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BERGSON AND JUNG
BY PETE A. Y. GUNTER
3 Time and Free Will did produce, however, an anticipationof Jung's person-
personacontrast. Bergson states (TFW, 231): "Hence there are finally two different
selves, one of which is, as it were, the externalprojectionof the other, its spatialand,
so to speak, social representation."This social self may be "parasitic" upon the
fundamentalself. "Many live this kind of life, and die without having known true
freedom" (TFW, 166).
3a
S. Alexander,Space, Time and Deity (New York, 1950),I, 44.
BERGSON AND JUNG 637
6 Henri
Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, 1970), 932.
7 Carl Gustav Jung, "The Content of the Psychoses, Part II, 1914," trans. M.D.
Elder in Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (authorized translation), ed.
C.E. Long (London, 1922), 351.
8 E.A. Bennet, C.G. Jung (London, 1961), 31. For a similar opinion, cf. Thomas
F. Graham, Parallel Profiles: Pioneers in Mental Health (Chicago, 1966), 147.
BERGSON AND JUNG 639
ed., eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire,
trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N.J., 1960-79), X, 147. Jung includes Aristotle's
horme here as another possible candidate, and denies that any such notion (even,
apparently, his own) can fully explain mental dynamics.
15 Jung's paralleling of his libido and Bergson's elan vital is accompanied after
1920 by previously unstated reservations. Translations of passages concerning Berg-
son are also changed in Jung's collected works so as to distance Jung from Bergson.
In "On Psychic Energy" (completed in 1928) the paralleling of Jungian libido with
elan vital, horme, and (Schopenhauer's) will is followed by a demurrer: "From these
concepts I have borrowed only the concrete character of the term, not the definition
of the concept. The omission of the detailed explanation of this in my earlier book is
responsible for numerous misunderstandings, such as the accusation that I have built
up a kind of vitalistic concept." (Jung, Collected Works, VIII, 30.) But Jung, prior to
the 1920s, was in a position to express himself accurately and to examine carefully
the work of his English-language translators. The meaning of statements made con-
cerning Bergson by Jung and translated prior to 1920 is often not consistent with later
versions of the same statements.
640 PETE A. Y. GUNTER
28
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, II, 143.
29 30
Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 335. Ibid., 416.
31 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, II, 383.
32
Sigmund Freud, "Letter to James Jackson Putnam, July 8, 1915," trans. Judith
Bernays Heller, in Nathan G. Hale, Jr., ed., James Jackson Putnam and Psycho-
BERGSON AND JUNG 643
One would like to know more about Freud's view of Bergson's in-
fluence. Unfortunately, the published record says little more on
this point.
If the period 1911-13marksthe emergence of Jung's new psychia-
try and his break with SigmundFreud, the years 1913-20have been
called his "fallow period." Henri Ellenbergerpoints out, however,
that in this period, which culminatedin Jung's Psychological Types
(1920), his system of psychological analysis achieved definitive
form.33In WandlungenII one finds anticipations of concepts for
which Jungwas later to become famous, but anticipationsare not yet
doctrines. Jung's reading of Bergson in mid-1912 to mid-1913 oc-
curred at a time when importantcomponents of Jung's conceptual
scheme were still taking form. During the period 1913-20Jung spe-
cifically equates Bergson's ideas with his own concepts of instinct,34
intuition,35the (limited) function of the human intellect,36reaction-
formation,37and introversion-extroversion.38 His treatmentof mech-
anism and finalism duringthese years is notably similarto Bergson's
(thoughhere the common source is probablyKant),39as is his closely-
related insistence that the difficulties of the present, and not of the
past or future, are the key to mental illness.40Nor can it be purely a
matterof accident that Jung includes the intuitive personalityamong
his four basic psychological types and, like Bergson, connects intui-
tion with future-orientedspeculation.41There can be no question,
then, that the philosophyof creative evolution had by 1913become an
integral part of Jung's reflections. One can easily imagine that it
played a role in the development of such Jungian concepts as the
archetypes, individuation,the collective unconscious, and intuition.I
shall argue that this likelihood becomes increasingly strong as one
moves from the first of these concepts (the archetypes) to the last
(intuition).
