Frances Gray - Jung, Irigaray, Individuation: Philosophy, Analytical Psychology, and the Question of the Feminine

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2008 by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2008 Frances Gray

Paperback cover design by Lisa Dynan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Frances, 1949
Jung, Irigaray, individuation / Frances Gray.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58391-777-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-415-43103-3 (pbk)
1. Irigaray, Luce. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Jung, C.G. (Carl Gustav), 18751961. 4. Individuation (Psychology) I. Title.
B2430.I74G73 2008
194dc22
2007023916

ISBN 0-203-93827-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-203-93827-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-1-135-44836-3 ePub ISBN

ISBN: 978-1-58391-777-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-43103-3 (pbk)

You refuse to admit that the unconscious your concept of the unconscious did not spring fully armed from Freuds head, that it was not produced ex nihilo at the end of the nineteenth century, emerging suddenly to reimpose its truth on the whole of history world history at that past, present and future. The unconscious is revealed as such, heard as such, spoken as such and interpreted as such within a tradition. It has a place within, by and through culture.

(Luce Irigaray 1991: 80)

This book provides a theoretical background to the thinking of Carl Jung and Luce Irigaray. It shows that they have a common grounding in philosophy, which provides a place from which we can begin to see their work in terms of overlapping concerns. I argue that Jung and Luce Irigarays uvre can be situated in a collectivist framework. The collective or social community is the birth site of community members who should be thought of as potential individuals. I argue that Jung and Luce Irigaray have a shared concern with the issue of how members get to be individuals, that is, the process of individuation. However, I argue that Luce Irigaray takes up Jungs idea, albeit unconsciously, of the individuation of group members in a collectivist context. The collective with which she is concerned is women. Using her idea that women must be emancipated from the masculine paternal symbolic, I argue that women can be individuated as specific members of a group only when the collective of which they are members is itself individuated.

I argue that collectives are ambivalently placed with respect to their members. On the one hand, the ideal of the individual as an autonomous, responsible, choice maker is promoted by the Western liberal democratic collective as a whole; on the other, specific collectives embody various practices of initiation, both conscious and unconscious, that assume and require sameness at a fundamental level. Much theory about the psyche assumes sameness: of experience, of categories and their applicability, of intent. Even the notion of individuation assumes sameness or similarity insofar as individuation involves development from a state of immersion and lack of individuated being, to individuated being marked by distinctiveness and integrity. Individuation, on this view, is an account of the lifelong process that the achievement of individuality is. Jung argues that individuation means becoming an individual, and, insofar as individuality embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it implies becoming ones own self. We could therefore translate individuation as coming to selfhood or self-realization (Jung 1966: 266).

My argument encompasses more than this, however. I introduce Luce Irigarays mimetic critique of psychoanalytic theory and apply it to Jungian analytical psychology theory. Accordingly, I show that Jungs idea of individuation is limited by the masculine assumptions intrinsic to his figuring of the collective unconscious. I argue that individuation, like many other notions and processes which are developed and articulated by Jung, is a product of masculine symbolic understandings correlative with the collective unconscious and its archetypal structuring. I suggest that if we read Jungs work within this context, then we can see that his is not a neutral reading or construction of the psyche, but one which precludes the possibility of an authentic feminine voice. Individuation, I claim, is the