I have a hunch that divination is the way in which manic-schizoid personalities impose their interpretation of symbols on the world, while carpentry is the tendency for autistic personalities to impose their meanings on the world. The two seem to run against each other. I see a parallel in my current reading of Jung.
In Jung’s Man and His Symbols, one of the co-author’s (Jolande Jacobi) writes about her patient Henry having a dream about fighting with some Chinese guys, so she defers analysis and urges him to read the I Ching, which is on the one hand an esoteric book of Taoist philosophy, on the other a divination manual that was probably updated (like all divination manuals) over long periods to justify its use.
The author proceeds to assert that divination still has value in today’s world, which is based on Jung’s idea of “synchronicity”, whereby one draws conclusions based on “an inner unconscious knowledge that links a physical event with a psychic condition, so that a certain event that appears ‘accidental’ or ‘coincidental’ can in fact be physically meaningful.” (p. 357)
Throughout her section, the author describes how she prefers not to appeal to reason to analyze Henry’s dreams. Rather, she is appealing to feeling and intuition, no doubt crucial skills for understanding deeper, underling conflicts in one’s personality. The Jungian might, then, be emboldened to rely on their own intuition when interpreting the symbols in their patients’ dreams.
This leaves the door open for a manic-schizoid personality type to impose his or her own interpretation of symbols at the expense of the dreamer’s own, personal interpretation, and this interpretation might run against the patient’s own goals in life. This can take nefarious forms, no differently than can modern psychology in attempting to bend the will of a patient so they will move away from affiliation with family or peers and toward the state, a cult, some scientific institution, etc. If the patient feels guilt over some sexual dream involving animals or an extramarital affair, but if the analyst says such a dream indicates that the patient must abandon their family or tradition in order to “find their own meaning in life” or something, then this is a covert attempt to convert the patient away from one kin group and into a new one – the analyst’s – so they can continue deriving pay from the patient.
Patients on the autistic side of the spectrum, being more analytical and less “feeling”-based, might be lured by such analysis into thinking that their own interpretation is wrong, but in fact an autistic patient might have a very clear idea of which kin group they want to remain with – their church, family, or group, for whatever personal reason – and in fact their dreams might simply be an attempt to square their psychological life with this group. Provided this group isn’t actively abusing or harming the patient and causing these aberrant dreams, then the analyst’s job is merely to help the patient acquire dignity within their current kin group.
Of course Jungians would agree that these symbols do not have universal meaning across dreams, but by appealing to evolutionary psychology – and by claiming that the archetypes have evolved over long time scales – the Jungian might claim to understand the symbols better than the subject him or herself:
Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. … I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal. (p. 57)
And this is why the book, despite claiming agnosticism regarding symbolic meanings, relentlessly hammers home the meanings of certain symbols. Red equals passion, animals tend to equate to sex or to some aspect of our “inner animal”, etc. The analyst will cite Darwin, mythology, and any number of sources to drive this claim home, and the patient is naturally at their mercy, not having the same research experience. In fact, these symbols are far from universal. Animals meant very different things to Romans and Eskimos. Colors have very different meanings to a Tongan and an Icelander.
By appealing to evolutionary biology when interpreting symbols, the analyst constructs an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Symbols are at once too old to be understood rationally, supposedly originating in our “animalistic past”, and yet the analyst is “well read” enough in mythology to appeal to history’s seers and oracles and claim a monopoly of expertise in their interpretation. A shoddy analyst might interpret a Christian patient’s dream symbols with “any other myth,” but a good analyst will plumb the patient’s meaning of these symbols without imposing their own. The eucharist, the color red, and a jacket will mean different things to different Christians of the same congregation, or even to the same person in different times of their life, or they might mean the same thing between a Westerner and a Telugu speaking Indian.
The overreliance on appealing to myth is a major fault point in Jungianism. Take the sun: it is at once a giver of life and a killer; a god and a demon. It means Sunday, eyeball, center… Mythology has an entire vocabulary dedicated to the sun, and each individual pantheon has multiple gods represented by the sun. There is no one meaning for the sun “symbol” in mythology, any more than there is one god of the sun; trying to find one would drive one mad. And yet this is where much dream interpretation derives its economic power: by calling on an infinitely large library of mythological symbols, one can find any meaning in anything and bill the patient ad infinitum, because symbols are the gift that keep on giving. Think of a fundamentalist clinician seeing a patient who reports a dream about the number “728” in the book of Revelation. They would make a grave error in appealing to numerology. They must instead delve into why the patient is seeking answers to life in a prophetic holy book in the first place.
Jung’s book has many introverted (autistic) patients being paired with seemingly extroverted (manic) analysts, and this is a relationship that is ripe for abuse. The introvert mostly concerns his or herself with analysis and offloads symbolic content into right angles, architecture, machines, and automation (which I call “carpentry”). Their “meanings” are clear to the autistic patient; they fulfill the need for certainty that is at the base of his personality stack. As a result, he is quite comfortable leaving them be and moving on to the next carpentry. But the manic personality seems to express discomfort at carpentry; “waves” begin speaking to him, and it becomes difficult to dreive meaning in what he feels is an increasingly “dehumanized” world. He therefore leans into trance-like interpretation of carpentry to give it meaning, and such meaning is not universal; it is simply his own anxiety. The manic analyst over-indulges in their own symbolic interpretation of carpentry. This might be a subconscious act of revenge on an increasingly carpentered world, one that is full meaning for the autistic patient, but one that is increasingly alien to the manic analyst. The autistic patient will come to feel sympathy for the analyst, who is constantly reaching for and needing something out of the patient, while the patient simply wants to get on with carpentry. It’s a personality conflict that is increasingly played out in the clinician’s office, and also in the church – where charismatic preachers rail against “overthinking” the Bible – and in the Autism “sciences” – where researchers increasingly try to make their patients “express” themselves in a manic way and not in a carpentered way.
The problem might in fact be with the intuitive analyst, the charismatic preacher-counselor, and the extroverted researcher.
Naturally, there are some analysts on the autistic end of the spectrum who might impose a rigid, rationalist interpretation of signs on the manic patient. This is no better. It merely demonstrates that there is a translation issue between the two sides. However, the over-appeal to mythology, and adherence to the belief in the “animal brain”, sets off alarms in my own mind. I, for one, would never want an analyst to tell me that the resolutions to my issues can be found in sun myths or other esoterica. This would indicate that the analyst has no appreciation my personality, but is rather trying to resolve some issue that they have. But my gut says that this is tends to be the trend in Jungian analysis, and in much of analysis overall. I’ve learned to trust my gut more these days, though I’m always happy to be wrong.
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