El texto que publico a continuación
es un artículo escrito por el Dr. en Física y experto en Psicología Analítica, Herbert van Erkelens, publicado
en el año 2009 y titulado "Una respuesta junguiana a Ken Wilber" (A
junguian response to Ken Wilber).
"The book by Ken Wilber I
especially value is Grace and Grit. It is a book about living, loving, death
and resurrection, the central theme of Jungian psychology. Death and
resurrection also concern me personally. The first dream I ever recorded as a
student in physics was about a mummy in a subterranean chamber, coming to
life again under the influence of love. Marie-Louise von Franz, the former
co-worker of Jung, told me about the dream: ‘What has been dead comes to life
again in a creepy way. The physicists have, during the Enlightenment,
declared matter dead. But matter is alive.’
In my dream an unknown woman
stretched her hand towards the skeleton-like hand of the mummy which appeared
unexpectedly between the white bandages. By this act the bony hand was
transformed into a healthy, living hand. For many years Marie-Louise von
Franz acted for me like that unknown woman. Her books and letters helped me
to live and determined the course of my life. There was no need to turn to
Ken Wilber. Why should I? But a medical doctor in Holland told me that Wilber
had criticized Jung in a book about the disease and the dying of Treya
Killam, the woman whom Wilber had married.
Around that time there
appeared in German a book by Edith and Rolf Zundel about leading psychotherapists
of our time. In that book one chapter was devoted to Ken Wilber, though he is
not a psychotherapist. Edith Zundel tells us that Marie-Louise von Franz
regarded Wilber as the modern Thomas Aquinas who was writing the Summa
Theologia of our time. What could that possibly mean? On the one hand it is
certainly a compliment. But on the other, it could mean that Wilber runs the
risk of overlooking something of essential value. Aquinas himself suspended
his writing in the third part of the Summa, because of the inner, mystical
change that befell him. He said to his friend Reginald of Piperno: ‘I cannot
go on, Reginald, everything I have written seems as worthless as straw.’
The I-You relationship
If Ken Wilber would ever
meet with such a writer’s block, he would not have to blame Grace and Grit
for being 'worthless as straw.' It is a magnificent book, but it contains
fragments from the interview by Edith Zundel in which Wilber launches a
fierce attack on Jungian psychology. Apparently Jungian psychology does not
fit into his view of a transpersonal psychology. Wilber formulates the main
reason for criticizing Jung as follows:
‘Jung’s major mistake, in my
opinion, was to confuse collective with transpersonal (or mystical). Just
because my mind inherits certain collective forms does not mean those forms
are mystical or transpersonal. We all collectively inherit ten toes, for
example, but if I experience my toes I am not having a mystical experience!
Jung’s "archetypes" have virtually nothing to do with genuinely
spiritual, transcendental, mystical, transpersonal awareness; rather, they
are collectively inherited forms that distil some of the very basic,
everyday, existential encounters of the human condition - life, death, birth,
mother, father, shadow, ego, and so on. Nothing mystical about it.
Collective, yes; transpersonal, no.’ (Grace and Grit, Shambhala, Boston,
1993, p. 181)
Has Jung really confused
collective with transpersonal? Since Jung introduced his idea of the
collective unconscious as distinct from the personal unconscious, the term
collective must indeed be understood as transpersonal. But in Jungian
psychology that does not mean that any experience of this transpersonal realm
would be mystical in character. It is Wilber who equates transpersonal with
mystical, not Jung. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the concept of the
collective unconscious that forbids some kind of mystical experience. But
that is not the aim of Jungian psychotherapy. The aim is to become conscious.
That means that one is no longer obsessed by the contents of the collective
unconscious. One obtains instead an individual relationship with them. Hence,
we should carefully distinguish a collective experience of archetypal
contents, such as mass hysteria, from a conscious, individual experience of
the same contents. After all, the main discovery of Jung is the so-called
individuation process. This process is tending towards the experience of
one's uniqueness and wholeness.
According to Jung it is
impossible to become conscious without a (therapeutic) relationship with
another person. In The Psychology of the Transference Jung states: ‘The
unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only
through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is
always found in a "You." Wholeness is a combination of I and You,
and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature
can only be grasped symbolically, as in the symbols of the rotundum, the
rose, the wheel, or the coniunctio Solis et Lunae (the marriage of the Sun
and the Moon).’ (Collected Works, Vol. 16, par. 454)
One may wonder whether there
is room in Jungian psychotherapy for some kind of transpersonal experience. I
think there is, but in the context of the I-You relationship. In the end it
is this I-You relationship which, occasionally, can be of a transpersonal
kind, if it involves love. In a letter from April 1941 Jung writes about this
in terms of something unexplainable: ‘This love is not transference and it is
no ordinary friendship or sympathy. It is more primitive, more primeval and
more spiritual, than anything we can describe. That upper floor is no more
you or I, it means many, including yourself and anybody whose heart you
touch. There is no distance, but immediate presence. It is an eternal secret
- how shall I ever explain it?’ (Letter to Mary Mellon, in: C.G. Jung
Letters, Volume I, 1906-1950, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 298)
Archetypes
That Jung speaks about a
love that is at once more spiritual and more primitive than we can describe
is typical of his psychology. He does not try to reach the spiritual by
overcoming the primitive. In the same way he does not use the term
"archetype" as belonging to a spiritual domain high above the level
of biological instinct. In Aion he writes that certain complex thought-forms,
the archetypes, ‘must be conjectured as the unconscious organizers of our
ideas. The motive force that produces these configurations cannot be
distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct. There is,
therefore, no justification for visualizing the archetype as anything other
than the image of instinct in man.’ (Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II, par.
