Foreword to Perry: “The Self in Psychotic Process”

Foreword to Perry: “The Self in Psychotic Process”

As I studied Dr. Perry's manuscript, I could not help recalling the time when I was a young alienist searching vainly for a point of view which would enable me to understand the workings of the diseased mind.

Merely clinical observations—and the subsequent post mortem when one used to stare at a brain which ought to have been out of order yet showed no sign of abnormality—were not particularly enlightening. "Mental diseases are diseases of the brain" was the axiom, and told one just nothing at all.

Within my first months at the Clinic, I realized that the thing I lacked was a real psychopathology, a science which showed what was happening in the mind during a psychosis.

I could never be satisfied with the idea that all that the patients produced, especially the schizophrenics, was nonsense and chaotic gibberish.

On the contrary, I soon convinced myself that their productions meant something which could be understood, if only one were able to find out what it was.

In 1901, I started my association experiments with normal test persons in order to create a normal basis for comparison.

I found then that the experiments were almost regularly disturbed by psychic factors beyond the control of consciousness.

I called them complexes.

No sooner had I established this fact than I applied my discovery to cases of hysteria and schizophrenia.

In both I found an inordinate amount of disturbance, which meant that the unconscious in these conditions is not only opposed to consciousness
but also has an extraordinary energic charge.

While with neurotics the complexes consist of split-off contents, which are systematically arranged, and for this reason are easily understandable,
with schizophrenics the unconscious proves to be not only unmanageable and autonomous, but highly unsystematic, disordered, and even chaotic.

Moreover, it has a peculiar dreamlike quality, with associations and bizarre ideas such as are found in dreams.

In my attempts to understand the contents of schizophrenic psychoses, I was considerably helped by Freud's book on dream interpretation, which had just appeared (1900).

By 1905, I had acquired so much reliable knowledge about the psychology of schizophrenia (then called "dementia praecox") that I was able to write two papers3 about it.

The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1906) had practically no influence at all, since nobody was interested in pathological psychology except Freud, with whom I had the honour of collaborating for the next seven years.

Dr. Perry, in this book, gives an excellent picture of the psychic contents with which I found myself confronted.

At the beginning, I felt completely at a loss in understanding the association of ideas which I could observe daily with my patients.

I did not know then that all the time I had the key to the mystery in my pocket, inasmuch as I could not help seeing the often striking parallelism between
the patients' delusions and mythological motifs.

But for a long time I did not dare to assume any relationship between mythological formations and individual morbid delusions.

Moreover, my knowledge of folklore, mythology, and primitive psychology was regrettably deficient, so that I was slow in discovering how common
these parallels were.

Our clinical approach to the human mind was only medical, which was about as helpful as the approach of the mineralogist to Chartres Cathedral.

Our training as alienists was much concerned with the anatomy of the brain but not at all with the human psyche.

One could not expect very much more in those days, when even neuroses, with their overflow of psychological material, were a psychological terra incognita.

The main art the students of psychiatry had to learn in those days was how not to listen to their patients.

Well, I had begun to listen, and so had Freud.

He was impressed with certain facts of neurotic psychology, which he even named after a famous mythological model, but I was overwhelmed with "historical" material while studying the psychotic mind.

From 1906 until 1912 I acquired as much knowledge of mythology, primitive psychology, and comparative religion as possible.

This study gave me the key to an understanding of the deeper layers of the psyche and I was thus enabled to write my book with the English title Psychology of the Unconscious.

This title is slightly misleading, for the book represents the analysis of a prodromal schizophrenic condition.

It appeared forty years ago, and last year I published a fourth, revised edition under the title Symbols of Transformation.

One could not say that it had any noticeable influence on psychiatry.

The alienist's lack of psychological interest is by no means peculiar to him.

He shares it with a number of other schools of thought, such as theology, philosophy, political economy, history, and medicine, which all stand in need of psychological understanding and yet allow themselves to be prejudiced against it and remain ignorant of it.

It is only within the last years, for instance, that medicine has recognized "psychosomatics."

