Undulating Ungulate

15 Responses to “one from Jung”

1.   bruce
   April 25th, 2007 | 2:36 am

   Normal is a myth. Unsuccessful? By what measure? One’s own? Society’s?

2.   chuck
   April 25th, 2007 | 7:39 am

   does that mean that that the the normal aim of the unuccessful is to be ideal?

3.   Andrew
   April 26th, 2007 | 9:01 am

   Dunno if this would be true in the original German (I assume he said it in German), but that quote could be read in two *very* different senses. The other sense is: if you’re not normal you’re unsuccessful.

4.   Janet
   April 26th, 2007 | 9:34 am

   To SEEM normal is the aim of those who don’t want to get their heads kicked in by normal people.

   To be weird is the aim of people who are so normal they’re boring and have to try and make themselves interesting by pretending they’re sooo crazy.

   And I’m totally with Bruce on the ‘define success’ thing.

   I think celebrating so-called ‘success’ is one of the things that makes people f**ked up.

5.   Administrator
   April 26th, 2007 | 11:04 am

   Jung would likely define “success” as being psychologically actualized and integrated; I’ll leave it to your own judgment how many “normal” people are.

   I found the quote in the context of a bio of Jung; casting Jung as being one who unrepentantly went his own way, and attempting to show his attitudes in his own words.

6.   Janet
   April 26th, 2007 | 11:39 am

   Would have been useful if you’d clarified the definition of success in the quote – the OED paperback dictionary defines success as ‘a favourable outcome; doing what was desired or attempted; the attainment of wealth, fame or position.’ Generally I tend to assume usage 3 as this is what it means in most contexts you hear/read the word success in. I guess Jung’s definition could come under the second definition, but you’d still need to define ‘what was desired or attempted’ as being psychologically actualised and integrated.

   I know I’m overanalysing, but unless I’ve got the correct context it almost makes the quote sound like misguided self-help

7.   Janet
   April 26th, 2007 | 11:42 am

   And let’s not get started on defining normal….

8.   Administrator
   April 26th, 2007 | 12:10 pm

   I think it also entirely possibly to read it as a massively snarky quote taking the usual sense of success – people who haven’t achieved anything much desiring refuge in normality.

9.   Andrew
   April 26th, 2007 | 5:00 pm

   Yeah, that was roughly what I figured the first sense was, when I only gave the other sense. In fairness to me giving the other sense (if you’re not normal you’re unsuccessful), I think he is sometimes guilty of thinking like this, and I’d draw attention to his writings on gender to illustrate it (ie as represented in his theory of the Anima/Animus)…. uh, I’d draw attention to it if I had his writings on me right now, but I don’t, so instead I’ll ask if you’re interested in me quoting it – I can see it getting waaay off topic

10.   Lou
    April 26th, 2007 | 5:00 pm

    IF you decide to ignore everything, and decide to measure & deem yourself sucessful by only YOUR OWN terms (which face it, are a far better measure than those pre-set ones of anyone else)
    You loose all desire of wanting or needing to be normal
    (ahhhh – release)

    You let society’s terms deem you unsuccessful and suddenly the all consuming urge is to be normal
    (urghh than one seems like win-win for societeeeee)

11.   Janet
    April 26th, 2007 | 5:40 pm

    I am the son and the heir,
    of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
    I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular.
    So shut your mouth, how can you say,
    I go about things the wrong way
    I am human and I need to be loved,
    Just like everybody else does.

12.   Administrator
    April 27th, 2007 | 1:53 pm

    Andrew: by all means, bring the erudition.

13.   Andrew
    April 29th, 2007 | 6:42 pm

    Right then, bringing the erudition. I’ve included a lot of explication too, so even though you don’t have HTML markup stuff in comments, I’ve put tags on the main lumps of Jung. That means that if things get murky, you can always cut’n'paste this comment into something that does do HTML… As I was looking for a quick illustrative range of quotes, I got most of them via Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, but the explication is mine.

    I worry that this is going to come out like a character-assasination of Jung (I admit before we begin that I distrust him deeply). I’ve provided references so while you can verify that I’m quoting him accurately you can also see what I’m leaving out. And I note that Jung’s theories and philosophy developed over his lifetime whereas these quotes are just from instants in time (just as you can’t anticipate The Tempest on the basis of The Taming of the Shrew). Also, if I’m emphasising the rascist misogynist reactionary-right Jung, bear in mind that the fact he’s been co-optable by numerous thinkers of *very* different colours presumably says something. Um, I assume you know all this – this is a performance to show I do too.

    Okay, I’m going to start by quoting stuff on homosexuality – I do this because it’s not the usual entry-point to discussions on Jung’s beliefs on gender (“androgyny” is the usual entry-point, but showing his beliefs about homosexuality helps manifest his fuller views on androgyny – it’s normal to omit the less pleasing aspects of his androgyny theory). I also quote this because it refers directly to “normality”, and in my reading, to “normality” as a positive quality.

    “homosexual relations between students of either sex are by no means uncommon… I am speaking here not of pathological homosexuals who are incapable of real friendship and meet with little sympathy from normal individuals, but of more or less normal younsters who enjoy such a rapturous friendship that they also express their feelings in sexual form.”

    ['The Love Problems of a Student', in Civilisation in Transition, p.107, trans. R.F.C. HUll]

    I’ll just mention in passing the background psychoanalytic assumption that “normal” homosexuality is “a phase”, and that permanent homosexuality is a form of immaturity – it’s common to most early psychoanalytic thinkers, though their valuations of that differ from thinker to thinker.

