~ ) Pergamon Nw, v Idem m t'xyrhoL Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 61~'~4, 1995

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A P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L R E A D I N G O F J U N G ' S P S Y C H O L O G Y

Review of Jung and Phenomenology by Roger Brooke. London & New York: Routledge, 1991.

ROBERT KUGELMANN Department of Psychology, University of Dallas, 1845 East Northgate Drive, Irving, TX

75062-4799, U.S.A.

The best phenomenological critiques follow Husserls' dictum to "return to the things themselves" through the body of work being critiqued. Merleau-Ponty's (1942) analysis of Pavlov sees through the mechanistic explanation of the Russian's physiological research to how it reveals the structures of behavior; Ricoeur (1970) employs an analogous approach in reading Freud; and L6vinas (1961) reads Descartes in such a way as to undercut Cartesianism while showing Descartes' depth of understanding of subjectivity. Now Roger Brooke, a practicing psychotherapist and professor of clinical psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, has produced a phenomenological hermeneutic of Carl Jung's analytic psychology that allows the reader to hear Jung as if for the first time, and to apprehend the psychological reality thatJung strove to express.

Brooke takesJung's assertion that he was a phenomenologist seriously. That is a bold step, given the generally negative evaluation of Jung's thought by leading phenomenologists. YetJung and Phenomenology demonstrates thatJung was de facto a phenomenologist , even if de jure his theories were often a muddle of the philosophical positions challenged by Husserl, Heidegger, and Meleau-Ponty. This book is a profound reading that challenges both analytic psychology and phenomenological psychology. Neither should be the same after Brooke's book.

The volume has a clear, coherent structure, beginning with a statement of the project of articulating a "phenomenological analytical psychology." Then, after providing an overview of Jung's psychology, (in Chapter 2), and a brief presentation of phenomenology (Chapter 3) that neither insults a reader well-versed in phenomenology nor mystifies a reader for whom phenomenology is a novelty, Brooke offers a series of chapters that explore and interpret key Jungian ideas phenomenologically: "Psyche, and the structure of experience" (Chapter 5), "The self and individuation" (Chapter 6), "Conscious and unconscious" (Chapter 7), and "Archetypes" (Chapter 8). These four chapters are bound by a discussion of Jtmg's trip to Africa (Chapter 4) and a clinical study (Chapter 9) that shows the therapeutic relevance of a phenomenological analytical psychology. A final chapter presents "An integration of themes," conveniently summarizing the main points in a cogent fashion.

I will begin in media res. The central chapter is "A critical discussion of Jung's experience in Africa: the place of psychological life." Jung visited Africa in the

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middle o f his life. For Brooke, that j o u r n e y revealed the hear t o f Jung ' s insights into psychologica l life in a way tha t t r a n s c e n d e d whatever else he said a b o u t those insights. In o r d e r to grasp that hear t , I will have to descr ibe Brooke ' s b o n e o f c o n t e n t i o n w i t h J u n g a nd how he o v e r c o m e s J u n g ' s concep tua l limitations. Brooke in forms us early in the b o o k that:

If our purpose is to rearticulate Jung's work in phenomenological terms, the main task in doing so is to undercut the Cartesian subject-object split in which much of that work has been conceived. Undercutting the Cartesian split will neutralize Jung's temptation to endorse the natural-scientific vision of reality, and will recover the world as the authentic home of psychological, imaginal life. (p. 11)

In Africa, the split was u n d e r c u t existentially for Jung . It was necessarily u n d e r c u t existentially, fo r tha t is how the split was first o f all lived. Car tes ian ism is n o t pr imari ly abou t Descartes. Cartesianism is an existential posit ion, a m o d e of being- in-the-world that reduces the world and everything and everyone in it to resources to be p l u n d e r e d a nd developed, and it reduces the subject to a "spectator self," to use a term f rom Romanyshyn ' s (1989) dep th p h e n o m e n o l o g y o f the m o d e r n self.

In Africa, J u n g expe r i enced a:

sense of returning to a source that was also a goal .. . . of enacting in the concrete terms of actual life one of the essential themes of the individuation process: that the realisation of the self as the goal of psychological development is also a return to that self which forms the original matrix of one's life. (p. 53)

T h a t source was the "self," a key c o n c e p t for Jung . Equally, it was the world as temple. Indeed , the revelat ion o f the self is s imul taneously the revelat ion o f the world as temple, because,

Jung had realized the self as a non-substantial openness within which the world could come into being, first as a world, then as a temple. But to realize the self as a non-substantial openness is to discover that the self is not an entity but a capacity that emerges through the relevation of the world. (pp. 60-61)

In Africa, J u n g discovered that "in the psyche" and "in the world" refer to the same t h i n g . J u n g expe r i enced the t ru th that the psyche is no t inside us, bu t that we are inside the psyche. Brooke commen t s :

The separation of the world from the place of experience (i.e., Cartesianism) is the single biggest obstacle for the technological European to overcome if it is to be understood that the essence of psychological life is its world-relatedness. (p. 54)

For Brooke the lesson o f Jung ' s exper ience in Africa comes as an invitation "to incarnate ou r psychological life and recover that vital ecological sensibility that is the founda t i on o f a mean ingfu l existence" (p. 62). Tha t incarnat ion, in theoret ical terms, occurs as the psyche. In a brilliant move, Brooke unders tands "psyche" no t as an inne r entity, bu t "the place o f exper ience , and that place is the world in which

A phenomenological reading of Jung's psycholoD' 63

we live" (p. 85). That is to say, what Jung calls psyche, Heiddeger called Dasein.

