You are on page 1of 29

The Phenomenological Body and Analytical Psychology

by Janet Kaylo copyright 2003 The purpose of this paper is to pose the following questions: Is it possible for a phenomenological body to exist for Analytical Psychology? Is there testimony to its absence, understandable cause for its omission and, ultimately, possibility for its inclusion without sacrificing central Jungian theory? Aspects of Jung's his understanding on of psychic and reality equality (as in intentionality), emphasis openness

therapeutic practice, and his poetically descriptive approach all fall within the boundaries of phenomenological psychology. As Roger Brooke notes (1991), though Jung's understanding of phenomenology was a 'loose' one, his concerns mirror those of phenomenological psychology: both show a determination to address psychological phenomena on their own terms, through a means which does not encroach upon the integrity of the original experience. Jung's theories, however, are still typically excluded from contemporary philosophical works that address the body as a 'gestalt' in the meaning-making process of consciousness. Though Jung consistently warns his students and his readers that body and psyche are one and the same life--that no thing is true until it reaches the body, and that the symbol always needs physical expression--the focus of his investigation was decidedly not how the body created the reality of the psyche, but how psychic images were reality. Jung also continued to identify the body within the realm of instincts, following Freud in associating body sensation with development of ego; or utilised the body as a representational aspect

of psychological life, describing the chakras as centres of energy as explained within Hindu philosophical traditions. The 'animation' of the body he continued to credit to spirit, ambitiously proposing to prove that there was reason to consider 'a theory of the psyche ultimately based on the postulate of an autonomous, spiritual principle' (1931, par.661). Though he states that this spiritual principle must eventually be born out in physical form, one could question, as a founding principle, and an a priori, whether it necessarily requires interaction with the physical world in order to exist. This particular complication certainly contributes to criticisms of Jung's theory as both solipsistic and mystical. While Brooke offers in Jung and Phenomenology a thorough treatment of Jung's phenomenological assets, he nonetheless concedes that in relation to the body, 'Jung failed to follow through a consistently psychological analysis...', as his psychological body was not situated as the bodying-forth of human existence within worldrelatedness (1991, p. 72/3). What, then, can be discerned in our bodies? And from what access, if not a bodily one, are unconscious manifestations both arising and moving? When allowed a phenomenological presence, the body reveals itself as a deeply sensitive, disclosing weave of relations between the sentient and the sensible world. The phenomenological body is a body known not as 'object', but as experiential subject--the constitution of which can be rigorously described. To include the living, dialectic body of phenomenology in a particular way which might allow its inclusion into the Jungian canon, one must first allow consideration of the following points: that significant and valuable (and possibly all) manifestations of the unconscious lie within the existence of the body itself; that the human body, through its universal corporeality, presents a collective structure of

meaning, while it provides the ground for both intersubjective and intrapsychic reality; and that the body and its movement reflect both personal and collective conscious/unconscious dialectics, as within it we find the juncture between our psyches and our world. Treatment of the body/mind from the 17th to the 19th centuries In medieval and modern Europe, the body held a position of prominence as the measure of all things. It was a period, in Foucault's terms, of direct gestures and ready transgressions, when 'bodies made a display of themselves' (Foucault, 1976, cited 1984, p. 292). The body built the cathedrals, won the battles, and engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Courtroom procedures included judicial torture, and even after death, hanging corpses were often touched for their presumed miraculous healing powers. Both tacitly and overtly, 'bodies were pregnant with meaning', and body and soul were meant to be kept together (Porter, 1990, p. 50). Descartes devotedly studied the human body, prior to his writing of the Meditations, primarily as a means of differentiating from it the aspect of man that existed beyond death. As he applied a theory of mathematics to the study of the body, biological functions that were previously attributed to the soul were given 'mechanical' explanation, through measurable quantities in time and space. Descartes elevated mind beyond anything attributable to the body, stating in Principles of Philosophy that: '...neither extension nor shape nor local motion, nor anything of this kind which is attributable to a body, belongs to our nature... thought alone belongs to it' (cited Welton, 1999, p. 1). Continued studies of anatomy in the mid-17th century revealed nerve fibres which lead in the direction of the head; and by 1657, maladies associated with mental disturbances--including hysteria, hypochondria,







previously considered disturbances of the flow of spirits through the organs, were being traced to diseases of the nervous system (Frank, 1990, p. 141). Though rationalism embedded itself deeper in the collective psyche, Enlightenment conditions were still filled with a world of spirits, not yet fully banished. In the average life of men and women there were fears of ghosts, monsters, bed-curtains, masks, and mice, and the body's expressions held deep meaning: '[e]ven the reflection of a distorted face in a mirror could frighten a sensible person and provoke convulsions' (Luyendijk-Elshout, 1990, p. 203). A remarkable number of patients suffered from convulsions, epileptic fits, or grimaces, which were considered pathological responses to fear--often occurring in response to masks or visions of strange faces. But why did the sight of a 'masked man' pose such a danger? Luyendijk-Elshout explains, referring to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 'there was a great distance between...the inner feelings of man and the social mask he was obliged to wear. Wearing such a social mask entails a precarious and delicate balance for a sensitive nature' (p. 226). With the full force of reason came also the burden of maintaining a mask of optimism and rationalism; displaying a firm belief in the order of nature and its certainties. Meeting face to face a black mask or a false face was a signal that someone had neutralised the social order--it was a symbol of disorder and irrationality. In spontaneous grimaces and convulsions, one could see the body exacting its toll for the demands of a conforming, rational mind. By the mid-eighteenth century, insanity and its cousins were claimed to be rooted in the mind: '[Insanity] must depend upon some specific alteration in the essential operations and movements of the mind, independent and exclusive of every corporal,

