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Jung JournalCulture & Psyche

ISSN: 1934-2039 (Print) 1934-2047 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujun20

Jon Mills’s Underworlds

Kenneth Kimmel

To cite this article: Kenneth Kimmel (2019) Jon Mills’s Underworlds, Jung Journal, 13:1, 125-135,DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2019.1560826

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2019.1560826

Published online: 15 Mar 2019.

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NAOMI AZRIEL, LMFT, is a depth psychotherapist inprivate practice in Oakland, California, and an advancedanalytic candidate at the C. G. Jung Institute of SanFrancisco. She works with adults and children, withspecial interests in sexual, spiritual, ancestral, and cul-tural trauma. She has lectured and taught on the use ofself in working with sexual trauma, queer sexuality, andsex-workers. Correspondence: 4287 Piedmont Avenue,Suite 108, Oakland, CA 94611, USA. Email: naomiaz-riel@gmail.com.

ABSTRACT

This review of the book The Psychoid, Soul andPsyche discusses author Ann Ulanov’s interweav-ing of Jung’s conceptualization of the psychoidlevel of the unconscious with both clinical andtheological ideas. Central to this discussion is theidea that at significant moments in life and inanalysis, we enter into a new mode of knowingthat involves the shedding of all prior experienceand points of reference. This transformative andimpactful realm of experience is interrelated toreligious ideas about the nature of God and theways we humans can never fully know or com-prehend God’s nature, nor our own wholeness.

KEY WORDS

analytic psychology, Anima Mundi, coincidence ofopposites, individuation, God, C. G. Jung, DonaldKalsched, Samuel Kimbles, matrix, Nicholas ofCusa, psychoid, The Red Book, Self, theology,Ann Ulanov, unconscious, unus mundus

Jon Mills’sUnderworlds

An Essay and Review

KENNETH KIMMEL

Review of: Jon Mills, Underworlds: Philosophies of the

Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics,

London, New York: Routledge, 2014.

For all readers who recognize the importance ofthe multidisciplinary spirit that Jon Mills’s

works epitomize, I heartily recommend hisbook. In 170 distilled pages spanning 4400years in the history of Western ideas, Mills hasshown great care and impeccable scholarship toilluminate the diverse philosophies of theunconscious that underlie his ambitious surveyof psychic underworlds. Reading it has been bothdemanding yet richly rewarding, a tour de forcethat has stretched me to my limits.

The ancients’ mythopsychological beliefsabout the soul anticipated our contemporarydiscovery of psyche’s unconscious core. Millsintroduces the Egyptian Book of the Dead withits depictions of mythical underworld migra-tions of the soul through death and rebirth.He then moves on to the classical Greeks andthe divergence from belief in the immortalityof soul ascribed to pre-Socratic and essentialistPlatonism to the Aristotelian philosophy ofsoul dependent on corporeal embodiment.

Mills guides the reader from Westernantiquity to nascent modernity, by explicatingthe metaphysical idealism in Hegelian dialec-tics. He moves on to Freud, Jung, and Lacan,the preeminent, widely divergent psychoanaly-tic voices of the late nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, whom he considers the main expo-nents of the ontology of an unconscious.

Mills’s project encompasses the impactupon psychoanalytic and metaphysical thinkingof those burgeoning, concurrent twentieth-cen-tury European philosophical systems of existen-tial phenomenology shaped by Sartre andHeidegger. He concludes his opus withWhitehead’s “process philosophy,” based onthe concept of an unconscious life-force thatpermeates the cosmos.1

Mills illuminates the “ontologies of soul”through two primary lenses—dialectics andteleology.2 His book is a dialectical text in itsown right—and one that simply cannot bebriefly summarized without being overly

Kenneth Kimmel, Kimmel Reviews Mills 125

simplistic. It is rare to find a writer with suchacumen, whose rich discourses encompassboth the great psychoanalytic theories ofour day and the philosophical traditions theystand upon.3

Mills’s compact survey compares mostwith medical historian Henri Ellenberger’smagnum opus The Discovery of theUnconscious (1970), which comprises 932pages! As a phenomenologist, Ellenberger situ-ated the pioneers of dynamic psychiatry incontext and relation to their social, historical,and cultural surround, highlighting each one’spersonal “creative illness” out of which theirtheories emerged. Yet, he largely overlookedthe importance that philosophical traditionshave had upon psychoanalytic thinking. Forhim, existence preceded essence. Whereas withMills, his depictions seem to privilege theessence or ideas of the founders of depthpsychology, respectively. This stance does pre-sent, at times, an abstract, removed quality tothe tone and substance of Mills’s writing.

Mills begins his book with an ideaattributed to Democritus. In reality weknow nothing, for truth lies in the abyss.While one would assume that these openingwords speak to an unknowable mystery, onethat comprises the kernel of Mills’s opus,what we find instead is that Democritus,a pre-Socratic philosopher, held to the beliefthat the knowledge of genuine truth could beachieved, but only through inductivereasoning.4 This idea anticipates theHegelian dialectic of “negation” out ofwhich the essential Truth is revealed,through logic and reason.

In his own words, Mills privileges the“main metaphysical paragons that informa systematic account of the philosophy of theunconscious over the past 200 years . . .” (14,my italics).5 He seeks to compare and contrast

the “more coherently organized” systems inlieu of the unformed or undeveloped “terseand inchoate scatterings of allusions or refer-ences to unconscious processes” (15). These“outliers” include poets, romantic and trans-cendental philosophers, theologians, mystics,and, I would include, post-modern, post-phe-nomenological, and post-secular philosophers.This leads to my central critique of Mills’sfine work, which I will expound upon in theconcluding remarks, that gives voice to thosephilosophers who call into question the privi-leging of a Logocentric viewpoint.

