Accepting Psychology
I had started this as an essay on Jung but ended up as a brief on Psychology itself.
One of the early readings perhaps in 87-88 while I was pursuing my graduation in English Language and Literature at LOYOLA COLLEGE, Madras was a book titled “The Collective unconscious” of Carl Jung. I finished reading the book in a night which is rare for me. Several things stand out about the book. Apart from Freud who is sort of magazine stuff especially in serious Malayalam ones such as Mathrubhoomi, and popular psychology that is in the form of advice from columnists, this was my first exposure to the world of psychology.
The term as understood by the layman including me at an earlier time was that the psychologist is able to look into the eyes and say everything about your inner workings just like an astrologer or a palmist. This attaches a certain amount of mysticism around the Psychologist. Most magicians display better in this vein using what we understand as illusions. But when one really understands the magic it is nothing short of tricks.
The next exposure is when one studies Psychology as a paper. It talks about perception, learning, personality, attitudes, motivation, intelligence, emotions etc. in a kind of structural inevitability. That is to say because man is such and such and so he tends to do certain things in a certain way. For example man is capable of perceiving three dimensionally because he has two eyes that are spatially set apart optimally and in a straight forward frontal manner. Quite unlike the honey bee which has an aggregate eye, a sort of cluster of eyes that ‘sees’ the flower as not just as one but as a cluster of flowers. All the topics of Psychology mentioned above are in some way similarly discussed. The only dubious area for even the seasoned Psychologist is the Stimulus – Response theory of learning in its various types. The complexity of learning is discussed and the stimulus- response and the response – stimulus theories pooh-poohed by authors such as Arthur Koestler who in my opinion is less seriously considered than he deserves.
To my mind and to most Indian minds I believe western psychology of this sort leaves a sense of ‘there is something more’ that needs to be captured. The western obsession with analysis leaves much to be desired by the synthetic thinking of most of the orient. Very few of the western writes are gifted in the sort of synthesis that is essential to an understanding of worldly phenomena. This happens not within disciplines but across disciplines as well. But their analysis is beyond compare to be even.
Jung comes as a refreshing breeze amidst such. For once it does not start with the individual. Although Psychology deals with the individual, just as Sociology deals with the collective, it is very difficult or even impossible to think about the individual in isolation except in the terminal and cold stage. Anything that we speak about the individual in such a condition is merely the physically structural such as perception and its phenomena such as illusion and hallucination which are special cases of perception in its interaction with the external.
To my mind and to most Indian minds I believe western psychology of this sort leaves a sense of ‘there is something more’ that needs to be captured. The western obsession with analysis leaves much to be desired by the synthetic thinking of most of the orient. Very few of the western writes are gifted in the sort of synthesis that is essential to an understanding of worldly phenomena. This happens not within disciplines but across disciplines as well. But their analysis is beyond compare to be even.
Jung comes as a refreshing breeze amidst such. For once it does not start with the individual. Although Psychology deals with the individual, just as Sociology deals with the collective, it is very difficult or even impossible to think about the individual in isolation except in the terminal and cold stage. Anything that we speak about the individual in such a condition is merely the physically structural such as perception and its phenomena such as illusion and hallucination which are special cases of perception in its interaction with the external.
The individual is not as such but a product of the society. Be it the family or larger units of it. All psychology has to consider this contextual fact and attempts to separate the individual would lead to the kind of Psychology that Koestler calls ‘ratomorphic view of man’ or worse still ‘the anthropomorphic view of the rat’ that the stimulus – response theory states. This comes at two levels. The brain and the nervous system is progressively complex from rudimentary life to plants, animals and then higher apes and homo-sapiens. The other is the considerable interplay of social forces in its various gradations from the immediate motherly , to the siblings to the neighbour hood, to the village to the clan or the tribe to the occupational to the impersonal state or nation.
Even the rat that is studied in the laboratory is culled away from its collective to yield any completely valid display of ‘normal’ behaviour.
Jung in this context speaks about the collective not just the immediate living but also into the past through ages to the ancestral, unconscious that he postulates are in the mind of every one of the species. This leads to archetypes that have common symbolic values as well, as in the snake which evokes fear and is a symbol of evil and power of a certain kind.
He then proceeds to talk about the complexes, inferiority, superiority, Oedipus and Electra and traces the archetypes from myths and so forth. It is said that Freud only arranged what Shakespeare already knew and wrote in his plays. Jung to me arranged it far into the past in a grand plot. Does the collective behave in a manner as to expose and express the fears and anxieties of the individual? Is it possible to interpret world events in the light of Psychology? Jung does exactly the same. In his book on “Essays on contemporary events” he does interpret the German collective going back to the mythical Wotan the god of frenzy and restlessness which is so much part of the German Psyche expressed in the philosophy that rocked Europe towards the middle of the century. My curiosity extrapolates to Hofstede in his country metaphors for organizations. The metaphor for German organization is ‘the well oiled machine’. CAN we say the German psyche tends to mask its inner turmoil in external order and discipline in its perfect engineering? Will it some day break loose again?
The Russians put it in a different way that Psychology or the mental phenomena is a fine balance between excitation and restraint. Also quite acceptable to me in this rudimentary form. Jung calls the purpose of Psychology to be more and more of bringing to conscousness what is in the unconscious. Jiddu Krishnamurty always insisted on the pure awareness as against thought.
I have sort of traced the little Psychology that I know in tracing Jung. The other schools such as social learning of Bandura and the Gestalt Psychology and recently positive psychology and organizational Behaviour and the earlier humanism of Rogers and Maslow are I believe corrections to the deficiency Psychology which was a remnant of the post war years. I hope Psychology would develop in these directions more meaningfully. A further correction would be probably the dualistic thinking of white and black which seems to have created much of the hostility paradigms from individual conflicts to the blocs of the cold war. The black and white thinking needs to be replaced with shades of meanings and reality, more like a spectrum of reality where more and more of space is given to multiple realities in various levels of equilibrium.
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