The concept of the unconscious developed by Bergson in Matter
and Memory (1896) is limited, as we noted above, to the individual's
experience. On this point Bergson agreedwith Freud:there is nothing
in the unconscious that was not first in the conscious mind. In Crea-
tive Evolution (1907) this position is revised through the inclusion in
man of the memory of his evolutionary past:
Is it not plain that life goes to work . . . exactly like consciousness, exactly
like memory? We trail behind us, unaware, the whole of our past; but our
memorypours into the present only the odd recollection or two that can in
some way complete our present situation. Thus the instinctive knowledge
which one species possesses of anotheron a certainparticularpoint has its
roots in the very unity of life, which is, to use the expression of an ancient
philosopher,a "whole sympatheticto itself." (CE, 167)
This passage demonstrates the analogy and the connection between
the individual unconscious and what I call Bergson's collective "bio-
logical unconscious." Each living creature, he holds, contains within
itself dormant potentialities, "memories" of a common past which it
shares with all other living creatures. We thus share via an inherited
and universal unconscious what Bergson claims are unsuspected
capacities for the understanding of modes of life other than our own.
Other creatures are also endowed with such capacities which,
however, they use in very practical, if often unedifying, ways. A wasp
like the sphex seems to have an almost a priori instinctive knowledge
of its prey, the cricket, and is able to sting the cricket precisely on the
three nerve centers which paralyze its legs, transforming it into a
suitable living meal for the sphex's larvae.42 We will return to the
sphex when we consider Bergson's concept of instinct in connection
with the Jungian archetypes.
Man is not, on Bergson's terms, primarily an instinctive animal.
He is a vertebrate, hence a creature of intelligence. In man, however,
can be found potentially compensatory instinctive capacities which, if
extended and made reflective, might give us the key to many puzzles.
These insights Bergson calls "intuitions." Unlike the primitive sub-
stratum from which they are drawn, intuitions are "disinterested,
self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon [their] object and enlarging
it indefinitely" (CE, 176). But, however disinterested and reflective
they may become, for Bergson our intuitions have their roots in
modes of knowledge and action of which we are ordinarily unaware.
This all too brief resume of Bergson's concepts of biological mem-
ory, instinct, and intuition provides the basis for a comparison with
Jung's notions of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and intui-
tion. In Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson does not discuss his collec-
tive unconscious in terms of anthropology and myth, although he does
so specifically in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932).
Rather, he applies that concept to biological problems. Jung was
cautious in dealing with the natural sciences but was quite capable of
approaching the unconscious from a biological viewpoint. In "Instinct
and the Unconscious," a talk delivered in July 1919, he begins by
criticizing the neo-Darwinian account of instinct:
But such an explanationis far frombeing satisfactory.Bergson's philosophy
suggests anotherway of explanation,where the factor of "intuition" comes
in. Intuition,as a psychologicalfunction,is also an unconsciousprocess. Just
as instinct is the intrusionof an unconsciously motivatedimpulse into con-
scious action, so intuition is the intrusion of an unconscious content, or
'image' into conscious apperception.43
Instinct and intuition are analogous but by no means identical:
instinct, an impulse toward action, and intuition, an unconscious ap-
prehension, are "counterparts." The one is no less difficult to under-
stand than the other. But Jung cautions in language which is almost a
direct quote from Creative Evolution:
... we must never forget that thingswe call complicatedor even miraculous
are only so for the humanmind, whereasfor naturethey arejust simple and
by no means miraculous.We always have a tendency to project into things
the difficulties of our understandingand to call them complicated, while in
realitythey are very simpleand do not partakeof our intellectualdifficulties.
Intellect is not always an apt instrument;it is only one of several faculties of
the humanmind.44
46
Jung notes that Bergson also uses the term "crystallization" to "illustrate the
essence of intellectual abstraction." Jung, "A Contribution to the Study of Psycho-
logical Types," Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 293.
47 Jung, Psychological Types, 318. 48 Ibid., 318-39. 49 Ibid., 316.
BERGSON AND JUNG 647
50 For a recent account of the instincts of the paralyzing wasps, see Loren Eiseley,
loc. cit., see note 42 above. All the Strange Hours (New York, 1975), 243-54.
51
Jolande Jacobi, Complex/ArchetypelSymbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung,
trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, 1959), 52.
52
Jung, Psychological Types, 534-40.
648 PETE A. Y. GUNTER
Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely, althoughhe does not
draw along with him all that life carriesin itself. On other lines of evolution
there have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since
everything interpenetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but of
which he has kept only very little. It is as if a vague and formless being,
whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize
himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way.
