Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is one of the most well-known existentialists of the 20th century. Through his various mediums, including novels, plays and philosophical essays, Sartre asserted and demonstrated his basic view that existence precedes essence. Sartre's existentialist philosophy stands in contradistinction from the Aristotelian and Scholastic assertion that human existence is an expression of a general, metaphysical essence of being. Instead, Sartre insisted that existence defines the essence of the individual. The individual, thus, is what he or she does. The human being, then, is condemned to freedom and has no choice but to choose -- and to choose responsibly. Any denial of such radical freedom at the heart of existence for Sartre is "bad faith." Sartre forcefully -- and perhaps unfairly -- criticized Freud's argument for the existence of the unconscious. For Sartre, there can be no unconscious since one cannot consciously posit the existence of an unconscious, which, by definition, is outside of consciousness.
Sartre's philosophy, among others, deeply influenced the thinking of psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, who advanced the existential position of Sartre that persons experience being-for-themselves and seek to enhance this. Existential being refers to a continuous dynamic flow of consciousness-through-action (praxis) which issues from human beings out of their social environments. Yet when we behold others we tend to see them as beings-in-themselves, as objects located in our own purposive vision. For Sartre, interpersonal relationships were a perpetual struggle to assert the fluidity of our own existence against persistent attempts to objectify us by others. Since the "scientific world view" is overwhelmingly objectifying, this view of the detached observor seeks to explain us further by analytic reasoning which reduces us to parts. There is psychological violence in this distant gaze and disintegrative thinking. Sartre opts for his own brand of dialectical reasoning wherein the convictions of any persons or group will be 'depassed,' i.e., encompassed into the larger configuration of another's convictions. No conviction should therefore masquerade as a moral absolute or objective determination. Laing, following Sartre, regards contemporary psychiatry as having made a false objectification of psychic states. Patients seeking help because they feel like dead and shattered objects find themselves further petrified by the viewpoints of psychiatry. The very data which symptoms constitute are in reality capta, pieces torn and abstracted from the fabric of lived existence.
As mentioned above, existentialist psychology and humanism are closely aligned, and humanistic psychology is, in fact, more of an outcrop of the existentialist tradition than the other way around. Maslow was deeply influenced by existentialist philosophy and psychology, for example. Also, Maurice Friedman was responsible for generating a fascinating dialogue between the existentialist philosopher, Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers states the following as his "central hypothesis":
"...the individual has within himself or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering his or her self-concept, attitudes, and self-directed behavior -- and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided. "
Based on this assumption, Rogers elaborates three conditions for the therapeutic relationship in order for it to inhabit the "definable climate" of which he speaks:
1) "Genuineness, realness, or congruence"
2) "acceptance, or caring, or prizing -- unconditional positive regard"
3) "Empathic understanding"
These conditions define what Rogers calls his "person-" or "client-centered approach" to therapy. This approach is described by Rogers as more a "basic philosophy" than a particular technique or method, which involves a "basic trust in the person" rather than a skeptical or distrustful attitude. Rogers' approach begins with the assumption that human nature is essentially 'good,' that the person shares with all living organisms an "actualizing tendency...to grow, to develop, to realize its full potential." Rogers places himself in contrast to traditional psychotherapy which views the human being as "innately sinful" and, in turn, which involves a skeptical attitude toward the client.
Friedman's dialogue between Rogers and Buber reveals both similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Buber, for one, is more inclined to view human beings as polar, in distinction from Rogers' trust in the power of "self-actualization" to heal from the 'good' inner core of the person's natural resources. This leads to a fundamental difference between how Rogers and Buber understand the relationship between "acceptance" and "congruence." For Rogers, the terms imply one another, whereas Buber does not equate the two. Buber insists that "confirming a person as he or she is" merely marks the first step in confirming what "in the present lies hidden what can become." In short, it seems that Buber is less inclined than Rogers toward merely trusting in the hypothesized 'goodness' of the person's "self-actualizing" potential to lead the person to this potential.
In support of Buber's distinction, Friedman writes: "Healing does not mean bringing up the old, but rather shaping the new: It is not confirming the negative, but rather counterbalancing with the positive." Buber and Friedman seem to have a good point in that their take on Rogers allows for a darker side to human nature. Buber understands the human being as potentially destructive as well as growth-promoting. Therefore, Buber's viewpoint, as Friedman understands it, considers confirmation a "wrestling with the other against him or her self" in order to strengthen the 'positive' pole as opposed to the 'negative' pole. The question remains, however: Who is to differentiate the 'negative' from the 'positive'?
Theory inevitably implies a system of beliefs which have ethical implications. In the light of Friedman's dialogue with Rogers and Buber, there is clearly such a struggle to reconcile two very similar beliefs systems which contain different assumptions regarding the idea of the nature of the human being. In turn, this implies two potentially different views of the nature of the therapeutic relationship. Yet, can these two views be reconciled?
