The problem of participation mystique is the cancer that is eating Analytical psychology.
Jung’s definition of participation mystique is:
a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (CW 6, ¶ 781).
We could summarize participation mystique in that way: because the unconscious is always projected on the environment, we constantly live in our unconscious up until we integrate consciously our projections. Jungians should know about that psychological process because Jung was very clear about it. The integration of unconscious contents is the first obligation of any serious Jungian follower.
Nevertheless, the Jungian literature of the last 60 years is immersed in the magical world of participation mystique or, should we say, the Jungian mystique. As an example, from thousands of other ones, Sonu Shamdasani who, as an historian and not a psychologist, could and should have been immune to this, felt too into the magical world of Jungian mystique. He underlined, in the introduction of The Red Book, twelve separate fantasies that Jung may have regarded as precognitive instead of linking them to his depression of which they all are a symbol. Why emphasize “precognition”, a phenomenon at the fringe of science, when basic Jungian interpretation is the best way to interpret those fantasies? The only answer is that Jungians love too much their Jungian mystique and they are unable to stick to science. They promote Jungian psychology as a science and they fall in the Jungian mystique at the first occasion. If Jungian analytical psychology were really a science, participation mystique would be seen as the principal enemy.
Alchemy is probably the most popular medium for those who are lost in their participation mystique because it is full of magical images. At this time, there is no Jungian interpreters who wrote about alchemy that has understand why Jung used Alchemy and Gnosticism. If they did not link, in their writings, alchemy to mystical experiences, it is a clear indicator that they did not understand Jung at all.
In their books and papers, those interpreters use inaccurately alchemical terminology as if by using Jung’s words they could enter his world and rise themselves to his level. They want to impress their readers with their supposed knowledge of alchemy but that kind of behavior, pretending we know what we do not, comes with a price: the danger of being, one day, disproved and ridiculed. To anyone who has carefully read Jung and his alchemical studies, there is no doubt that alchemy and Gnosticism were about mystical experiences. Jung used their terminology to speak about them because he spoke to those who would have the ability to understand him in the future. It is sad that nobody in the Jungian community seems to have figured out that opposites never merge in reality. Their conjunctions only occur in consciousness as a symbol during mystical experiences.
One of the best examples of the participation mystique problem of analytical psychology is this quote from Stanton Marlan’s book C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination:
“Like Jung, I find myself gripped by Jung’s story of his descent into the unconscious and his fateful encounter with alchemy. I find something infectious about this story. I have read it over and over again and identify with Jung’s experience as a symbolic ‘as if’, an inflation—part transference, part fetish, part participation mystique, and part poetic inspiration. What feels like an autonomous process draws me into a phantasmagoria of alchemical fiction, one has become an important part of my life and study.”
Marlan's confession is one example out of numerous other authors who have let participation mystique win. What we find in this short quote is one of the major reasons why no one has yet been able to achieve Jung’s level of individuation. Too many Jungians know that they are the victim of a god-projection in relation to Jung, but they do nothing about it. They have abdicated their first duty to integrate unconscious contents. They prefer their magical world of fantasies over reality and over science. Their participation mystique is so important that they are not able to understand the psychological meaning of Jung’s writing and their scientific look on analytical psychology, if it ever existed, has become profoundly deficient.
Who is to blame for that lamentable state of Jungian psychology? The editors and the reviewers who are not doing their job properly. When those editors and the peer reviewers accept to publish something that leans toward the Jungian mystique instead of putting them aside, they do irreparable harm to the field of Analytical psychology. When a "scientific" Jungian journal publishes in the same number articles, essays and poetry, their editorial board have sacrificed their scientific responsibility and have brought back their review to the state of a high school journal. The peer review system is broken in Analytical psychology and there is no way out unless a few people wake up and start to give science its letters of nobility.
Jung wrote, in a private letter to Eugene Rolfe in 1960, a few months before his death:
“I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole. (…) I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”
Jung was very magnanimous to take that responsibility unto his shoulders but we must consider here that Jung was not the only one responsible for that problem, his followers and interpreters also were and still are.
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