278)
In Wilber’s mystical view
the archetypes ‘are the first subtle forms that appear as the world manifests
out of formless and unmanifest Spirit. They are the patterns upon which all
other patterns of manifestation are based. From the Greek arche typon,
original pattern. Subtle, transcendental forms that are the first forms of
manifestation, whether that manifestation is physical, biological, mental,
whatever. And in most forms of mysticism, these archetypes are nothing but
radiant patterns or points of light, audible illuminations, brilliantly
colored shapes and luminosities, rainbows of light and sound and vibration -
out of which, in manifestation, the material world condenses, so to speak.’
(Grace and Grit, p. 180)
Wilber now fosters the idea
that there are Jungian archetypes and transpersonal archetypes: ‘The power of
the "real archetypes," the transpersonal archetypes, comes directly
from being the first forms of timeless Spirit; the power of the Jungian
archetypes comes from being the oldest forms in temporal history.’ (Grace and
Grit, p. 182) But the Jungian archetypes do not have any form. The archetype
as such is a hypothetical and irrepresentable structural element of the
unconscious that must be distinguished from the archetypal forms and ideas as
they appear in our consciousness. These structural elements, the organizers of
the archetypal ideas in matter and mind, are regarded by Jung as timeless.
The Jungian archetypes are thus essentially the same as the transpersonal
forms of timeless Spirit. As Wilber himself admits, the Jungian archetype of
the Self is genuinely transpersonal because of its ultimately nondual
character. That might imply that the individuation process already involves a
gradual approach to the realm that Wilber himself calls transpersonal.
But Wilber insists on making
a difference between Jungian and transpersonal archetypes. According to him
Jung uses the term archetype ‘as certain mythic structures that are
collective to human experience, like the trickster, the shadow, the Wise Old
Man, the ego, the persona, the Great Mother, the anima, the animus, and so
on. These are not so much transcendental as they are existential. They are
simply facets of experience that are common to the everyday human condition.’
(Grace and Grit, pp. 180-181)
Is that true? In Memories,
Dreams, Reflections Jung speaks about his first descent in the collective
unconscious: ‘It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty
space.’ Here he met a strange couple: Salome and Elijah personifying the
blind anima and the wise old man. Later another figure rose out of the
unconscious: Philemon. Jung writes: ‘Philemon and other figures out of my
fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the
psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their
own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself... He was a
mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a
living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me
he was what the Indians call a guru.’ (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Fontana
Paperbacks, 1983, pp. 207-208)
Wilber wants us to believe
that these experiences have little to do with the transcendental. According
to him they simply belong ‘to the everyday human condition.’ But I know very
few people who walk in the garden with their spirit-guru. So I wonder why
Wilber insists that archetypes in the Jungian sense ‘have nothing to do with
mysticism, with genuine transcendental awareness.’ (Grace and Grit, p. 181)
Is Jung’s encounter with Philemon not a mystical experience?
The fourth element
I don’t think that Jung has
made the errors Wilber is attributing to him. So I wonder how errors that
Jung himself never made could have developed into ‘the single greatest
obstacle within the field of transpersonal psychology.’ (Grace and Grit, p.
179) Maybe, the terminology of transpersonal psychology leads to a
misunderstanding of Jung’s achievements. In the books Wilber wrote after
Grace and Grit he develops a scheme of our understanding of the world that is
unable to incorporate the findings of Jungian psychology. The scheme of four
quadrants derives from three value spheres connected with I, we and it. The
I-You relationship, so central to Jungian psychology, does not play a
significant role in this scheme. Moreover, Wilber likes to reduce the four
quadrants to three basic principles. In an interview by the psychologist of
religion Frank Visser Wilber clearly states: ‘The Big Three is just a
shorthand of the four quadrants.’ Here the Big Three are the Good, the True
and the Beautiful of Plato’s philosophy.
