Review: A Ground for Jungian Thought

Author(s): Ronald Schenk

Review by: Ronald Schenk
Source: The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn 1992),
pp. 11-23
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
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A Ground for Jungian Thought

Roger Brooke. Jung a-nd Phenomenology. London and New

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

York, Routledge, 1991.

Reviewed by Ronald Schenk

Phenomenology is a post-modern philosophy that came into

being during the first half of this century through the work of its
founding fathers, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Contemporaneous not only in time, but
in historical necessity with Tung's thought, phenomenology
emerged in response to the materialism, positivism, and Cartesian
rationalism of the modern mind. The foundation of phenomen-
ology, simply stated, is a vision which is as free as possible from
underlying preconceptions, governing concepts or constructs, and
dogmatic theory. The "approach" ofphenoluenologyis to under-
stand an individual phenomenon from the standpoint of its own
ground as an apparent reality using the method of knowing that
takes direct description as its starting point.
In 1970, Paul Ricoeur, a radical phenomenologist and lin-
guist, published a classic series oflectures using Freud's thought to
explore language-specifically hermeneutic language. (Paul
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans-
lated by Denis Savage. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970) In
that exploration, Ricoeur found that psychoanalytic language,
embodying a "hermeneutics of suspicion" when regarding Car-
tesian consciousness in its immediacy, seemed to be in opposition
to phenomenology, which starts with a "hermeneutics of belief. "
Upon closer examination, however, Ricoeur concluded that
phenomenology and psychoanalysis are often alike in their indirect
approach to naive consciousness. First, because it suspends concep-
tual ground in the service of an understanding governed by the

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 event or thing itself, phenomenology, like psychoanalysis, manages
to provide a "humiliation or wounding" ofimmediate conscious-
ness. The purpose of this wounding is to reveal the concealed or
"co-intended" aspect ofconsciousness, what psychoanalysis might
see as unconscious motivation. (Ricoeur, pp. 377-378) Second,
both phenomenology and psychoanalysis hold to a notion of
intentionality, namely the "intending" of consciousness for an
"other" outside of itself. The psychoanalytic view sees the uncon-
scious intent as desire for something; the phenolnenological view
sees consciousness as always a consciousness ofsomething. Third,
both pHenomenology and psychoanalysis find an ambivalent "re-
ality" unfolding in language as a dialectic ofpresence and absence.

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

(Ricoeur, p. 384) Words are "absent" as signs or signifiers of
Ineaning and "present" as living symbols that form a concealed or
unconscious world. Finally, both phenOlnenology and psycho-
analysis hold to a sense ofthe intersubjectivity oflneaning, namely,
meaning is such only "insofar as the implicit is what another can
nlake explicit." (Ricoeur, p. 386) Indeed, for Ricoeur, the goal of
both psychoanalysis and phenomenology is "the return to true
discourse." (Ricoeur quoting De Waelhens, p. 390) In summary,
Ricoeur's achievement was to see psychoanalysis and phenomenol-
ogy, each through the eyes of the other.
Ricoeur opened Freud's work to phenonlenological analysis
by seeing in it the dialectic of two languages-the language of
science (biological foundations, dynamics of forces) and the lan-
guage of lneaning (hermeneutic constructs such as id, ego, super-
ego). Through a similar vision, two major ontologies-two views
ofpsychological reality-are revealed in the work ofthe other great
founder of depth psychology, C.G. Jung. The first is a conceptual
universe-a quasi-scientific world, which, in the service of"empiri-
cism," splits observer from observed, reasserts a formal theory
expounding mechanistic structures and the dynamics of energies
based on nineteenth century physics, proposes psychic systems of
oppositions and logocentrisI11 based upon the Inetaphysics of the
classical concept ofproportion, and provides abstract, often tauto-
logical Aristotelian categories of definition. Jung's second ontol-
ogy is a poetic rcalnl which he tenned "esse in anima)" a middle
ground encompassing both subject and object which declares the
reality of fantas}', nletaphor, and ilnagination.
The mixture of these two ontologies in Tung's work has
caused, to put it mildly, some confusion in the Jungian world. (See

