Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology - Marie-Louise von Franz Audiobook

Written by Marie-Louise von Franz
Format: MP3
Unabridged

To be sure, this is one of Marie Louise von Franz’ most brilliant books: a depth-analysis into the nature of projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. Von Franz defines projection clearly in chapter one, where she points out that the phenomenon under clinical investigation leads to psychological problems when the archaic identity of a subject doing the projecting leads to disturbances in adaptation, at which point integration of the projected content into the subject is desirable (7). As she points out the archaic identity between subject and object still lives at the very bottom of the psyche and this lower and more “primitive” level contains the real secret of all life-intensity and cultural creativity (8). Her aim is to get to the bottom of the projection-making process, to show through her erudition how the goal of Jungian analysis is to help the patient and presumably the reader not to project anymore. This is also the aim, she says, of Zen Buddhist meditation and although she sees such detached consciousness, at least at times, through an idealizing lens, she says we average human beings will, for the most part, have to continue for the rest of our lives to recognize our projections for what they are: as mistaken judgments about people, situations, and events (199). She posits for analytical psychology five stages in the process of withdrawing projections. This leads her to the following discussion. “One of the oldest ways of symbolizing projection,” she says, “is by means of projectiles, especially the magic arrow or shot that harms other people” (20). She develops this idea further: “When one becomes the target of another person’s negative projection, one often experiences that hatred almost physically as a projectile” (21). “Ultimately,” she adds, “it appears that projections always originate in the archetypes and in unconscious complexes” (24). She applies this idea clearly to the problem of transference and countertransference in psychotherapy (27). She is adept at tracing the notion of projection to the withdrawal of projectiles in religious hermeneutics, in Western philosophy, Gnosticism, early Christianity and the schism in the second millennium. Her discussion increases in insight in the connections she makes between “excited points” in the electromagnetic field (posited by modern physicists) and the archetypal nuclei that emit certain psychoid auras of numinosity, or light. Here she makes it clear that in Jung’s hypothesis the archetypes in their quiescent state are not projected: “projection is an essential part of the process by which the archetype assumes a determinable shape” (86). Madness and possession by evil spirits, whether in an individual, a family, an analytical relationship, or in groups, may be cured by a shaman, she says, because the shaman has the power to overcome contaminations by toxic emotions: “during his initiation he has overcome his own states of possession” (99). “The Inner Companion” is a marvelous chapter and “Consciousness and Inner Wholeness” makes it clear that Jung’s notion of the Self is meant to be understood as an experience that may put an end to projections (160); experiences of Self may sometimes lead to a metanoia of consciousness where changes in the personality become irreversible (161). This may lead to the inner eye of insight and re-collection, or integration of the Self from projection, where little sparks of light in the unconscious begin to light up and one great inner light of consciousness is presumably illuminated (170). The discussion on individuation and relatedness, where she speaks of “the social function of the Self” and “reciprocal individuation,” where one gathers around oneself a “soul family”–a group not created by accident and projection, but by something more objective arranged by the Self (177)–is brilliant. Chapter nine discusses reflection with erudition and the “fourfold” mirroring of psyche and matter (synchronicity). She ends her book with a discussion of synchronistic events as “acts of creation in time” that may be observed objectively through reflexio (reflection). This may happen when we are able to perceive the synchronous ordering of events as part of a psychoid process, where one can integrate “absolute knowledge” in an archetypal nuclei as existing “in a space-time continuum in which space is no longer space, nor time time” (193). Such rare moments of re-collection are the aims of Jungian analysis. Ending her book she points to non-possession by the numinosity of the Self as the aim of individuation, modeling the the pinnacle of Chinese wisdom, as instanced in hexagram 15 of the I Ching, “Modesty.”