The Plural Psyche

The claim, elaborated across post-Jungian analytical psychology and given explicit taxonomic form by Samuels, that the psyche is structurally plural rather than structurally unified — that the monistic reading of Jung in which the self integrates a multiplicity into a whole is only one reading, and a partial one.

The claim is classically Hillman’s: “Jung’s preference for the self unduly narrows a psychology that in every other respect stresses the plurality and multiplicity of the psyche, the archetypes and complexes” (Hillman, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 85). Samuels shows, citing Collected Works 8, paras 388ff., that Jung himself “did use a polycentric model of the psyche. He did write of a multiplicity of partial consciousnesses like stars or divine sparks, ‘luminosities’” (Samuels 1985, p. 85). The polycentric Jung is not a revisionist reading; it is present in Jung’s own text and has simply been occluded by the Classical School’s emphasis on the integrating self.

Rafael Lopez-Pedraza formulated the pluralist reformulation of the one-and-many: “the many contains the unity of the one without losing the possibilities of the many” (Lopez-Pedraza 1971, p. 214, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 85). Samuels reads this as a radical revision of “Jung’s notion of the one containing the many, as represented by mandalas” (Samuels 1985, p. 85). The plural psyche, in this reading, does not dissolve the unifying work of analysis but demotes it from a first principle to one psychological option among several.

Relationships

• self
• archetypal-school
• archetypal-image
• individuation

Primary sources

• samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985)