In support of Rogers, I must say that Buber's idea could potentially lead to a therapeutic relationship in which the therapist becomes the arbiter of 'truth,' the one who decides which pole is 'positive' and which is 'negative,' the one who is 'supposed to know.' This is potentially dangerous, for obvious reasons. Instead, Rogers' view allows for an understanding of the human being as ambivalent without the need to push the client toward any particular direction. Rogers' view allows for a therapeutic relationship in which the therapist and client may share the struggle. On the other hand, Buber's perspective is an attempt to move beyond the often 'pollyanna' humanism of Rogers by seriously considering the possibility of evil. For an attempt to reconcile these two positions, I recommend my own paper:
Reflections on Being a Psychotherapist
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was also one of the pioneers in developing an existential psychology. For Jaspers, philosophy involves the inquiry into freedom, history, and the possibility of meaning in existence. Jaspers studied both medicine and law, and evenually joined the staff of a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg. Jaspers came to the conclusion in his work that there are three stages of being. Being-there, the first stage, is the human being's reference to the external, objective world of reality. The second stage, Being-oneself, is the stage that allows the person self-awareness of choices and decisions. Finally, for Jaspers, the highest stage of existience is Being-in-itself, the attainment of the fullest of meaning involving the transcendental world of individual meaning that encompasses and comprehends the totality of meaning -- the individual is in effective communication with the social and physical environment so that existence is fully defined.
The movement of phenomenology, as it is often stated in History of Psychology texts, greatly influenced the Gestalt psychology movement. Phenomenological psychology, influenced by Edmund Husserl (1959-1938), is characterized by an attempt to move beyond psychology as a natural science and define a method of inquiry for psychology as a human science. Husserl's "transcendental phenomenology" aims to "bracket" or put aside the "natural attitude," one's basic assumptions regarding the nature of reality. It is fundamentally descriptive and, thus, qualitative rather than quantitative. Without prejudgment, bias, or any predetermined set or orientation, the transcendental phenomenologist strives to apprehend the structure of any phenomena which appears through the "eidetic reduction." This involves using "imaginative variation" to capture the essential structure of any phenomena within consciousness. Most importantly, the goal of the phenomenologist is not to manipulate or control the phenomena, but rather to permit the phenomena to reveal itself as it is, including its origins or bases. Using this method, phenomenology attempts to overcome the reductionism and atomism of natural science psychology by providing a method which focuses on the meaning and significance of the phenomena for the experiencing person from the perspective of the whole person. The "Duquesne Group" out of Duquesne University has been known for its attempts to systematize a phenomenological methodology for psychological research which matches the rigour of natural science. Adrian Van Kaam, Amedio Giorgi and Fred Wertz have all greatly contributed to this tradition.
It is in the early thinking of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) that existentialism and phenomenology are brought together, particularly in Heidegger's magnum opus, Being & Time (1927). Heidegger characterizes Western philosophy as forgetful of the question of Being, which is the central preoccupation of his thought (see the Why page at Mythos & Logos for more information). Heidegger, in turn, argues that it is the human kind of being or Dasein (translated as "there-being") who asks the question of Being; therefore, the human being must already have an implicit understanding of Being. The human kind of being is distinct in that it asks the question of Being, and, as such, the human being can be said to exist and be characterized by existence. "Dasein," writes Heidegger, "always understands itself in terms of its existence -- in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not to be itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them already." For a more in depth exploration of Heidegger's thought, see my Heidegger page at Mythos & Logos.
Heidegger's work has been highly influential in the development of existential-phenomenological psychology. Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) is notable as the psychologist who first attempted to integrate the work of Husserl and Heidegger with psychoanalysis. Binswanger was a close colleague of Freud's, and it is remarkable that, considering Binswanger's differences with Freud, his relationship with him endured while other dissenting colleagues, such as Jung, Adler and Rank, were shunned by Freud. The kinship between Freud and Binswanger can likely be attributed to Freud's early influences as a student of Franz Brentano, who was also Husserl's teacher and whose "Act psychology" is a major precursor to the phenomenological movement. Fred Wertz, for example, has researched the remarkable parallels between Freud and Husserl. Influenced by Heidegger, Binswanger termed his approach to psychoanalysis, Daseins-analyse. Binswanger, too, argued that the reductionistic methods of natural science are inadequate for understanding the human being. As a therapist, Binswanger asserted that the psychotherapist must endeavor to apprehend the world of the patient as it is experienced by the patient. Also influenced by Heidegger's philosophy of time, Binswanger emphasized that the therapist should focus on the patient's present experience in therapy, and, while agreeing with Freud's instinct theory, he argued that the past is relevant only in so far as it matters to the patient in the present. Fundamentally, Binswanger was concerned with understanding the present experience of the patient represented in consciousness, and, thus, the aim of analysis is to uncover the structures of phenomena interpreted by each patient's individually defined context of meaning.
