Jungian Essays
On intellectualization, Logos and Eros, and the discipline of not-knowing
On intellectualization as a defense, the patient who arrives at analysis already equipped with the vocabulary, and the severance between thought and feeling that knowing without feeling performs. Drawing on Damasio, Jung, Whitmont, and Diel, the essay closes on the alchemical figure of the coniunctio and the analytic discipline of not-knowing.
The modern psychoanalytic patient looks different from the patient of fifty years ago. One of the most important differences is the degree of ‘utilization’ of therapeutic jargon. In fact, the expansive use of psychological terminology has become so ubiquitous and pedestrian that it now dictates exactly this tendency. On the surface, it is a progressive movement towards understanding the analytical process. However, there are some undercurrents that point to a diminishing-returns trajectory, with the single underlying idea, namely, knowledge in itself cannot create profound change.
Let’s look at it through therapeutic examples, as they clearly show these common tendencies. Most therapists and analysts, regardless of the modality they work with, are now seeing large numbers of patients who are well-informed about that modality. Patients often arrive at the consultation equipped with the language to name their symptoms and etiology, and even the interventions needed for their own cure. This is the more “intellectual” layer of that knowing. The more “affective” or emotional layer of how this psychological data is used comes through patients’ often aggressive descriptions of others, such as using labels of “narcissist”, “borderline”, “autistic” as discharging strategies of negative affect. This approach has its own everyday merit, as it provides a much-needed emotional outlet. However, neither of these seemingly important ways of using psychological information leads to any substantive or meaningful change within the person. With some patients, this “knowledge base” creates a conviction that they know how to handle their own case. But, the most bewildering response that I hear from most of my patients comes in the form of an archetypally loaded question: "So what do I do?" It often comes up at moments of sadness and grief, coupled with knowledge acquired outside or inside the session. They identify the feeling, they apply data to it, and — nothing. The emotional resolution is still not there. Why?
LP · NCPsyA · SCPsyA
Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in New York's West Village. This journal presents original essays on depth psychology, dreams, and the inner life.
Before we venture into a deeper understanding of intellectualization as an epistemological phenomenon, let’s look at its application in the psychoanalytic taxonomy as well as its neurobiological markers. In classical psychoanalytic literature, intellectualization is a defense. The good news is that it belongs to higher-order defenses, presupposing a more rigorous psychological functioning of the person who utilizes it. For example, there’s an undeniable distinction between defenses of intellectualization and denial, where the former can still allow the person to engage in an unpleasant conversation while the latter suppresses the possibility of any meaningful dialogue. In everyday terms, this is fine. However, when applied to the questions concerning “existential crisis”, relying on intellectualization can mislead one into a false sense of depth and understanding. When viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, intellectualization often becomes an obstacle of grand proportions. Pontalis expressly describes it as a “modern avatar of ‘intellectual resistance’ which should be situated in an aggressive transference”. Plainly put, the patient is as stuck as before, but with a touch of intellectual hubris, which is a unique characteristic of this condition.
The neurological literature offers another important clue for exploring the dramatic effects of intellectualization, the severance of intolerable feelings, but this time from a physiological angle. In his book Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio details the case of the patient named Elliot, who underwent surgery to remove a tumor in his brain. The surgery necessitated the removal of some brain tissue in the ventromedial region of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates emotion into decision-making. This case, later supported by similar cases, showed a striking dissociation: Elliot’s intelligence, memory, abstract reasoning, and articulate discussions remained intact. However, his personality and decision-making capacity deteriorated considerably. The consequences of this change would range from spending an hour deciding on what to eat for breakfast to making ruinous financial decisions. Without feelings, he was immobilized by logic and unable to use reasoning accurately.
Elliot’s example points to something Jung wrote about from the perspective of more subtle emotional dynamics. He often talked about the manifestation of emotional sterility and disembodied existence in contemporary people, where “a modern man had become dissociated from [his] instinctual nature and had become prone to intellectualization” (West).
In analytical practice, the symbolic expression of intellectualization breaks through as the psyche’s typical tendency toward the dramatization of imagery, bringing a person’s attention to the dynamics hidden in the unconscious. Patients report dreams of corpses without heads, or of beheadings witnessed or performed. The splitting of the body into head (thinking) and torso (feeling) as two severed objects serves as a gore symbolic expression of how intellectual defense splits—de-capitates—human psychic functioning.
With the advent of a new, technologically driven age, the separation between knowing and feeling became endemic, more evident, and more dangerous. The rift is much easier to spot than one may think. It manifests as a structural imbalance. Jung talked about such structural warping as one-sidedness, which arises “due to [over]identifying with a particular conscious attitude.” The intellectual one-sidedness often comes at the expense of feeling. There is a price to pay. These hidden feelings return as moodiness or breakdown. Whatever we intellectualize as unacceptable within our own self-image flares up as projection onto an “enemy”. And even our proclivity to put off dealing with the emotional aspects of relationships returns one day, wrapped in the cloak of a midlife crisis or a symptom.