Wilber seems to be unaware
of the fact that Jung devoted almost all his life to reaching a point of view
beyond Plato. In Jungian psychology the basic experience is connected with
the so-called quaternity, an archetype which in dreams and fantasies is
frequently symbolized by a circle divided by four. If people like Wilber
begin to speak about the Big Three, Jungians always respond with the
question: ‘Where is the missing Fourth?’
Jung’s Psychology and
Religion is based on dreams of the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In
these dreams the quaternity plays an important role. Jung writes: ‘The
application of the comparative method indubitably shows the quaternity as
being a more or less direct representation of the God manifested in his
creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol, spontaneously
produced in the dreams of modern people, means the same thing - the God
within.’ (Psychology and Religion, Yale University Press, 1938, p. 72)
Moreover he says: ‘The
medieval philosophers of nature undoubtedly meant earth and woman by the
fourth element. The principle of evil was not openly mentioned, but it
appears in the poisonous quality of the prima materia (primeval matter) and
in other allusions. The quaternity in modern dreams is the product of the
unconscious... [The] unconscious is often personified by the anima, a female
figure. Apparently the symbol of the quaternity issues from her. She would be
the matrix of the quaternity, a theotokos or Mater Dei, just as the earth was
understood to be the Mother of God. But since the woman, as well as evil, is
excluded from the Deity in the dogma of the Trinity, the element of evil
would also form a part of the religious symbol, if the latter should be a
quaternity. It needs no particular effort of imagination to guess the
far-reaching spiritual consequence of such a development.’ (Psychology and
Religion, pp. 76-77)
The fourth element missing
in the dogma of the Trinity is the world of nature. This world embraces the
feminine, the reality of evil and the cosmic presence of matter. The
quaternity unites what has been divided by the dogma of the Trinity. In the
quaternity spirit and nature are again reconciled with each other. Therefore
one can characterize the spirit connected with the quaternity as the spirit
of nature or as the spirit of matter. Since this spirit of nature has no
place in contemporary science nor in Christian religion, the transition from
Three to Four in our understanding of the relationship between man, God and
the cosmos would indeed be a tremendous step beyond traditional belief and
thinking.
I have no idea how this step
from Three to Four relates to transpersonal psychology. In the latter
psychology we have the important insight that prepersonal states of mind
should not be confused with transpersonal ones. Hence the development scheme:
prepersonal, personal, transpersonal. Again the number three! From the
perspective of transpersonal psychology Jung in a romantic way elevates prerational
states to postrational glory. (Grace and Grit, p. 189) But does that mean
that he has fallen into the pre/trans fallacy? If the first four integers
stand for the unfolding of consciousness, the return to unity in Jungian
psychology does not take place at stage three, but at stage four, according
to the famous alchemical axiom attributed to Maria Prophetissa: ‘Out of the
One comes Two, out of Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as
the Fourth.’
The five-pointed star
Frank Visser has published
in Holland a book about Ken Wilber. It has as subtitle Thinking as Passion.
If I should write a book about Carl Gustav Jung or Marie-Louise von Franz I
could never use such a subtitle. What Jung and von Franz have tried to
achieve is some middle point between thinking and feeling, sensation and
intuition. That is the reason that their basic writings deal with symbols and
not so much with concepts. Symbols have a feeling tone that is missing in
rational concepts. In some sense Jungian psychology can be viewed as the
psychology that tries to rehabilitate the feeling function. Von Franz herself
had many dreams in which her head was chopped off. She had to sacrifice her
strongly developed rational thinking in order to arrive at the middle ground
where Jung was staying.
In Grace and Grit the
feeling function is present. It is a very moving story of a love relationship
under the doom of cancer and death. The Wilber I get to know from this book
seems to me a very sympathetic man with a lot of compassion and humour. But
in A Brief History of Everything Wilber as an individual who lives and
suffers in a concrete world disappears again behind intellectual schemes
which do not touch my heart. Here Wilber is again the philosopher, the Thomas
Aquinas of our time.
I am afraid that Grace and
Grit will remain the only book by Wilber dear to me. Surprisingly it ends
with the number five. It even points beyond the number four of Jungian
psychology. Wilber tells us that in the year of Treya’s fortieth birthday, Dra
Free John, a teacher of both of them, began saying ‘that the ultimate
enlightened vision was when one saw the five-pointed cosmic star, or cosmic
mandala, pure and white and radiant, utterly beyond all finite limitations.’
