The State as a “Lunatic Asylum”
An Explication de Texte of a Paragraph in Aion
“Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.”[1]
After his post-doc studies with Pierre Janet in Paris,[2] Jung’s first job was in a lunatic asylum, the esteemed Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich. His eight years there gave Jung many insights into what it means to live amidst those out of touch with reality.[3] In the five decades after his clinic work, his private practice, his global travels, his extensive correspondence, and his keen observations from his base in Switzerland gave Jung many opportunities to assess the mental health of humanity, and he was not impressed. Why not? Why did Jung offer many warnings about the health of Western culture,[4] and what did he identify as dangers?
In one succinct paragraph in his “researches into the phenomenology of the self”[5] Jung identified many roots of our current problems, both social and psychological.
The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimilation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Wherever the Marxist Utopia prevails, this has already happened. But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.
A close textual analysis can bring up what Jung saw as both potential problems and ways to avoid them.
Text:
The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimilation of the traditional myth.
Analysis:
Jung had great appreciation for history and wrote repeatedly of the value of roots–individuals and cultures aware of and drawing on their past as a basis for understanding the present and planning for the future.[6] In the context of his work as a psychiatrist Jung knew that he was dealing with a task–integrating the unconscious of his patient–that was embedded in both a personal and a collective historical context. The anamnesis would give Jung some particulars of the patient’s history and the background of the illness[7] and, in rare cases the anamnesis itself allowed Jung to resolve the problem.[8] Usually more was required: lengthy examinations of dreams and their contexts (both historical and recent), the development of trust and transference, along with the patient’s own story, would suggest to Jung the myth the patient was living.[9] Over the years of the analysis the patient would develop some understanding of the mythic context of his/her life.
In my experience in analysis, learning about the myths I was living gave me great comfort, as it set my turmoil in a larger realm, with a deeper connection to the general human experience. Over time, the assimilation phase took the form of my “owning” the myth and drawing emotional sustenance from it. In all this work, I think it helped a great deal that I had been a history major in college: I came to Jung and his work sharing his appreciation of history.
Text:
This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development.
Analysis:
What can be true on the personal level (the one-on-one work between analyst and analysand) may not be so for the collective. While some cultures (e.g. the Swiss) may emphasize historical continuity and handle development mindful of their roots, many others (e.g. America) do not. Henry Ford articulated the view most Americans have of history, when he declared that “History is more or less bunk.”[10] The revolution that meant freedom from British rule, the lure of the frontier and new opportunities, the invention of the “new, new thing”[11] reflect how American culture (and others also) tend to ignore, and even denigrate the “continuity of historical development.”
Text:
Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.
Analysis:
Jung wrote these words in 1950, during the Cold War between the West and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The revolutionary rhetoric of the Communists excoriated old conventions and traditions. Jung had assessed correctly the dictatorship of the proletariat, with its pogroms, mass murders and brutalities[12]–“an interlude of barbarism” indeed!
Text:
Wherever the Marxist Utopia prevails, this has already happened.
Analysis:
Jung followed the news. He read the papers and heard stories from friends and patients about what Stalin was doing to the Russian people.[13] Jung was being ironic in his description of Stalin’s Russia as “the Marxist Utopia,” as, in its terrifying treatment of its people, it was anything but a desirable place. Russia in 1950 was proving Jung’s point about the dangers for a nation to throw over its heritage.
Text:
But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation.
Analysis:
It is not only dangers from demagogues and tyrants that can cause spiritual and psychological problems: our society’s emphasis on quantitative analyses, “hard” facts, stress on doing rather than being, while blithely ignoring values and subjective aspects of living can also produce doleful results.[14]
Jung recognized that human beings need more than the latest gizmo, clever machine, or mental distraction: for our mental, physical and spiritual well-being we need soul nourishment[15]–none of which can be provided by our gadgets and techniques. As he surveyed the state of the Western world in 1950 Jung warned us that, for all our putative “progress”–television, airplanes, faster cars, etc.–we were risking our mental health.[16]
Text:
With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest.
Analysis:
Jung had many patients who had robust physical health and lots of wealth, but, at the same time, showed up in his office with all sorts of neuroses, phobias, anxieties and mental miseries.[17]
Text:
But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary.
Analysis
Being rich, having no worries about where one’s next meal was coming from, made little difference, Jung knew, in terms of mental and spiritual health, i.e. true well-being. Jung would remind us that material riches often can be the source of mental problems.[18] In my dealings with some of the “Stowe trust fund babies,” I have seen this myself. On both the personal and the collective levels, lucre can be “filthy” indeed.[19]
Text:
Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria.
Analysis:
Jung knew that people need to feel connected, part of a lineage, with a sense of where they came from and how their heritage informed their present reality. Absent such familial and cultural ties, the individual is set adrift, unable to place him/herself in a meaningful environment.[20] The result is neuroses, mass-mindedness, and vulnerability to fads, fashions, distractions and trivialities that set them up for succumbing to the emotional frenzies and senseless excitements characteristic of collective hysteria.[21] Jung had had occasions to witness this on his trips to Germany in World War II.[22]
Text:
Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization.