Like Binswanger, Medard Boss worked at developing a critical synthesis of Heidegger and Freud. However, compared to Binswanger, Boss' Daseinsanalysis is, in many ways, a more sophisticated and rigorous development of an ontic human science psychology with its foundation in Heideggarian ontology. Boss' goal from the very beginning involved a radical humanization of medicine and psychology with such a new existential foundation, and his life-work involved a persistent articulation of both the theoretical and practical implications of such an endeavor. As such, Boss' existential-phenomenological approach to psychology shows the possibility for the emergence of human science-oriented medicine and psychology which mirrors Heidegger's polemic against Cartesian dualism -- the splitting of man into res cogitans ("mind") and res extensa ("matter"). Boss' contribution includes an existential analytic of human embodiment such that the human being is understood as a bodying-forth of possibilities in the world with others and alongside things, and, thus, overcomes the Cartesian body-mind split. While Boss is often critical of Freud, his work is, in many ways, well-integrated with psychoanalytic thought and, in fact, opens a potential paradigm by which psychoanalysis is able to overcome many of the epistemological difficulties which have plagued psychoanalytic theory from the very beginning.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is notable for his groundbreaking work toward developing a post-Cartesian, existential understanding of perception and embodiment. A long-time colleague of Sartre (they co-edited Les Temps Moderns), Merleau-Ponty's work is in many ways more rigorous, graceful and sophisticated than Sartre's more popular writings. For Merleau-Ponty a post-Cartesian psychology depends on an understanding of perception as the primary function of the human organism such that human embodiment constitutes the only adequate foundation for a theory of perception. Merleau-Ponty's work is, in many ways, the crowning achievement of the existential-phenomenological tradition in that he develops a coherent and compelling body of work which overcomes the metaphysical problems of a modernist psychology through his analysis of perception, embodiment, intersubjectivity and language. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is particularly ripe for a developing dialogue between existential-phenomenology and psychoanalysis; unfortunately, he died before he had truly come into his own as a cutting-edge continental philosopher. On phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty wrote:
"Phenomenology brings to psychoanalysis certain categories, certain means of expression that it needs in order to be completely itself. Phenomenology permits psychoanalysis to recognize 'psychic reality' without equivocation, the 'intra-subjective' essence of morbid formations, the fantastic operation that reconstructs a world on the margin of, and counter to, the true world, a lived history beneath the effective history -- a world called illness. Freudian thought, in turn, confirms phenomenology on its description of a consciousness that is not so much knowledge or representation as investment; it brings to phenomenology a wealth of concrete examples that add weight to what it has been able to say in general of the relations of man with the world and of the interhuman body. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis, in mutual encounter, would lead us toward a philosophy delivered from the interaction between substances, toward a 'humanism of truth' without metaphysics..."
He goes on to say:
"[However], the accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist of phenomenology's saying clearly what psychoanalysis has said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology implies or unveils in its limits -- by its latent content or its unconscious -- that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis...Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency."
As William J. Richardson (1980) has pointed out, Heideggerian phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory both are "aiming toward the same latency," as Merleau-Ponty has said. In particular, Richardson shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis and Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology aim toward this same unconscious or latency. Most importatnly, both Heidegger and Lacan adhere to Saussure's distinction between language (la langue) and speech (la parole).
Richardson writes:
"For Saussure, language is a self-contained system of signs, a species-specific, semiotic code that may be clearly disengaged from any use in speech that may be made of it and thus become the object of rigorously scientific investigation. Levi-Strauss transposes this concept into a different key and speaks of the 'symbolic order,' the order of signs that sets the pattern (establishes the law) for all human relationships, and, he, too, conceived this to be the appropriate object of scientific inquiry. When Lacan, then, speaks of language as 'structure and limit of the psychoanalytic field' (1977, p. 56) and describes this field, following Levi-Strauss, as the 'symbolic order,' we are invited to infer that this was an extrapolation from Saussure's linguistics through the sphere of anthropology to the field of psychoanalysis.
As such, then, the symbolic order would be essentially an object, however much deeper and more comprehensive than other objects, hence a being, something that is. In that case, one would have to admit that language conceived in this way as unconscious is radically different from Heraclitus' Logos when interpreted by Heidegger as aboriginal Language. The difference is as radical as the difference between beings and Being, as the ontological difference itself. It this is the proper way to understand the matter, we would have to say that what Heidegger offers Lacan is the opportunity to think the problem of language in the ontological dimension that grounds his own ontic experience of it -- to mediate the 'unapparent,' 'unavoidable' yet 'inaccessible' content that makes all scientific effort, hence structuralism itself, possible." (from Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Fall 1980, p. 16).