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Andrew Samuels's attempt to sort out this confusion in lung and
the Post-Jungians. London and New York, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1985.) Following in the Cartesian heritage of modern
western thought, "classical" Jungians have taken Jung's concep-
tualizations as if they were literal, and they have built modular
paradigms around the definition and redefinition of lung's con-
ceptual assertions. Archetypal psychology, founded through the
work of James Hillman, emerged in reaction to this approach. By
nlaking ontological distinctions in Jung's work, Hillman has been
able to demonstrate how Jung's grounding in imagination gives a
psychological view of experience, while his grounding in concep-
tualization tends, rather dangerously, to empower and enhance the

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

observing ego in a nonpsychological way.
Roger Brooke's lung a1td Phenomenology continues in the
tradition ofRicoeur and Hillman by attempting to "see through"
rung's work, this time with the eye of phenomenology. Brooke's
assertion is that Jung, in attempting to stake out ground for
psychological reality, was forced, by the limitations of his concep-
tual background and by his need to gain general recognition for his
ideas, to use the very language of conceptual logic that he was
intuitively trying to undermine. By deriving meaning through the
application of concepts, or in tlle alchemical sense, by extracting
spirit from matter, Jung's writing often depicts human beings as if
they were material bodies separate from an outer world, bodies
containing energies and forces working 11lysteriously within. In
this depiction, psyche beconles encapsulated in bodyand separated
from a world which is dead, and care of the soul through analysis
becomes the application of a grid of concepts onto disembodied
experience. In this mode, Jungian psychology "tends to perpetuate
in its conceptual foundations an image of Cartesian man: an isolate
in his experience standing over a meaningless, homogenous
world." (Brooke, p. 114)
Brooke's thesis is that seeing Jung's work through the lens of
phenomenology allows sonlething different to emerge-an ilnage
of Jung as psychological poet, setting forth experience itself as
111eaningful and findi·ng the expression of experience through
llletaphor as the basic data ofpsychological life. He holds that even
as Jung was explaining himself in logical constructs, something in
his work was striving for articulation through phenomenological
expression-the meaning inherent in the "pregnant immediacy"
ofthe phenomenon itself. (Brooke, p. 7) In the phenomenological

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 paradigm, "inner" and "outer" become a unity, which phenom-
enology calls the "life world," and the psyche becomes the ground
for all experience working through human consciousness in meta-
phors. (Of course, this sounds very much like archetypal psychol-
ogy, and one of Brooke's insights is to see Hillman, who empha-
sizes "saving the phenomena," as a "healer" of Jung's thought.)
Seen phenolnenologically, Jung becomes a poet of the soul, a
craftsman working in the mode of imagination with an "intrinsic,
irreducible, and mutually transformative relationship between hinl
and his subject matter." (Brooke, p. 7)
But because Jung actually stands with each foot in a different
paradigm, a tension enlerges between the way he talks about

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

meaning and the way he talks about experience. Jung's quasi-
scientific mode conflicts with his poorly-expressed, imaginal, rela-
tivistic sense of the co-participation of observer-observed. (This
latter epistemology, or way ofknowing, which derives from medi-
umistic psychology, is never clearly worked out in Jung, who
sometimes even d~nigrates it as "participatio11 mystique"). The
"poetry" ofthe latter mode needs conceptual tightening, and it is
this tightening that Brooke sees as the gift of phenomenology-a
contribution that grants the poetic side ofJung's thought both an
epistemological (metaphor) and ontological (life-world)foundation.
Brooke helps the uninitiated by introducing phenomenol-
ogy. He presents Mecleau-Ponty's classic definition of phenom-
enology as a Inethod for studying the essences of phenolnena that
has four characteristics: description, reduction, search for essence,
and intentionality. He-proceeds to relate each of these character-
istics to Jung's method. As he makes clear, phenomenology is
basically a descriptive enterprise, "obsessed by the concrete"
(Brooke quoting Van den Berg, p. 31), and as such is distrustful of
all theoretical assumptions and conceptual orientations. Descrip-
tion in phenomenology is not a naive, positivistic categorization of
observables, but the disciplined return ofa "second naivete" to the
phenomenon itself; so that it may reveal itselfin ever deeper, richer,
more subtle and more complex ways. (Ricoeur, p. 28) In this light,
Jung discloses himself as a phenomenologist in his forceful expo-
sition of religious experience as "fact" (Psychology and Religion,
Collected Works, Vol. 11. Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1969, pp. 5-7) and in his criticism ofFreud's way ofplacing theory
over experience. (Archetypes ofthe Collectipe Unconscious, Collected
Works, Vol. 9, Pt. 1. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968,