Brooke develops this identity in detail and with precision. He concludes by stating:

(T) he psyche is the open realm within which the world is constituted as a human world. The open realm as an imagintive constituting power and the world thus disclosed are each inconceivable without the other, so that the revealed world is not that to which psyche is contingently related but a constituent dimension of psyche itself. (p. 93)

The psyche is the opening within which the world appears, the appearance of the world, and equally, the "world of work, interpersonal relations, and so on" (p. 77).

This understanding of the psyche makes possible a revisioning of the notions of the self and individuation. Brooke addresses the various meanings that self has for Jung, and subjects the self to a detailed analysis. Individuation is "a p r o c e s s . . , in which personal identity is established as an appropriat ion of a limited number of possible world-disclosures and relationships from out of the totality of possibilities t ha t Jung calls the self' (p. 119). In this process, one appropriates and transforms "the primitive and archaic self' (p. 119). For the modern self, what Cushman (1990) calls the "empty self," this means a "sacrifice of the heroic [as world domineering] mode of being-in-the-world, and the realisation of a mode that is essentially receptive and hospitable" (p. 119). Self-realization means, moreover, an openness to the interiority of the world, and a recovery of the body as the place of incarnating world-disclosures, not as the inner site of their being. Self-realization means, most radically, the sacrifice of both the anatomical body and the inner mind of Cartesian consciousness, in the service of hospitable presence to the world as temple.

Given the current climate in psychology favorable to social constructionism, it is worth dwelling on aspects of Brooke's reading of Jung that challenge profoundly the radical historicity of social constructionism. Of course, in Jung, questions of human nature leads us to the collective unconscious and the archetypes. In Jung's misappropriat ion of Kant and Plato, these concepts refer to a retried realm of eternal verities that somehow, mysteriously and numinously, produce powerful symbols and psychoses. Brooke rehabilitates these notions, in dialogue with and in critique of Hillman's (1975) archetypal psychology. For Brooke, the unconscious is the "lived matrix" of psychological life: "personal psychological life emerges fl-om impersonal foundat ions, but these foundat ions cont inue to provide structure, consistency, and density to psychological life despite the vicissitudes of culture and history (and despite the claims of much contemporary thought)" (p. 127). The unconsc ious is the latency of ou r metaphor ica l p resence in the world, the hiddenness which, as darkness, etches the edges of the light. More specifically:

"File collective unconscious, therefore, may be thematised as the primordially incarnate body, but the shift in attention from body to Being affirms that the collective unconscious is given equally in the world. It reminds us that incarnate iutentionality cannot be interpreted subjectivistially or dualistically, which would make the revealed world a 'function' of intentionality. (p. 131 )

Following Heidegger and Boss rather than Merleau-Ponty in his understanding of lived body, for Brooke the body fundamenta l ly incarnates the pr imord ia l

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possibilities of being, rather than being their source. The world, as psyche, and human presence, as psyche, as opening to the world, are the locus of the hiddenness of being which is the unconscious.

Equally, they are the locus of the archetypes. Brooke de-reifies the archetypes; they are "species-specific bodily potentialities" (p. 148). This is no biologism: "the mistake [in understanding the archetypes] is not in situating the archetypes in the body (as long as 'in' is not taken too literally) but in trying to do so through the medical fantasy of the body as meaningless anatomy" (p. 148). The term archetype refers to the possibilities for bodily presence and the modes of world appearing. Brooke concludes by stating that "archetypes are fundamental necessities in human psychological life" (p. 155). They constitute human nature: the realm of necessity, of the unchanging, of the density of psychological life. This understanding is a chal lenge to social construct ionism which, in response to the tendency of psychology to reduce psychological life to abstract universals which express fundamental (Cartesian) biases of the modern self, tends to reject all universal claims about the self.

In closing, I recommend this book to anyone interested in phenomenology or in analytic psychology.Jung and Phenomenology is a groundbreaking work far surpassing previous phenomenological attempts to address Jung's work. It is theoretically astute, with clear clinical relevance.

REFERENCES Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology.

American Psychologist, 45, 599-611. Hillman,J. (1975). Re-visioningpsychology. New York: Harper & Row. L6vinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1961) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior (A. Fisher, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon

Press. (Original work published 1942) Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation (D. Savage, Trans.). New

Haven: Yale University Press. Romanyshyn, R. (1989). Technolog 3 as symptom and dream. London & New York: Routledge.