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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issues
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Jung and Educational Theory offers a new take on Jung's work, providing original, rich and informative material on his impact on educational research. * Explores Jung's writing from the standpoint of educational philosophy, assessing what it has to offer to theories of education * Highlights Jung's emphasis on education's role in bringing up integrated and ethical human beings * Offers the perspectives of a diversity of academics and practitioners, on topics ranging from the role of the unconscious in learning to the polytheistic classroom * Both a valuable addition to the academic library and a significant new resource in the professional development of teachers
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Table of Contents
Cover
Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series
Title page
Copyright page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Jung and Holistic Education
1 Jung and the Soul of Education (at the ‘Crunch’)
Introduction: Education and Controversy
Jung on Education and Bloodsucking Ghosts
The Educated Soul and Nature: Robert Romanyshyn and Jerome Bernstein
Post-Jungians in the Classroom
Jungian Educational Practice in the University
Jungian Education in Schools
Healing Fiction as Classroom Practice: Visionary and Psychological Reading of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
2 On the ‘Art and Science’ of Personal Transformation: Some critical reflections
Introduction
Jung and Education
The Power of Images
A Short Detour to the Pragmatics of Science
Soul-speak as Ideology
A Closing Reflection
3 The Polytheistic Classroom
Archetype
Great Zeus
Glorious Hera
Mother Demeter
Bright-eyed Athene
Shining Apollo
Artemis the Huntress
Golden-haired Aphrodite
Winged Eros
Ares the Warrior
Crippled Hephaistos
Aunty Hestia
Dancing Dionysos
Prometheus the Saviour
Hermes the Salesman
Conclusion
4 Itinerary of the Knower: Mapping the ways of gnosis, Sophia, and imaginative education
‘The Breath of Possibility’: Imaginative Education and Jungian Motifs
Gnostic Jung and Esoteric Iterations
In Search of Sophia: The Way of the Lost Goddess
Conclusions
5 The Unifying Function of Affect: Founding a theory of psychocultural development in the epistemology of John Dewey and Carl Jung
Introduction
Dewey and Jung Converge upon the Idea of the Objective Capacity of the Subject
The Developmental Continuity between the Biological and the Psychocultural
From More Complex Individual Identities to More Humane Social Institutions
The Modern Identity and Its Impact on the Identity of the Social Scientist
Affect Science: The Path to ‘Affect Freedom’
Affect Freedom, Cultural Leadership and Psychological Citizenship
The Psychoeducational Practices of a Transformative Political Psychologist
6 Deleuze’s Philosophy and Jung’s Psychology: Learning and the Unconscious
Introduction
Self-education
Affects and Experience
How We Learn
Becoming-other
New Ethics
A Concluding Remark
7 ‘The Other Half’ of Education: Unconscious education of children
Introduction
The Nature and Extent of Children’s Involvement in ‘the Other Half’ of Education
Some Problems with Jung’s Account of ‘the Other Half’ of Education
Conclusion
8 Complex Education: Depth psychology as a mode of ethical pedagogy
The First Experiment
The Second Experiment
Education as Awakening Vocation
Vocation and Response-ability
Toward an Ethical Pedagogy
9 Jung and Tarot: A theory-practice nexus in education and counselling
Index
Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series
Series Editor: Michael A. Peters
The Educational Philosophy and Theory journal publishes articles concerned with all aspects of educational philosophy. Their themed special issues are also available to buy in book format and cover subjects ranging from curriculum theory, educational administration, the politics of education, educational history, educational policy and higher education.
Titles in the series include:
This edition first published 2013
Chapters © 2013 The Authors
Book compilation © 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Volume 44, Issue 1)
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jung and educational theory / Edited by Inna Semetsky.
p. ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-29734-6 (pbk.)
1. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961–Influence. 2. Education–Philosophy. 3. Educational psychology. 4. Psychoanalysis and education. I. Semetsky, Inna, 1948–
LB14.7.J855 2012
370.1–dc23
2012002032
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The cover design incorporates “Butterfly” © Michail Grobman. Work on Paper, 1965, 29 × 20.
Cover design by Cyan Design.
