The Dynamics of Transformation

Jung’s Influence on Deleuze and Guattari

Grant Maxwell 3 weeks ago

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 Although it is not clear that Deleuze and Guattari were simply and
unambiguously Jungians, they extensively engaged with Jung’s work in both
a!rmative and critical ways. For instance, in Di!erence and Repetition, Deleuze
writes: “Was not one of the most important points of Jung’s theory already to
be found here: the force of ‘questioning’ in the unconscious, the conception of
the unconscious as an unconscious of ‘problems’ and ‘tasks’? Drawing out the
consequences of this led Jung to the discovery of a process of di"erenciation
more profound than the resulting oppositions.”[1] The concern with
“problems” and “di"erenciation” is central to Deleuze’s project in what many
consider his magnum opus, and it is striking that Deleuze articulates such a
strong resonance between his work and that of Jung, as Jung’s influence on
Deleuze has not tended to be emphasized by scholars.[2] Similarly, there are
several passages in which Deleuze takes Jung’s side against Freud, who
nominated Jung his “successor and crown prince”[3] in 1910, and then
excommunicated him around 1913 for his purported psychoanalytic heresies.
One of the most revealing of these passages by Deleuze is in L’Abécédaire,
recorded as a long television interview that would only air after his death, in
which he discusses “a text that I adore by Jung” about Jung’s dream of descent
through successive subterranean strata, at the deepest layer of which Jung
finds a multiplicity of bones that Freud insists on reducing to the unity of a
death-wish.[4] Deleuze presents this encounter as a primary example of his
central concepts of multiplicity and assemblage, which he portrays Jung as
understanding, contrary to Freud’s egregious misunderstanding of these
concepts, an instance that also finds brief mention in A Thousand Plateaus,
where Deleuze and Guattari write that “Jung is in any event profounder than
Freud.”[5] Deleuze also makes positive references to Jung in Nietzsche and

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 Philosophy,[6] with Claire Parnet in Dialogues II,[7] and with Guattari in Anti-
Oedipus,[8] and it even seems possible that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of
the rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus is at least partially derived from Jung’s
discussion of this concept in 1961’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.[9]

In 1969’s The Logic of Sense, Deleuze explicitly employs the term

“synchronicity,” and significant portions of that book seem to be explorations
of something very much like Jungian archetypes and the subtle kind of formal
causation characteristic of the late Jungian conception of synchronicity in
other terms. Deleuze indirectly defines synchronicity as a form of resonant
correspondence that is not merely a linear logical series operating in terms of
the causes and e"ects of e!cient causation, while Jung, in the subtitle of the
book Synchronicity, defines it as “an acausal connecting principle,” both of
which definitions Deleuze implicitly takes up later in the same book, in
relation to the Stoics and Leibniz, in his discussion of “alogical
incompatibilities and noncausal correspondences,” of which he writes that
“astrology was perhaps the first important attempt to establish a theory,” as
this ancient mode of thought posits a persistent formal, as opposed to
e!cient, causal (or perhaps quasi-causal, or even acausal) correspondence
between the movements of the heavens and events in the human domain.[10]

A decade-or-so later, in A Thousand Plateaus, the figure of Professor

Challenger—who is apparently an embodiment of the assemblage of Deleuze
and Guattari based on a character by Arthur Conan Doyle—is giving an obscure
and di!cult lecture which seems partially designed to prune back the audience
(and perhaps those reading about this oddly hallucinatory presentation) to the
few steadfast diehards willing to expend the extraordinary e"ort required to
comprehend these esoteric domains, so that “the only ones left were the
mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, along with a few astrologers,
archaeologists, and scattered individuals.” In the same book, Deleuze and
Guattari describe Jung’s approach as “integrating” any given animal image
found in dream or myth “into its archetypal series,” though they express

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 dissatisfaction with this construction, seeking further to deterritorialize
Jung’s theory, which they clearly find great value in along with the Jungian
approach of Gaston Bachelard in Lautréamont (about which James Hillman also
wrote), to suggest that “we sorcerers” can discern that “there is still room for
something else, something more secret, more subterranean” constituted in a
becoming beyond the “progress or regress along a series,” which they
associate with “the whole structuralist critique of the series,” a critique which
“seems irrefutable.” However, later in the same text, they a!rmatively quote
H.P. Lovecraft’s evocation of an ascendance through n-dimensions “up to the
dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity” in their description of the
“plane of consistency” (as opposed to the “plane of development”) which is
the locus of becomings “written like sorcerers’ drawings” on that immanent
plane, “the ultimate Door providing a way out” or, alternately, “the gates of
the Cosmos.”[11]

Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the archetypes as “intrinsic qualities” rather

than the conception that they advocate, in which “cosmic forces” or
“expressive qualities” (which are “fictional” like the infinitesimal form of the
calculus created by Leibniz) are real but nonactual formal causes characterized
by their function in specific assemblages of becoming—nomadic paths
enacting a vital autonomy for which particular e"ectuations are derivative
points, so that the integral trajectory is primary and the series derived from it
secondary—is already prefigured in Jung, who remained ambivalent about the
archetypes’ metaphysical status. Thus, rather than rejecting altogether Jung’s
archetypal theory, Deleuze and Guattari, like many Jungians, have refined that
theory, rendering it more subtle and general by suggesting that the locus of
becoming is not found primarily in the linear, sedentary series of
chronological development, but in temporally nonlinear “transformational
series” across scale ascending, as in Jean Gebser’s concretion of time, through
increasing degrees of freedom. They seem to suggest that the integration of n-
dimensional archetypal series is precisely the conceptual construction
characteristic of the Leibnizian, infinitesimal version of the integral calculus,

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 and thus that the metaphysical integration explicitly correlated with the
integral calculus specifically integrates these nonlinear and nonlocal
archetypal series of diachronic and synchronic resonances, which is precisely
the mode of relation characteristic of Jung’s late expression of synchronicity,
syncategorematically approaching the transcendental archetypal
potentialities in their multiplicitous singularity.[12]

While these discussions of Jung’s work are profound, they require a Sherlock
Holmesian reading of subtle clues to decipher, a recognition that Deleuze
implicitly a!rms in Di!erence and Repetition, writing that “a book of
philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel,” with
hints leading the reader to revelations of ultimately complex networks of
intertwined relations that were formerly occluded.[13] Deleuze, with and
without Guattari, often only evokes these realms of thought, teasing the
reader with references to Jung and his work in ways that cannot easily be
pinned down, that remain elusive. One suspects the reason for this coyness is
that, although Deleuze clearly found great value in Jung’s work, he also
understood that Jungian thought has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the
main streams of academia, as Jung brilliantly and profoundly explored
conceptual domains that were often beyond the pale for the dominant spheres
of the twentieth century academy. However, this situation currently bears
signs of a rapid shift, and the increased recognition of Deleuze and Guattari’s
extended, though complex, engagement with Jung might help to carry the
Swiss psychologist from the marginal frontiers of thought, where he remains
the undisputed king, into the central nodes of academic discourse where Freud
has long presided, at least in the humanities. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari
explore most of the same uncharted domains as Jung, though their writing is
so di!cult and complex that only those who are paying very close attention,
and in many cases who are already familiar with Jungian thought, will discern
the deep resonances between these thinkers. One suspects that this was a
subtle and purposive strategy by Deleuze and Guattari, which has been
extraordinarily e!cacious in allowing their work to occupy a central place in

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 continental thought, while also allowing them to engage with relatively
marginal Jungian concepts, winking at the Jungian cognoscenti while
generally escaping the notice of those within academia who unquestioningly
accept the overly hasty dismissal of Jung’s work largely instigated by Freud.
Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari implicitly seem to have understood Hillman’s
admonition that “Freud and Jung are psychological mas​ters, not that we may
follow them in becoming Freudian and Jungian, but that we may follow them
in becoming psychological,”[14] though of course the same can also be said
about following Deleuze and Guattari as philosophical and psychological
masters.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Di!erence and Repetition (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995) 317n17.

[2] A notable exception is Christian Kerslake’s excellent Deleuze and the

Unconscious.

[3] Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, The Freud-Jung Letters (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994) 104.

[4] C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Anchor Press, 1964) 56-58.

[5] L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze 1996. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
241.

[6] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006) 212n8.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987) 80.

[8] Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009) 46, 162,
278.

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 [9] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 4.

[10] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990) 120, 170-71.

[11] A Thousand Plateaus 43, 57, 235, 237, 250-51, 333.

[12] A Thousand Plateaus 306, 322-23, 380, 398, 420, 507.

[13] Di!erence and Repetition xx.

[14] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: HarperCollins

Publishers, 1992) xii.

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Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: James Hillman, Freud, archetype, Jung, synchronicity, gebser, Deleuze, Guattari, Leibniz,
Bachelard, Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, Claire Parnet, Christian Kerslake

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