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MANIC-DEPRESSIVE psychosis is predominantly seen today as an illness with an hereditary-biological etiology. Interest in the psychodynamic issues, and even in the psychopathological description of this condition, has decreased greatly since the still rather undefined ‘organic’ etiology has been so widely accepted. The result is that little has been expressed in recent literature which could help or amplify our understanding of this pathology, despite the great fascination and empathy that manic-depressive states evoke in therapists who deal with them.
Jung conceived of depression as a regressive state, a ‘… sink (ing) down into a sort of embryonic condition.…’ (JUNG 7, p. 32), and as expressive of an absolute dominance of the unconscious over conscious processes (JUNG 4, par. 75; 6, par. 344). In his paper, ‘On manic mood disorders,’ Jung underlines the extremely erratic, chaotic and rootless life-style of manics, as well as the association of the disorder with alcoholism, orality and anti-social behaviour. But he left us neither a unitary description of the psychosis nor an interpretation of it.
It is the purpose of this paper, therefore, to formulate a Jungian hypothesis of manic-depressive illness. I propose first that the disorder is not affective, but rather a dysfunction of the ego/self axis. In order to support this hypothesis we will examine Ludwig Binswanger's phenomenological approach to and understanding of the disease, and then show how Binswanger's constructs relate to those of Erich Neumann regarding the ego/self axis. Having shown the relationship between