sympathetic, direct, or indirect excitement, or irritation whatever' (Harper, 1789, cited Porter, 1990, p. 67). Whereas the mad were formerly treated with whips and shackles, by the late 1700's government of the mentally ill was the order of the day. While initially a method of terrifying the one afflicted often produced a reversal of symptoms, by the end of the 18th century, fear was located internally within the conscience of each person. Psychological 'management' was used instead to gain the patient's confidence and favour, so as to acquire better discipline and ascendancy over them (Foucault, 1961; Porter, 1990). With rational behaviour and moral reform uppermost concerns in asylums and prisons, earlier corporal punishment gave way to what Foucault called 'systematic penalization of the mind'. 18th century man was to be free from the chains of fantasy and mystery; obedient to reason and understanding. The continued move toward mind and away from body, Porter places within the wider class dynamics of the period, as follows: '[T]he growing bourgeois stress upon the mind, upon bodily purification, delicacy, and social distance, formed tactics for dematerialisation, designed to segregate the propertied and the polite from the hoi polloi...Mind was to be cordoned off from body, just as the polite were not to be touched by the great unwashed' (Porter, 1990, p. 78). Consciousness and soul, as they were drained from nature and the body, were being concentrated in the mind. Post Enlightenment Separation of Matter and Spirit Though working with matter of a much subtler kind, perhaps the work of Mesmer (1734-1815) was located precisely on the last border between the physical and the 'psychological' at the end of the 18th century? A primary principle of Mesmer's theory of 'animal magnetism' relied on the existence of a 'subtle physical

fluid' which fills the universe, and provides the connecting medium between everything on earth, the earth to the heavenly bodies, between one person and another--and could be conveyed to other persons (Charet, 1993). explanations for their While mesmerists proposed materialist successes, established academicians

considered them simply cures to psychosomatic possessions; while Paris physicians disparagingly compared Mesmer with occultists such as Paracelsus, Fludd, and Bruno (Schaffer, 1990). Mesmer, however, never agreed that the treatment consisted of transference from mind to mind, always maintaining that it was the 'animal magnetic fluid' that made his treatment work. Rather, it was his student Puysegur who willingly discarded the fluid theory, and accepted instead a wholly psychological explanation for the apparent cures. Could this moment have signalled the loss of a 'felt sense' for the 'material'--and interpersonally shared--body in psychology? Within Porter's analysis, Puysegur 'paved the way for hypnotism, Victorian spiritualism, and dynamic psychiatry, anticipating the course taken by young Freud in shifting away from neurophysiology toward therapies that steadily grew less somatic: from cocaine, to hypnosis by pressure, to free associations and the talking cure' (1990, p. 76). By the end of the Enlightenment, mental disturbances were seen either as purely somatic, and treatable with medication, or as behaviour disorders requiring moral therapy. German mesmerists, however, were concerned with more philosophical questions, and saw in the magnetic fluid theory demonstration that the universe was a living organism. While the French investigated the somnambulistic states simply as auxiliary support for medical study, the Germans considered these trances an opportunity for experimental metaphysics (Charet, 1993). It would seem the phenomena occurring in the trances became more important than

the phenomenon of the mesmerist's transmission through the fluid 'sixth sense'. And here, as Charet notes, 'lies the still unsolved problem of the precise relationship between psyche and soma' (n10, p. 48). Jung believed in 'the close connection of psychic happenings with the physiological structure of the brain, with the glands and the body in general' (Jung, 1931, par. 657). But he protested that placing physical explanations in a place of primacy created a psychology that was without psyche. Psychology that left unexplored the unconscious psychic life and--as he considered it-built solely upon the drive of the instincts, was a psychology only of ego-consciousness. In Jung's first presentation at the Zofingia, a paper entitled "On the Limits of The Exact Sciences", he vehemently attacked contemporary materialistic science, and declared that 'exact research' should be conducted in the metaphysical realm (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 687). The subject of the psyche that dreams, anticipates, creates visions, and thinks below the level of the egoconsciousness was what Jung was interested in unveiling. In contrast to the materialist Lockean model that Freud followed (Rychlak, 1992), Jung continued from Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena, to the study of those things that lay precisely outside of the sensible world. Where scientific materialists believed that matter would deliver up more information than spirit had previously, Jung took as his starting point Kantian limits of reason--where the ultimate nature of matter would remain unknown--to allow for and explore Kantian noumena: what was noumenal for Kant was appropriated as phenomenal for Jung The 'disenchantment of the world' that had occurred throughout the Enlightenment, Jung sought to repair by returning to mankind a relationship with his unconscious, bringing to light '...the ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams

