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In his earlier book Jung and the Post Jungians (1985), Andrew Samuels focused on the similarities between the many and the one - how most contemporary trends in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy were prefigured in the ideas and practice of C G Jung. Now The Plural Psyche is a celebration of the many and the different where Samuels applies what he calls the ‘tool’ of pluralism to a range of concerns in depth psychology, extending from the microcosm of the intra-psychic world to the interpersonal world of the family and beyond. His study takes in such issues as sexuality, gender identity, borderline disorder, private and public morality, concentrating especially on the figures of the father and the analyst.
A pluralistic attitude is one which positively upholds and maintains the contradictions and differences within a subject or field, in the belief that ‘truth’ is multi-faceted and not reducible to a single position. Samuels writes (p. ix):
Pluralism is an approach to conflict that tries to reconcile differences without imposing a false synthesis on them and, above all, without losing sight of the particular value and truth of each element in the conflict.
Implicit in this approach are both the structuralist idea that a subject is defined by the oppositions between its interrelated parts and, further, the post-structuralist claim (supported by Samuels) that meaning is multi-faceted and over-determined and, above all, governed by the subjectivity of the enquirers.
Pluralism, as an instrument, seems also to connect directly with three key Jungian concepts:
his vision of the psyche as the relationship between conscious and unconscious, constituted by the collision of opposites (Humbert 1988, p. 117):
Wholeness doesn't mean having or being everything; it means, rather, living in a structure within which opposites are at play.
the centrality of metaphor - that all theory, and indeed all language, is metaphorical and that the metaphorical may be a more valid witness than the liter