Notes on Contributors
Peter T. Dunlap is a founder of the Center for Political Development located in Petaluma, CA, USA, devoted to helping progressive leaders, their organizations and community groups to attend to the subtle prejudices that restrict the emergent leadership capacities needed at this time in our history. His research focuses on an exploration of the transformative experience toward becoming progressive political leaders. He recently published Awakening Our Faith in the Future: The advent of psychological liberalism (Routledge, 2008). Email: [email protected].
Raya A. Jones, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Academic specializations include narrative and Jungian approaches to the self, and developmental psychopathology. She served on the executive committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Authored and edited books include Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity (Routledge, 2007), Education and Imagination (Routledge, 2008), and Body, Mind, and Healing after Jung (Routledge, 2010). Email: [email protected].
Antonina Lukenchuk is an associate professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University, Chicago, IL. She has a PhD in Linguistics, EdD in Adult Education and MEd in Educational Foundations. Her research focuses on paradigms of research, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical discourse analysis, cross-cultural studies, transpersonal psychology and service-learning. Among her recent publications is Living the Ethics of Responsibility through University Ser vice and Ser vice-learning: Phronesis and praxis reconsidered (2009). She is a kajukenbo martial artist and a volunteer in community organizations. Email: [email protected].
Dr Shiho Main is a fellow at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and an associate lecturer in Childhood with the Open University, UK. Her research interests include Jung’s views on education and psychological development; history of childhood; and psychological issues concerning children’s rights. Among her recent publications is Childhood Re-imagined: Images and narratives of development in analytical psychology (Routledge, 2008). Email: [email protected].
Bernie Neville is adjunct professor of Education at Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia, with a long career as a researcher and teacher educator. His research has focused on the impact of teacher–student relationships on student learning and well-being. His book Educating Psyche: Imagination, emotion, and the unconscious in learning examined education through the lens of archetypal psychology. In his recent book, Olympus Inc.: Inter vening for cultural change in organizations, he applies the archetypal framework to organizational change. Email: [email protected].
Joshua Ramey (previously known as Joshua A. Delpech-Ramey) is a visiting assistant professor at Haverford College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and spiritual ordeal (Duke University Press, 2012). Ramey is also the editor of ‘Spiritual Politics After Deleuze’, a special issue of SubStance (39.1), and the author of numerous articles on contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and cultural theory. His essays have appeared in Angelaki, Political Theology, Discourse and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Email: [email protected].
Dr Robert Romanyshyn is a teacher, writer and psychotherapist trained in phenomenology and Jungian psychology. An affiliate member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, he is a senior core faculty member of the Clinical Psychology program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA. He has published six books, including The Wounded Researcher (2007), over 40 book chapters, and edited special journal issues. He has given lectures and workshops at universities and professional societies around the globe. A DVD, Antarctica: Inner journeys in the Outer World, is available online at www.jungplatform.com. Website: RobertRomanyshyn.com. Email: [email protected].
Susan Rowland, PhD, is now core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and formerly professor of English and Jungian Studies at Greenwich University, UK. She is the author of books on Jung, gender and literary theory including Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002), Jung as a Writer (2005) and C. G. Jung and the Humanities (2010). Her new book, The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, complexity evolution and Jung is published in 2012. From 2003 to 2006, she was founding chair of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Email: [email protected].
Inna Semetsky is adjunct professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has a PhD in philosophy of education (Columbia University, USA), MA in Family and Child Counseling, and Grad.Dip.Ed in math/science education. She has five entries in the Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development (2006) and has published four books including Deleuze, Education and Becoming (2006) and Re-Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic (2011), as well as numerous articles and chapters, including in International Handbooks. She serves on the board of four academic journals. Among her forthcoming books is The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the Art∼Science of Tarot (Sense Publishers). Email: [email protected].
Introduction: Jung and Holistic Education
Inna Semetsky
This book assembles nine chapters written by contributors from Australia, USA and the UK who have brought the rich legacy of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology to the attention of the international community of educational philosophers and theorists.
