Winnicott Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
D.W. Winnicott, Psychoanalytic Explorations, “Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” p. 482.
https://archive.org/details/psychoanalyticex00winn/page/482/
Jung, in describing himself, gives us a picture of childhood schizophrenia, and at the same time his personality displays a strength of a kind which enabled him to heal himself. At cost he recovered, and part of the cost to him is what he paid out to us, if we can listen and hear, in terms of his exceptional insight. Insight into what? Insight into the feelings of those who are mentally split. (p. 483)
When Jung deliberately lied to Freud he became a unit with a capacity to hide secrets instead of a split personality with no place for hiding anything. (p. 487)
Whatever Freud was, he had a unit personality, with a place in him for his unconscious. Jung was different. It was not possible for a split personality to have an unconscious, because there is no place for it to be. Like our florid schizophrenic patients (though he was not one) Jung knew truths that are unavailable to most men and women. But he spent his life looking for a place to keep his inner psychic reality, although the task was indeed an impossible one. By the age of 4 he had adopted the sophisticated theory of the underground of the dream, closely associated in his case with the burial of the dead. He went down under and found subjective life. At the same time he became a withdrawn person, with what was wrongly thought at the time to be a clinical depression. From this developed Jung’s exploration of the unconscious, and (for me) his concept of the collective unconscious was part of his attempt to deal with his lack of contact with what could now be called the unconscious-according-to-Freud. (p. 488)
This gives us the idea Jung’s work as being out of touch with instinct and object-relating (except in a subjective sense). Jung’s extravert No. 1 personality (False Self in my language) evidently gave a rather normal impression, and gave Jung a place in the world, and a rich family and professional life, but Jung makes no bones about his preference for his True Self (Jung’s language) No. 2 personality which carried him the sense of real. (p. 488)
The mandala is truly a frightening thing for me because of its absolute failure to come to terms with destructiveness, and with chaos, disintegration, and the other madnesses. It is an obsessional flight from disintegration. (p. 491)