or in abnormal states of mind' (Jung, 1931, par. 674). Jung's way of putting 'an end to the conflict between mind and matter', was to refer to the subjective life of psychic reality--to psychic images. These images he considered constituted the known experience: 'for they alone are the immediate objects of my consciousness' (Jung, 1931, par. 680). Between the materialists' res extensa, and the rationalists' res cogitans, Jung strove to realise esse in anima-which lived the balance between them. In his quest for meaning in the soul, Jung's interests in the psyche took him back to a time well before the 17th century--to the Gnostics, Alchemy, and ancient Eastern texts. Jung turned, 'for better or for worse...back to the teachings of our forefathers' (Jung, 1931, par. 661). As we did not know how the psychic and the physical came to affect each other, Jung stated, we were therefore 'free to frame our assumptions the other way about for once, and to propose that the psyche arises from a spiritual principle which is as inaccessible to our understanding as matter' (Jung, 1931, par. 661)(italics added). Though Jung placed body and psyche as 'two aspects of the same thing', his hunger to explore the realms of the 'unseen' psyche left the body in an intangible, symbolic form, which failed to locate its flesh and blood as the bodying-forth of human existence. The Body of Phenomenology In Languages of the Psyche, G. S. Rousseau asserts that late in the Enlightenment, progressive thinkers such as Condorcet were dedicated to undermining mind/body dualisms by insisting that consciousness was merely an expression of body-based sense impressions and sensations. But romanticism spread throughout Europe, as a testament of mental individuality; and at the same time fierce challenges were made to the mind from cults, the church, the arts--and newly developed discourses in anthropology,

psychology and the by then 'privileged discourse of psychiatry' (Rousseau, 1990, p. 43). Body and consciousness remained elusive as a holistic unit, and those who persistently pleaded for body, generally enforced the dualism. Thus, as Rousseau confirms, minds and bodies were assured a legacy as individual entities. It was Phenomenology, officially founded by Husserl in the early 1900's, which laid claim to undercutting--once and for all--the Cartesian split between matter and mind; subject and object. In "Archetypes and Consciousness", Scott (1977) suggests that in an effort to understand meaning, the philosopher and the psychotherapist can and should work together. Philosophical investigation he sees therefore as a necessary element of any fully developed practice of psychotherapy. As all psychoanalytic work involves interpretation, theoretical formulations have far-reaching effects on which material is brought to light, and in what manner it is interpreted. Jung's theory of archetypes is thus philosophically indebted to Kantian theory of reason, and to the western metaphysical tradition of explanation by way of hypothesis. Scott contends that while Jung's archetypal theory is crucial to prevent his work from dissolving into individualistic relativism, it is also 'injurious' to the significance of Jung's experiential insights--upon which the theory was grounded--and inadequate in accounting for actual human experience. Jung uses archetypes to justify transcultural continuity, and to provide a nonsubjective ontological basis for human individuality. The archetypes are, however, a hypothetical structure of an autonomous realm, which in principle is not subject to direct knowledge or description (Scott, 1977). relativising and subjectifying function, As Jung conceived of the theory of the consciousness as ego-oriented and ego-dominated, and ego as a Unconscious and the Archetypes explains human commonness by

reference to an abstraction.

The archetypes, as such, are

irreducible to a more primordial shared experience, and subjectivity is known through psychic value attached to images, which are reflective of unconscious states of being. Had the archetypes not, for Jung, theoretically 'misappropriated' (p. 40) the universal nature of humanity--and had Jung not limited consciousness to the realm of the ego--he might have located the structure of the preconscious within grounds, which are both approachable and describable. In contrast, Scott suggests consciousness be understood as 'disclosive openness'. Within such consciousness, shared universal structures of meaning and representation are present prior to the ego's intellectual appropriation of it. Human consciousness as 'disclosive openness' is both common to all of humanity, and subject to description. This, Husserl discovered in the lived body's presence to the world. Husserl and the Lived Body Husserl first developed the notion of Leib--lived body--as set in contrast to Korper--the body which falls under pure physical description. Combined with the theory of intentionality, Husserl's concept of the lived body provided the framework for an entirely new notion of subjectivity--and continued in the work of those who followed him, such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Though the long-range goal of Husserl's work was to establish the autonomy and efficacy of reason, what emerged in his determined efforts to do so was a phenomenology of the body--as he discovered the degree to which 'reason' was dependent on the body's very constitution. Husserl's differentiation between Leib and Korper contested the mechanical notion of the body which was left by Descartes, and which to a large extent has continued into a medical and natural scientific tradition still with us today.