With this formulation, Richardson implies that psychoanalysis may be ontologically grounded in the hermeneutic of Dasein, who is always a being-in-the-world through the existential modes of being-with, understanding and speech. In particular, this project is particularly fertile for Richardson in three ways. In the first place, Heidegger's understanding of the human kind of being is a being which is radically historical -- a being who is 'authentic' when taking up his or her history as his or her's ownmost history (facticity) which opens toward one's ownmost possibilities. Richardson (1980) writes:
"...in psychonalysis the subject 'assumes' his own history. We take this to mean that he 'takes it over,' makes it his 'own,' 'owns' up to it. This implies the prior discovery of the past for what it is -- not necessarily for what it is in 'reality but for what it is in 'truth,' for 'in psychoanalysic anamnesis, it is not a qustion of reality but of truth' (Lacan, 1977, p. 48). But how is this 'truth' discerned? By rendering it present in the analytic dialogue, 'because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessitites to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them present' (Lacan, 1977, p. 48). Hence, the "truth" of the past is discerned by letting a 'sense' become manifest in the present. In other words, 'what we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history -- that is to say, help him to perfect the present historization of the facts that have already determined a certain of the historical 'turning points' in his existence' (Lacan, 1977, p. 52). But this rendering present of the past includes the functioning of the future as well, for the 'analysis can have for its goal only the advent of true speech and the realization of the subject of his history in relation to a future' (Lacan, 1977, p. 88)....[T]he structures most helpful to Lacan would be those of the historicity of Dasein achieving its authenticity with regard to its past by the process of re-trieve, i.e., by thinking-upon-the-past in authentic dialogue: letting the future come again through what has been and rendering it present, i.e., letting its 'sense,' its 'truth' become manifest in and through the mutual exchange." (Ibid, p. 18)
Secondly, Richardson asserts the vital point that "this constitution of the subject's history takes place in and through the speech 'addressed to the other...' In the collective dialogue, it is the letting-appear of the spoken word that liberates, that heals. And not just spoken word but word as spoken to the other." (p. 18). As radically being-with, the human being shares his or her speech with others, and healing, therefore, takes place in the shared speech of client and therapist which shows itself as a shared truth.
Lastly, Richardson demonstrates that the Heideggarian understanding of "truth" (Aletheia) is essential for a hermeneutic phenomenological thinking of the "talking cure." He writes:
"The process of logos as legein, letting appear, is also a letting truth come to pass. For truth is originally a-le-theia, where lethe means hiddenness and the alpha privative suggests privation, like the removal of a veil of darkness. To let appear, then, means to let being emerge into light as what they are, to liberate them from hiddenness, free them from darkness unto themselves, let them be true. Truth, then, is liberating, 'makes us free.' But it also makes us 'whole,' for when Holderlin speaks of Being as the 'Holy' (das Heilige), Heidegger interprets this to mean that Being in its ineffable bounty makes whole (heil); it is therefore wholesome (das Heile); it is a making whole, a healing (heilen)." (Ibid, p. 19)
In short, the "talking cure" is healing in that it listens to the Saying of Being in language (as opposed to speech) such that the 'truth' may show itself and, in turn, one retrieves one's past (as having-been) in the service of the future (as coming-toward) in the present (as waiting-toward). Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not at all at odds, but, in fact, inform one another.
The movement of existential-phenomenological psychology has been largely carried on by the "Duquesne school" at Duquesne University. The initial impetus for the Duquesne psychology program came from Rev. Henry Koren, a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers who resided as a faculty member in Duquesne's philosophy department, who first introduced Duquesne psychology students to a series of lectures in phenomenological psychology. It was the Dutch Holy Ghost Father, Adrian Van Kaam, however, who took the vital steps to make Duquesne's existential-phenomenological psychology program a reality. Van Kaam, who joined the Duquesne psychology faculty in 1954, felt the need for such a program in a climate in which the "third force" movement had only just begun to blossom and in which the psychological community had only begun, with thinkers such as Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, to reflect on the problems of the excessive influence of positivist philosophy on American psychology. Van Kaam saw the potential in existential-phenomenology to heal the fragmentation within the discipline of psychology, as he wrote in 1959:
"The newly emerging anthropological psychology intends to fulfill the need for synthesis, integration, and theoretical depth in the many vastly expanding fields of knowledge about man. The awareness of the necessity of this kind of function in psychology has been increased considerably by the growth of existential-phenomenology. Existential-phenomenology's concentration on man's being and acting has made various psychologists aware of the need to understand in their deepest meaning the manifold findings, theories and terminologies of the numerous schools of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry in different cultures and to keep integrating them in an open, continuously growing and changing Gestalt. This task of anthropological psychology may be compared with the task of meta-biology in the biological disciplines and the rise of theoretical physics in the physical sciences."
