brokeback mountains

Music: The Academy Awards on the Disney Channel As the nominees for the "best supporting actor" flit across my screen, I'm just finishing up the background reading for tomorrow's seminar on the theory of Carl Gustav Jung. At the behest of a visiting scholar in a couple of weeks, for class I assigned some selections from Anthony Storr's edited collection, The Essential Jung, and I have to admit I'm more than disappointed with Storr's "one-sided"--to borrow a term from Jung--treatment. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Jung along with Steven F. Walker's Jung and the Jungians On Myth, and it's clear Storr's presentation suffers from a somewhat willful, custodial blindness to the intimate relationship between Jung and Freud, and the ways in which the homoerotic dynamics of that relationship (roughly a seven year, mutually acknowledged "crush" between the men) found their way into their respective theories. For example, the so-called love triangle of Freud, Jung, and Jung's patient Sabina Spielrein is completely neglected (of course, this is one of the topics of Avery Gordan's Ghostly Matters . . . as Juliet Mitchell would note, it makes sense that the Woman is erased by these two . . . in letters), and Jung's horribly botched "experiment" with her goes without mention. Storr is clearly tidying up: this morning I laughed aloud at the assertion that Jung "was no disciple" of Freud. Although it is true that Jung "knew" all along it would end in tears, from his published correspondence with Freud it's obvious he was seeking a father . . . .

Well, per usual, I don't have much insight to offer for the blogosphere. Tomorrow I plan to orbit my lecture around the figure of Spielrein, who represents the "object: woman" problem Juliet Mitchell says inspired Psychoanalysis and Feminism and which, I think, is the invisible center of the Jungian deviation (viz., Jung's repeated insistance on duality and the "other side"). The subjectless status of woman is also central to the interpersonal dynamics that made its way into psychoanalytic work—the sort of thing that only published letters brings out. Consider this excerpt from a letter Freud wrote Jung about Ferenczi:

My traveling companion is a dear fellow, but dreamy in a disturbing kind of way, and his attitude toward me is infantile. He never stops admiring me, which I don't like, and is probably sharply critical of me in his unconscious when I am taking it easy. He has been too passive and receptive, letting everything be done for him like a woman, and I really haven't got enough homosexuality in me to accept him as one. These trips arouse a real longing for a real woman.

. . . a real woman like, oh, Jung—of course! But Jung would eventually refuse Freud's advances, as it required becoming "a woman" in Freud's misguided understanding of subject (or rather, object). In other words, Jung's break can be understood—at least in part—as another "feminist" intervention in psychoanalytic theory when you look at it from an autobiographical vantage (Jung basically accused Freud of being a malicious patriarch). Of course, this argument is . . . likely to meet resistance, as, of course, I identify with Jung somewhat . . . .

I also realized today, as I was reading selections from Jung's autobiography, why I appreciate psychoanalysis: it is explicitly and unabashedly autobiographical. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, like much of Jung's later work, does not suspend the Self from "theory." But it does not dissolve into purile auto-indulgence (as one strain of [auto]ethnography in communication studies tends to do) either. At least in the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis attempted to display its source of invention. Jung's theories (most especially his concept of the shadow) betray an inescapable racism, but one gets the sense from reading him that, unlike Freud, he'd probably fess up to his whiteness were he still alive. I dislike Jung's theory, but Spielrein notwithstanding, he seems much more sincere of a "dude." Unlike his keepers, he acknowledged his love for "daddy" even on the threshold of death; Freud was not so willing.