(CE, 266)
53 Nicholas Core, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit (New York,
1960), 10.
BERGSON AND JUNG 649
Special thanks are due to Bergson for having broken a lance for the rightof
the irrationalto exist. Psychology will probablybe obliged to acknowledge
and to submitto a pluralityof principles,in spite of the fact that this does not
suit the scientific mind.56
son, though there is certainly room for conjecture about the exact
mannerin which Bergson's influencemade itself felt. There is another
point of influence, however, about which there can be little doubt but
about which Jungwas probablynot aware. It stems from the work of
Pierre Janet.
Like Bergson's philosophy, Janet's psychological analysis has
gone into eclipse. Around the turn of the century Janet was the
acknowledged leader of dynamic psychiatry. Jung studied for a se-
mesterwith him in Parisin 190057and took from him several key ideas
which can be tracedto later, post-Freudianfeaturesof Jung'spsychol-
ogy. Two of Janet's central concepts clearly worked their way into
Jung'sthought:"fonction du reel" and "tension psychologique." The
hardest conceivable task, Janet held, is that of coping with present
reality. This efforthe termedthe functionof reality-renamed the ego
by later psychiatrists. "Psychological tension" is closely related to
the function of reality. In a healthy mind psychological tension is
maintainedand developed, and the function of reality is sustained.
But when, throughthe encounterwith insuperableobstacles, the ten-
sion of personality is broken, we have regression, "l'abaissement
du niveau mental." In Wandlungen II and in Psychological Types
Jungreturnsrepeatedlyto these ideas, reshapingthem in terms of his
own theory of psychological energy, using them against Freudian
theories of the self.58 Janet terms the activity through which the
function of reality is made effective by confronting the present
(presentification). Jung recurs to this notion repeatedly, insisting
against Freud that mental illness often springs from a failure to deal
withpresent problems and that the iliness can by no means be traced
simplisticallyto early childhoodtraumas. He recurs often also to the
decay of psychological tension and its accompanyingregression, in-
sisting that regression in many cases results from the fear of life, not
from cripplingchildhood conflicts. It can also, he holds, result from
an injuryto the ego itself.
The extent to which Janet's concepts of "attention to life" and
"psychologicaltension" were derived by him from Bergson's Matter
and Memoryought to be more widely known to historiansof psychol-
ogy. In 1911, in an introductionwrittenfor the English translationof
Matter and Memory, Bergson states that these two concepts, at first
57 "I studied with Janet in Paris and he formed my ideas very much. He was a
first-classobserver,thoughhe had no dynamicpsychologicaltheory. It was a sort of
physiologicaltheory of unconsciousphenomena,the so-calledabaissementdu niveau
mental, that is, a certaindepotentiationof the tension of consciousness." C.G. Jung
Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull
(Princeton, 1977), 283.
58 Present in abundance in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, they remain
largely "repressed" duringJung's collaborationwith Freud.
BERGSON AND JUNG 651
59Bergson, Matter and Memory, xix. The other of Janet's chief works is
L'Automatisme psychologique (Paris, 1889).
60 Pierre
Janet, Les Obsessions et al psychasthenie, (Paris, 1903), I, 474-502.
61 See
esp. Claude M. Pr6vost, Janet, Freud et la psychologie clinique (Paris,
1973).On 203n.Pr6vostcalls for a systematicstudyof the relationshipsbetween Janet
and Bergson, a study which will be extremely difficult.
652 PETE A. Y. GUNTER
If, as James A.C. Brown and others have noted, there is a "generally
static impression conveyed by the Jungian system,"62 the priority of
the archetypes would be its source.
But in Psychological Types, at least, Jung is ambivalent on pre-
cisely this point. While there are, he intimates, a fixed set of arche-
types, these archetypes achieve new, creative expression and can
thus be said to evolve. Thus there is room in Jung's thought during this
period for a static, Kantian rendering of the archetypes as sheer
a priori determinants of thought and behavior as well as for a dy-
namic, process-oriented explanation of the archetypes as specific
tendencies toward development. However, the second, more Berg-
sonian tendency in Jung's thought provides a more fruitful, and hope-
ful, beginning.
North Texas State University.
62
James A.C. Brown, "Assessments and Applications," The Freudian Para-
(Chicago, 1977), 379.
digm, ed. Md. Mujeeb-ur-Rahman