Freud, Jung, and the Dangerous Supplement to Psychoanalysis

Even the most individual systems are not absolutely unique, but offer striking and unmistakable analogies with other systems.

–C.G. Jung, On Psychological Understanding (1914)

Derrida begins “Freud and the Scene of Writing” insisting that“despite appearances,the deconstruction of logocentrism is not the psychoanalysis of philosophy” (196), citing Freud’s logocentric relegation of writing to the status of supplement for the primary processes of memory (227). Nevertheless, at the end of the essay Derrida radicalizes the Freudian trace as a deconstructive remainder in the name of a “psychoanalytic graphology,” “a psychoanalysis of literature respectful of the originality of the literary signifier” (230–31). Even as “Resistances” establishes a “restanalysis” outside the psychoanalytic order of sense (5), in Archive Fever his Third Thesis refers to Freud as the first who “has analyzed, that is also to say, deconstructed” the archontic, even as his compulsive repetition of patriarchal logic defines the movements of Freud’s own archive (95). This fort/da implies a distinction between a logocentric “Psychoanalysis” centered on the metanarratives of the Father (the Oedipus complex and the primal horde) and a protodeconstructive “psychoanalysis” unworking the former’s pretence to completion and its formation in the latent content of the dream.

In his reading of this radicalized psychoanalysis Derrida aligns supplementarity and repression in a way that historically frames the Freud–Jung schism, as Derrida himself suggests in the fort/da game Freud plays with Jung’s transgressive theory of libido (Post 366f). On the level of theory, however, the repressed supplement makes possible a deconstruction of the “Freudian legend” (Shamdasani 72ff), the deracinating creation myth of Jung as ungrateful, rebellious son in an uncanny repetition of the Oedipal primal scene, abjected from psychoanalysis to preserve its illusory, ergonal purity. This mythology has contributed to Jung’s status as arguably the most misinterpreted and misunderstood intellectual of the twentieth century. Allegations of cultism and anti–Semitism, misappropriations of Jung by the New Age movement, structuralist reductions of Jung by Jungians, and Jung’s often confusing terminology have contributed to the marginalization and radical undertheorization of Jungian analytical psychology. Jung’s critical obfuscation is further amplified by two major advocates of the “Freudocentric” myth (Shamdasani 31). Lacan, enforcing a tyranny of the libidinal signified, condemns a (supposedly) Jungian indiscriminatory libido insofar as it cannot be laid to rest upon the Procrustean bed of psychoanalysis (“On Narcissism” 114–15), describing the archetypal symbol as “the blossoming of the soul, and that is that” (“Situation” 392). By way of radical reduction, Slavoj Žižek trivializes Jungian thought as a “New Age [. . .] resexualization of the universe (‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’)” sanctioning “an underlying, deeply anchored sense of archetypal identity which provides a kind of safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion over roles and identities” (443–44). In a vulgar Freudianization, Žižek further attempts to reabsorb the Jungian parergon into psychoanalysis with a “Jungian” reading of Wagner in terms of superego symbolism (Zupančič viii). At no point do either Lacan or Žižek cite passages from Jung’s works. Brief and somewhat polemical as this critical history is, it nevertheless points to a resistance to reading Jung away from Freudocentric theogony—a resistance resulting in a critical blindness toward the synthesis, in Jungian thought, of deconstructive valency and the hermeneutic impetus of the individual.

In this essay I read “Freud after Derrida” specifically in terms of the metapsychological supplementation of psychoanalysis by Jungian analytical psychology—a supplementation which can be triangulated between history, criticism, and theory. Beginning with the concepts of the unconscious and the Freudian dream–work I will read Jung otherwise, through the double logic of the supplement, as both repressed/ abjected Other (as he “adds” to the illusory purity of psychoanalysis) and insofar as Jungian metapsychology bids to incorporate and move beyond psychoanalysis—the supplement as it “insinuates itself in–the–place–of” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 144–45). This reading otherwise of Jung aligns depth psychology with deconstruction in ways unavailable to psychoanalysis. Interestingly, Jung’s parergonality has also been transferred to notable post–Freudian work...