    I think it worth noting in relation to the use of terms like “normal” that while Freud used “normal” for heterosexual, its doublet was “invert” – while this still indicates a certain amount of value judgement, it differs from Jung – there is a story that when a woman asked Freud if he could cure her son of his homosexuality he responded that he couldn’t because it wasn’t a disease. This is a long way from the concept of pathology. It’s said that psychoanalysis as a movement later came to demonise homosexuality as a way of “buying” their institutionalisation; but I don’t think it was as cynical as that for Jung.

    With Jung, in this piece at any rate, “normal” is opposed to “pathological” and “incapable of real friendship”. I think there’s room for interpretation that the fact that “pathological homosexuals” meet with little sympathy from “normal individuals” doesn’t mean they don’t deserve sympathy. However, this might be special pleading, given what comes next:

    “The more homosexual a man is, the more prone he is to disloyalty… He becomes gushing, soulful, aesthetic, over-sensitive, etc.- in a word, effeminate, and this womanish behaviour is detrimental to his character”; and

    “Generally they [lesbians] are high-spirited, intellectual, and rather masculine women who are seeking to maintain their superiority and to defend themselves against men. Their attitude to men is therefore one of disconcerting self-assurance, with a trace of defiance. Its effect on their character is to reinforce their masculine traits and to destroy their feminine charm. Often a man discovers their homosexuality only when he notices that these women leave him stone-cold.”

    ['The Love Problems of a Student', p.108]

    I think that removes the likelihood that Jung thinks these people should be viewed as sympathetic. It should also be clear that

    a) he links homosexuality with the inversion of gender traits (stating the obvious, and for the time, normative – however, it’s important to note this when I move away from the discussion of homosexuality)

    b) in his explication of these traits he is a mysogynist

    In relation to that last claim, yes, it’s an opinion, but I offer it as a “neutral” descriptive term, not simply as an aspersion on his character: the Concise OED defines “mysogynist” as “a man who hates women”, and I think this would be a necessary starting point for his assessment of “feminine” gender traits – the only feminine quality that is non-pejorative in the last two quotes is “charm”, and that’s a fairly equivocal one in light of the others. And I’m spelling it out, but the last quote is similar to the logic of boorish arseholes for whom a rebuff is “evidence” of lesbianism or frigidity – a woman’s normality is measured in her relations to *men* rather than *people*.

    Okay, *now* to bring in androgyny.

    “Wholeness consists in the union of the conscious and unconscious personality. Just as every individual dervies from masculine and feminine genes, and the sex is determined by the predominating genes, so in the psyche it is only the conscious mind, in a man, that has the masculine sign, while the unconscious is by nature feminine. The reverse is true in the case of a woman. All I have done in my anima theory is to rediscover and reformulate this fact. It has long been known.”

    ['The Psychology of the Child-Archetype', in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans R.F.C. Hull, p. 175]

    Dealing first with its internal failures – I accept that this is not the core presentation of his anima theory but it is critically weak in its own right: the connective “just as”/”so” is presented as if this is a logical proof, which it is not. I suspect that the appeal to authority that closes the quote is a recognition of the failure of his proof to work.

    The next point to make is that for this model of “wholeness” to work, one has to accept a thoroughly schematised model of gender (as opposed to sex) difference – I’ve already given an indication of Jung’s idea of what it *means* to be masculine or feminine. Following that, although his anima theory has been taken as presenting androgyny as the model of wholeness, that opening line, “Wholeness consists in the union of the conscious and unconscious personality”, is not as utopian as one might hope:

    “a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less, the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one’s own background, and one’s real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.”

    ['Woman in Europe', in Civilisation in Transition, p.118, trans. R.F.C. HUll]

    And what is meant by “as a man” and “as a woman”? Well, we’ve seen that already, in his definitions of that which makes the feminine man feminine and the masculine woman masculine – though the “problem” of the feminine man seems to be his *success* in being feminine whereas the “problem” of the masculine woman is her *failure* in being masculine.

    Of course, I’m flitting between writings there, so to take another quote from ‘Woman in Europe’ that will show its continuity with ‘The Love Problems of a Student’:

    “A woman who takes up a masculine profession is influenced by her unconscious masculinity… she develops a rigid intellectuality based on so-called principles, and backs them up with a whole host of arguments which always miss the mark in the most irritating way… [she] exasperates and disgusts men”

    ['Woman in Europe', pp.118-9]

    In case, at this point, there is still any suspicion that Jung is still not rigidly opposed to that which he has been calling “normal” in these quotations, I note one more line from ‘Woman in Europe’: “there is a quite special need for woman to have an intimate relationship with the other sex” [ibid]

    Here is another quote, just to hammer home the point about the influence of his mysogyny on his reification of gender difference, and the influence of both on anima theory; *and* the point that anima-theory does not valorise androgyny in practice (“a man should live as a man”):

    “Men can argue in a womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have been transformed into the animus of their own anima. With them the question becomes one of personal *vanity* and *touchiness* (as if they were females)”

    ['Aieon' in Psyche and Symbol, p.13]

    By now it must be clear that what Jung is presenting as bedrock universals of human psyches are really just gender stereotypes. And that far from advancing a genuinely autonymous viewpoint he is seeking to entrench these stereotypes in a socially conservative intervention. Frans Fanon’s line on Jung’s racism can be applied neatly to his opinions on gender as well: “Jung has confused instinct with habit”.

    At least in this aspect of his work, to be “normal”, in the most socially conservative sense of the word, is also to be psychologically whole and healthy.

14.   Administrator
    April 30th, 2007 | 12:01 am

    Blimey.

15.   michael
    April 30th, 2007 | 1:13 pm

    Jesus, reading those Jung quotes was a bit like those “women know your place” clips from Harry Enfield and Chums.