The ethical dimensions of life and analytic work through a Levinasian lens

Abstract

This paper contextualizes Jung's method of amplification within the larger history of philosophical hermeneutics and most particularly within the relational ethics of the post-modern, post-phenomenological and post-Heideggarian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. While finding the epistemological assumptions (foundationalism) of subject formation guiding Jung's interpretative method incompatible with the extra-ontology perspective of Levinas, this paper underscores the necessity for revitalizing our theory and practice by bringing back the unthought in Jung's corpus so that the truly ethical dimensions of life and analytic work are in alignment with our present epoch. Finally, one enigmatic analytic moment demonstrates how the radical Levinasian primacy of ethical experience in subject formation can emerge in a contemporary clinical encounter. The Levinasian sensibility will be shown to open up new perspectives that contrast with the formulaic ways in which we tend to understand the effects of countertransference, transcendence, time and ethics.

Accounting for Material Reality in the Analytic Subject

“…Jung was not interested in personal unconscious processes, which he equated with Freud’s unconscious considering its function as inferior to the objective psyche [ 37 ]. Understanding human experience therefore was largely dependent on the interpretation of archetypal “images”, which of course could not be understood in terms of merely personal unconscious processes [ 38 ]. This view of subjectivity does not account for sources of signification deriving from personal unconscious processes (fantasies, dream material, transference phenomena, nachträglich shifts in temporality, etc.…”

“…The thought of an act can only be born through the violent and traumatic struggle of being overcome by the other’s demand. Contra Jung, no teleological account is sufficient for this primal ethical awareness [ 38 ].…”

“…Jung clinically interpreted childhood motifs (to include mother symbology) as representing archetypes without considering the importance of actual childhood experiences or the fantasies of these experiences as having analytic relevance to subject formation [ 56 , 57 ]. Elsewhere, I elaborated on the rigid stance of epistemological authority that Jung relied upon when it came to the archetypal explications of the patient’s experience that can be noted in his method of amplification [ 38 ]. I state that the term “amplification” itself was a misnomer, in that it implied that Jung’s intent was to expand the signification of unconscious content, yet this process was in fact only a precursor to a formulaic reduction of the expanded material to a presumed archetypal core ([ 38 ], p. 87).…”

“…Elsewhere, I elaborated on the rigid stance of epistemological authority that Jung relied upon when it came to the archetypal explications of the patient’s experience that can be noted in his method of amplification [ 38 ]. I state that the term “amplification” itself was a misnomer, in that it implied that Jung’s intent was to expand the signification of unconscious content, yet this process was in fact only a precursor to a formulaic reduction of the expanded material to a presumed archetypal core ([ 38 ], p. 87). His phenomenological-descriptive approach however, was one he retained for working with the personal unconscious and was derived from his earlier research with the word association test ([ 56 ], para.…”