In the remarkable book Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in education, Noddings and Shore (1984) remark on Jung’s intuitive function that guides our perceptions and judgments in addition to merely rational thinking. The chapters in this book are written by academics and practitioners that remarkably combine all four of the Jungian functions, including the intuitive, in their approach to research. This uncompromising, holistic and non-reductive, inclusive attitude has allowed the authors to discover a largely untapped area, the dimension of education spread through Jung’s vast body of works, despite two apparent obstacles to their research. Not only has Jung’s analytical or depth psychology as the analysis of the unconscious always existed just on the margins of mainstream theoretical orientations in clinical or counselling practice, but also Jung’s legacy still remains largely outside the disciplinary fields in Academia altogether.
This book thus fulfils two novel objectives. First, it brings Jung’s corpus into academic discourse in the area of philosophy of education and educational theory. Second, it contributes to articulating the educational value of Jung’s psychology as a powerful complement to its therapeutic value, well known to those Jungians and post-Jungians who work in clinical practice. In fact—as will be seen in the majority of the chapters in this book—the absolute line of division between educational and clinical aspects with regard to Jung’s conceptualisations is no longer feasible. Jung’s great achievement was his anti-dualistic and unifying approach to what we today call human sciences. Jung’s psychology and his emphasis on the learning, individuating, process grounded in human experience strongly parallels John Dewey’s educational philosophy, in the framework of which all education is always already moral education devoted to human growth.
Before I present a synopsis of the book’s contents, I would like to express my gratitude to many independent reviewers including Maryann Barone-Chapman, Tina Besley, Bill Doll, Peter Fitzsimons, Peta Heywood, Clifford Mayes, and several others who provided their much appreciated professional advice that enabled the selection of essays for publication in this book. Thanks are also due to Susanne Brighouse for her expert technical assistance with the editorial process.
The book begins with Susan Rowland’s chapter entitled ‘Jung and the Soul of Education (at the “Crunch”)’. Challenging the utilitarianism of modernity, Rowland locates education in relation to nature, both human and non-human. She addresses the diminished role of the humanities in education and presents an extensive review of Jungian techniques in the teaching of English as a second language and in Business Studies in universities, as well as in the context of holistic transformative education in schools. She argues that Jung focused on the problem of being educated as a social being inspired by the creative and artistic potential of the unconscious.
For Rowland, the Jungian approaches to education represent the critique of fragmentation achieved by a ‘healing fiction’ embedded in a story. She concludes her chapter by presenting the ‘visionary’ and ‘psychological’ readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in a university course on literary theory. Rowland’s argument is that the Jungian contributions to education are dedicated to aiding psychic wholeness. She discusses ‘the educated soul’, drawing from the works of two contemporary post-Jungians, Robert Romanyshyn (whose chapter, in one creative stroke, completes this book) and Jerome Bernstein, in the context of the evolution of Western consciousness, alchemy and indigenous (Navajo) culture.
The very concept of Jungian ‘soul-speak’ in education becomes problematical for Raya Jones in her chapter ‘On the “Art and Science” of Personal Transformation: Some critical reflections’. Focusing on the works of several influential post-Jungians, Jones interrogates the concept of transformative learning and addresses the recent call to ‘excite children’s imagination’ in the area of primary education in the UK, as per the Cambridge Primary Review. Taking a critical approach from within a social sciences research perspective, Jones argues that there remains a dissonance between educational goals and those of Jung’s therapeutic methods. Jones positions Jung’s goal of individuation as becoming a whole person against the background of educational policy in the UK in the tradition of liberal education, and builds up an argument against directly transmitting Jung’s methods into pedagogical praxis with children.
Acknowledging Jung’s science versus art dilemma with regard to modern psychology, Jones emphasises the differences between the reality of the educational settings and that of the therapy room and the difficulty involved in teachers’ self-education as a form of Jungian therapy. Jones notes that the discourse on soul psychology in education may impose a subtle coercion, its shadow, given that transformative education generally is understood as emancipatory, and problematises the value-neutrality of the tendency towards taking ‘Jung’ out of psychotherapeutic settings and into the classroom.