What the psyche is trying to do is balance itself out through compensation. This is our unconscious’s method of overcoming and remediating inner lopsidedness. If feelings are constantly repressed and sacrificed for the sake of reasoning and thinking, the principle of compensation will force them to erupt in ways that are intense, distorted, and often maladaptive. The quote from Whitmont’s Symbolic Quest exemplifies this psychic situation in practical terms of analysis as well as a manifestation of modern socio-cultural “diseases”:
“Some of the results of this one-sided emphasis are the individual and mass neuroses of our time, with the ever-latent danger of explosive eruptions. Addictions to alcohol, narcotics and the"mind-expanding drugs" also express a search for emotional experiences which in the course of our extreme intellectualization have become lost. But it is not only the drug- and alcohol-addiction;"work-addiction," the "manager disease," the compulsive need of always having to do something in order to appear busy, also indicates the inability of modern man to find a meaning in life.”
The work of the French psychologist Paul Diel, whom Einstein credited with introducing a “new unitary conception of the meaning of life,” offers an in-depth examination of the harmonization of desires, intellectual capacity, and the mythical function of the psyche. He considered the overintellectualized condition of modern man as a result of “vacillation between blind belief and intellectual reasoning”. The unfortunate result of this back-and-forth movement, he saw, was the ultimate loss of what he called mythical emotions, leading to the rationalization of symbols and the reductionism in meaning-making. The reality of these cultural conditions is abundantly on display in our modern Western world. Everywhere we look, we see people “condemned to live a life of psychological poverty and partialness in the midst of material plenty, without the option of wholeness because the religious function has been disabled” (Cambray). The tragedy of this condition is that sometimes the condemned person is oneself.
Jung looked at our modern dilemma of “intellect vs. feeling” from a different perspective. For him, it was not a question of supremacy—intellect over feeling, or the other way around—but rather it was an idea of two opposites that are forever united in a continuous dialogue. In the case of intellectualization, Jung's term Logos applies directly. Cowan describes Logos as the principle “concerned with intellectual reasoning and logical analysis.” Logos constellates its natural opposite, Eros, which stands for the “principle of relationship, the psychological capacity to form relationships based on love and desire” (Cowan). The union of Logos and Eros in turn results in coniunctio, the sacred marriage that leads to the creation of a higher unity.
Jung often drew on medieval alchemy in his psychoanalytic theorization, looking past its macabre imagery and the reductive view of the search for material gold. In his view, alchemy embodied the philosophical quest for the inner Philosopher's Stone and therefore offered a symbolic record of human psychological development. Alchemical imagery is laden with images of Sol et Luna, King and Queen, mercury and sulfur, which are symbolic expressions of the same principle of complementarity in things. Logos and Eros – or thinking and feeling – are those same opposites,and it is the goal of our inner work to convert the dialogue between them from opposition into generative union.
We can find man’s failure to achieve coniunctio expressed in myths. For example, Diel translates the downfall of Adam and Eve in terms of this split:
“The Judaic myth demonstrates the same consequences of the downfall of the intellectualized individual: deformation of the spirit, symbolized by the promise of the serpent-vanity; deformation of sexuality, which becomes depraved and is burdened with shame [the fig leaf]; and deformation of future society, symbolized by the curse ‘to earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow.”
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The work of holding Logos and Eros in active relation, rather than allowing one to govern the other, is more easily described than undertaken, and the reader who has followed the argument this far may already feel the difficulty. You may find yourself just as confused as that patient, asking in despair, “So what do I do?” Let’s conclude with a couple of quotes that will confirm one thing you may already know: you don’t know. Or to be more precise, knowing is not equivalent to understanding.
When Trungpa Rinpoche was asked by one of his students to describe the process of “relinquishing his doubts and queries in order to follow a Buddhist path”, the answer he got was: “Do not intellectualize over much. Just do the practices, and their cumulative wisdom will become apparent as you go along” (Zweig).
The ever-present nature of thoughts in our minds is something we all have to deal with constantly. Yet, this layer is just one of many. And underneath, there’s much to experience, to touch, to feel.
“Man knows more than he understands. That is why the most direct and penetrating insights into the modern situation come not from intellectualizing but from the naive profundities of the deep psyche. Thus, a poet may, upon occasion, send forth a flash of true knowing about man's condition. And sometimes, too, a philosopher or a historian in a poetic moment may bring forth a knowing that is more than understanding. When it does happen, it is because the verbalizing intellect has been pressed aside by the force of a new knowledge coming directly out of the depths of man's nature.” (Progoff)
To make room for that arrival is the slow discipline analysis asks of both analyst and patient.
LP · NCPsyA · SCPsyA
Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in New York's West Village. This journal presents original essays on depth psychology, dreams, and the inner life.
These images are not mere metaphors. They are lived experiences. Analysis is how you learn to navigate them.
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