Psychiatry has entirely neglected the study of the psychotic mind, in spite of the fact that an investigation of this kind is important not only from a scientific and theoretical standpoint but also from that of practical therapy.

Therefore I welcome Dr. Perry's book as a messenger of a time when the psyche of the mental patient will receive the interest it deserves.

The author gives a fair representation of an average case of schizophrenia, with its peculiar mental structure, and, at the same time, he shows the reader what he should know about general human psychology if he wishes to understand the apparently chaotic distortions and the grotesque "bizarrerie" of the diseased mind.

An adequate understanding often has a remarkable therapeutic effect in milder cases which, of course, do not appear in mental hospitals, but all the more in the consultation hours of the private specialist.

One should not underrate the disastrous shock which patients undergo when they find themselves assailed by the intrusion of strange contents which they are unable to integrate.

The mere fact that they have such ideas isolates them from their fellow men and exposes them to an irresistible panic, which often marks the outbreak of the manifest psychosis.

If, on the other hand, they meet with adequate understanding from their physician, they do not fall into a panic, because they are still understood by a human being and thus preserved from the disastrous shock of complete isolation.

The strange contents which invade consciousness are rarely met with in neurotic cases, least not directly, which is the reason why so many psychotherapists are unfamiliar with the deeper strata of the human psyche.

The alienist, on the other hand, rarely has the time or the necessary scientific equipment to deal with, or even to bother with, his patients' psychology.

In this respect, the author's book fills a yawning gap.

The reader should not be misled by the current prejudice that I produce nothing but theories.

My so-called theories are not figments but facts that can be verified, if one only takes the trouble, as the author has done with so much success, to listen to the patient, to give him the credit—that is humanly so important—of meaning something by what he says, and to encourage him to express himself as much as he possibly can.

As the author has shown, drawing, painting and other methods are sometimes of inestimable value, inasmuch as they complement and amplify verbal expression.

It is of paramount importance that the investigator should be sufficiently acquainted with the history and phenomenology of the mind.

Without such knowledge, he could not understand the symbolic language of the unconscious and so would be unable to help his patient assimilate the irrational ideas that bewilder and confuse his consciousness.

It is not a "peculiar historical interest," a sort of hobby of mine to collect historical curiosities, as has been suggested, but an earnest endeavour to help
the understanding of the diseased mind.

The psyche, like the body, is an extremely historical structure.

I hope that Dr. Perry's book will arouse the psychiatrist's interest in the psychological aspect of his cases.

Psychology belongs as much to his training as anatomy and physiology to that of the surgeon. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 353-356

Jung’s Influence on My Life and Work by John W. Perry

Jung’s Influence on My Life and Work by John W. Perry

My first encounter with Jung arose out of one of those auspicious blendings of circumstance which seem so often to mark the turning-points in one's psychic life.

On behalf of my intent to embark upon the field of psychology and religion, my father arranged to meet Jung when in Zurich, and persuaded him to return the visit when attending the Harvard Tercentenary.

Since I was seeking a new and revitalized experience of religion, and my parent was a bishop, 1 can imagine this crisis in in father figures might have appealed to Jung.

However, the occasion found me young and innocent of the world, especially of the psychic one, and he did the only thing he could for my benefit-he talked almost steadily for two days, filling my head with a rich flow of psychic nourishment that took me several years to incorporate and digest.

Many of my Boston acquaintances were far better equipped than I to benefit by such a colloquy, and it bore heavily on me; only in retrospect can I look upon those days and feel justification in knowing that not many could have been so touched in the wordless deeps as to find the rest of their lives given shape by them.

I could not assent at the time to what Jung was telling me, though I found it strangely fascinating; the psyche I had been studying in classes and books had quite a different cast, and I felt an obligation to cleave to the scientific view and not wander away into what seemed to me to be bucolic pastures of European scholarship and erudition.

My analytic reading began shortly after with Freud's works, which I devoured with avid enthusiasm and in which I thought I was finding the answer to all things human; I set about applying it all mercilessly to family and friends.