Nature, as Husserl understood it, was physically characterised as the correlate of a particular (rather than a pure) interest brought to it by the subject. As ensouled bodies, objects of nature included both material bodies as their 'founding stratum', and also psychic properties that came with them (Husserl, cited Welton, 1999, p. 41). It is precisely because these properties belong to the body, Husserl explained, that it is termed a lived body. Husserl thereby declared men and animals indivisible as material things: that is, they cannot be broken down into component properties, because they are spatially-localised and, with what is counted as psychic, have 'something like' extension in space (p.42). The body did not function as a mere transmitter (as it did for Descartes), with perception only a passive process. Rather, the body contributed directly to the content of what is perceived. The psychic properties Husserl considered to animate the body were perhaps the very same objects of study for Jung. But where Husserl considered them in the body enough to assign the lived body an extension in space, Jung's extension into space was effected through the Self, which was not actually a part of the lived body, because it was not considered to belong to the individual (Jung, 1989). With Jung's notion of 'I' as ego consciousness only, detached from but identified with the body, what is attributed to the body is not capable of extension in space. In fact, what Jung states instead is that the body creates the exclusiveness of consciousness, which is determined by being 'here and not there' (Jung, 1989, p. 344). Here begins the confusion caused by limited definitions of consciousness. For the phenomenologists, not only was 'I' greater than the ego-logical appropriation of the body, but 'I', or consciousness, was yet to be defined. Husserl presents a relational process in the material presence of things, rather than in invisible psychic processes such as Jung's









environment, things would be rendered only 'phantoms' floating somewhere between the material world and mind--a place where Jung's archetypes may be thought to reside. And 'things', for Husserl, have a relation to each other, because of the orientation they have to our perceiving and moving bodies. In Welton's words, Husserl's is a 'lived body of free movement of approaching and distancing, of grasping and repelling, of resisting and penetrating' (Welton, 1999, p. 43). The lived body is a psycho-physical, moving interaction between ourselves and the objects of our world. These movements are, furthermore, experienced from within, through what Husserl called kinaesthetic sensations: which he considered to form an essential part of the constitution of our spatiality. In addition to our kinesthetic sensations, Husserl determined that the lived body is itself one of those things that it comes to experience. The body moves itself in the ongoing course of perception; and the tactual qualities we encounter arise in correlation with various movements of it. The enlived body is present to itself 'not only as a nexus of sensing but also as locus of movement, even as a system of movements'. In Husserl's analysis, sensing is extended into an act of localisation, and movement inserted into an analysis of motivational interdependency (Welton, 1999). But what becomes of the natural scientific description of the body? How do its physical description and its phenomenological characterisation interact? While Jung reconciles this intersection through positing the existence of a psychoid archetype, as an archetype--like other archetypes--what it still lacks is individual material reality. Husserl addresses this issue in a late text, suggesting that the body contains not only an 'outer body' but an 'inner body' as well:

that which is 'a unity of organs kinaesthetically and sensibly moved', whose activity makes possible 'courses of experiences...' (cited Welton, 1999, p. 51/2). Husserl essentially retains a unity between Korper and Leib, by rendering a body that extends beyond a nullpoint --that is, beyond a perceptual organ which remains an absence or 'nullity' in the midst of the perceived. Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, while following on from Husserl, disagreed that an assumptionless point of view could be achieved through the phenomenological method; rejecting Husserl's pursuit of essence and the presence of a transcendental ego. A transcendental ego is an identity of 'I' that is intuitively--and spontaneously--aware of itself as existing over time. This 'I' can be seen as a correlate to Jung's notion of Self, though here it is still considered to exist within human consciousness, and not as a 'spiritual principle' which precedes it. The existentialists were concerned with the nature of existence rather than the nature of essences, and moved away from Kant's most fundamental mode of self consciousness as 'transcendental apperception'. Instead, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty conceived the awareness of existence over time as occurring empirically, through the body's presence to itself as a Being-in-the-world (Wider, 1997). Sartre begins from the belief that all consciousness is selfconsciousness, whose subject is grounded in a primary form which is rooted in the body. Distinguishing itself from the Cartesian cogito, Sartre's was not a transcendental 'I', but an 'I' which was empirically grounded (Wider, 1997). While Sartre himself lost sight of the body-subject, Wider argues that when his primary bodily notion is returned to the pre-reflective and reflective distinctions, his work is sustained under the supposition that the most basic mode of the body's presence to the world is bodily intentionality. In the pre-reflective state--which lacks distinctions between 'I' and 'not

I'--there is still a bodily intentionality through which one sustains a consciousness of self. Carrying Wider's argument one step further, I would suggest the following: As Sartre's pre-reflective 'self' is without conscious distinctions between it and its world, one could presume that here we would discover some of the richest somatic possibilities in the transference and countertransference phenomena; and a ground for the archetypal a priori, if located in the body's fluid unconscious rather than in a fixed matrix of instincts. Additionally, investigation into this pre-reflective realm may yield an organic reconciliation between the anatomical and the lived-body (a coniunctio?), while revealing the site of the 'third area' or 'transitional space' of the therapeutic encounter. This pre-reflective state of consciousness may also be the 'fluid' state (of hypnosis?) through which Mesmer worked his cures. Choosing to identify himself outside of the field of a positivist scientific perspective, Sartre refused to allow any evidence from the fields of biology and neuroscience to support his theoretical claims (Wider, 1997). Jung, in contrast to Sartre, held an idea about the body that appears to fall fairly consistently within medical models of his day. In his Zarathustra Seminars, for example, he criticises Nietzsche for equating the self with the body, for body, as Jung presents it, is obviously just a material composite: ...Nietzsche makes the one-sided identification of the self with the body, and of course that is not satisfactory; he endows the body with a creative faculty or a meaningful faculty, which, even with a tremendous effort of the imagination, cannot be put into it. For we know too well that the body is a biological function, having seen how it behaves in experimental biology (Jung, 1989, p. 397). Jung allows that the body has its 'claims' on the subject, and is necessary as a counterbalance to the spirit (Jung, 1989). And while