Yet, Bernie Neville’s chapter ‘The Polytheistic Classroom’ does bring Jung into an ‘archetypal’ classroom populated by the gods of the Greek Pantheon as personifications of the different Jungian archetypes. Neville asserts that the Greek pantheon can provide educators with a pluralist language for talking about a wide range of distinct philosophies, value systems, energies, feeling states, habits of behavior and teaching styles observed in the classroom. For example, the archetypal pattern personified in Zeus is the pattern of power that wants to maintain itself either brutally or benevolently and can both protect and punish; the archetype of Demeter suggests a ‘mothering’ aspect to a teacher profession; Hermes tends to subvert the conventionally accepted order of things, to disrupt our certainties, and to make changes possible.
Neville notices that each of the Greek gods gives us a different meaning for our being, a different truth, which must be held in balance. Each of the gods represents a different notion of the aims of education or a different perspective on curriculum and, as reflected in current debates on the aims of education, these immortal gods still demonstrate their eternal arguments. Commenting on the phenomenon of ego-inflation as especially important for Jung, Neville remarks that we may find inflations of all kinds in educational systems, in classrooms, and in teachers’ personalities. The gods (or archetypes) are many; for Neville, if we follow the advice of the ancient Greeks we will be careful not to neglect any of them as well as not get carried away in worshipping any single one of them.
Antonina Lukenchuk’s essay ‘Itinerary of the Knower: Mapping the ways of gnosis, Sophia, and imaginative education’ connects Jung’s theory with several discourses in educational theory on the role of imagination as articulated, for example, by Maxine Greene and Kieran Egan. Lukenchuk finds the close affinity of Jung’s claim that reason alone would not suffice with Greene’s argument for imagination and arts education and cites Dewey and other philosophers on the role of the arts in developing various faculties of children.
Lukenchuk argues for an integrated educational theory that would also incorporate Gnostic philosophy. She notices the role of the archetypal feminine exemplified in the Gnostic image of Sophia whose ‘presence’ can be traced through Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, to Julia Kristeva’s works, to Ukrainian lore. Affirming the Gnostic Jung as offering us the knowledge of the heart, she argues that multiple and cross-cultural Jungian discourses should become part of mainstream education, thereby revitalising its philosophical foundations and suggesting new ways of perceiving, knowing, teaching and learning.
While Dewey’s educational philosophy is noted in passing alongside Jung in Lukenchuk’s essay, Peter Dunlap’s essay ‘The Unifying Function of Affect: Founding a theory of psychocultural development in the epistemology of John Dewey and Carl Jung’ makes Dewey’s ‘postulate of continuity’ central to understanding Jung’s developmental theory of knowledge. Dunlap argues that Dewey’s and Jung’s thoughts converge on the resolution of the subject-object dichotomy prevalent in the positivist paradigm of modernity and moves into a political sphere addressing the potential for more humane social institutions. He demonstrates that Dewey’s political philosophy has a psychological wing while Jung’s psychology has a political wing, and offers a critique of the cultural identity of political citizenship versus individualism. He identifies ‘affect science’ as the path to ‘affect freedom’ that employs the biological, psychocultural, and political functions of our emotions and lists several examples of contemporary cultural leadership and post-Jungian ‘political therapy’.
For Dunlap, individual ‘political psychologists’ need the guidance of a strong institutional form—in terms of educational philosophy, professional ethics, and best practices—in order to establish a range of new professions within community organizations to enable transformative action as an embodied solution to the crises of our time. He concludes the essay by suggesting a type of a social scientist involved in psycho-educational community practice as a potential agent of the transformation of culture.
Inna Semetsky and Joshua Ramey engage the work of Gilles Deleuze as yet another philosophical counterpart to Jung in their chapter ‘Deleuze’s Philosophy and Jung’s Psychology: Learning and the Unconscious’. The value of Deleuze’s corpus for educational theory is steadily growing; hence positioning Jung’s psychological theory against this particular philosophical background in education mutually reinforces both novel directions in philosophy of education. Analysing Jung’s theory of the archetypes and Deleuze’s pedagogy of the concept as two complementary conceptual resources, the authors posit Jungian individuation as becoming-other in the process of (adult) self-education as learning from experiences. Addressing the anti-Oedipal nature of the unconscious for both Jung and Deleuze, the authors emphasise that it is the collective unconscious that connects us with the public—social, political, historical, cultural and natural—existence in the world.
