What Do Psychoanalysts in the United Kingdom Think of Analytical Psychology?

Introduction

In thinking about the question proposed to me by Thomas Kirsch as the subject of my paper today, "What do psychoanalysts in the United Kingdom think of analytical psychology?" I had two initial responses. First, that I could be extremely brief since the answer is surely, "not much!" My second thought, however, was to reflect on the particular inflection of the question, and why it had been phrased this way round rather than in reverse, "What do analytical psychologists think about psychoanalysis?" In the latter case, I suspect, the answer would be very different—"quite a lot." So here I am at an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic conference in a professional position that I have come to recognize—that of an outsider, speaking defensively, trying to understand why people outside our Jungian institutes are not much interested in our discipline. In the words of Kenneth Eisold (2001), "for analytical psychology, psychoanalysis has been both powerfully influential and inimical; it represents both an established and competitive tradition of psychological treatment and an injurious source of disparagement and neglect" (336). I hope to address at least some of the reasons why psychoanalysts' attitude to analytical psychology can seem to be an antagonistic one, leaving many Jungians feeling that their ideas have been slighted.

Although Freudians and Kleinians outnumber Jungians in the United Kingdom, there are now over 2,000 Jungian analysts in the world, of whom many are members of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP). My impression is that the range of different ways to practice as a Jungian analyst may be broader than that available to psychoanalysts. Andrew Samuels (1998) delineates four types of analytical psychologists. First, there are members of the "classical school," which embraces the general method of analysis that Jung introduced. David Hart (1997) describes analysts of this type as characterized by "respect for what is unknown, for what is unexpected, for what is unheard of" (89). They emphasize higher states of mental functioning, including thinking, creativity, and the symbolic attitude, and they value the role of myths, dreams, and artistic creations. Implicit in the classical outlook is the optimistic idea of a psyche that heals and of the analyst as the patient's companion on a journey towards individuation, during which the psyche will unpack its contents and thereby allow the self to emerge.

Next, there is the "developmental school," elaborated in the United Kingdom by Michael Fordham and committed to a clinical and theoretical investigation of infantile mental states as they affect both development and failures to symbolize throughout the life-cycle. The patient here goes on no comfortable journey, and primitive experience—both positive and negative—forms an integral part of any analysis. Developmental analysts dwell largely on the here and now of the transference, seeking to understand and dismantle defenses when they hold up the process of individuation and the development of a symbolic capacity. Samuels (1998) also describes two schools that have evolved over the past two decades and are more extreme versions of those already described: what he calls "Jungian fundamentalism," whose adherents ignore everything except Jung's ideas; and finally a group that he thinks has made a "merger with psychoanalysis," becoming seriously alienated from its Jungian birthright.

Where, you might ask, do I locate myself with respect to Samuels' typology? I belong to the "developmental school" of Jungian analysts and have integrated a good deal of psychoanalysis into my work. However, I remain with pleasure and at heart an analyticaI psychologist, a post-Jungian if you like, and more so over time. I do not find all Jungian theory or clinical practice helpful or to my taste, but I am particularly attracted by Jung's spatial and teleological approach to the unconscious and his valuing of meaning over causality. I welcome too his emphasis on the many different levels of unconscious material and his idea that consciousness is but "an island in...