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Schenk reviews
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pp. 54-55) Brooke could also have cited Jung's fanlous statement
regarding the dream, "Stick as close as possible to the dreanl
inlage," wherein he is consummately phenomenological. (The
Practice of Psychotherapy) Collected Works) Vol. 16. Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 149)
A more formal characteristic of phenoInenology is the step
in thought that Husser! called "the phenomenological reduc-
tion," which involves two aspects, the "bracketing of being" (or
the "epoche") and the return to "original experience." "Bracket-
ing," for Husser!, is a separation from the "natural attitude" in
which prejudices and preconceptions that are concealed hinder
access to an understanding of phenomena as dley present theIn-

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

selves to naive consciousness. The return to "our most original
experience ofour most original ,vorld (Brooke quoting Luijpen, p.
33) is like Hillman's "animal perception," the direct experience of
the world unencunlbered by concepts. (James Hillman, "Image-
sense," Spril1g 1979. Dallas, Spring Publications, 1979)
Jung's sensibility to what phenomenology refers to as "re-
duction" can be seen throughout his career, and Brooke provides
aInple documentation, such as Jung's advice in 1912 to the bud-
ding psychologist to
abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid
farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through
the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums
and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gam-
bling hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges,
Socialist meetings, churches' revivalist gatherings and ec-
static sects, through love and hate, through the experience of
passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer
stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give
him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real
knowledge of the human soul. (Two Essays on Allalytical
Psychology, Collected Works, Vol. 7. Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1966, pp. 246-247)
Or Brooke cites dle following passage, written forty-five years
later, to point out that Tung's approach to the analytic situation
gives evidence of his phenomenological sensibility.
If I want to understand an individual human being, I
must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average
man and discard all theories in order to adopt a com-
pletely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only ap-
proach the task of understanding with a free and open

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 mind. (Civilization ill Tra1lsition, Collected Works, Vol. 10.
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1964, p. 250)
More succinctly Tung said, "nothing is I110re unbearable to
the patient than to be always understood. . . . Understanding
should ... be ... an agreenlent which is the fruit ofjoint reflection."
(Practice ofPsychotherapy) pp. 145-146)
Brooke is careful, however, to note that both phenomenology
and Tung are aware of the linlits imposed by the human condition
on achieving the phenomenological reduction. Tung often pointed
out the paradox, that since only the psyche can ask questions
regarding the psyche, what psyche shows ofitselfis always in a sense

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

a reflection of the psyche that is asking the question. "[ 0 ]ne is
oneself the biggest of all one's assumptions." (Practice of Psycho-
therapy) p. 329) And Brooke knows that finally, Tung considered
complexes, which inevitably influence one's perceptions, as "the
most absolutely prejudiced thing in every individual." (The Struc-
ture and Dynamics ofthe Psyche) Collected Works) Vol. 8. Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 103)
A third trait of phenomenological investigation, often nlore
difficult to conceptualize, is Husserl's "eidetic reduction," which
Brooke helpfully terms "the search for essence" (in itself, a Tung-
ian phrase). This is the process wherein the essence of a thing or
event is revealed through a meditative, intuitive, imaginative
perception. Ricoeur points out that the notion of a concealed
essence is very UI uch akin to what depth psychology considers "the
unconscious," and that the eidetic reduction is akin to analysis.
Phenonlenology, however, considers essences to be given with the
phenonlena themselves, depth lying in the surface. Essence is
intuited by a naive consciousness, revealed through the nlode of
ilnagination and nlade up of meaningful relations. Intuition, of
course, is not pure perception, but like all perception, an interpre-
tation which in itself is co-constituted by language. Thus, for
phenolnenology, the world is not a dead object described through
the lifeless tool of language but a living event simultaneously
revealed/manifested/ perceived/interpreted through metaphor.
Brooke finds Tung's kinship \vith the phenonlenologist's
"search for essence" in his (Tung's) hernleneutical approach to the
psyche. As a phenomenologist, Jungwas interested in understand-
ing the psyche on its own terms. He considered pathological
behavior, bodily symptoms, love affairs, the therapeutic relation-
ship, and dreanls as texts to be understood, and he saw that the
language which best provides a link with the vital roots of psycho-

