In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Jude Bloom]

> On Mar 14, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 
> Quite right. I mean, assuming your "today" is referring to the 20th
> C., although his ideas regarding psychoanalysis began to drift out of
> clinical practice and academic study in the field of psychology during
> the 1970s.

Yeah, that's what people say... I dunno. I worked in Brain for a while. I get that people stopped talking about penis envy or anal sexual development in 2-year-olds...

On the other hand. People still go see a medical person with special training. They pay for the session, even if it's a token fee. They sit on a couch or a comfy chair. They tell a stranger their problems. They have transference. They fall in love with their therapist. Then their therapist becomes mommy or daddy and they fall in hate with their therapist. They say things they "don't mean" to say and then talk about it. They talk about their dreams, fears, sexual obsessions, hangups, whatever. They talk and talk, and although there's no good objective measure for betterness, eventually they end the sessions.

I don't think none of that really happened before Freud and it still is what happens today. So I truly don't see Freud as drifting out of psychological *practice.* Many of his wackier ideas, sure. But not the whole, you know, thing.


> Freud is important, he was just consistently mistaken, 


I'm not sure this very discussion bears that out. 


> The point of my post, though, was that people often freely embrace and
> endorse Freud's influence in literature while dismissing Jung. My
> surmise is that the reason for that is that all they know about Jung
> is the material, such as archetypes, that New Agers fluffed into angel
> food.


And also perhaps because Freud was a great writer, and Jung was not.



Thanks! I am enjoying this discussion. Sorry if it's no Pynchon.

~ JB