The tradition begun by Van Kaam has resulted in over a generation of work toward integrating a human science psychology from an existential-phenomenological perspective. This tradition has included the work of faculty such as Anthony Barton, Constance T. Fischer, William F. Fischer, Amedeo Giorgi, Richard J. Knowles, Charles D. Maes, Edward L. Murray, Paul Richer, David L. Smith, Rolf Von Eckartsberg, Michael Sipiora, Eva Simms, Russ Walsh, Roger Brooke, and Martin Packer. The tradition has continued with increasing emphasis on a dialogue with post-structuralist thought with faculty such as Suzanne Bernard and Lacanian scholar, Bruce Fink. This tradition has extended its influence to programs at the University of Dallas, Saybrook University, Fordham University, Seattle University, State University of West Georgia, BrighamYoung University and Pacifica, to name a few. Duquesne graduate and University of West Georgia faculty member, Christopher Aanstoos, resides as President of the American Psychological Association's division of Humanistic Psychology and is editor of Humanistic Psychology. Scott Churchill, faculty at the University of Dallas, edits Methods. Steen Halling and Georg Kunz, along with James Risser, have been instrumental in the development of a phenomenological-oriented psychology program at Seattle University, and, further, have both furthered scholarship into the contributions of Emmanuel Levinas for the tradition. Bernd Jager carries on the Duquesne tradition at the University of Quebec in Montreal and Fred Wertz does so at Fordham University in New York City, as well as editing the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. Robert Romanyshyn has been especially instrumental in developing an accessible and rich phenomenological psychology which addresses the fundamental problems of psychology in a technological culture -- and his work has carried on at Pacifica after many years at the University of Dallas, where he provided an organic influence upon the emergence of James Hillman's Archetypal psychology. Other Duquesne graduates include James Brennan, Paul Colaizzi, Robert Coufal, Michael DeMaria, Eric Dodson, Robert Fessler, Edwin Gantt, Mark Johansson, Anne Johnson, Stanton Marlan, Donald Moss, and Robert Sherry, to name a few, all of whom continue in their post-graduate work to contribute to the tradition of existential-phenomenological psychology. This is a tradition which I am proud to belong -- as a current and future proponent of existential-phenomenological psychology and as a student of Duquesne's doctoral program in Clinical Psychology-- and a tradition which I endeavor to continue, along with the help of my co-editors and staff at Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts (which I co-edit with Victor Barbetti and Claire Cowan-Barbetti).
The traditions of psychoanalytic theory and existential-phenomenology, I would argue, are closely related. I do not think it is a coincidence that Husserl's turn to the life-world and Wittgenstein's turn to everyday language games emerge concurrently with the birth of psychoanalysis. Like phenomenology and the linguistic tradition, psychoanalysis can be understood as a movement toward returning the human being to the world and to language, which, as Martin Heidegger has shown, are deeply intertwined.
As Robert Romanyshyn (1990) has pointed out, both phenomenology and psychoanalysis are related to a fundamental rejection of the "style of vision," the "way of experiencing the world" characterized by the new physics of nature and the new physiology of the body of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Such an experiencing of the world, per Romanyshyn, is exemplified by linear perspective as the metaphor of the seeing eye as a camera became literalized -- a vision which allows for the Cartesian cogito's primacy over the social and historical dimensions of existence. And, in general, the modern paradigm, which gives primacy to deductive reasoning over the rhetorical, is, on the whole, characterized by the general literalization of its metaphorical activity. In the case of phenomenology, there is a move to return "humanity to the world from that distance, infinite in the ideal, from which we practice a scientific vision." To do so, one must de-literalize the metaphors which give rise to such a vision. The task of a depth psychology, then, is such a de-literalization of the image.
As Romanyshyn (1990) writes:
"Psychoanalysis has sensitized us to our own multiplicity. It has cautioned us never to assume the who or the what of experience. It has taught us to suspend the claim of the ego to be the locus of action and to suspend the claim of the past to be an empirical history. As a science of remembering, it brackets the prejudice of the ego as the agent of psychology life, and the prejudice of fact...as the datum of psychological life. In doing so it recovers the multiple figurations of psychological life...; it also recovers the historical past as an imaginal story that one creates or makes in re-membering it as much as it is a story already made, waiting to be discovered."
In this sense, both phenomenology and psychoanalysis are a cultural therapeutics: an effort to return the subject to the world -- and, ultimately, to the breadth and depth of being-in-the-world.
See: The Psychology-Rhetoric Relationship: A Brief Historical Sketch by Brent Dean Robbins
The many people who have contributed to existential-phenomenological psychology has been too numerous to credit here. Some of those names who have been neglected, but which may be further explored by following the link to their pages, can be found here.
See my on-line writings for more detailed applications of existential-phenomenology to psychological theory and practice.
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JUNG'S ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Carl Jung (1875-1961) is truly one of the great minds of psychology. As mentioned above, Jung was a close colleague of Freud -- in fact, Freud himself considered Jung to be his theoretical heir, thus casting himself in a father-like role with Jung as the crowned prince of psychoanalysis. With Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, he should have known better, for their Oedipal rivalry led to a harsh and traumatic split. Jung, it seems, had gone too far afield in his reconceptualization of Freud's original insights. Yet, these very insightful innovations of Jung were truly brilliant, foreshadowing the "third force" movement in psychology. In many ways, Jung can be considered the 'father' of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.