he repeats the dictum that the body and the psyche are 'one and the same', the body he is referring to is a Cartesian one: it is made up of compounds and chemicals, and biological systems. It is not seen as a phenomenological presence of conscious existence. Thus, Jung confusedly both maintains and cuts across the duality of body and mind: For the more the mentality or the psyche leaves the body to itself, the more the body goes wrong...The two ought to live together... . It is always a wise thing when you discover a new metaphysical try it out for a month or so, whether it upsets your stomach or not; if it does you can always be sure it is wrong (Jung, 1989, p. 355). Though this is very good advice for a metaphysical proposition, it nevertheless psychological evokes a duality for while it. suggesting struggles one with make the reparations Jung

boundaries of his conceptual divisions here. 'Man', he says, 'has also a living body'. Also? The two parts of the system must work together, he advises, because 'something might be apparently quite nice for the body, but it is a very bad experience for the soul' (Jung, 1989, p. 355). And yet: '...soul and body are not two things. They are one.' Quite likely, this good experience for the body that is bad for the soul, is brought about by the ego--or the instincts acting upon it?--rather For than Jung, the like 'body' under phenomenological the body is the investigation. Descartes,

concretisation of that 'unknown thing', which produces both it and psyche (Jung, 1989). Whereas Descartes--and Jung--argued for the living presence of the 'soul' underneath consciousness, for Sartre, beneath conscious activity there was simply the body's presence to the world. Could this underlying bodily presence to the world be considered what Jung was defining as soul? More than the self-consciousness of subjectivity, this unconscious presence to the world Sartre adopted

from Heidegger's notion of Dasein: the intersubjective, inseparable relationship formed between our existence and the world. Heidegger's Body As the presencing of intersubjectivity, Heidegger defines the body as a sensorimotor means of revealing what is Other, while itself receding before its experiential data. Though attention can shift so as to reside within the body's own here-and-now experience (its muscular sensations and sense of weight), Heidegger considered this a 'deficient' mode of our usual concern with the world. Attending to the body directly requires suspending what Polanyi described as its 'from-to' telos, which is directed away from itself (Leder, 1990, p. 18cf). One arrives at this 'deficient' mode of perception by suspension, as it is considered derivative of the more primary mode of moving outward towards the world of things. Selfpresencing requires modifying this inherent corporeal initiative (Leder, 1990) and, even while doing so, can only be achieved to a limited degree. (Increasing one's capacity for 'self-presencing' is one of the results of eastern practices that attune with the breath, as well as western somatic techniques that amplify awareness of bodily sensation.) What phenomenologists thus far had failed to do, was identify the shifting forms of orientation within the body's perception of itself. In its layers of 'synaesthetic' perception, body consciousness seamlessly recedes and emerges as its various experiences of the world come into view. Husserl's kineasthetic sensations, and his 'inner body', as well as Sartre's pre-reflective identity all fall within this appearing and disappearing structure of bodily consciousness. Still hanging on to notions of a scientific, physiological explanation of body, Jung might place here what he termed feelings: as he

considered emotions to arise within experience of physiological change (Jung, 1989). Roger Brooke (1991) refers specifically to Heidegger's notion of Dasein to discover parallels between theories in phenomenology and Jungian theory. This makes it particularly interesting to note that for many years scholars of Heidegger's thought determined that 'there is virtually nothing on the body to be found in Heidegger's writings' (Levin, 1990, p. 123). Perhaps, here, too, lies a parallel between them. While Heidegger admitted that the body presented a problematic of its own, for Jung, no such problematic existed, as 'there [was] no difference in principle between the physiology of the monkey and our own physiology' (Jung 1989, p. 1398). The Unconscious Body While providing a pre-reflective, continuous sense of identity, meaningful aspects of consciousness that are rooted in the body are specifically forgotten during experience, as 'the body conceals itself in the act of revealing what is Other' (Leder, 1990, p. 22). This presence-absence nature of the body includes not only the disappearance of surface organs--such as the eye when bringing the visual field into view--but also what Leder examines as background disappearance. Into the 'background', whole bodily regions disappear as they are incorporated into the corporeal gestalt, and are relegated to a supportive role--such as the muscles in the neck while turning the head to gain access to another visual field. Perhaps it is within Leder's background disappearances that we would locate the Jungian somatic unconscious. And what might we find if we allowed our consciousness more deeply into the physical sensations that accompany this background, 'anatomical realm'? Both physically and phenomenologically, the body as a whole is always shifting. Taking account of the lived body as a living process,