Wilber then continues: ‘Treya didn't know this was said at that time, but
nonetheless that is exactly when she changed her name from Terry to Estrella,
or Treya, which is Spanish for star. And it is held that, at the precise
moment of death, the great five-pointed cosmic star, or the clear light void,
or simply great Spirit or luminous Godhead, appears to every soul. It is my
own belief that this vision had appeared to Treya some three years earlier -
it had done so in a dream she told me of, right after an empowerment with the
Very Venerable Kalu Rinpoche - the vision was unmistakable, and accompanied
by all the classic signs, though she told no one of it. She did not change
her name to "Treya" because Free John had talked about this
ultimate vision; she had simply had this vision, of the luminous cosmic star,
in a very real and direct way.’ (Grace and Grit, p. 404)
The ladder to heaven
In the face of death all
distinctions disappear, also those which seem to separate Jungian from
transpersonal psychology. Marie-Louise von Franz discusses in chapter 11 of
her book On Dreams and Death the
idea of a spectrum of consciousness, the very idea with stands at the
beginning of Wilber's career as a writer and thinker. Jung had put forward
such a spectrum as a new hypothesis in order to throw light on the
relationship between the body and the psyche. In a letter to Raymond Smithies
he wrote: ‘It might be that the psyche should be understood as unextended
intensity and not as a body moving with time. One might assume the psyche
gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending
for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body... In the
light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the
relative infinite tension of intensity of the psyche proper is transformed
into perceptible frequencies or "extensions." Conversely, the
fading of introspective perception of the body explains itself as due to a
gradual "psychification," i.e., intensification at the expense of
extension. Psyche = highest intensity in the smallest space.’ (On Dreams and
Death, p. 144)
This hypothesis by Jung is
not very clear in itself. But the whole idea of degrees of consciousness is
confirmed in many dreams by Wolfgang Pauli in which the concept of frequency
is related to various levels of spiritualization or disembodiment. Pauli
wrote an essay about the frequency motif in his dreams. It will be published
as part of the correspondence between Pauli and Jung. In this essay on
"background physics" Pauli remarks: ‘It seems to me that personal
consciousness is actually placed on the side of matter and ordinary time,
whereas timeless, objective psyche is found on the other (complementary)
side.’ In the same way von Franz writes in On Dreams and Death: ‘The psychic universe is timeless, is spread
throughout space and also contains a transpersonal knowledge, a knowledge
which Jung ascribes to the collective unconscious.’ (On Dreams and Death, p.
153) She further remarks: ‘Perhaps the various staircases, ladders, etc.,
which appear so often in the cited dream material [of dying people], also
point to a more gradual connection between the two forms of energy (body
matter and psyche).’ (On Dreams and
Death, pp. 153-154)
It seems to me that one and
the same myth underlies Jungian and transpersonal psychology. It is the
ancient Egyptian myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris. In the dream I
mentioned at the beginning of my exposition there is a mummy in a
subterranean burial chamber. It is the spirit in matter. But the corpse may
as well be regarded as Osiris. His rising out of the land of the dead is in
the Pyramid Texts connected with a stairway or ladder to heaven. For instance
the Egyptologist Wallis Budge writes: ‘The ladder is referred to in the
Pyramid Texts. It was made originally for Osiris, who by means of it ascended
into heaven. It was set up by Horus and Seth each of whom held one side and
they assisted the God to mount it.’
Why Horus and Seth? Von
Franz tells in On Dreams and Death
that in the ancient Egyptian Book of
Gates Death itself is represented as a God with two faces: Horus and
Seth. But Horus and Seth are enemies. Seth has killed Osiris, and Horus as
the son of Isis and Osiris wants to revenge his father. But in the end both
Horus and Seth hold the ladder on which Osiris ascends towards the ever
circling stars which never go down under the horizon. There is a
reconciliation of opposites in the face of death. The ladder itself is a sign
of that reconciliation. If a human person dies, he becomes Osiris and says
according to the Egyptian Book of the Dead: ‘I set up a ladder to Heaven
among the Gods, and I am a divine being among them.’
Jungian analysts are people
who have a mother rather than an Apollo complex. They first have to descend
into mother earth, into the depth of their own psyche, before they can even
think of ascending to heaven. For many of them the descent into the interior
of the archetypal earth is experienced as going through hell. After such an
adventure you have learned your lesson. You have experienced the life-giving
water that rationality is unable to offer you. Consequently, Jungian
psychology is convinced that rational thinking must play a more modest role
in a future science. Marie-Louise von Franz therefore writes at the end of On
Dreams and Death: ‘We stand at a great turning-point in modern science, which
points toward the healing discovery that we are everywhere surrounded by
rationally impenetrable mysteries. This is a recognition that hopefully
signifies the beginning of a period of greater intellectual modesty.’ (On
Dreams and Death, p. 157) If such intellectual modesty is adopted, there
would no longer be any need for a hot debate between Jungian and
transpersonal psychology. We would, like Horus and Seth, both hold up the
ladder to Heaven.
Copyright © 1999 -
Permission is granted to quote from this article on the condition that full
credit is given to the author."
A Herbert van Erkelens le
corresponden todos los derechos de
autor, a quien agradecemos esta interesante contribución.
El texto original está publicado en http://herbert.vanerkelens.nl/jungian-psychology/68-a-jungian-response-to-ken-wilber
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