Analysis:
In the post-war years Jung observed how Stalin administered this “therapy” to the exhausted and hysterical peoples of the Soviet Union–brutal repayment for the long years of starvation, death, blood, sweat and tears they had endured through the war to defeat Hitler.[23] Rather than repay their sacrifices with freedom and a peaceable nation, a tyrannical dictator produced a reign of terror that lasted for 25 years.[24]
Text:
Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.
Analysis:
Rationalism and materialism were two of Jung’s bêtes noires, partly because they were
-isms, i.e. theoretical concepts which ignored the uniqueness of persons and their situations in life.[25] Turning a word into an -ism made it an abstraction that is impersonal, which Jung felt could lead to evil: “Our rationalistic ‘doing,’…is … the evil of our time,…” [26] Even more than despising -isms, Jung objected specifically to materialism because it “overvalued physical causation with a refusal to acknowledge any other causal connection than the physical one.”[27] Jung had other criticisms of materialism, e.g. that it “reduces everything to physiology,”[28] and, in so doing, it “relegated the psyche to the rank of something secondary and derived.”[29] While Jung knew matter was a “thoroughly metaphysical concept,”[30] materialists treated matter as “a tangible and recognizable reality.”[31] By replacing the “intangibles of the soul”[32] Jung felt that materialism “engenders craziness”[33] and leads to “spiritual devastation.”[34]
Jung knew that our modern world operates within the paradigm of rationalistic materialism: we calculate what’s in it for us when contemplating an action. We worship what Jung called “the yellow god”[35] as we ignore the needs of the poor and elect to the highest office in the land those who lie, cheat and encourage others to do likewise.
Perhaps, as Jung predicted, we are living in an insane asylum.
Bibliography
Bair, Deirdre (2003), Jung: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Brinton, Crane, John Christopher & Robert Lee Wolff (1960), A History of Civilization, 2 vols. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.
Jaffe, Lawrence (1990), Liberating the Heart. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung, C.G. (1960), “The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease,” Collected Works, 3. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
_________(1971), “Psychological Types,” Collected Works, 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
_________(1960), “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Collected Works (CW) 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ _(1959), “Aion,” Collected Works, 9ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
_________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
_________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” Collected Works 16. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Development of Personality,” CW 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), “The Symbolic Life,” Collected Works 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1965), Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books.
Wheeler, Charles, “Interview with Henry Ford,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916.
[1] Collected Works 9ii ¶282. Hereafter Collected Works will be abbreviated CW.
[2] Bair (2003), 79.
[3] Ibid., 158.
[4] These warnings include our lack of “a symbolic life,” the “craze for mass organization,” the “spiritual devastation …wrought by materialism,” stupid thinking.. that one…can rule the unconscious by our arbitrary rationalism,” “exaggerated skepticism and rationalism,” and man “forced to his own destruction by his own inventions;” CW 18 ¶s625, 1345, 1659 & 1660, respectively.
[5] This is the subtitle of CW 9ii.
[6] CW 17 ¶251.
[7] The Greek anamnesis literally means “without forgetting;” in the context of analysis it is when the analyst takes the patient’s history, the backstory of why s/he is undertaking analysis; CW 16 ¶194.
[8] Jung recounts two examples of the anamnesis alone effecting a cure, both during his stints in the army, where he saw young men whose back stories were sufficient for Jung to diagnose, explain what going on and relieve the men’s complaint; CW 17 ¶`177-178.
[9] Jung (1965), 171, 199.
[10] Interview with Charles Wheeler,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916.
[11] This is the title of Michael Lewis’ account of Silicon Valley and the rise of computer technologies.
[12] Brinton et al. (1960), II, 438-460.
[13] In CW 10 ¶517, Jung noted how Stalin let 3 million peasants starve to death.
[14] Jaffe (1990), 90.
[15] CW 18 ¶627.
[16] CW 11 ¶85.
[17] In the decades before air travel become routine, it was a costly, slow endeavor to get to Zürich, so nearly all Jung’s American patients were wealthy, e.g. Medill McCormick, Elizabeth Shipley Sergeant, Joseph and Jane Wheelwright, and Joseph Henderson; Bair (2003), 253-254.
[18] Mishandled, money can be soul-deadening; CW 10 ¶719.
[19] I Tim. 3:8.
[20] CW 16 ¶216.
[21] Wolrd Book Encyclopedia Dictionary, I, 972.
[22] Bair (2003), 434, 441.
[23] Brinton, II, 560-561.
[24] I.e. 1928-1953; ibid., 604.
[25] CW 10 ¶893.
[26] CW 6 ¶369.
[27] CW 3 ¶467.
[28] CW 6 ¶594.
[29] Ibid. ¶961.
[30] CW 18 ¶1345.
[31] CW 8 ¶529.
[32] CW 18 ¶1115.
[33] CW 8 ¶529.
[34] CW18 ¶1345.
[35] That is, money; CW 10, ¶s 102, 946.
