From depth psychology to depth sociology: Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to consider some of the common themes in the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss, and to offer some observations on their historical significance. Firstly, all three theorists were historical pessimists. While it may be true that their historical pessimism reflected their class position as bourgeois social theorists in the age of mass society, I think it is equally important to recognize that utilization of the theory of the unconscious itself creates a paradigm with strongly conservative and anti-utopian implications. Their dependence on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is significant. His work, early in the nineteenth century, lay the foundations both for the theory of the unconscious and for the historical pessimism that went with it. His metaphysical pessimism lies behind not only Freud's Libidolehre and Jung's “psychic energy,” but also behind the somber prophetic, cataclysmic imagery employed by Claude Lévi-Strauss from Tristes Tropiques to L'Homme Nu.

The following passage, which draws to a finale the pessimism of Tristes Tropiques, a very Schopenhauerian book, is typical: The world began without the human race and it will end without it. The institutions, manners, and customs which I shall have spent my life cataloguing and trying to understand are an ephemeral efflorescence of a creative process in relation to which they are meaningless, unless it be that they allow humanity to play its destined role. That role does not, however assign to our race a position of independence. Nor, even if man himself is condemned, are his vain efforts directed towards the arresting of a universal process of decline. Far from it: his role is itself a machine, brought perhaps to a greater point of perfection than any other, whose activity hastens the disintegration of an initial order and precipitates a powerfully organized Matter towards a condition of inertia which grows even greater and will one day prove definitive. From the day when he first learned how to breath and how to keep himself alive through the discovery of fire and right up to the invention of the atomic and thermonuclear devices of the present day, man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated. No doubt he has built cities and brought the soil to fruition; but if we examine these activities closely we shall find that they also are inertia-producing machines, whose scale and speed of action are infinitely greater than the amount of organization implied in them. As for the creations of the human mind, they are meaningful only in relation to that mind, and will disappear into nothingness as soon as it ceases to exist. Taken as a whole, therefore, civilization can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism: tempting as it would be to regard it as our universe's best hope of survival, its true function is to produce what physicists call entropy: inertia, that is to say. Every scrap of conversation, every line set up in type, establishes a communication between two interlocutors, levelling what had previously existed on two different planes and had had for that reason, a greater degree of organization. “Entropology,” not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.

And yet I exist. Not in any way, admittedly, as an individual: for what am I, in that respect, but a constantly renewed stake in the struggle between the society, formed by the several million nerve-cells which take shelter in the anthill of the brain, and my body, which serves that society as a robot?

I have quoted this passage at length because it gives a vivid feeling of the profound metaphysical despair that lies at the roots of Lévi-Strauss' work. In his recent writings and interviews his pessimism has become even more pronounced; he seems convinced that the entire civilized world is moving rapidly and inexorably towards its ecological self-destruction.

A second theme that runs through the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss is the concern with polarities and their dialectical reconciliation or transcendence. Freud's theory was shot through with polarities-one thinks of the dualism of instincts, and the polarities of pleasure/unpleasure, active/passive, subject/object, etc. In the eternal struggle between these immortal adversaries, Life and Death, Super-Ego and Id, Mind and Body, Freud placed the Ego as an integrating and synthesizing principle. Freud's proclivity for dualistic ideas was shared by Jung. The interests of Jung and Lévi-Strauss in the dialectical reconciliation of the opposites was already discussed above. Once opposites are seen to be in relationship, as parts of a system, they cease to be opposites and become polarities.

Schopenhauer provides a link to another common theme shared by these writers, the belief that “everything is inter-related and mutually attuned.” Schopenhauer believed that physical causality was only one of the rulers of the world; at a deeper level there was a kind of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness was rather like a dream compared to wakefulness. For all of these thinkers individual consciousness was based on a larger system of intercommunications, but whereas this theme was not stressed by Freud, it became central in the works of Jung and Lévi-Strauss.

As we have seen throughout this essay, Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss were committed to the notion that there is a hidden order in the mental and cultural life of mankind, and they were convinced that this hidden order can be discovered by human reason. Behind the diversity of human cultures they believed that they saw an underlying unity, and they explained this unity in terms of what they believed to be a universality of unconscious processes of the human mind. Freud and Jung tried to explain their notions of the “unconscious” in terms of “energy,” drawing their models from physics. Freud's libido theory was more physical, Jung's more psychical, but they both remained tied to an energy model. I believe that one of Claude Lévi-Strauss' most important contributions to the social sciences was to liberate the notion of the unconscious from this energy theory. Instead, he spoke of it as being like a language, employing the ideas of system and structure and particularly the concept of the “symbolic function” drawn from structural linguistics and information theory.

In Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology “System” and “Structure” are treated as belonging to the realm of Information/Communication rather than as belonging to the realm of matter/energy. “Structure” is the ensemble of laws which govern the behavior of the system, and the components in the system are largely interchangeable. They do not necessarily derive from the same level of organization as the system which controls their various combinations, permutations and structural transformations. As we saw above, for Lévi-Strauss the unconscious is “empty.” It is simply a “universe of rules” similar to the phonological laws that govern languages. In this usage, “the unconscious” is a term designating a process of the human mind, a process which operates in all human cultures according to the same laws. In fact, the “unconscious” is nothing but the totality of these laws and relationships. Even the world of symbolism—though it exhibits an infinite variety of contents-is always bound and limited by these structural laws, because all human beings are bound by the same mental constraints. In the Kantian tradition, Lévi-Strauss sees his task as analyzing the operations of the human mind (l'esprit humain) within these contraints, and I think it is fair to say that his work is a kind of critique of sociological and anthropological reason in the same sense that Wilhelm Dilthey's was a critique of historical reason.

In this paper I have attempted to show that there was a progressive development in the theory of the unconscious from Freud, through Jung, to Lévi-Strauss. Jung, working in German Switzerland, was more sympathetic to German idealism and historicism than was Freud. In his work Jung blended this German philosophical tradition with French sociological theory. This unique amalgam could have led him to elaborate a depth sociology correlative with his depth psychology, but his search for his own historical predecessors led him to investigate the psycho-historical significance of mysticism, spiritualism and alchemy instead. He was always convinced of the power, importance and significance of the “collective representations” that guide and shape our perception and experience. Jung wrote: “We should never forget that in any psychological discussion, we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.” Modern civilized man's belief in the sole reality of the individual, along with his belief that he is born a tabula rasa, was simply an illusion, a modern myth. At our deepest core level, each of us is united to all mankind and to the history of the human race. Whether we call this deepest level “society” with Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, the “will and its representations” with Schopenhauer, the “wider self through which saving experiences come” with William James, the “Unconscious” with Freud, or the “Psyche” with Jung, or the “structures of the human mind” with Lévi-Strauss, depends on our primary assumptions, metaphysics and temperament. They are but different terms pointing towards the one common transpersonal background structure that makes possible both human experience and communication of that experience.