The Post-Jungian Taxonomy

A cross-source finding: the post-Jungian field does not speak with one voice, and it knows it does not. The tradition is irreducibly plural, and the scholarly task is to keep the plurality legible rather than to resolve it into a false unity.

Four attempts at taxonomy preceded Samuels’s. Fordham (in Jungian Psychotherapy: A Study in Analytical Psychology, 1978) divided post-Jungians geographically into a Zürich School (mythological, religious, symbol-focused) and a London School (clinical, transference-focused, in dialogue with Kleinian psychoanalysis). Adler (1979) divided them ideologically into orthodoxy, neo-Jungians, and archetypal psychologists. Goldenberg (1975) divided them generationally into second and third generations, reserving the third for those who “do not feel any responsibility to Jung personally” (Samuels 1985, pp. 11–12). Samuels (1985) proposed the threefold Classical / Developmental / Archetypal division that has persisted.

The productive finding is that no single taxonomy is sufficient — each reveals something the others occlude. Samuels’s own hypothesis is that “the differences between the schools may also reveal the common base of the discipline of analytical psychology” (Samuels 1985, p. 64). The fault lines are where the load-bearing structure shows. A Jungian conversation that collapses them loses structural information; one that keeps them visible — Samuels’s wager — preserves the tradition in its actual shape.

Sources

• andrew-samuels: the threefold Classical / Developmental / Archetypal taxonomy (Samuels 1985)
• james-hillman: the primacy of image and the critique of the monistic self (Hillman 1971, 1975a, quoted in Samuels 1985)
• michael-fordham: the Zürich / London geographical division and the Developmental School’s clinical microscopy (Fordham 1978a, quoted in Samuels 1985)