The Body as "fundus animae"
Some Aesthetical Remarks on the Origin of Analytical Psychology(*)
This paper(1) is part of a research on "Panthasie und Affekte bei C. G. Jung (1875- 1961)" whose first outcomes can offer some hints to sketch in a new way the outlines of the jungian aesthetics.
The aspects of the jungian thought which are of particular importance for aesthetics are many, among them the symbol and the archetype, but what I’m trying to prove is how an aesthetic valency emerges even in a part of his work perhaps less known but in my opinion not less important: Jung as an experimental scientist and a psychologist of psychiatry.
From an analysis of his writings on psychiatry, field he mainly devoted himself during the first decade of the century, but which he never dismissed during his life, comes out that:
1) the kinds of hysteric (neurotic) and schizophrenic (psychotic) thinking are judged meaningful as provided with a particular poetic value;
2) even though his interest is mainly concentrated on nosology and psychologic experiment, Jung already outlines his reflections about the symbol, the myth and the instinct of the mind or the archetype;
3) even though he is a strenuous supporter of psychogenesis of mental illnesses, he doesn’t renounce considering the possibility of an organic cause. Finally this possibility will be ruled out but the notion of «Körper» will undergo an interesting metamorphosis: from pure canal of transmission of physical-chemical impulses, the body will become first the arbiter of the psychic life and than the source of its meaning;
4) regarding to this, important is the role played by fantasy: it is in fact modifying his evaluation of fantastic activity that Jung comes to the assumption of collective contents of the unconscious.
I will now try to develop these four aspects in two phases.
First. At the beginning Jung declares himself influenced by Théodore Flournoy, Pierre Janet and some other French scholars, later by Sigmund Freud. But I have discovered considerable analogies also with the Leibnitian and Baumgartenian psychology and aesthetics, even though I think Jung did not know directly Baumgarten’s work, and probably Leibniz’s e Wolff’s ones too.(2)
The diagnostic model set up by Jung is the following: hysteria, somnambulism and schizophrenia (which before 1911 was called Dementia praecox) are characterised by a free flow of sensitive thought made up of confused ideas (undeutliche Vorstellungen) which is weakened by a drop of attention. The internal and external coherence of the ideas is strongly disturbed by the affective complexes, which monopolise the energies usually handled by the consciousness causing what Jung defines as a "lack of beauty" of insanes’ thoughts.
All this is asserted in a work important for his psychiatric reflection as Über die Psychologie der Dementia praecox, 1907(3). The frame of jungian reasoning is ascribable to the following syllogism:
a) the deliriumof patients is intelligible if interpreted as a dream;
b) the syntax of the dream shows strong analogies with poetic thought; consequently:
c) schizophrenic thought is analogous to the poetic composition.
The dream is here the middle term of the parallelism between schizophrenia and poetical creation: "The patient describes for us, in her symptoms, the hopes and disappointments of her life, just as a poet might who is moved by an inner, creative impulse"(4).
Elsewhere he states: "what the artist and the insane have in common is common also to every human being – a restless creative fantasy (schaffende Phantasie) which is constantly engaged in smoothing away the hard edges of reality"(5).
But the artist’s way of thinking and the schizophrenic one are not properly the same. Jung explains that even if the poet uses metaphors he speaks the language of a normal mind; so he thinks "directedly", being for the most part conscious of his expressive means.
The artist in other words makes himself understandable and normal people can therefore find in his "Geistesprodukte" the true reflections of their joys and sorrows. The patient instead expresses himself without any "directing ideas" and often using dreamlike images. His thought process seems therefore to be quite impenetrable(6).
So, it is not the trite saying that everyone is unconsciously a poet in his dreams, since this would be too vague. Even though it is true that in our dreams our complexes are remoulded into symbolic forms, this is done in an aphoristic and disconnected manner that rarely leads to more coherent and broad structures. To obtain this – Jung explains – you need instead "complexes of poetical – or hysteric – intensity"(7).
Such a poetical "intensity" seems to be nothing else than a kind of link among ideas: the products of ill people provide in fact "a long-drawn-out and elaborately woven tissue of fancies" which in Jung’s opinion is comparable to an epic poem or to a romance. This – as I can infer – for the fantastical web is woven during the waking state, under the control of the from-the-ego-complex-stolen attention (i.e. a passive type of attention)(8) that actually gives little more clarity to ideas. But this does not imply that all madmen should be considered poets, since the train of fantasies tends in the hysterics and especially in the psychotics to blur and deteriorate in the imperfection of dreams, with their monstrous, grotesque and distorted metaphors. Nonetheless the presence of one or more basic themes, related to the pathogenic complex, makes Jung to consider the delirium more poetic than the dream.