Along with Freud's "personal unconscious," Jung felt that he had discovered evidence for a "collective unconscious" shared by all human beings. While the personal unconscious is organized by complexes (i.e., Oedipal complex), the collective unconscious is characterized by "archetypes," "instinctual patterns of behavior and perception," which can be traced in dreams and myths. Joseph Campbell, influenced by Jung, traced archetypal patterns in the mythologies of all cultures. Jung, in general, placed less emphasis on the sexual drives, since he felt the unconscious is driven by the process of "individuation," a drive toward wholeness and balance between the contrary forces of the psyche through the "transcendent function." Like the humanistic psychologists would argue, Jung felt that the unconscious is also a source of health and vitality rather than simply pathological forces. However, Jung also felt that the unconscious holds the potential for evil as well as good.
For Jung, the structures of the psyche are organized by unseen archetypal forces. He used many of the same terms as Freud, such as ego and unconscious, but they hold a different meaning when considered in the light of Jung's whole theory. The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about. In men, the anima represents the feminine aspects of the psyche, while the animus represents the masculine aspects of the psyche in women. The whole of the archetypal organization of the person, for Jung, is called the Self, the unity of the whole towards which the individuation process strives for balance and harmony.
Of the followers of Jung in the Analytic psychology tradition, one of the most influential and innovative has been Marie-Louise von Franz.
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James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is inspired by Jung, yet Hillman, in the spirit of Jung himself, moves beyond him to develop a rich, complex, and poetic basis for a psychology of psyche as "soul." In my opinion, Hillman's writings are of the most innovative, provocative and insightful of any psychologist this century, including Freud himself. What makes Hillman's work so important is its emphasis on psychology as a way of seeing, a way of imaging, a way of envisioning being human. His work is truly originary and involves a radical "re-visioning" of psychology as a human science. Hillman's roots are mostly classical, but in the service of retrieving what has been lost to psychology and, thus, in the service of psychology's future in the service of "psyche" or "soul." The power of Hillman's thought, however, has more to do with how he approaches phenomena rather than what he has to say about it. Soul-making is a method, a way of seeing, and this cannot be forgotten. Hillman's roots include Renaissance Humanism, the early Greeks, existentialism and phenomenology. His thought is rhetorical in the best sense of the word; thus, imaginative, literary, poetic, metaphorical, ingenius, and persuasive. If nothing else, one cannot read Hillman without being moved.
Hillman's work is "soul-making" and, in this sense, psychological (the "logos" of the "psyche") in the truest sense of the word. Hillman listens to the saying of the soul, and it speaks in his writing through him. Of Hillman's use of the term "soul," Thomas Moore writes:
"Hillman likes the word for a number of reasons. It eludes reductionistic definition: it expresses the mystery of human life; and it connects psychology to religion, love, death, and destiny. It suggests depth, and Hillman sees himself directly in the line of depth psychology, going all the way back to Heraclitus, who observed that one could never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths one traveled, so profound in its nature. Whenever Hillman uses the forms psychology, psychologizing, and psychological, he intends a reference to depth and mystery."
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
Anyone who takes the discipline of psychology seriously should listen closely to what Hillman has to say and mostly to how he says it. Hillman's work has been furthered and popularized in the writings of Thomas Moore. Robert Sardello, Robert Romanyshyn, and Michael Sipiora have all organically contributed to the development of the movement.
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TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
While Hillman's Archetypal psychology attends to "soul," the vales, transpersonal psychology is concerned with the peaks, "spirit." In general, transpersonal psychologists are concerned with developing a psychology which integrates the wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions. As the term suggests, 'trans'- personal psychology attempts to place the individual within the greater cosmos beyond the self in which he or she is embedded. Like Jung, most transpersonal psychologists feel that religiosity and the "perennial philosophy" speak to a wisdom of the spiritual reality in which we participate and of which we are a part and product. It is an outgrowth of the humanistic movement and is influenced by its forerunner, Abraham Maslow, who felt that "self-actualization" involves a greater awareness of a spiritual dimension to existence.
Brant Cortright has written of eight basic assumptions of transpersonal psychology:
1. "Our essential nature is spiritual."
2. "Consciousness is multidimensional."
3. "Human beings have valid urges toward spiritual seeking, expressed as a search for wholeness through deepening individual, social, and transcendent awareness."
4. "Contacting a deeper source of wisdom and guidance within is both possible and helpful to growth."
5. "Uniting a person's conscious will and aspiration with the spiritual impulse is a superordinate health value."
6. "Altered states of consciousness are one way of accessing transpersonal experiences and can be an aid to healing and growth."
7. "Our life and actions are meaningful."
8. "The transpersonal context shapes how the person/client is viewed."
As Rolf von Eckartsberg and Robert Romanyshyn have emphasized, psychological and spiritual traditions are primarily metaphorical; they describe and organize human experience. Theory, then, is a map which should not be confused with the territory, and yet such maps are necessary for understanding. Transpersonal psyschology then is a way of seeing that is "spiritual", which aims to integrate and to unify, an effort to synthesize many different traditions into one coherent system. This is its strength as well as its weakness. A spiritual way of seeing can often do a disservice to soul-making by neglecting the complexities and ambiguities -- and, above all, the differences -- between such traditions. It tends to paint in broad strokes, which can lead to missing the subtle nuances that give each tradition its unique character and integrity. The good news is that transpersonal approaches are a way to develop a common language for such traditions to dialogue. However, within this framework, there is always a danger of totalizing the "Other" -- that is, Western spiritual assumptions often tend to consume and appropriate other systems to suit its own needs. Thus, we must guard against a transpersonal psychology which can become an intellectual version of the Crusades. A healthy dose of Levinas, particularly as articulated by Alphonso Lingus, helps to remind us of this potential danger of the transpersonal approach.
