Heidegger, Jung, and the Madness of 1933 (Part I): To What Extent Is Jung’s Notion of Archetype Compatible with Heidegger’s Notion of Being?

Frank H. W. Edler
Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE
Copyright © 2002 Frank Edler

(A talk given on September 20, 2002, as part of the Friday Conferences sponsored by the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.)

This talk follows Kathy O’Connor’s presentation on creativity and madness given September 6. It deals with the same issue in an historical context, that is, with the ‘madness’ that swept Germany in 1933. [I put the term ‘madness’ in single quotations because it hasn’t been defined at this point.]

This past summer I think of as my "Jung summer" because it is the first time I’ve tried to read Jung in a more systematic way rather than reading an isolated essay here or there. One of the most difficult things to recreate and understand of an author or an historical period is the atmosphere, that is, the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist, the sense that was in the air at the time.

The ‘madness’ of Germany in 1933, of course, started well before that time; however, it did not achieve its full expression on a national scale until after January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg. Many Germans, whether they were National Socialists or not, saw 1933 as a time of revolution and were swept up in the blast of that wind.

It is this spirit, this revolutionary fervor and euphoria emerging from post-war devastation and economic desperation mixed with anti-Semitism and hero-worship which is difficult to grasp. To offer a distant parallel: although I grew up in the 60s in terms of high school and college, I am shocked when I see documentaries of that time. I have grown and changed and it takes time for me to recreate the intensity of that revolutionary spirit in which I participated but which has since dissipated.

Before stepping into the madness of 1933 with Heidegger and Jung, before examining how they participated in this maelstrom – or not, and how they interpreted or misinterpreted this madness, I want to back away a bit to take a look at Jung and Heidegger.

This presentation has given me the opportunity to try to answer a question that has been with me for quite some time in relation to Jung. Clarifying this question will also have an impact on how close or how distant Jung and Heidegger were in their thinking. Jungians may perhaps be tired of this question; nevertheless, it is a question fundamental to Jung's analytic psychology: What exactly is an archetype? Since archetypes are directly related to Jung's understanding of creativity and madness (and thus the madness of 1933), I'd like to reopen the question, especially in light of what Ronald Hayman says about it in his recent biography entitled A Life of Jung. After reviewing the controversy that the term (archetype) generated during Jung's own lifetime, Hayman concludes with the following remarks: "Although he [Jung] often returned to the problem [of archetypes], it was mostly to repeat what he had already said. He never succeeded in working out the muddle" (Hayman,229)

Jung apparently used the term 'primordial image' before introducing the term 'archetype.' The latter term he introduced in 1919 in his work "Instinct and the Unconscious" (Hayman,226; Spirit,80). Hayman claims that Jung took the term 'primordial image' from Kant (Hayman,227). I would suggest that it goes back to Goethe who had a great love of probing for and uncovering primordial patterns and also to Jakob Burckhardt, the classical philologist. In his version of natural science, Goethe talks of the Urphenomenon (primordial phenomenon), Urpflanze (primordial plant), and Urbild (primordial image) as primordial patterns that undergo ceaseless variations.

Moreover, in his essay "Psychology and Literature" (1930), Jung refers directly to Goethe and to Burckhardt when he describes the primordial image the creative process of the artist:

                                                  The creative process has a feminine quality, and the
                                                  creative work arises from unconscious depths -- we
                                                  might truly say from the realm of the Mothers. Whenever
                                                  the creative force predominates, life is ruled and shaped
                                                  by the unconscious rather than by the conscious will, and
                                                  the ego is swept along on an underground current, becoming
                                                  nothing more than a helpless observer of events. (...) Both
                                                  of them [Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's Thus Spake 
                                                  Zarathustra ] strike a chord that vibrates in the German
                                                  psyche, evoking a "primordial image," as Burckhardt once 
                                                  called it (Spirit,103).

This does not mean that Kant was unimportant for Jung's attempt to describe archetypes as we shall see below.

I think the question "What is an archetype?" may be misleading or perhaps not the right question. The question "What is an archetype?" assumes that an archetype is some sort of entity that can be identified in time and space. Archetypes as such are not entities that appear in time and space and, therefore, archetypes are not empirical concepts. If archetypes were empirical concepts, we would be able to abstract them from observation. Since archetypes as such are not objects that appear in time and space, no observations can be had of them and, thus, no abstractions can be made.

So how do we make sense of archetypes? Here is where Kant became useful for Jung in three ways: 1) Kant's presentation of time and space as a priori intuitions, 2) Kant's notion of the ideas of reason as regulatory, and 3) Kant's distinction between noumenon and phenomenon.

Jung takes the Kantian notions of time and space as pure a priori intuitions and applies them to archtypes. Just as time, for example, is not an empirical concept for Kant, that is, time is not an object observed in time, but the necessary condition for any observation, so too, Jung says that the archetypes as such are not observable entities in time and space, the necessary condotions that amke any fundamental experience possible. In other word, becoming aware of a fundamental experience is necessarily becoming aware of it as archetypally conditioned just as for Kant any observation of something is necessarily an observation of it in time.

