VIEWS AND REVIEWS
When seemingly unrelated events come together, we have to suspect that an unseen Power is at work. In Christian language we would say it is the Holy Spirit. In Jungian parlance we would speak of “synchronicity.” Whatever we want to call it, I felt such a meaningful coincidence of events taking place when I was asked to write this article. The 88th birthday of Elined Kotschnig, the desire of Inward Light to honor her with a special anniversary edition, and the fact that I was asked to write an article about Kunkel, all coinciding with a forthcoming republication of Kunkel’s works, seemed to me evidence that something important was stirring our consciousness at this time.
For me personally, the events that are coming together began about three years ago, when I had a series of three dreams in which Kunkel was alive. In these dreams I was made to realize that Dr. Kunkel wasn’t dead as I had thought, but had been alive all these years, actively teaching a group of people. I greeted this revelation with joyful astonishment because I had been certain that he was dead, and yet, there he was in my dreams, living and vital.
When the third dream came I knew that something important was afoot, and that the unconscious was insisting that I get the message. I then began to reread Kunkel’s two most important books, In Search of Maturity and How Character Develops. I was astonished at how alive they were; on almost every page I gathered an impressive new insight. This made me realize what an unconscious young man I was when I first met Fritz Kunkel and read his books back in the early 1950’s. At that time I wasn’t sufficiently developed to appreciate the depth of his writing and his insights.
Both of these books have long been out of print; yet my dreams told me that Fritz’ work and ideas were still alive in the unconscious, that they were filled with vitality, and that people could be instructed by them. I decided to test the vitality of Kunkel’s ideas by lecturing on them. Wherever I talked of Kunkel I found people eagerly listening. I also found that one or two people would almost always turn up who had known Kunkel and who were overjoyed to hear someone speak of him again in public. Then I knew that an effort must be made to have his most important books republished.
It wasn’t easy to interest a publisher in a man who had died twenty-seven years ago and was unknown to the vast majority of the American public, but finally Paulist Press courageously agreed to undertake the project. I am happy to say that In Search of Maturity and How Character Develops are now available in a single volume entitled, Fritz Kunkel: Selected Writings.
This news will be especially exciting to the members of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology and to the readers of Inward Light, for it was an invitation to lecture at Pendle Hill that first brought Dr. Kunkel to this country in 1936. At that time Kunkel was a psychiatrist in Germany where he and his family lived. While a young man, he had decided to be a doctor, and graduated from medical school just in time to be drafted into the German army during World War I as a physician and surgeon. While tending to the wounded on the battlefield, the young Dr. Kunkel was badly wounded and lost one arm as a consequence. After the war he tried to resume a normal medical practice, but soon realized that a one-armed doctor was severely handicapped. It was then that he decided to go into psychotherapy. Thus, as a result of his tragic wound, the world gained one of its foremost psychologists.
Kunkel began his psychological career by trying to learn all that he could from the early founders of depth psychology: Freud, Adler, and Jung. He experienced Freudian analysis and then moved on to work personally with Alfred Adler. Later he studied Jungian psychology, and while he never had analysis with Jung, he did have long conversations with him and some correspondence. It is possible to see the influences of all three men in Kunkel’s psychological outlook. Freud’s influence can be seen in Kunkel’s interest in the psychology of childhood, and the way that early childhood influences resulted in later adult personality formations. From Adler he gained his appreciation of the importance of the Ego, with its strivings and ambitions. And from Jung he gained insight into the nature of the Self and the teleological emphasis on the individuation process that was so lacking in Freud.
Kunkel owed much to these mentors and colleagues, but the psychological synthesis that he developed was uniquely his own, and the insights that he had into the nature of egocentricity, its origin, and how it must be broken down if the Real Self was to emerge, were original with him.
It wasn’t long before Kunkel had a successful practice of psychotherapy, and as the years went by he was increasingly in demand as a lecturer and writer. A creative writer, he published a book almost every year, and lectured widely throughout his native Germany and Europe. His books were widely read in Germany, and, as I understand, are still in print in that country. Some of them were translated into foreign languages as well, and for many people his name was as familiar as that of Freud and Jung.
