Freud and Jung

This paper has been adapted from a talk given to a small group of psychoanalysts in May 1990 with the aim of stimulating discussion about the relationship between psychoanalytic ideas and the changing intellectual climate in which we live. I have written several papers on the theme of the need to find a new paradigm for psychoanalysis which would release us from the constraints of Freud's 19th-century scientific thinking. I was influenced both by analysts who used ideas from outside psychoanalysis and also by the many holistic theories that have become popular in recent years. The point of a holistic theory is that it combines scientific and non-scientific ideas into a single world view. Science is not devalued, but it is placed in a wider context in which other viewpoints are not criticized for being non-scientific.

My first paper was about Bateson and Matte Blanco; the second was about holistic thinking as exemplified by David Bohm's theory of implicate order (Bohm, 1980); then I wrote a paper on femininity based on Sylvia Payne's 1935 paper (Arden, 1984, 1985, 1987). The idea of feminine thinking as integrative and holistic originated with Marjorie Brierley and has been around in the Independent Group of the British Psycho-Analytical Society ever since. I suggested that Jung's view of femininity in men and women accords much better with cultural and aesthetic experience than