Jung's Image of Psychological Man*

In his brilliant study of Freud, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests that Freud is to be understood as a combination of two elements, force and meaning. Seen from this standpoint, Freud's interpretation of dreams and the other symbols of the unconscious is a translation of what is already a translation, a decipering of what has already entered into the realm of meaning through the meeting of libidinal energy and symbolic signification. By this same token Freud represents a synthesis of two antithetical traditions, that of mechanism and rationalism, on the one hand, and that of romanticism and mysticism, on the other.1

Freud does indeed represent a golden mean between the be-haviorists, who try to deal with psychology in purely mechanistic terms, and a psychologist like Jung, who converts everything into meaning and leaves no room for an energy and force that is not, in however symbolic a way, rationalized. The behaviorists, and operationalists, even when they correct their isolated psychological monads in favor of dyadic relations, are barred from an image of man in the full sense of the term by their resolutely external position in relation to their subject. Jung's opposite emphasis on meaning seen from within tends to lead him toward an all-encompassing gnosis.