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16 All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ronald Schenk reviews
logical experience was psyche's own traditional language-reli-
gious symbol, myth, fairytale and alchemical image. Like the
phenomenologist, Jung stepped back from concretism by caution-
ing against confusing the metaphorical nature of experience with
something literal; "every interpretation necessarily remains an 'as-
if. '" (Archetypes, p. 156) He also intuited the constitutive force of
language itself; "[i]nterpretations make use of certain linguistic
nlattices that are themselves derived from prinlordial ilnages."
(Archetypes, p. 32) (According to Marie-Louise von Franz, this
resolution of the archetypal roots of language-conventions
comes through clearly in the style of Jung's Gennan original, a
subtlety lost in translation. See her C. G. Jung; His Myth i,~ Our

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

Time, New York, Putnam, 1970.)
A final aspect of the phenomenological method is derived
from the idea of intentionality-all consciousness is a conscious-
ness of something. In other words, there is no split between
"consciousness" and "sonlething" to begin with; each co-consti-
tutes the event.
In short, consciousness is that irreducible, non-optional
occurrence within which the world comes into being. It
cannot be an encapsulated entity, enclosed within itself, or a
little person looking at images in the brain. As
being-in-the-world, consciousness is the open clearing that
gathers the world together. Its constimtive power is that such
a world is gathered together in history, culture, and lan-
guage, as well as through the peculiar twists of individual
lives, and it is out of that gathered world-disclosure too that
we come to understand ourselves as the persons we are.
(Brooke, p. 43)
Accepting this constitutive role of consciousness affects how
we analyze consciousness, and the importance we assign to it.
Brooke recognizes Jung's intuitive grasp of the unity of psyche
and world, and sees several ilnportant consequences for psycho-
logical analysis. First, the withdrawal ofprojection beconles not so
nluch a nlechanical extraction of life from world to psyche, but a
shift in mode of experiencing from literal to metaphorical. Second,
although he often seems to be imagining psyche as within, Jung
also writes in a way that indicates we are in psyche. Third, Jung's
focus on the separation of the ego fronl the unconscious is finally
in the ainl of revealing the world, that is, the unique place of the
human ego in the schelne of things conIes about simultaneously
with the enlergence of world.

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atuf Phenomenology
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 Interestingly in light of Hillman's cntlClsnl of typology
(Egalitaria" Typologies Vet"SttS the PerceptiOtI ofthe Unique. Dallas,
Spring Publications, 1980), Brooke sees Jung's notion of typo-
logy as a further indication of his intellectual kinship with the
phenonlenological notion of intentionality. Brooke notes that in
Jung's Inodel ofconsciousness there is no perception ofthe world
which is not typologically limited, and that this suggests a structural
unity encompassing consciousness and world. Typology can be
seen as "a measure ofshifting values and intensities in one's relation
to the world. H (Brooke, p. 44) Here he Inight have cited Tung's
direct statement,