Jung will extend this notion of the a priori to the collective unconscious itself:

                                          The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a
                                          self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality
                                          handed down to us from primordial times in the specific
                                          form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical
                                          structure of the brain. There are no inborn ideas, but 
                                          there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to
                                          even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity
                                          within certain categories [my italics]: a priori ideas, as
                                          it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except
                                          from their effects. They appear only in the shaped material
                                          of art as the regulatory principles that shape it; that is to 
                                          say, only by inferences drawn from the finished work can
                                          we reconstruct the age-old original of the primordial image
                                          (Spirit,80-81).

In other words, the original of the primordial image, that is, the the archetype as such with all its possibilities, is the one that does not appear in time and space whereas the primordial image is the development of one or more of these possibilities in concrete form. The primordial image then is a particular interpretation of the archetype as such or the embodiment of one or more of these possibilities in the concrete form of an image.

Jung himself at times promotes the confusion between archetype as such and primordial image when he simply identifies the primordial image with the archetype as such. However, the primordial image is simply the translation of the archetype as such into time and space. In his seminar on Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Jung confirms this:

                                          You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest in space and
                                           time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither
                                           space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space
                                           and time. And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical
                                           world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. So much of the
                                           self remains outside, it doesn't enter this three dimensional world
                                           (Zarathustra,240).

To use Kant's language for a moment, and also keeping in mind that Kant is rolling over in his grave, Jung equates Kant's noumenon, the way a thing may exist apart from time and space, with the archetype as such, and the phenomenon, the way a thing exists and appears in time and space, with the primordial image.

In short, I think we can make some sense of the muddle Hayman referred to earlier. Whether this clears it up altogether is another story, Kant's protest from the grave not withstanding.

I'd like to push on, however, to Heidegger and Jung. Bringing their thought together in some compatible way makes the Jung-Kant discussion look like a piece of cake. I do not think I can adequately sketch a place where a bridge or rapprochement can be established, but let me at least make an attempt. 

For an adequate approach to both Heidegger and Jung, we would have to look at the emergence of Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), especially Bergson and Dilthey as well as the emergence of phenomenology, especially Husserl and Max Scheler. Jung does not mention Lebensphilosophie or phenomenology very much before 1933. He does mention Bergson, for example, in his 1933 essay "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man" in the following way:

                                           You can also take the unconscious as a manifestation of the life-
                                           instinct and equate the force which creates and sustains life with
                                           Bergson's elan vital or even with his duree creatrice. Another 
                                           parallel would be Schopenhauer's Will (Civilization,147).

As much as Jung may have disagreed with Freud, he still agreed with him that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. Nietzsche's vitalism was enough for Jung in terms of Lebensphilosophie, but Jung still had to work out his own love-hate relationship with Nietzsche in the 1930s. (This parallels also parallels Heidegger's reexamination of nietzsche in the 30s, although Jung started his seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra a year or so earlier than Heidegger did.)

During the 20s, Heidegger was already developing his own version of phenomenology based on Husserl's notion of categorial intuition. Heidegger was trying to develop categories for understanding life and human existence based on the everyday manner in which we go about interpreting. Let me emphasize the word "categories" here: for Heidegger, lived experience (for the lack of a better term) is already embedded in a categorial sense. Even the simple perception of entities involves a categorial component "before it is conceptually grasped as a category" (Kisiel,371). To put it in another way, "we first live in categories as in contexts from which we experience the things included within them" (Kisiel,371). What Heidegger wanted to do was to locate the a priori structure in human existence that made this everyday interpreting and living in categories possible.

For Heidegger, the a priori structure of human existence or Dasein that makes any interpretation possible is the unigue way in which human being participates in time. Dasein's temporality is not to be confused with linear time. In fact, Heidegger in Being and Time derives linear time from temporality. Dasein's being is literally parsed out in and through temporality. Being here includes both presence and absence. Dasein's existence is not just a dot on the linear time-line whose only reality is the "now." The future and the past are both forms of presence: the future is present as absent in a way that difers from the past which is also a form of presence as absence. This structure of standing out in the interplay of presencing and absencing in various ways is what Heidegger calls ecstatic temporality.

At first glance, it seems as though Heidegger is "all outside" and Jung is "all inside," and that little hope exists for a place that could offer mediation between them. However, if we go back to Jung's remarks in his Zarathustra seminar, we can perhaps see a place of mediation. When Jung refers to the self "as if it were trying to manifest in space and time" and how it "cannot bring them altogether into space and time," he identifies this effort as man or human being: human being is the result of this attempt to translate the self which includes the collective unconscious into space and time. This is not too far from Heidegger's notion of truth as aletheia, an openess or clearing that emerges from the hidden, the concealed and which can never eliminate the concealment altogether just as the collective unconscious can never be completely translated into time and space.

In Part II of this essay, I will attempt to develop this dialogue between Heidegger and Jung in terms of the madness of 1933.

Abbreviations

Hayman                                  Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999).

Spirit                                       C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton:                                                 Princeton University Press, 1966).

Zarathustra                              Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, abridged edition, ed. James L. Jarrett                                                (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Civilization                               C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books,                                                1964).

Kisiel                                      Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley, Los Angeles,                                                London: University of California Press, 1993).