Response To Aimé Agnel's Paper

I hate to add my noise to the music of this paper. Yet this is a paper which invites noise in, welcoming disruption as part of the background which completes thought. This paper raises the noise of psychological thinking to the level of creative sounding, precisely by introducing what its author well calls ‘an added degree of complexity’. My disruption will take the form of a thinking - and therefore, categorically, more seemingly knowing - response to what he has already given us, superbly, with feeling. Aimé Agnel allows his thinking to play below the surface of his argument, illuminating his ideas from within. I come from without, like the Stranger to whom his patient Mathilde must somehow relate. If I am in the role of forcing this subtle author's thought to the surface, I would like to start intrusively, by posing a question of his text which it has already answered, as a beginning point for an inquiry that may deintegrate the paper and stimulate discussion. Only then will we see if we can provoke the transcendent function to make its emergence in the discussion. Here is my question. The title of Agnel's paper is ‘Un autre degré de complexité’ - another, or an added, degree of complexity. What, then, is the first degree of complexity that this paper invites us to complicate?

Agnel himself gives us a historical answer. The first degree of complexity that Jung uncovered in the evolution of his psychological thought was the complex theory, which enabled the white-coated, academic, laboratory Jung of 1904-9 to map out the structure of the unconscious without sacrificing what Agnel calls the ‘continuity of consciousness’ that had allowed the philosophic and scientific thought of his ‘fathers’ in academic psychology to get this far. And clearly, the developing evidence for the shadow that Jung was able to adduce in his experimental researches with the word association test was a complication; it had led Jung to introduce what truly was a ‘complex