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

The book on types yielded the insight that every judgement
made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type
and that every point ofview is necessarily relative. (Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. New York, Vintage, 1965, p. 207)
More importantly, Brooke furthers his case for Jung's sensi-
bilityto relativity in an insightful way by highlighting Jung's notion
of fantasy as the
medium that integrates one's psychological functions and
brings both the constitutive power ofone's psychological life
and the world into being.... [F]antasy in analytical psychol-
ogy is the definitive quality of that "between" out of which
the world and one's sense ot oneself (ego) emerge and are
derived. (Brooke, pp. 46-47)
Tung's specific contribution to the phenomenological clainl that all
perception is understanding is to have seen all understanding as a
mode offantasy.
Having demonstrated the sensibility of phenonlenology and
its connection with Tung, Brooke leads us into the heart of his
book, a phenomenological consideration of Tung's foundational
concepts-"psyche," "self," "conscious/unconscious," and "ar-
chetype." Brooke's thesis, to which he returns again and again, is
that whereas Jung tried to transcend Cartesian duaiisITl through an
intuitive grasp ofthe workings ofthe psyche, the logic ofrationality
in his language betrays his sense of a prior unity of body/psyche/
world. The result of the tension between the spirit of Jung's
thought and the mode of its expression is that the latter is
undermined by tautologies, contradictions, and abstractions.
Brooke sets out to reveal what is still, therefore, only an implicit
promise in Jung's thought-an underlying ontology of unification.
Brooke chooses Jung's experience in Mrica as his initial

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illustration of Jung's encounter with the "fundamental world-
openness" that phenomenologists call intentionality. This is a
radical sense of the interactional nature of psyche and world, and
Brooke, hinlself a South Mrican, sees Jung's account of his
experience in Mrica as an indication of his "recovery of the world
as the home ofpsychological life. " (Brooke, p. 57) Here Jung ,vas
taken by the event of the dawning of the light of a new day which
he suddenly grasped as a metaphor for "consciousness as the
illuminating realm within which the being of the world can shine
forth." (Brooke, p. 58) He found that meaning is given in the
metaphors through which the world speaks, and he was indelibly
impressed by a "dawning significance ofthings"-sunrise, jungle,

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

aniinal, native man-and realized that through things the world
revealed itself as a "temple," without which there could be no
reflective consciousness. (Jung, Civilization) p. 62) "In Mrica,
Jung realized the self as a non-substantial openness within which
the world could come into being." (Brooke, p. 60) The longing
for consciousness, then, is a longing for world, and it is through
the world that consciousness dawns. It is misleading to speak of
world and psyche as Jungians often do, rather, each is a co-
constitution of the other.
The notion of"psyche" needs not only a "world," however,
but also a "body" in order to be rescued from the circularity ofsuch
definitions as "the totality of psychic processes." (C. G. Jung,
Psychological Types) Collected Works) Vol. 6. Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1971, p. 463) Phenomenology offers the posi-
tion that what gives psychology body is an eye (or mind) that sees
psyche as integral with the human body; indeed, psyche is the
experience ofthe "lived body," or the place ofexistence "bodying
forth." For phenomenology, all perception is bodily, hence in a
sense unknowable, a mode of being "which is neither ego nor
thing of the world." (Ricoeur, p. 382) A... Brooke says paraphras-
ing Merleau-Ponty, "What is loosely and misleadingly called the
'body,' provides density and limits to psychological life; (what is)
loosely and misleadingly called the 'psyche' or 'mind' offers
reflection and transcendence of(freedom from) the particularities
that beset animal existence." (Brooke, pp. 71-72)
Brooke shows that although Jung often wrote as if psyche
were surrounded by body, he again intuitively sensed an a priori
unity, this time between body and nlind. In the Tavistock Lec-
tures, Jung refers to body and mind as "two aspects of the living

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being (The Symbolic Life, Collected Works, Vol. 18. Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 34) and at another point
concludes with "the mysterious truth that spirit is the life of the
body seen from within, and the body, the outward manifestation
ofspirit-the two being really one." (Civilization in Transition) p.
94) Elsewhere, Jung writes, "The body is avisible expression ofthe
here and now." (The Visions Seminars. Zurich, Spring, 1976, p.
475) Thus, to talk of psyche and body is another misleading
dualism imposed by rational language. In contrast, Brooke asserts
that "to work with the depths ofthe psyche ... is to reclaim those
significances revealed within the lived body." (Brooke, p. 69)
Brooke refornlulates the Jungian sense of psyche as interior