The Nazi regime, however, sent a dark cloud over Kunkel’s psychological world. After Pendle Hill invited him to lecture in the United States in 1936, Kunkel decided to leave Germany and make the United States his home. Another lecture tour in this country in 1939 gave him an opportunity to come here once again. When war broke out it wasn’t possible for him to return to Germany, and he made his home in Los Angeles. Here he wrote the two books I have mentioned—his first attempt, I believe, to write directly in English—and these two books, along with Creation Continues, his psychological commentary on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, were the crowning fruit of his literary effort.
After Kunkel’s death in 1956, his work in this country receded into the background, and it seemed as though he was forgotten, except by individuals like myself who had benefited so much personally from his healing guidance and wisdom. Now, however, the events that are coming together indicate that our present world consciousness is ready for Kunkel in a new way — and also needs him. Perhaps we are ready at last to look more closely at that egocentricity of ours that Kunkel described so clearly and so vividly, and take responsibility for it. Perhaps we are also ready for the unique synthesis of the clinical, scientific spirit, and the religious spirit, that Kunkel combined so well.
Kunkel’s message is one of realism and hope, and we need both. He has no illusions about the nature of human beings, and more than any other depth psychologist he has pointed the finger at our egocentric nature with its many twists and turns, distortions and defenses. Relentlessly and with scientific accuracy Kunkel described all of this dark side of the human Ego. But at the same time he never ceased to point out the creative life that was possible for each person to live when in contact with his or her Real Self. To all of us he said, when faced by the darkness that eventually threatens each egocentric person, go through it. On the other side God waits, ready to give us the gift of a creative life.
I can think of no more fitting way for Elined Kotschnig, one of the first persons in this country to realize the value of Kunkel and his work, to be honored than the pending republication of Kunkel’s books.
John A. Sanford
San Diego, CA
Robert Johnson’s earlier publications, HE and SHE were short essays on understanding masculine and feminine psychology. WE is a longer essay on understanding relationships between man and woman, more specifically the difference between being “in love” and loving. A “Note For Women” at the very beginning points out that this treatment of romantic love is made from a man’s standpoint, but can be as important for women as for men.
Like his two earlier works, the central thesis—the psychology of romantic love and how to free one’s self from it—is developed within a framework of a myth (Tristan and Iseult) whose main characters, events, places, and objects are treated as psychological symbols interpreted in terms of analytical psychology. Johnson is a master at this. The book is non-academic and non-clinical, written for the educated layman rather than the professional specialist. Sentences are simple and short even when presenting complex ideas. Constant repetition is refined to an effective teaching technique. Superb use is made of metaphor and symbol such as, “stirring-the-oatmeal love,” “sword power,” and “harp power.” The circularity of argument is pure Jungian. Almost all themes are treated simultaneously. It is, in short, a right-brain work. Much of the presentation is wise; I find some of it frustrating.
Though the basic dynamics of anima projection are familiar to all Jungians, many of the ideas in WE are novel and exciting. For example, Johnson treats romantic love as affecting not just the individual but our entire western culture during some seven hundred years as well. “Romantic love has existed through history in many cultures… But ours is the only culture that has experienced it as a mass phenomenon.” Similarly he stresses its major dimensions: “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche… and the single greatest psychological force in our culture. It has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” He makes an uncompromising indictment of it. “This curious blend of the numinous and deadly… is afflicted with illusion.… We never sense vast difference between relating to a person and using that person as a vehicle for our projection.… It is a love not of another person but of ourselves … and must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism.… It is willing to sacrifice everything to passion.… It reverses morality.… This is the great wound in the western psyche.” The reader gets to feel that romantic love is a national problem, on a level with the deficit and arms control.