The comparison between pathologic and poetic thought leads finally to the following consideration: the insane shares with the poet the capability of elaboration and extension of the web of fantasies, but the former acquires also the incoherence and the grotesque of the dream, that is to say – this is the point – "der Mangel alles Schönen"(9), the lack of everything beautiful, as I stated before.
Now, for those who are well acquainted with the origin of the modern aesthetics, especially with Baumgarten’s Metaphysica and Aesthetica(10), it is easy to guess here a psychotherapeutic topical making of the doctrine concerning beauty as "perfectio phaenomenon"(11), that means perfection grasped by the "analogon rationis"(12).
I will try shortly to explain: thanks to an "abaissement du niveau mental" (Janet), that causes an inconvenience of the attention, the well-connected series of sensitive ideas forming the poetic plots – or, as we have seen, the hysteric or schizophrenic ones– lose their nexus. Nexus causes unity, and unity is perfection(13), which if appearing to the sensitive knowledge is named beauty(14). As losing perfection the fictions recede and become what Baumgarten defined "somnium obiective sumptum" (in German: "ein Traum, das geträumte")(15), i.e. a disorderly mass of parts called also "phaenomena substantiata"(16). The principles of ontology have been violated and we go back to the "mundus fabulosus" (17) where the danger of a psychosis is very probable in Baumgarten’s opinion too: fantasies – he says – become stronger than the perception of reality, and this causes an isolation from the senses where hallucinations flourish and lead to the so called "ecstasis"(18) or, once they have become usual, to the "delirium"(19).
As we have seen, the identikit of the schizophrenic thinker outlined by Jung is very similar: a sort of poet able to convey his deep psychic energies to a long-drawn-out web of fantasies. Nevertheless the poet in question is anaesthetised since he has lost the physical rooting of his images and consequently he loses the ability of dealing with the beauty, i.e. the coherence of his images, too. He would be an "aestheticus felix", or "pulchre cogitans", "schöner Geist"(20), briefly a genius, if he did not lose the ability of dealing consciously with the metaphoric and metonymic shifts from one idea to another(21). But actually it is another personality aesthetically thinking within him, another personality not innervated by his physical experiences, and for this alien to the ego-complex. In other words: the strong fantastic activity of the schizophrenic replaces the ordinary condition of the waking state, seriously impairing the "fonction du r&eacuel" (Janet), i.e. the adaptation to the environment. The mind has been fixed on the pathogenic complex and the patient is unable to feel new emotions.
How could the "beauty" of the thought be recovered?
Second. The question of the physical rooting of common experience of the ego seems to me rich of implications for aesthetics. Let’s dwell upon it.
So far the hypertrophy of fantasy, even thought with its aesthetic implications, has been considered as an impediment to the psychic health. After 1907 Jung will start assigning fantasy a strong therapeutic value, changing completely his way of interpreting the concept of symbol.
The first meaning of symbol and consequently that of fantasy were bound to Jung’s infatuation for Freudian psychoanalysis, which lasted no more than a five year period (about 1906-1911). In Psychoanalyse und Assoziationsexperiment, 1906(22) Jung states that in order to be psychoanalyst you should be able to decode symbols. But "Symbol, Symbolik, symbolisch" are here used in a generic and rather negative way: the symbol, he states, is nothing but a subsidiary association, based on a rough, vague and superficial analogy. It obscures rather than clarifying the idea to which it is related(23).
My impression is that the basis of the aesthetic meaning of the later doctrines of the symbol(24) and of the archetype has already been laid in Über die Psychologie der Dementia praecox. And proving this I am going to close my paper.
The main aim of this work is to prove that psychosis is always caused by psychologic problems. The consequence of such a strong point of view made Jung to distance from his Director Eugen Bleuler who didn’t deny an organic component in the aetiology of dementia praecox, that caused properly the primary symptoms. On the contrary Jung bravely states that also the organic degeneration (endocrine system, synapses) is caused by noxae deriving from the extreme violence of the feelings present in the complex. But, properly speaking, it seems to me that Jung doesn’t deny the somatic contribution too; simply, he thinks it comes from the psychic disorder.
Beside I think that, once reversed in this way, the causal relationship between body and mind should not be considered strictly as a relationship since body and mind become indistinguishable; better the body becomes the lowest and darkest level of the psychic reality, i.e. the "fundus animae"(25), while the mind – the healthy one – appears to be constantly innervated and nourished by the body.