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

life, separate from outer world (a carry over from the age ofKant),
into psyche as "life-world"-"thc place of experience and that
place is the world in which we live." (Brooke, p. 85) He points to
three ways in which Jung seems to have grasped in his own way the
notion oflife-world. First, as his writing on his experience in Mrica
reveals, Jung could envision a Weltanschauu1wwhich rendered the
world as alive. Widened consciousness from this perspective is not
developnlent of an intetiorized psyche through self-criticism and
withdra\vn projections as it is for the Kantian Jung, but "is a
function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the
individual into absolute, binding and indissoluble communion
\\rith the world at large." (Jung, Two Essays, p. 178) Second,
through the notion of the psychoid archetype, the hypothetical
realm where spirit and matter come together, Jllng was clearly
attempting to bridge psyche and world. Finally, Jung's sense ofthe
"dialectical" nature ofanalysis leads to a sense ofIife-worid as inter-
subjective; we are who we are only through relationship. Brooke
reinforces his point by providing (despite Tung's own inability to
value Heidegger) several analogies between Jung's notion of
psyche as the essential structure of hunlan existence and
Heidegger's notion of DaseiH.
Jung, ofcourse, regarded individuation as the central concept
of analytical psychology and his positive view of individuation (in
contradistinction to Schopenhallcr who saw it as the consequence
of blind \vill) is intricately related to his notion of the self. Jung's
use ofthe notion ofthe selfas a "center" or the "central archetype,"
which stenlS fronl the classical concept of proportion, forgets the
sense of all archetypes as centrally ordered and of nlany central
aspects of psychic life as implicating each other. The selfwould be

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seen by Brooke, not as reified entity, but a capacity to structure
psychic life around a center. As "totality," the selfis the realization
of the anlbiguity of existence known and unknown. Brooke again
emphasizes Jung's sense of the ontological unity between self and
world and cites Jung's statement, "Individuation does not shut
one out from the world but gathers the world to oneself." (Brooke,
p. 106) Individuation as the self's unfolding is the world's disclo-
sure. For Brooke, individuation as world-disclosiveness involves
the deliteralizing of one's engagenlents with the world into
nletaphorical structures. In the unfolding of self, we discover we
are living a story ofwhich we are no longer the author. This sense
of individuation is expressed in Jung's stateluent, "1 happen to

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

myself." (Tung, Religion) p. 259) With that discovery, we are able
to experience metaphor as the structuring ele~ent of our being.
Individuation then bec9mes "a process of differentiation and
transformation in which personal identity is established as an
appropriation of a limited nmnber of possible world disclosures
and relationships from out ofthe totality ofpossibilities that Jung
calls the self." (Brooke, p. 119) In this passage Brooke hears the
echoes of Heidegger's Dasei,.,.
Like Dasein, the self is "mine" yet not personal; it is the
embracing totality out of which individuality and identity
emerge; it is realized at all levels of psychological develop-
ment as a world with which one is engaged (even autistic
flight is a kind ofengagement); as a gathering ofthe world it
brings the world into being in the light ofhuman conscious-
ness; it surrounds that place of identity one usually points to
as "oneself," yet its spatiality is not extensive in the philo-
sophical sense; it is a home within which the gods can be
experienced and thought. (Brooke) p. 106)
Any discussion ofl ung's ontology has to address the apparent
dualistic, static, and reified nature of Jung's definition of con-
sciousness and unconsciousness. When he speaks of"contents" of
the unconscious as if they (and it) were something literal or spatial,
and uses concepts of libido and compensation to describe the
"dynamics of the unconscious," Jung sounds like an Enlighten-
filent philosopher taking a Cartesian, Inechanistic view of the
psyche. But once again Brooke makes a distinction between lung's
"self-conscious theorizing and the spirit of his intention."
(Brooke, p. 121) When Jung tends to see the unconscious in the
ego's terms, he is a self-conscious theorizer who presents the
psyche as a self-regulative system, structured, a mechanical entity.