The crux of the matter turns out to be the relationship between the two worlds in which man (in the generic sense) lives and the role of the anima. Man lives in an outer, physical, material, “ordinary” world of time and space where there are humans to relate to and love. He also lives in an inner, psychological world of the psyche and the archetypes—a spiritual realm of the sacred and the divine where there are images and symbols to relate to and love. The anima or soul (the sacred inner feminine) is “a psychological organ” that performs the life-giving role of making the invisible inner world visible through images and gives “the sacred world the substance of the symbol.” “Psychological faith” is knowing that these symbolic images of the inner world are real. The great error is in “muddling” the two worlds. In romantic love we make the wrong approach to the anima, unconsciously projecting this entity of the inner world to a physical being of the outer world. Meanwhile, through the mind-blowing enchantment of the lethal love potion, we turn the Queen of the Inner World into “Iseult Maya.” She brings on “the dance of illusion” in which we are unable to see or know the true person in front of us and we lose our individuality. This is “psychological blasphemy” (making the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill) and “the sin against consciousness” (the refusal to take life consciously).
How does modern man extricate his soul from romantic love and get it back into “the inner cathedral” where it belongs and once was? Johnson’s suggestions are explicit. “We must learn to differentiate the inner from the outer… to open our eyes and acknowledge anima … as a divine presence.… We must give up living anima as projection … (This) takes a conscious act of sacrifice … a death of ego.… For both men and women, to look honestly at romantic love is a heroic journey.” Ultimately, it takes transformation—a change of consciousness and a change of values. The analysis of romantic love is completed by a concluding chapter, “Of Human Love.” Johnson is optimistic. He believes we can make romantic love “a path to consciousness.” “I believe,” he declares, “if men and women will understand the psychological dynamics behind romantic love and learn to handle them consciously, they will find a new possibility of relationship, both to themselves and to others.”
I found Johnson’s psychological approach to our religious impoverishment particularly rewarding. Western man, he believes, is unknowingly searching for the sacred. Instead of looking for it in his inner life, where he could find it, he looks for it “in romantic love, in sex, in physical possessions and drugs and physical people, but it is not there.” The reason is simple but startling. “We do not have religious lives because we pay little attention to our souls.… We have forgotten that (they) have a divine origin.… We don’t believe in the inner life.… Western man has sacrificed the sacred to the secular, and psyche to ego.… We don’t know how to experience the gods inwardly, on the symbolic level.”
Johnson is clear about how one can recover a religious life. It requires, above all, affirming one’s religious nature and taking the images of the inner life “with the utmost seriousness.” He says it is necessary to “devote time and energy to experiencing my psyche, to exploring my own unconscious, to discovering who I am and what I am when I am not just the ego.… One may do this by traditional religious practice, by contemplative meditation, by yoga, by fantasy and dream work, or by Jung’s active imagination. But it requires an inner practice, an affirmative soul-life, actually lived day by day.”
I have several bones to pick with Johnson. One has to do with his all-or-nothing view of anima projection. Could not a little bit of projection be a wonderfully positive addition to a marriage? Joseph Campbell, at the 1976 Friends Conference thought so. Another has to do with relationship. I missed any mention of the very important concept of psychological relationship, including Guggenbuhl-Craig’s idea of marriage as a path (through Hell) to salvation. And what about the redemptive possibilities of experiencing romantic love? Johnson, in passing, writes of using this as “a path to consciousness” but his attention is elsewhere. He seems not to imagine the possibility of growing through romantic love to human love with the same person. And I wish he had done more with the practical meaning of “commitment” as a prime element in human love.
My principal problem with WE involves the relation of the inner world to the outer. Johnson refers to “the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary,” but he seems to me to keep the two worlds totally separate. For him the symbolic life seems to be something lived completely in the inner world – the inner Iseult is loved on her inner throne with active imagination recorded in one’s journal. But isn’t the symbolic life consciously summoning the Iseult within to guide a relationship (without projection or identification) to the Iseult without? Johnson mentions the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation as a perfect symbol of the union of the human and the divine, but in WE there is much more of differentiation than of union.
Johnson has given us much soul food in this beautiful, terrifying, question-raising book. It should be read by lovers of every age and relationship, and the sooner the better.
E. McClung Fleming
Wilmington, DE