Let’s now consider where Jung states such a psychophysical valency of the "feeling- toned complex" (gefühlsbetonter Komplex). In the first chapter of his work on dementia praecox he discusses the latest theories on that nosology. Jung criticizes the psychiatrist Erwin Stransky who states that there is a clear dyscrasia between the "Noopsyche" and "Thymopsyche", the two distinct psychic factors we have to assume to make dementia praecox understandable(26). But – Jung replies – a disproportion between the affective and intellective component is only noticeable to an outsider, and one should prove that the insanes don’t link them on their own, in their subjective feeling. It is more correct therefore assuming that there is a basic functional unity of the mind(27) which cannot be considered cracked if the connections are not visible from the outside. Generally speaking we have to say that the sense-perception, the intellectual component and the feeling-tone are only functions of one single reality(28).
Even though it is undistinguishable from the other components the feeling-tone has anyhow a special function, because it’s a sort of mould that impresses itself on the single ideas linking them in general associative levels; the feeling-toned complexes are in fact defined also as "a higher psychic unity", and we could consequently consider them the prototype of the ego-complex, which is "the highest psychic authority"(29).
Now, every man has complexes of different type and intensity; in the sane people the strongest is the ego-complex to which each association is normally bound. But what for our need is noticeable is that – as Jung explains – the affective tone of the ego-complex is properly its normal afferent innervation from the body, so that the ego becomes nothing else of "the psychological expression of the firmly associated combination of all body sensations"(30).
So, as I can infer, each psychic event is unconsciously known as being a part of ourselves, and this because it is accompanied by "von dem mächtigen und immer lebendigen Gefühlston des eigenen Körpers", Gefühlston which is well rooted in our body(31). The body, in other terms, impresses on the ideas a general feeling-tone and so presents itself as a kind of transcendental element of the psychic content, i.e. an "archetype" characterising each association and so determining the personality.
In this way "Körper" could also be named "Leib"; it becomes in fact the cement of the psychic life of the ego, a ground that even though without any specific intention is constantly known to us as feeling-tone innervating ideas. The body might finally be compared to the zip unifying Stranky’s noopsyche and thymopsiche.
And so, bearing in mind the original unity of psychical phenomena we have seen above, I could define it as the aisthetic element keeping the ego in contact with the reality he is aware of and that consequently neutralises the split between affective life and cognitive life. In fact every time this darkened knowledge about (or "attention" towards) the body falls, the real problems for the mind begin: the ego-complex has been submitted by other complexes rooted only in the region of the psyche, physical sensations are abandoned and the mind withdraws autistically in itself. The emotional tone has been fixed and the psyche falls into pieces, giving way to the "psychologische Stürme" of mental illness.
Even though supporting the theory of psychogenesis of schizophrenia, Jung has in this way assigned a physical rooting to the mental health. Such a doctrine will merge later on in the famous hypothesis of the collective unconscious: the body innervating the psyche will become the mythopoetic and archetypic unconscious of the human species, a sort of mental- instinctual force, the a priori of psychic functions(32).
Jung uses some principles taken from biology: the cerebral cortex is made up of layers, the lowest corresponds to the most primitive functions of the mind, operating at lower energetic levels. Here the guiding of the thought (i.e. of the associations of ideas) is based on phenomena such as shifts, condensation, mediated associations, mere assonance in the way of expressing and so on; same which take place in the experiments where sane subjects are made artificially inattentive.
These lower faculties are in a way productive: they produce metaphors, symbols, even though blurred and consequently imperfect, as we have seen above. But what changes in Jung’s interpretation of these "Geistesprodukte", is that they are not only superficial phenomena but something absolutely peculiar of each culture: an instinct, a philogenetic memory of the body, or better the way in which the body takes part to the genesis of the meaning(33). Later on, in 1950’s in his latest psychitric writings ha states that these "archetypal patterns" are the conditions "for the forming of representations in general", "just as the instincts are the dynamic conditions for various modes of behaviour. It is even probable that archetypes are the psychic expressions or manifestations of instinct"(34). Finally the "archaische Formen", i.e. the archetypes, are really defined as the "biologische Grundlagen der Psyche"(35).
The mind, guided by automatic impulses, especially on the crucial moments of our life is lead to produce symbols in which the analytical psychologist can sense the right way of a new spiritual orientation of the person(36). These symbols in which the "fundus animae" expresses itself are referred to a form of pre-individual thought(37), which could be interpreted as the logos of the body.
When all the energy usually spent in the sphere of experience can’t be employed it happens a "regression"(38) of the psyche, which implies an intense unconscious fantastic activity: it is in fact in the unconscious where it is attempted to avoid the impediment and where the mind is opened to the future. And heavens help the conscience which wanted to block that attempting, since the instinct toward freedom hides itself in the fantasy!
So, proposing the body as the source of every spiritual orientation, or as I could say as the therapy for the human mind, Jung realizes he is proposing a sudden turn about from a deep rooted tradition. And this even though the body Jung referred to after 1907 is not properly that of the present experiences but of the experiences of those who lived thousands of years ago(39). But this irruption of the natural history ought to be the topic of further considerations.