its aspects of appearance and disappearance remain in flux, as a means of extending its perceptual powers. Incorporation of experience as bodily knowledge is transformed into potential for new action: the process of incorporation itself being a dialectic of the body and its world, as through it, both the world and one's body are reciprocally transformed. But as the body incorporates new awareness--thus transforming the world through it--both ebb and flow into presence and absence. Over time, these new experiences and the world that beckoned them recede from view. In the fluidity of body-world relations, disappearances swell into a vast field of repetitions of our corporeality: As I go through the day, I do not notice my body, but neither do I, for the most part, notice the bed on which I sleep, the clothes I wear, the chair on which I sit down to breakfast, the car I drive to work. I live in bodies beyond bodies...recapitulating...aspects of my corporeality. As such, it is not simply my surface organs that disappear but entire regions of the world with which I dwell in intimacy (Leder, 1990, p. 35). Such is the pervasive nature of our corporeal disappearance. Merleau-Ponty's Body, and Jung 'The notion of perception is ambiguous', Merleau-Ponty states, 'because [the senses] are instruments of bodily excitation only, and not perception itself' (1962, p. 212). Though we call these senses our own--our eyes see, our hands touch, our backs ache--these expressions do not account for our actual experience, but rather interpret from a perspective detached from its original subject. Because we have been taught these ways of thinking, we distribute through the body, perceiving which really belongs to the soul--and interject perception into the thing which is perceived (p. 213). As our relationships with the world are taken for granted, in order to see the 'wonder of the world' and grasp it as paradoxical,

we must break with and suspend our compounded relationships with it. We must 'refuse it our complicity', 'put it out of play' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xiii). The material presence of our relationships with the world are taken for granted and thus go unnoticed: 'in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them'; as our existence is 'too tightly held in the world to be able to know itself' (p. xv). In 'radical reflection', one brings to conscious reflection the pre-reflective, essential experiences of consciousness. Husserl's search for essences, Merleau-Ponty defends, are 'destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman's net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed' (p. xv). Seeking the essence of consciousness, then, consists in rediscovering the presence of oneself as being-in-the-world. This presence to oneself can be found within the dialectic processes of our corporeal nature, as a universal physiological consciousness. It does not require unconscious structures such as archetypes that can never be known. Rather, to position Jung's archetypal structures within the body's complemental, receding and emerging states, would provide a material rather than a speculative dialectic, which is describable within bodily experience. The knower and the known are then united in a process of intentionality and meaning-making, which is universally shared through human embodiment. Jungian analysis that does not take account of the mutual corporeal dimensions experienced both within and outside of the consulting room, thus abrogates the primordial basis through which our psychological realities are formed. If consciousness is a disclosive process of openness, it moves beneath self-conscious intentional action, and is capable of providing Jung's use of imagery and psychic value with a corporeal base. The lived body and the

anatomical body--or for Jung, soul and the material body-relinquish a conceptual duality. This reconciliation is effected through psycho-physical awareness, which places in mutual communication bodily participation and psychological perception. Conclusion - A Bodily Presence for Jungian Theory and Practice With Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty returned the unknown soul to the material body of the senses. Though the 'incorporation' was not complete--as the direction of his work was left unfinished--it is within his vision of phenomenology that Jung's psychic images can thrive, as they are implanted into the soil of a fully corporealised life. In Merleau-Ponty's unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible (1968), the lived body is supplanted by the ontological notion of 'flesh'; and Merleau-Ponty embraces what belongs neither to the subject nor the world exclusively--but is a primal element out of which both are born in mutual relation (Leder, 1990). As a kind of circuitry, the flesh traverses and includes me, but I am not its origin. The body is a pre-reflective synergy of different consciousnesses, and the sensible world arises 'from the mutual reference and intertwining of all forms of perception' (p. 63). Though he continued to refer 'flesh' to the sensorimotor--or surface--body, in this last work, Merleau-Ponty gives us the 'flesh' as a series of 'chiasmatic' intertwinings; which Leder (1990; 1999) then extends to include the visceral, whose circuitry is intertwined with the visible. The hidden base upon which the surface body rests, the visceral body constitutes its own 'circuitry of vibrant, pulsing life, which precedes the perceptual foetal life, outruns it in sleep, sustains it from beneath at all moments...Like the Visible, the Visceral cannot be properly said to belong to the subject; it is a power that traverses me...' (1990, p. 65).

Jean Luc Nancy (1994) states in "Corpus", that the body was first thought from the inside: 'as buried darkness into which light only penetrates in the form of reflections...' (p. 19). Scott's suggestion that what Jung's archetypes lack is a connection to everyday, moment-to-moment existence, can be taken up here: in the body with no words, the body that bleeds, the body which is first an interiority 'dedicated to images, and to the knowledge of images...'. The death of god, Nancy interprets as one 'in which we have lost this glorious body, this sublime body: this real symbol of his sovereign majesty.... It is here as nowhere else that spirit arises as infinite concentration into the self...' (p. 19/22). To root Jung's archetypes in the receding/emerging body allows mutual corporeal intertwinings, which present an endless field of psychic valuings: as the living body's multiple fields of consciousness engage sensuously with the world. Whilst Jungian analysts such as Samuels (1991), Field (1989), Schwartz-Salant (1986;1991;1995), Hillman (1982), Weiner (1994) and Redfearn (1994;1998) have each called for a revisioning of the bodys presence in psycheand others have attempted to directly connect bodily dimensions with Jungian ideas (e.g. Blackmer (1989), Chodorow (1986;1991), McNeely (1987), Papadopoulos (2000;2001)-implicit within Jungian praxis is an attention to the interwoven texture of the imaginal, the lived-body, and the lived-world phenomena. Romanyshyn (2000) revisions this interweaving specifically as a phenomenology of the sensuous world which itself reveals this imaginal, metaphorical character. When coupled with the attention of Merleau-Pontys radical reflection, the imaginal is thus allowed its embeddedness in physical presence. To require: bring the body as the shared, collective conscious/unconscious dialectic into the consulting room would a) the therapist's honest physical presence--that is, a