The authors’ argument is that it is Jung’s transcendent function that acts symbolically or indirectly (versus immediate representation in consciousness) and, analogously to Deleuze’s transversal communication, contributes to creating novel concepts, meanings and values in our practical experience. Addressing what one author (Semetsky, 2010) posits as the ethics of integration in education, the authors affirm that the integration of the Shadow is necessary for the educators’ self-education grounded in Jungian analytical method(s) considered by him to be an eminently educational activity.
Shiho Main in her chapter ‘ “The Other Half ” of Education: Unconscious education of children’ contrasts the aim of ‘the other half’ of education, as an indirect unconscious process, with formal curriculum and direct education. She addresses the children’s psyche as described by what Jung qualified as participation mystique. Arguing that a purely technical education is insufficient, Main nonetheless identifies some problems with Jung’s account of the other half’ of education.
Main presents Jung’s view of children as competent individuals from early on and elucidates a historically controversial hypothesis of ontogeny (the course of individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (human evolution as a species) in the context of Jung’s developmental psychology. She bridges the dichotomy between developmental (natural) and symbolic (cultural) aspects in Jung’s psychology with regard to the education of children. Asserting that, for Jung, diversity is the expression of universality, she concludes that education in terms of the unconscious process between a student and a teacher does not specify any particular conditions and is therefore inclusive of often marginalised groups regardless of culture, socio-economical background, special needs, etc.; all unified by the purpose of children’s well-being.
This essay by Robert Romanyshyn is titled ‘Complex Education: Depth psychology as a mode of ethical pedagogy’. While the ethical implications for education, as based on Jung’s theory of the unconscious, were also addressed in Semetsky’s and Ramey’s chapter, it is Romanyshyn who brings the ethical pedagogy to the foreground. Undercutting the Cartesian dream of reason, Romanyshyn weaves together phenomenology, hermeneutics and Jung’s psychology to analyse the unconscious dynamics between a teacher and a student as leading to ethical ways of knowing and being, while remaining careful not to conflate therapy with pedagogy. His central message is that educators have an ethical obligation to take responsibility for their own complex prejudices. Romanyshyn is interested in complex ‘characters’ implicit in the transference field in a classroom and structures his arguments by reference to his seminal book The Wounded Researcher as well as to several earlier practical experiments informed by his formidable Jungian scholarship.
Referring to the imaginal, Romanyshyn strengthens the role of this ‘third’ dimension between the senses and the intellect that enables an embodied way of being in the world within the context of a complex mind reaching into nature. His intent is to cultivate a special, even if uncertain, metaphoric sensibility capable of leading one out of linear and literal ways of thinking. Noticing Jung’s Gnostic interests, Romanyshyn asserts that a teacher has to be a master of metaphor and argues that ethical education should become a vocation oriented toward the development of individuated human beings who can take up the universal conditions of human existence in a manner that is transformative both of themselves and also of those very existential conditions.
Semetsky’s essay on ‘Jung and Tarot’ presents this ancient cultural practice as an educational and counselling tool that can be used as an aid in the process of Jungian individuation. Her research methodology is a theory-practice nexus that overcomes the Cartesian mind-body dualism. By means of narrating the symbolic meanings of Tarot images we can become aware of the unconscious actions of Jungian archetypes. Thus Tarot hermeneutic functions in the mode of post-formal pedagogy oriented to learning from experiences comprising a ‘school of life’ filled with meaning.
To conclude, Jung’s theory is profoundly postmodern in its denial of the exclusive role allotted to the conscious subject. Philosophy of education should take note of the relevance of this idea as well as of Jung’s emphasis on self-knowledge and lifelong human development irreducible to perpetual training. Jung was adamant that education should not be confined to schools or stop when a child grows up. In her book Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach, Nel Noddings refers to the Socratic ‘Know Thyself’ principle as the often-disregarded yet necessary goal of education. Noddings emphasises the importance of self-knowledge as the very core of education: ‘when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education’ (Noddings, 2006, p. 10, italics in original). Such education, according to Jung, will by necessity bring forth holistic and inclusive pedagogical practice, in which the ethical dimension is embedded and the aim of which highlights bringing up integrated human beings, children and adults alike.
