just what I call an archetype.
That is the first archetype Freud discovered; the first and the only one.
He thought that this WAS the archetype.Of course, there are many such archetypes.
You look at Greek mythology and you find them, any amount of them.
Or look at dreams and you find any amount of them.
To Freud, however, incest was so impressive that he chose the term "Oedipus Complex," because that was one of the outstanding examples of an incest complex; though, mind you, it is only in the masculine form, because women have an incest complex too which, to Freud, was not an Oedipus.So it is something else?
He saw this only as a term for an archetypal way of behavior.
In the case of a man—a man's relation, say, to his mother.
He also means to his daughter because whatever he was to his mother, he will be it to the daughter too.
It can be this way or that way.
Dr. Evans: Then you believe, in other words, that the Oedipus complex is not as important an influence in itself as Freud did, but that it is
only one of many archetypes?
Dr. Jung: Yes.It is only one of the many, many ways of behavior. Oedipus gives you an excellent example of the behavior of an archetype.
It is always a whole situation.
There is a mother; there is a father; there is a son; so there is a whole story of how such a situation develops and to what end it leads finally. That is an archetype.
An archetype always is a sort of abbreviated drama.
It begins in such and such a way, extends to such and such a complication, and finds its solution in such and such a way.
That is the usual form. For instance, take the instinct in birds of building their nests.
In the way they build the nests, there is the beginning, the middle, and the end. The nests are built just to suffice for a certain number of young.
The end is already anticipated.
That is the reason why, in the archetype, it is hard.
There is no time; it is a timeless condition where beginning, middle, and end are just the same; they are all given in one.
That is only a hint to what the archetype can do, you know, but that is a complicated question.
Dr. Evans: To discuss more specifically Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex, a rather commonly held belief, again within the confines of
orthodox psychoanalytic theory, is that, in a sense, the child's early family behavior patterns with the mother, the father, etc., are to some
extent repeatedly relived, and can be regarded as a "repetition compulsion." For example, when the young man gets married, he may react to
his wife as he did to his mother, or he may be searching for someone like his mother.Likewise, the daughter, as she looks for a husband, may
be searching for a father. This will be repeated over and over again. This appears to be the heart of what the early Freudians were theorizing.Now, does this type of recapitulation of the very early Oedipus situation fit in with your conceptions?
Dr. Jung: No.You see, Freud speaks of the incest complex just in the way you describe, but he omits completely the fact that with this
Oedipus complex, he is only giving the contrary—namely, the resistance against it.For instance, if the Oedipus pattern were really
predominant, we would have been suffocated in incest half a million years ago, at least.
But there is a compensation. In all of the early levels of civilization you find the marriage laws, namely, exogamic laws.
The first form, the most elemental form, is that the man can marry his cousin on the maternal side.
The next form is that the man can only marry his cousin in the second degree, namely, from the grandmother.
There are four systems; quarter marriages, systems of 8 and 12, and a 6-system.
In China, there are still traces of both a 12-system and of a 6-system.
And those are developments beyond the incest complex and against the incest complex.Now if sexuality is predominant, particularly incestual sexuality, how can it develop?
These things have developed in a time long before there was any idea of a child—say of my sister.
That's all wrong. On the contrary, it was a royal prerogative as late as the Caanite kings in Persia, and among the Egyptian Pharaohs, that the Pharaoh had a daughter from his sister; he married that daughter and had a child with her, and then married his granddaughter.
Because that was royal prerogative.
You see, the preservation of the royal blood is always a sort of attempt at the highly appreciated incestuous restriction of the numbers of ancestors, because this is loss of ancestors. Now, you see, that must be explained too.
There is not only the one thing that shows its compensation.
You know this plays a very great role in the history of human civilization.
Freud is always inclined to explain these things by external influences.For instance, you would not feel hampered in any way if there were not
a law against it.
No one is hampered by one's self. And that's what he never could admit to me. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with Richard L. Evans, Pages 11-14
No comments:
Post a Comment