consciousness which allows the depth of the body to be present; b) 'radical reflection' upon the pre-reflective bodily awareness which is co-created by the two bodies in the room; and c) a conscious allowing of this 'living-body' dialogue into both the transitional space, and the therapeutic alliance. Therapists would invite what they see with their eyes to be touched by the tangible things the living body comes upon: 'being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 137). In Jungian analysis, the body can easily be eclipsed by the analyst's attention to the unseen, nonsensuous aspect of the relationship. Rather than creating the naive sense of a 'ready' vessel for countertransference phenomena, therapists, then, would be called upon to live physically, the immediate and spontaneous intersubjectivity which is both creating and created by the presence of the corporeal encounter. To bring bodily intentionality to the foreground of consciousness in the creation of a therapeutic space, would require more than (Redfearn's reference to) a 'not-too-disembodied therapist' to be present in the room (1998, p. 33). Including both reflective and pre-reflective bodily intentionality in the Jungian canon also requires adjustments to Jung's model of the psyche. The body would no longer be placed at the physiological, instinctual end of the spectrum only; and images, themselves, would be recognised as arising out of our bodily constitution. The Unconscious would be seen as something in the body itself. And, perhaps, the greatest weight of revision would fall on Jung's notion of the Self. In a deeply reflective state of embodiment, there exists an egoless consciousness that is present in a primordial, prepersonal mode of being in the world (Levin, 2000). Awareness of this Self's presence emerges through the reflection and reclaiming of an intertwining, incarnate belongingness. The body of the Self is

born through intercorporeality: 'The constitution of others does not come after that of the body, others and my body are born together from an original ecstasy' (Merleau-Ponty, cited Levin, 2000, p. 175). Scott suggests Jung's (and Husserl's) ground-breaking principles allow for transformation through perceptiveness and reflection that do not require an ultimate theory of transcendental order. To ground Jung's formative approach of interpretive 'tentativeness' and 'repeated recontextualisation', Scott emphasises the need for 'Husserl's accent on appearances and the open field of intentionality that gives disclosure and synthesis in the coming of things' (Scott, 2000, p. 155). Central to this I would include an attention to the weighty materiality of the body as a shared corporeal field within which both analyst and analysand work. Levin (2000) proposes Jung's collective unconscious be understood as the primordial body, as it unites in a dispersed consciousness, the sensuous through an act of synthesis. This prepersonal body of communication, he says, 'is no other than our friend Eros' (p. 164). With the primordial pre-personal body identified as the collective unconscious, archetypal structures thus correlate with Merleau-Ponty's organismic a priori, while radical reflection allows for the remembering of this a priori synthesis of meaning. As the primordial body is without an ego-logical subject, its memory works through images: '...its processes are, at first, more like dreams than thoughts' (p. 165). Jean Luc Nancy and David Levin both adduce that this place of 'non-knowledge' is the body that Psyche herself is. It is the body that cannot be reduced to a sign. As non-knowledge, to think the thought of the body, Nancy explains, one 'must weigh it as a word not yet uttered', a voice which remains without vocabulary, and resembles 'the dialogue of the soul with itself'. And just as the 'single body exposes itself as the sharing of its separate senses',

each body exposes the other, 'in the same gesture that exposes them to itself' (Nancy, 1994, p. 27-30). Following Haule's description (2000), while the ego as selfconscious subject appropriates and makes a world its own, the Self-as an intertwined body(s)--unconsciously gathers a world of unfathomed variation and complexity. Through the temenos, Jung's 'analysis from the Self' evokes an analytic third--born within a primordial bodily consciousness--and creates a shared implicit wholeness that includes the vast breadth and coherence of subjectivity. In conclusion: the unacknowledged context of the collective bodyworld, begs for elucidation and differentiation. It yearns to feel both its weightiness and its fluidity. As the corporeal world both swells and simultaneously disappears, and our existence passes through legions of bodies, in what other way could we better celebrate each one of our number? 1 Notes: 1. This is a response in the form of reframing the question asked by Jean Luc Nancy. Regarding the eight billion people in the world, he asks: Since we know that it is all for nothing, for no other purpose than to exist, and to be those bodies, what will we be able to do to celebrate their number? (1994, p.23).

