Carl Schmitt once said that Spinoza was the first liberal Jew, a remark which combines the insightful and the creepy in about the proportions you'd expect from Schmitt.
For my opinion is worth, and I really don't know that much about this subject, I think that Jung was obviously on to something in seeing the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hypostatization, a doctrine of human nature in general that was clearly in fact based on the psychoanalysis of the haute bourgeoise of Vienna. So up to the 50s and even the 60s hysteria was one of the main neuroses analysts used to diagnose, whereas today it has almost totally vanished (obviously what was once called hysteria has been absorbed into mania on the one hand and various psychoses on the other, but also our society has changed and so have its typical mental disorders). Freud grasped this on some level, but his response was inadequate. My guru Gauchet likes to say that his work on religion began with reading of Moses and Monotheism as a convinced Freudian, and having the reaction: "I don't know what happened but whatever it was it wasn't that."
I think (again for what little my opinion is worth) that for all his eccentricities the thinker who really addressed this limit of Freud wasn't Jung but Kojève's devoted disciple Jacques Lacan. The limit of Freud is that Freud posits an irrational basis for the *mind*, or for our sense of self. But Freud doesn't really posit an irrational or ungraspable basis for *thought* or rationality as such. In Freud, my basic desires and my sense of who I am have their basis in drives and experiences that don't know and can can't master or can only master with difficulty. In Lacan my belief that 1 + 1 = 2, and *all* the categories with which I make sense of the world, have their basis in something irrational or rather not graspable by scientific reason. The unconscious thus becomes something similar to what Heidegger meant by Being, and Freud is freed from residual positivism, his insights put on the right theoretical level. Lacan developed these insights in a rather perverse direction (or several!), but you don't get the same radical questioning of rationality as such in Jung, which IMO makes Jung's work resemble Mr. Casaubon's key to all mythologies.
Great post and thanks for the mention! Could you please expand a bit more on why you say that Jung is “ultimately a failure where earlier romantics were more successful”?
Carl Schmitt once said that Spinoza was the first liberal Jew, a remark which combines the insightful and the creepy in about the proportions you'd expect from Schmitt.
For my opinion is worth, and I really don't know that much about this subject, I think that Jung was obviously on to something in seeing the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hypostatization, a doctrine of human nature in general that was clearly in fact based on the psychoanalysis of the haute bourgeoise of Vienna. So up to the 50s and even the 60s hysteria was one of the main neuroses analysts used to diagnose, whereas today it has almost totally vanished (obviously what was once called hysteria has been absorbed into mania on the one hand and various psychoses on the other, but also our society has changed and so have its typical mental disorders). Freud grasped this on some level, but his response was inadequate. My guru Gauchet likes to say that his work on religion began with reading of Moses and Monotheism as a convinced Freudian, and having the reaction: "I don't know what happened but whatever it was it wasn't that."
I think (again for what little my opinion is worth) that for all his eccentricities the thinker who really addressed this limit of Freud wasn't Jung but Kojève's devoted disciple Jacques Lacan. The limit of Freud is that Freud posits an irrational basis for the *mind*, or for our sense of self. But Freud doesn't really posit an irrational or ungraspable basis for *thought* or rationality as such. In Freud, my basic desires and my sense of who I am have their basis in drives and experiences that don't know and can can't master or can only master with difficulty. In Lacan my belief that 1 + 1 = 2, and *all* the categories with which I make sense of the world, have their basis in something irrational or rather not graspable by scientific reason. The unconscious thus becomes something similar to what Heidegger meant by Being, and Freud is freed from residual positivism, his insights put on the right theoretical level. Lacan developed these insights in a rather perverse direction (or several!), but you don't get the same radical questioning of rationality as such in Jung, which IMO makes Jung's work resemble Mr. Casaubon's key to all mythologies.
Great post and thanks for the mention! Could you please expand a bit more on why you say that Jung is “ultimately a failure where earlier romantics were more successful”?