My late father hated Carl Jung. Should I shun him for ever too? | Zoe Williams

2023-09-04 14:03

My dad was a criminologist, but he self-identified as a behavioural psychologist. I only ever knew two things about behaviourism. One was a joke: two behaviourists have sex, and one turns to the other and says: “That was great for you; how was it for me?” There’s a funnier joke about a guy who has a fear of monsters under his bed, and after cycling through all the therapy in the world lands at a behaviourist who tells him to cut the legs off his bed.

You get the picture, right? Humans’ deepest motivations are all right there to see in their behaviour. Whatever you do, make it literal and solutions-based, and don’t get any metaphors involved. There’s probably a bit more to it than that, but never mind. None of us has to practise as a behaviourist in the next 20 minutes, and if and when we do, someone will train us.

The second thing I knew was that Carl Jung was the enemy. I never even heard the name Jung not prefixed by a swearword. Freud got a pass. It was OK for him to do metaphors so long as you understood that he wasn’t a scientist, he was more of a poet. Jung drove the behaviourists insane.

Honestly, in the entire time I knew my dad, he was open-minded, curious and experimental about almost everything except bloody Jung. It was a mixture of scorn and fear, like the child of a laudanum addict swearing you off opioids. The boundaries were immense. “I had a dream about a tunnel …” “Save it for fucking Jung.” “Do you ever think X’s peculiarities might be to do with her father’s experiences of the first world war?” “Snort. Shitting Jung might think that.”

That was all fine. It might not amaze you to hear that a life without Jung is quite manageable. But then a friend recommended a podcast, This Jungian Life, and after my instant recoil – anxiety and taboo activated at once, as if someone had asked me to join in on a heist or drop acid in Kew Gardens – I did think, wait a second, the old man has been dead for ages (my dad, not Jung, though yes, him as well). He couldn’t possibly mind me listening to a podcast. If he’d lived long enough to know what a podcast was, might he have found it himself? No, he’d have chosen true crime. Nevertheless …

They’re not psychoanalysing people on This Jungian Life; it’s just three Jungians shooting the breeze, explaining the difference between eros, sex and love, or talking about friendship. It’s honestly no more controversial than two centrist bros talking about what they’d have done differently in the Good Friday agreement, unless by “controversial” you mean “interesting”, in which case, yes, it is a lot more controversial.

At the end of every episode, they analyse a listener’s dream. In one, a woman finds herself in her parents’ bathroom. In the mirror, she can see her own demented shadow self charging at her. So, she’s in the parental complex, and you’re only ever alone in a bathroom. Is this a pure vulnerability, the place where you intersect with your parents and nobody else can help you? Does charging have any other meaning, besides running fast and aggressively? Why, yes, yes it does!

It’s fascinating, except I can hear my father turn in his grave. I can hear his impatient breathing. I can see the sceptical face he’d be making, teeth bared but not aggressively, more like a horse who is constipated and surprised. We all do this; it’s so unattractive. I’m trapped in my own parental complex, except I’m awake. This is a disaster. How can I deal with how much my deceased father hated Jung? Could a Jungian help?

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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