You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This brief volume presents a series of statements averaging about 400 words, each evidently constituting one of the ‘raids’ alluded to in the title. Paul Kugler tells us he wishes to rethink the basic tenets of depth psychology while holding the tension between Freud and Jung, so as to enrich our clinical perspectives.
The first chapter reviews 2500 years of philosophical reflection on the nature of the psychic image, from Plato to the present, in thirteen short, pointed salvos. Our Western heritage comes off as a long rollercoaster ride in which the value of the image has been, by turns: a pale reflection of the object, derivative of the subject, the source of all creativity, misleading illusion, etc. In the end the tension is lost and Jung wins the battle; for psyche is image, and image points beyond subjectivity—not to the object but to the ‘sublime’ (p. 20).
In Chapter Two, the ‘unthinkable’ becomes the unconscious, that which is unknown to the ego but not to a mythic figure like Khidr, Islam's Angel of Interpretation, ‘the personification [of] … unconscious meaning’ (p. 27). Although the unconscious ‘defies’ our efforts to know it, theories to dig out the truth of a text have flourished in the twentieth century. Kugler's historical reprise highlights the extent to which the various schools of interpretation have failed to lead us to some Khidr-like certainty. Khidr's God is hidden; our conscious lens is ‘always clouded’ by our figures of speech. In the end it is only this surd, this ‘unthinkable’ reality that ‘gives authority to all schools of depth psychology’ (p. 38).
In the following two chapters Kugler surveys, respectively, the psychoanalytic and Jungian schools of depth psychology. Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann seemed to rescue the ego from its relatively undifferentiated state in Freud's writings, as they considered the ego's defences and the question of whether it could live conflict-free. Object relations theory, however, contextualized the ego by taking