Interpreting a Freudian Split

 

            Slavoj Zizek, the renowned Slovenian provacateur and Lacanian psychoanalyst, describes the (in)famous rupture between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thusly:

“(T)he difference between Freud and Jung is insurmountable: the fundamental premise of Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ is that the universe is utterly meaningless- it is not structured in compliance with human desires, there is no harmony between microcosm and macrocosm- whereas Jung reinscribes a psychoanalytical problematic into the frame of ‘cosmic principles’ which guarantee correspondences between human life and the universe at large (yin and yang as psychic and cosmic principles, etc.).”

 

            But perhaps the meaninglessness of it all, which was so evident to Freud, is, paradoxically, the very guarantor of meaning.  Jung wrote extensively about the symbolism of the alchemical effort to transform base metals into gold; for Jung the alchemical process represents the process of individuation, the maturation of the soul.  But the process of individuation, melted down (to extend the metaphor) is nothing other than a byproduct of the individual’s day-to-day reckoning with suffering, a suffering which is rooted in the meaningless void into which we are all thrust as human beings.  Freud’s meaningless ground of suffering becomes the fertile soil out of which grows, respectively, the human soul, the insights of history’s religious geniuses, and civilization itself.

 

            Against Zizek, then, the irreconcilable split between Freud and Jung can be recast as a divergence of exploratory interests.  Freud remained until the end transfixed by the problem of human suffering and its relations to the peculiarities of human sexuality.  His vision of psychoanalysis is announced in his famous statement that the best he could do with the psychoanalytical cure was to deliver his patients from the misery of their neuroses to a state of common human unhappiness (not a small accomplishment in and of itself, to be sure).  As pessimistic as Freud’s insistence on meaninglessness and the inevitability of suffering appear, it is a perspective absolutely vital to the endeavor of psychoanalysis, and appropriate to its founding father.  Freud grounded psychoanalysis in the fact of the meaningless void in which humans suffer.  Everything that we humans accomplish grows out of the encounter with existential suffering.  To deny that is to obscure the profound insight of Freud, and to lose psychoanalysis in the process. 

 

            Jung’s ability to comprehend “man and his symbols”, what Zizek labels “cosmic principles”, comes from standing on Freud’s shoulders, as must all psychoanalysts worthy of the name.  That Jung found meaning where Freud found none simply indicates where Jung’s genius differed from Freud’s; Jung’s genius lay in his willingness to bring psychoanalysis with him as he made the leap that each of the world’s great faiths inspire.  The leap to discover what mysterious, ineffable meaning emerges from the shivering, suffering human soul’s encounter with the meaningless void.  If God exists anywhere, it is there, in the least likely of places, right in front of us in our eternal suffering.  That Jung finds God in the best hiding place of all, the very place that Freud, and Zizek, believe obliterates the very possibility of God, is a testament only to Jung’s willingness to follow Freud’s lead up to the edge that Freud defined as the limit of psychoanalysis, and walk right over the cliff.

 

            We are left, inescapably, with one question: where would we have psychoanalysis lead us?