O That Esoteric Windiness
And another treat, this review of a long biography of Jung. It’s full of good jokes and pertinent observations. For instance –
I picked it up with some words that Macaulay wrote in a review of a two-volume biography of Lord Burleigh echoing through my mind like the insistent snatch of a tune (I quote from memory): Compared with the labour of reading these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, the labour of children in the mines, the labour of slaves on the plantation, is but a pleasant recreation.
And then –
Jung was decidedly not born a charlatan—or at least, he was not one throughout the whole of his career. True, he grew up in a family with a more than average number of table-rappers, which no doubt inclined him later to the study of the esoteric (for it certainly never occurred to him to wonder why the esoteric was, in fact, esoteric), and was subjected in his youth to that Teutonic windiness which comes so easily, though no means inevitably, to those who think and write in the German language. There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity, to which bored society ladies are drawn like flies to dung: and this no doubt explains how he became the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy.
I particularly like that, because it’s so relevant to the Bad Writing topic we’ve been gnawing on lately. ‘There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity…’ Exactly so, and that’s why people do it. That, plus the way it makes it so much harder for critics to pin down their mistakes.
Jung was a preternaturally unclear writer and thinker: he would never say anything clearly when obfuscation would do. Whether this was from lack of talent or an unconscious appreciation that clarity led to the possibility of contradiction and even refutation…
Precisely. Dangerous stuff, clarity. It can make it clear that we’re talking nonsense.
Just don’t ever try reading Blavatsky.
I always had problems with Jung’s gender stuff–the idea that the same quality can be somehow inherent in a person of one sex but “contrasexual”, semmingly less legit, in someone of the other sex. Also his interesting idea of archetypes turned out to be a rather limited cast of characters none of which quite matched me. Admittedly most of my contact with his work was thru others’ intros, but I can tell by smelling something that I don’t want to step in it.
I suspect Jung may have gotten part of his cult because he might just have looked good in contrast to Freud, but I am not sure; I am only sure I can’t stand either of them any more…
Funny thing, though, my favorite fiction authors, Machen and Lovecraft and Cabell and so on, also come up with stuff that is vague, screwy-sounding, not-quite-adding-up…and yet it’s fun. Go figure…
No, don’t worry, I don’t plan to (read Blavatsky).
Yes exactly, Jung can look good (in some ways) compared to Freud – and vice versa. But one really doesn’t have to choose between them. It was odd listening to the biographer interviewed on Fresh Air the other day, she kept talking as if that were exactly what one has to do – go from Freud to Jung. And both she and the interviewer kept talking as if psychology were synonymous with the pair of them – when in fact they’re both quite irrelevant to psychology, especially academic research-based psychology. But apparently the word hasn’t reached the general public – including even someone who’s just written a huge biography of Jung. I find that very odd. It’s as if someone wrote a massive biography of Ptolemy under the impression that he’s central to mathematics as it’s taught now.
Anyway, the fiction thing isn’t all that strange, really. Fantasy in fiction is one thing, and in science it’s quite another!