References
Noddings, N. (2006) Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach (New York, Cambridge University Press).
Noddings, N., & Shore, P. J. (1984) Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in education (New York, Teachers College Press, Columbia University).
Semetsky, I. (2010) Towards an Ethics of Integration in Education, in: T. Lovat, R. Toomey & N. Clement (eds), International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing (Dordrecht, Springer), pp. 319–336.
1
Jung and the Soul of Education (at the ‘Crunch’)
Susan Rowland
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centred in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration, to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
(Stanley Fish, ‘The Last Professor’—Stanley Fish Blog—NYTimes.com)
[T]he actual act of teaching, something I’ve been doing for more than 50 years now, has not changed at all. In spite of all he new technology the most useful teaching device is still … a log, with a teacher at one end and a student at the other end.
(Tony Steblay in reply to Stanley Fish on the same blog)
They appear suddenly by the side of the truly modern man as uprooted human beings, bloodsucking ghosts, whose emptiness is taken for the unenviable loneliness of the modern man and casts discredit upon him.
(C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933, p. 228.)
Introduction: Education and Controversy
Writing in 2009, at a time of global anxiety and as a university teacher, the world of education appears fraught with universal concerns and to be undergoing its own identity crisis. In the blog quoted above, eminent US English literature professor Stanley Fish associates two major developments in university education. Here the move to a mass model, in which higher education becomes the expectation of more than one third of the population, is inevitably accompanied by the triumph of utilitarianism. Degree education of the masses becomes primarily a means to acquire skills for employment. The corollary at institutional level is that universities are characterized as profit-making institutions. Education is a business. The values of ‘useless’ study of the humanities are as quickly forgotten as their provision is being eroded.
So the accusation here is of a tragic narrowing of what education means. At the same time, the world faces related crises of climate change and economic meltdown. Indeed, as Robert Romanyshyn pointed out in his many works, we had better pay attention to the coding of our metaphors in which polar ice melting suggests more than affinity to capitalist meltdown, itself a metaphor often used for nuclear catastrophe. When trying to address the potential catastrophe of nature, routinely there are calls for a revolution in education. By ‘education’ here, what is referred to is the school system and not the activity in its widest sense.
How can we possibly connect a workplace changing fast via technology and saturated with notions of utility and profit with calls for a new kind of human being? Is education suffering from an overload of social demand and fantasy? From the fantasy that it can save the world while becoming a profitable new industry to replace dying forms of manufacturing? There is a dangerous gulf between ‘education’ as a locus of fantasies of salvation and what Fish rightly points out is its growing mechanisation and standardisation. Nor is a shift from institutions devoted to learning, to profitable businesses, confined to universities. In Britain in the 1980s, the imposition of a National Curriculum in schools, which significantly homogenised lesson content, was accompanied by the requirement to balance budgets. Schools, for the first time, began to hire managers or accountants.
This article will use the work of C. G. Jung to look at these tensions in education, from the demand that it be part of some kind of social salvation, to the possibilities being explored by Jungians in the classroom today. In particular, the theory and practice of education challenges imagined social boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the institutions and even between inside the self and outside, in cultural creativity. With Jung’s help, one might take this sense of provisional or liminal boundaries further and look at education inside the sphere of human existence and also beyond it. Where is education in relation to nature, matter and the non-human?
Jung on Education and Bloodsucking Ghosts
In an article of 1928, ‘The Significance of the Unconscious in Individual Education’, Jung divides education into three types (Jung, 1954, CW17, p. 149): by example; by norms or rules (collective education); and, significantly, individuation which means coming to terms with one’s unconscious. Here Jung is on his core ground. For his ideas are based upon the supreme importance of the unconscious as a source of creativity, and as at least partly, unknowable. All his key notions follow from this initial proposition. Most significantly, this hypothesis of the unconscious renders all other knowledge and argument provisional. To Jung, the assertion of something, anything, as absolute truth is a dangerous fantasy of the ego.