References Blackmer, J.D. (1989) Acrobats of the Gods: Dance and Transformation. Toronto: Inner City Books. Brooke, R. (1991) Jung and Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Brooke, R. (2000) (ed) Pathways into the Jungian World. London: Routledge. Charet, F.X. (1993) Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Chodorow, J. (1986) The Body as symbol: Dance/Movement in Analysis, in Schwartz-Salant, N. and Stein, M. (eds), The Body in Analysis. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron. Chodorow, J. (1991) Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology. London: Routledge. Ellenberger, Henri (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. London: Allan Lane The Penguin Press. Field, N. (1989) 'Listening with the body: an exploration in the countertransference', in British Joural of Psychotherapy, Vol 5 (4), pp. 512-522. Foucault, M. (1961) 'The Birth of the Asylum' from Madness and Civilization, in (1984) P. Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1976) 'We 'Other' Victorians' from The History of Sexuality Vol. I, in (1984) P. Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin Books. Frank, R. (1990) 'Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in 17th Century Medicine', in Rousseau, G. S. (ed) The Languages of the Psyche. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Haule, J.R. (2000) 'Analysing from the Self: An Empirical Phenomenology of the 'Third' in Analysis', in Brooke, R. (ed)

Pathways into the Jungian World. London: Routledge. Hillman, J. (1982) 'Anima Mundi: the return of the soul to the world', in Spring: Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought. pp. 71-93. Jung, C. G. (1931) 'Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology'. CW 8: 338-358. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Jung, C.G. (1989) Nietzsche's Zarathustra. C. G. Jung: The Seminars Vol II Part I and II. (Notes on seminars given 1934-39.) Jarrett, J.L. (ed).London: Routledge. Leder, D. (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Leder, D. (1999) 'Flesh and Blood: A Proposed Supplement to Merleau-Ponty', in Welton, D. (ed)The Body. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Originally published (1990) Human Studies, 13. Levin, D.M. (1999) 'The Ontological Dimension of Embodiment: Heidegger's Thinking of Being', in Welton, D. (ed) The Body. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Levin, D.M. (2000) 'Eros and Psyche: A Reading of Neumann and Merleau-Ponty', in Brooke, R. (ed) Pathways into the Jungian World. London: Routledge. Luyendijk-Elshout, A. (1990) 'Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightened Doctor and His Frightened Patient', in Rousseau, G. S. (ed) The Languages of the Psyche. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. McNeely, D.A. (1987) Touching: Body Therapy and Depth Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nancy, J.L. (1993) 'Corpus', in (1994) MacCannell, J. and Zakarin, L. (eds) The Thinking Body. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Originally published in Nancy, J.L. The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Papadopoulos, N.L.R. (2000) Critical Essay: Authentic Movement and Jung, in Harvest: Journal for |Jungian Studies, Vol. 46, (1), pp.118-128. Papadopoulos, N.L.R. (2001) The Dynamics of the Dance Movement Experience: Combining Jung and Winnicott, in Emotion, Vol. XII (4), pp. 19-31. Porter, R. (1990) 'Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body', in Rousseau, G. S. (ed) The Languages of the Psyche. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Redfearn, J. (1994) Movements of the I in Relation to the Body Image, in Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, pp. 311-330. Redfearn, J. (1998) 'The Body-Self Relationship', in Alister, I. and Hauke, C. (eds) Contemporary Jungian Analysis. London: Routledge. Romanyshyn, R. (2000) 'Alchemy and the Subtle Body of Metaphor: Soul and Cosmos', in Brooke, R. (ed) Pathways into the Jungian World. London: Routledge. Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, R. (1990) 'Towards a Natural History of Mind and Body' in Rousseau, G. S. (ed) The Languages of the Psyche. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Rychlak, J.F. (1992) 'Jung as Dialectician and Teleologist', in R.K. Papadopoulos (ed) Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments Vol I. London and New York: Routledge. Originally published (1984) in R.K. Papadopoulos and G.S. Saayman (eds) Jung in Modern Perspective. London: Wildwood House. Samuels, A. (1991) The Plural Psyche. London and New York: Routledge. Schaffer, S. (1990) 'States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural

Philosophy', in Rousseau, G. S. (ed) The Languages of the Psyche. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Schwartz-Salant, N. and Stein, M. (1986) (eds) The Body in Analysis. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron. Schwartz-Salant, N. (1991) Vision, Interpretation, and the Interactive |Field, in Journal of Analytical Psychology, 36, pp. 343365. Schwartz-Salant, N. (1995) 'On the Interactive Field as the Analytic Object', in Stein, M. The Interactive Field In Analysis. Wilmette, Ill. Chiron. Scott, C. (1977) 'Archetypes and Consciousness' Idealistic Studies ,7. Scott, C. (2000) 'Mnemosyne and Lethe', in Brooke, R. (ed) Pathways into the Jungian World. London: Routledge. Welton, Donn (1999) 'Soft, Smooth Hands', in Welton, D. (ed) The Body. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Welton, D. (1999) (ed) Introduction, in Welton, D. (ed) The Body. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Weiner, J. (1994) Looking Out and Looking In: some reflections on body talk in the consulting room, in Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, pp. 331-350. Wider, K. (1997) The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cornell University Press.

Janet Kaylo is a Certified Movement Analyst and Registered Movement Therapist holding an MA in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies from the University of Essex, England. She is faculty at Laban Centre London, and Goldsmiths College Art Psychotherapy Unit, University of London. She conducts workshops and training in Body Process and Movement Analysis internationally; and is director of the intensive Certification in Movement Analysis Programme at York University, Toronto. 44, Swingate Lane, London SE18 2HJ