The spiritual approach of integrating the many wisdom traditions of the world has its roots, for example, in Aldous Huxley's "Perennial Philosophy" (see my Perennial Philosophy page). Huston Smith has also contributed greatly to this endeavor. Several common ways of understanding spirituality are evident in this approach. For one, there is a tendency to see the spiritual dimension as both transcendent and immanent. There also tends to be an approach to human existence which emphasizes a hierarchy of psychological-spiritual development. Such a hierarchy is viewed from the perspective of a particular cosmology. Huston Smith's cosmology, for example, includes the four dimensions of existence: the territorial (physican senses and mind), the intermediate (psychic), the celestial (personal divine), and the infinite (impersonal divine). Spiritual and psychological health within these systems is typically understood to involve a process of achieving a higher or greater awareness of these realms of existence. In the extreme, this can appeal to a kind of narcissism in which a person believes he or she is "god." A healthy dose of existentialism can help the typical "new ager" from going psychotic from trying to achieve an all-knowing, all-powerful god-like nature -- which is foolish and lacks humility. This is another potential danger of this movement.
An important lesson for transpersonal approaches to psychology comes from Dante as described by Allen Tate. Allen Tate differentiates between the "symbolic imagination" and the "angelic imagination." While the angelic imagination "tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of essence," the symbolic imagination "conducts an action through analogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity." The symbolic imagination begins within the human place, and through the soul-making of de-literalizing the image, the poet works to show the traces of the Divine in the concrete description of the mundane. The poet who imagines symbolically cultivates the dwelling-place of the human, and she does not mistake herself for a god. With the imaginative description of the thing, the poet both witnesses and participates in the dance, and she finds herself within a deeper, richer, more human place. The angelic imagination, however, is the mode of understanding that fueled the foolish Tower of Babel project. Tate writes:
"When human beings undertake this ambitious program, divine love becomes so rarefied that it loses its human paradigm, and is dissolved in the worship of intellectual power, the surrogate of divinity that worships itself. It professes to know nature as essence at the same time that it has become alienated from nature in the rejection of its material forms."
Tate reminds us that an approach to the Divine is best served through concrete, poetic, soul-ful articulation of human existence, and the attempt to transcend the human can result in disaster, a project represented in the image of Icarus, who flew too high, too soon, and plummeted to his death.
Ken Wilber's spectrum model represents one of the most influential transpersonal models today. Wilbur must be credited as a pioneer who first embarked upon the effort to integrate a theoretical core for a transpersonal approach. One of Wilbur's most interesting and provocative insights is the "pre-trans fallacy." Wilbur argues that traditional psychology has tended to see transpersonal experience as a regression to prepersonal, primitive states of consciousness. He argues, on the contrary, that transpersonal states of consciousness are more mature levels of consciousness which from a personal perspective only appears to be regression.
Michael Washburn has developed a transpersonal model patterned after Jung's analytic approach. Washburn is especially critical of Wilbur's "pre-trans fallacy" argument. For Washburn the pre-personal and transpersonal share with each other the experience of the dynamic, collective, spiritual ground of existence; however, with the transpersonal consciousness, this is expressed through a well-integrated ego. In general, Washburn's approach is from a Western, theistic perspective compared to Wilbur's more nondual, Eastern approach to consciousness. Most importantly, it develops a transpersonal model which does away with the sense of a hierarchy of consciousness in Wilbur's model.
Robert Assaglioli's psychosynthesis theory has had a great influence on the transpersonal movement. Like Wilbur, he argues for a psychology of the height as well as the depths.
Another influence, Hameed Ali's Diamond Approach draws especially from the Sufi tradition which, compared to Jung, Washburn, Wilbur and Assaglioli, places a greater emphasis on the body; however, his concept of "essence" has striking similarities to Jung's concept of the "archetype."
A review of the transpersonal movement in psychology would be incomplete, of course, without mention of Stanislov Grof's Holotropic Model. Grof is known for his work studying the effects of LSD, which helped him to develop his method of therapy as well as a transpersonal theory of consciousness that takes account of spiritual realms of existence.
An exciting outgrowth of the transpersonal movement is the body-centered transpersonal approach, largely influenced by Wilhelm Reich. The many different approaches to transpersonal body-work include: Hakomi, John Pierrakos' Core Energetics, Bodydynamics, the Lomi school, Eva Reich's work, Jack Rosenburg's work, rebirthing, Eugene Gendlin's focusing-oriented psychotherapy, and Charlotte Selver's sensory awareness. (See below under Reichian tradition).