To Jung, subjectivity was a continual process of the ego being challenged, undermined, and remade by the richer creativity of the unconscious. This was ‘individuation’. Crucially, he used the metaphor of ‘education’ as part of a framework of understanding how therapy might aid individuation. While stressing the provisional nature of his findings, and the arbitrary quality of the portrayal of his psychology, he says:
Be that as it may, I venture to arrange the sum-total of findings under the four heads of confession, explanation, education and transformation.
(Jung, 1933, p. 35)
Interestingly, this account of his own methods of psychotherapy deliberately draws upon two social histories, that of religion, specifically confession to a priest, and that of education, presumably of a more individual type. Here, psychotherapy raids collective forms of discourse to set up another collective, the ‘rules’ of the analytic encounter, in which something very individual is hoped to occur: the individuation of the patient.
Two points could be drawn from this analysis by Jung. One is that ‘education’ is viewed here as a stage on route toward ‘transformation’, not as an end in itself. The other point is that, despite Jung’s apparent focus upon the individual, collective considerations are innate to his individuation. Of the ‘education’ stage he says: ‘[t]he problem which now faces the patient is that of being educated as a social being’ (ibid. p.49).
To Jung, the further into the psyche one delves, the more ‘collective’, and hence ‘social’, the implications. In suggesting that humans are born with the propensity for certain sorts of images and meanings (archetypes), he theorises a ‘collective unconscious’. Cultural life is made up of incarnations of archetypal images. These are energised by the collective inheritance of archetypes, while being coloured by individual and social histories. Jung’s psyche is both collective and cultural: it is most profoundly innately creative and partly mysterious. Hence, to him education means coming to terms with one’s unconscious in a social context. After all, the unconscious is not only to be found within in dreams. It is also, disconcertingly, to be found projected on to other people, to ideas and ideologies, and social institutions. In fact, the unconscious Other may reach out to us even as the face of nature and the cosmos. In this belief in the projection of a psychic inside to the outside by the independently creative unconscious, Jung appears to have stuck to modernity’s paradigm of a division between subject and object, self and world. However, in looking back at the Renaissance discourse of alchemy, and in forming his own ideas about the psyche and material world co-creating meaning (synchronicity), he anticipated new holism. Within holistic educational process, the educator is herself changed.
So who are the bloodsucking ghosts that haunt modernity? They are un-individuated, and therefore, un-educated people. Their un-self-conscious modern existence does not permit them to be remade by the unconscious, and thus they become cut off from it. The more one is cut off from the unconscious, the more one fears it. The greater the fear, the blacker and more powerful the unconscious becomes. Because Jung thinks collectively as well as personally, what is on the individual level someone who has no life of their own, who merely leeches off others, e.g. a bloodsucking ghost, is on a societal level the creator of a terrifyingly material unconscious other. Jung argued that a society not educated to the nature of the unconscious, one that believes only in the reality of matter, creates its own material ‘shadow’. Such a shadow, he believed, had become actual substance in weapons of mass destruction.
[M]an has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness—that is, the unconscious … The World War was such an irruption …
(Jung, 1933, p. 277)
Hence, in Jung’s own cultural institution of Jungian psychoanalysis, and also in his psychology, there is a suggestive fluidity or ‘deconstruction’ of absolute divisions between ‘self’ and ‘world’, ‘individual’ and ‘collective’, and even ‘education of the soul’ and ‘education of society’. The education of the soul is inevitably involved with the collective, as unconscious dreams and fantasies direct the analytic work into the patient’s humanity in a larger sense. For Jung, individuation is healing because Jung believed the psyche was a self-healing entity in which individuation became a drive to ever-greater psychic wholeness. Indeed, he called this wholeness union with, or intimation of, the self. Here self is not ego with a fantasy of separateness from the world; it is self as ever-deeper connectedness to the collective unconscious and the reality of humanity, society and cosmos. Ultimately, Jung is not facilely abolishing the modern individual. He is rather re-situating the human being as only fully herself when acknowledging and articulating deep relations to the unconscious psyche, human culture and nature.