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 This view serves the educational task of nlaking the psyche acces-
sible to the ego but loses its depth and complexity. When Jung
allows himself to accept his own more radical esse in anima, he
admits that consciousness is always more or less permeated with
unconsciousness; "there is no conscious content which is not in
sOlne other respect unconscious." (Jung, St'ructure, p. 188)
Fronl this relativistic position, Jung describes the uncon-
scious as many particular modes of being in the world. Thus,
Brooke re-articulates Jung's concept of the unconscious in several
ways: "The unconscious" is not apsychic locality, again, not literal,
but a vitallnatrix (which) discloses and gathers life worlds that are
at once primordial and historical and which have a life oftheir own

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

that is lived but not known. (Brooke, p. 132) It is an elnbodied,
intentional ambiguousness, or rather, "a multitude of complex,
(incarnate) intentionalities" (Brooke, p. 126), a "presence that is
present-as-an-absence," a face barely reflected, a voice dimly
heard-calling for appropriation through the limitations of con-
sciousness. (Brooke, p. 132)
In considering the concept of the archetype, Brooke prefers
to stress Jung's use of the term as a unifying concept, as when he
speaks ofarchetypes as "categories ofimagination" (J ung, Psychol-
ogy and Religion) p. 518)-categories which are at once, the
sources ofaction, reaction and experience. Archetypes link behav-
ior and experience; behavior and attitude are co-constituted
through the archetypal image. Brooke does not see archetypes as
static categories like museunl entries or find in theln literal readings
of personality gestalts; rather he insists on seeing the archetype in
terms of its capacity for a gathering of situation/activity/attitude
in a simultaneous, living structure. And again, archetypes as
enlbodied through inlage are intricately linked to the world-"the
human being's bodily potentialities which structure being-
in-the-world in typically human ways." (Brooke, p. 148)
It is interesting to linger over the developnlent of Brooke's
approach. As he states in his Introduction, Brooke is not trying to
translate Jung into a new language, but to give Jung's writings a
true encounter. He is clearly attempting to bring a much-needed
sensibility to Jungian thought, needed still because it is a sensibility
that is often given lip service, but rarely reflected in the way
Jungians think: that is, the co-constituting reality of world/
psyche/body. Through an authentic encounter with the phenom-
enological core of Jung's thought, he has attempted no less than
a re-imagining of Jung's central concepts, and his is therefore a

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grand and courageous endeavor. Following the method of lysis of
his phenomenological forebears, Brooke succeeds in dissolving
Jung's static, topographic, nineteenth century conceptualizations
into a fluid post-modern language of process that is expressed
through such dynamic language as "capacity," "gathering" and
"mode" and which unifies psyche/body/world. Certainly he
demonstrates that both phenomenology and Jung are after the
same thing-the experience ofa "lived world" or "lived body," a
unified state of participation in being that Jung depicts in his
alchemical writings through the image ofthe anthropos or primor-
dial man.
Although the central European tradition ofcritical phenom-

© C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

enology has served Brooke well in his reading of Jung, I would
agree with Hillman when he criticizes this phenomenology for
missing the "essential" imaginal nature of the psyche, which, as
Brooke hilnselfnoted, Jung referred to as "fantasy." It might have
been fruitful for Brooke to extend his scope ofphenomenology to
Bachelard who brings to language the full inlaginal possibilities
that Jung anticipated. Lacking this inclusion of the imaginal
(anima, if you will) in how we experience, Brooke's writing at
tinles feels as if it is caught up in the regurgitive repetitions of
a cleaning cycle. But I aln afraid IUy little grumbling here may be
like the pot calling the kettle white, and perhaps this detergent
quality points up, not only Brooke's Herculean propensities, but
Jungian theory's condition as an Augean stable in need of purga-
tion of its deeply encrusted Cartesian ontology. If, as is often
asserted, phenomenology needs Jungian analysis to realize the
myth of experience in its full depth, Jungian psychology needs
the ontology and epistemology ofphenomenology as a solutio for
static conceptual structures that are in fact the discards of past
philosophy.
Brooke is thoroughly versed in Jung, and his book reveals a
profound understanding of the spirit of Jung's thought. Perhaps
the freshness and depth ofhis insights could only have COlue from
a clinician who ,vas not technically trained as an analyst, but rather,
was self-trained to step outside of western conceptual structures
enough to be able to read the "text" ofJung's work with the same
kind of inlaginative eye that guided Jung himself.

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