Other influences in Transpersonal psychology include: Otto Rank, Sri Aurobindo, Howard Clinebell, Ram Dass, Meister Eckhart, Riane Eisler, Jack Engler, Mark Epstein, Victor Frankl, Daniel Goleman, St. John of the Cross, Jonn Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Krishnamurti, R. D. Laing, Timothy Leary, Wilhelm Reich, Ronald S. Valle, Charles T. Tart, Sri Krishna, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Ramana Maharshi, Franklin Merrill-Wolff, David Lukoff, John Nelson, Plotinus, Salvador Roquet, Donald Rothberg, Elbert Russell, Kirk Schneider, Kathleen Speeth, John Suler, Anthony Sutich, St. Teresa of Avila, Chogyam Trungpa, Thich Nhat Hahn, Francis Vaughn, Roger Walsh, John Welwood, Bryan Wittine, Robert Frager, Teilard de Chardin, William James, Susan Schneier, Ralph Metzner, William Blake, Morris Berman Han F. DeWit, Marcea Eliade, Anodea Judith, Sharon Salzberg, D. T. Suzuki, Karlfired Graf von Durckheim, Charlotte Joko Beth, Pema Chodron, A. H. Almaas, Frederick Franck, Natalie Goldberg, Allen Ginsberg, Mildred Chase, Denise Taylor, Eugen Herrigel, Takuan Soho, Carla Needleman, Jeane Martine, Paul Gorman, Karen Kissel Wegela, Stephen Butterfield, Marc David, Stephen Levine, Deena Metzger, Joanna Macy, Ken Jones, Chagdud Tulku, Monica Furlong, Fran Tribe, Dainin Katagiri, Rolf von Eckartsberg and many others.
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BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY AND OTHER EASTERN INFLUENCES
Buddhist psychology and other Eastern influences have had a profound impact on psychoanalytic thought in general, as well as in Western philosophy. The transpersonal psychologists have been more explicit about its influences, but the influences of Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are wide-spread today in our intellectual climate. To summarize the influences from the East in this brief forum is simply impossible, for it is a tradition which encompasses another culture's entire spiritual tradition since the dawn of history. Most notably, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, William James, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell have been core psychological thinkers who were directly influenced by Eastern thought.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus instead on Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker, which attempts to describe psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective. According to Epstein, "Buddhism has something essential to teach contemporary psychotherapists: it long ago perfected a technique of confronting and uprooting human narcissism, a goal that Western psychotherapy has only recently begun even to contemplate." I think this is essential for an understanding of Buddhist psychology and philosophy in general. As I mentioned above, the problem of "perennial philosophy" and transpersonal psychology is the emphasis upon what is common among all spiritual traditions, and, as such, it has often done a kind of violence to the richness and subtlety of the Buddhist doctrines.
In Buddhism, the neurosis which psychotherapy attempts to cure is inevitable. According to the Buddha, the First Noble Truth is that suffering is part of the human condition. As Epstein shows, the Buddha's first insight is that, as human beings, we must be humiliated by the limitations of our bodily existence. "No matter what we do..., we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. We are all subject to decay, old age, death, to disappointment, loss, and disease. We are all engaged in a futile attempt to maintain ourselves in our own image." Rather than escape from this realization, the Buddhist invites the seeker of liberation to contemplate this condition, to deepen one's awareness of our humility through meditative practice. In James Hillman's terms, this is "soul-making." If we are to be happy, says the Buddha, we must first acknowledge that as long as we are attached to the narcissistic ego, we will never come to terms with the oppressive and inescapable humiliations of life.
The Buddha's Second Noble Truth demonstrates, therefore, that the cause of our suffering is attachment to the ego which manifests itself in craving and desire. As Alan Watts has said, this is the desire for permanence in an ever-changing, impermanent existence -- the anxiety in the face of our finitude, as the existentialists would say. It is the attachment to a desire for a stable "identity," one could say. Liberation for the Buddhist, therefore, does not come from a greater or larger self -- an incorporation into a grotesquely indulgent, narcissistic ego which never stops craving -- or even, as Heidegger, Laing or Winnicott would suggest, from the uncovering of a more genuine self, but rather from the lack of a self, or emptiness. This lack is not a craving for lack, however, but rather an absence of craving for either existence or nonexistence -- call it, for the sake of simplicity: acceptance, letting-go, releasement. It is not the craving of eros or thanatos, but rather the absence of craving as emptiness. The Buddha's Third Noble Truth however promises that liberation is possible, and this is articulated by the Buddhas's Fourth Noble Truth. The Buddha's way is the Middle Path, which avoids the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification (or, as Epstein translates into psychoanalytic terminology, idealization and denial). Rather, liberation is found in the Eightfold Path: The ethical foundations of Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, the meditative foundation of Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness, and the Right View foundation of Right Understanding and Right Thought.
How can one possibly trace the lengthy history of Buddhism in the East and its reception in the West? Or, for that matter, early Taoist and Confucian philosophy prior to Buddhism?www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