What is necessary is not to smash the ego, for that would destroy consciousness and the result would be psychosis on either a personal or mass level. This is precisely what Jung designed his psychology to avoid. He regarded the disaster of Nazi Germany as the result of too little consciousness in the German collective life. Such dire results were caused by too little individuation on a personal and social level. Individuation produces consciousness. Jung’s unconscious is a monster if ignored or ill-treated by repression. It is a nurturing (M)other if individuation proceeds as an education in responding to the psyche’s creative potential. The consciousness produced by successful individuation is strong enough to work productively with the unconscious as a junior partner. This conscious ego is able to receive its profound fertility in ways that enhance the individual and her world.
Crucially, Jung saw this potential for education and transformation in the individual as simultaneously individual and collective. Societies, like individuals, fail or succeed in individuation. Indeed, Jung’s interest in the arts pivots upon his perception that the whole socially-located artistic process is a form of collective individuation. He argued that art could be categorised as either ‘psychological’ or ‘visionary’. Like many of his so-called ‘opposites’, these terms represent poles of a spectrum rather than discrete types. ‘Psychological’ stands for art where the artist has consciously worked upon a social problem. Here art is an overt expressive communication of aesthetic and cultural values drawn from the collective consciousness, the known social consensus.
By contrast, ‘visionary’ art is deeply evoked by the collective unconscious. It appears to the initial audience as strange, wonderful, shocking, sublime, daemonic or terrifying. Visionary art is hard to ‘read’, impossible to comprehend, for it calls to its audience for images, voices, intimations, dreams and nightmares that have been lost, forgotten, suppressed or not yet witnessed. Visionary art may be a prediction of social changes to come, or may excavate ancient forms of humanity. What it definitely brings to its culture is the ‘other’. It is a form by which the collective unconscious speaks to human beings as individuals, and also collectively as a society. In effect, visionary art produces its audience, and at the same time is profoundly individual and deeply connected to the social world. For it releases what is powerfully collective, and causes us to know our individuality as liminal as well as precious.
The Educated Soul and Nature: Robert Romanyshyn and Jerome Bernstein
Jung’s vision of the educated soul is not confined to the human world. He was fascinated by the borderlands of the psyche. Two post-Jungian theorists have developed what he left largely implicit in his work. Robert Romanyshyn, in publications stemming from his first book, Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989), and Jerome Bernstein, in Living in the Borderland (2005), both do vital work by looking at the psyche in nature.
Romanyshyn, in particular, explores alchemy, a historical practice that fascinated Jung. He pushes Jung’s alchemical studies further by exploring alchemy in relation to metaphor. Alchemy is popularly understood as the doomed pursuit of turning lead into gold in the Renaissance. More precisely, alchemy is a holistic vision of an educating and transforming practice. For alchemists believed that the material world was inspirited and inspired. Far from God being separate from matter, ‘he’ was trapped in matter and needed to be freed by complex processes centring on coagulation and solution, solidifying and dissolving. Yet the repeated solve et coagula could not be reduced to a purely material process, because the world is not sundered like this. Rather, the alchemist’s own soul was involved through philosophical study and poetic meditation upon symbols. Alchemy also sought to bring together feminine and masculine through a ‘chymical wedding’ of sun and moon.
What is of contemporary significance in this cultural practice, Romanyshyn argues, is the way alchemists believe in the creative linking of psyche, written text, material substance and nature or cosmos. For alchemists, their worldly practice with flasks and test-tubes, etc. (in which they became the precursors of modern chemistry), was a dynamic part of work with the psyche that was itself a marriage of intellect and love, Logos and Eros. Alchemists united parts of human activity that modernity has since divorced, to form divisions such as artistic creativity and science or mathematics, feeling versus rationality, and mind activity with body activity, and psyche as separate from matter. In so doing, alchemists situated humanity in a cosmic web. They saw their work as connecting the human soul to the nature of plants and animals, and the stars. Drawing astrology and magic into their philosophy, they produced a sort of prototype psychology.