It was so satisfying to have an explanation for hidden things!

Dutifully I moved ahead in my reading program over the years, toward Jung and Adler and the rest.

The Psychology of the Unconscious, which I had already glanced through like a college text as a measure to 'brush up on Jung' before seeing him, and had taken as a sort of code of symbols, I now greeted with different eyes, perhaps because by this time I had been in love and was no longer all closed up inside.

This new encounter with Jung was like emerging out of a tunnel into a broad and noble terrain, a real world, one of heights and depths, of living beings with an historical heritage and a future to strive toward.

The Secret of the Golden Flower lit up little flames in the interior recesses which have been glowing ever since.

The Jung of those earlier days in Providence came to life again and began to speak to my condition, and I began to sense that peculiar gratitude to him which most of us know so well.

During the war I received a second infusion of psychic nourishment which I could not fully digest, a rich inpouring of ways and views of the other side of the world, the Chinese Interior, and
more than ever felt the need to find the way to assimilate it; for I was tempted, as happens with large experiences, to find my life in it rather than the harder alternative of finding it in my life.

Of several foundations I requested to send me to Zurich to prepare for the field of psychology and religion, the Rockefeller wrote back with alacrity to say they had for some while been wanting
such a request and had been holding a special nest egg for the purpose.

At Zurich I had the good fortune to see the first beginnings of the germinating Institute, which was starting to embody the differentiation of one man's vision into its many facets to be developed by many individuals with their special gifts; it was heroic work on the part of that Curatorium to meet the many tribulations and establish a workable order.

I have since realized what a piece of good fortune it is to be able to immerse oneself in that psychic world for a solid block of time, which in the usual course of training in other areas one cannot do.

The heart that pulsed through that organism, of course, was Jung himself; for me his helping hand slipped into the opus from point to point to steer it on its course.

In the many talks we had on religion, while I was still na:ive enough, all that I heard seemed natural and more or less understandable, lighting up those obscure levels bit by bit.

What really hit me amidships and shook my timbers was a thrust in the other direction. I was having that upside-down kind of growth that begins somewhere down in the psychic basement and reaches for the light of day.

I found that what I really wanted to hear, because it threw me into a new dimension of experience, was his comment on how and where religious content connects with everyday life.

Perhaps it was made particularly moving by the circumstance that he, in his late age v.: 1th its inward turning and its appetite for exploring the depths in their historical perspective, was reaching over that long span to my predicament of young years and was striking the keynote to which I could resonate.

When with his penetrating intuition Jung would point out these principles, he flung doors open to right and left for me, and with great intensity I retraced my way through the imagery of my dreams and discovered anew the vital connections between them and the emotional episodes which had been bearing me along as on a mountain torrent.

Here my quite active religious psyche was implanting itself in events and relationships, and, though it required struggling to reclaim it, at least it then came clothed in the warm colors of experience.

It was what I wanted of a religion, one that I had known at first hand in China, that sprang out of depths, but that entered into the life of everyday, into love, work, social issues, and concerns.

My efforts since then have been directed toward exploring the vital point of connection between the religious dynamisms and the outward life, where the archetype slips into the emotional setting, and thus where the supra-personal is one with the personal.

There has been no break in this as a religious quest, but I have felt it to be turned onto its course more than once by the hand of this man who was so well acquainted with the uncharted waters; yet it has come full circle around into psychiatry proper, where I can explore in mental disturbances that vital point of articulation (of joining) and learn how to restore to persons the personalness of their psychic life.

I need hardly enlarge on the point of this impression of Jung.

The vastness of his mind and vision, the dimensions illuminated by him, were for me gentle and serene in quality as :flooding sunlight; but what moved me like the grandeur of a storm was the genius of his hold on life and of his seeing into life, for perceiving the deepest operations of the psyche equally in the slumbering world of the night and the turbulence of the welter of the life of the day. ~John W. Perry, Contact with Jung, Pages 214-217