Introduction: Underworlds andthe Ancient Soul

Egypt and Greece, the great civilizations ofantiquity, have bequeathed to us an array ofreligious and philosophical ideas. Mills beginshis opus with a brief survey of their earliestmysteries surrounding death, the underworld,eternity, and the evolving vision of the soul’slife. He recognizes the correspondence ofthese motifs to analogous struggles withinpsyche for the emergence of consciousnessfrom the darkness of unconsciousness.

Egyptian Soul

Jon Mills regards the Egyptian Book of theDead, the mythic account of the soul’s jour-ney through the underworld toward immor-tality, as one of the earliest culturalanalogies for the birth of consciousnessfrom the unconscious, what Freud describesas “a dark, inaccessible part of our person-ality … a chaotic, seething cauldron” (Freud1996–1995, SD 22:73). Through greatordeals of suffering and tests of moral char-acter, truth and justice mediated over acts ofgood and evil, reason and emotion. Whereas

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“agentic forces of higher wisdom” inculcatedthose worthy souls, impure hearts weredoomed for eternity to the “cauldron ofdead souls.”

Hades, the Hellenic Soul,and Plato

Hades, the dark underworld abode of souls,signifies the unseen uncanniness of the uncon-scious. Even in death souls retain a sense ofsmell, animated by the telos of the life-force ofbreath. Dialectically, souls are vestiges of lifeconcealed, or aspects of psyche, dissociatedfrom consciousness. In Plato’s prescient viewof soul, higher reason and shame are compo-nents of our ethical being that strive for mas-tery over suffering and violent passions thatseek to subsume them, reminiscent of Freud’sconflicts between id, ego, and superego, drama-tized in the Oedipal struggle.

The soul as the very essence of humans iscomposed of endless dialectical oppositions.Although Plato recognized psyche’s interde-pendence on the body, he posited a dualisticand teleological essentialism regarding theimmortality of the soul once separated fromthe body at death, as set forth in his creationstory, Timaeus.

Aristotle

In contrast to the Platonic and Judeo-Christian position regarding the immortalityof the soul, Aristotle’s soul cannot exist with-out a body. Neither is it a material object.Soul is a nondualistic monism comprised ofpsyche and soma as “differentiated elements ofthe same substance” (12).6 For Aristotle, “cog-nition” is the crowning glory of the humansoul derived from sense perception and desirecommon to all species. Cognition comprisespsyche’s faculty of imagination, which relies on

recollection, memory, and reason. Imagination“actualizes” the “potentiality” of unconscioussomatic sense perceptions, where the mind canthen recollect them. This agentic process leadsto self-consciousness and reflective thought—the soul’s pinnacle of achievement. Logic forAristotle, Hegel, and Whitehead is, Millsopines, a shared human “superordinate processanimating the universe . . .” that ascends frominterior unconscious origins (13).

Mills passionately defends Aristotle’sprescient argument calling into question theduality of psyche and substance that has foundresurgence in materialistic scientific circles.For example, the medical model’s invalidationof soul as an emerging unconscious process isexemplified by “evidence-based” treatmentrequirements that justify insurance companies’reimbursement for mental health services.“The tendency today among the biologicalsciences to boil down mind to . . . neurochem-ical–physical . . . substances . . . vitiates thephilosophical need to preserve the integrity ofsoul as a vitalizing . . . generative . . . self-creative agency that [is revealed] within [its]embodied . . . natural . . . ‘thrownness’” (12).

Hegel on Unconscious Spirit

Hegel is the first Western metaphysician todemonstrate how reason is preceded byunconscious psychic forces, and the “uncon-scious abyss” is central to his philosophy (18).His concept of a “nocturnal mine” owes itsorigins to the Christian mysticism of Böehme,the German transcendental idealism ofSchelling, and to Plotinus, the Neoplatonist.He diverges from their conceptions of a “non-being Divinity” that reveals itself, assertinginstead that the nocturnal abyss is a psychicreality of becoming that preserves an infiniteworld of imagination prior to consciousness,

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bringing to fruition a higher form of intelli-gence—cognition. Differentiation of Freud’s“I” from the “It” mirrors Hegel’s conceptions.

These conscious and unconscious struc-tures engage in the lifelong process at thecenter of Hegel’s great unifying theory ofmind, which is the basis of all mental opera-tions and the collective force that innervatesworld history and culture; his opus is theprecursor for Freud’s and Jung’s concepts ofa personal and collective unconscious.Without the dialectical process, Mills con-tends, the very conscious/unconscious struc-ture of the mind would collapse.

At the core of Hegel’s dialectical processare the concepts of Seele and Geist (from theGerman). Their respective English transla-tions—soul and spirit, only approximatetheir fuller meanings. Seele is originallyembodied in a corporeal existence, where nat-ural drives and desires emerge. It is initiallyidentified with an undifferentiated universalessence, an original unconscious unity sharedby every gender, race, or culture. Individualsdiffer in Geist’s development. Geist’s essencecarries both “spirit” and “mind,” or religiousand “neurocognitive” implications. Mills’sclose reading of Geist suggests the integrationof the totality within the personality, frombase desires to refinement of the ethical andmoral development of character.

The dialectical movement of the uncon-scious drives self-awareness away from its originalidentification with the feeling Seele in itscorporeal home—the place of Geist’s immediate,initial being. Through “sublation” after “subla-tion”—or Aufhebung—the unconscious pro-duces violent contradictions in originaldeterminations that are negated, preserved, andthen transmuted, elevating Geist towarda “higher unity” of “pure self-consciousness . . .a unification of nature within mind” (19).

As a psychoanalytic inquiry, Mills cau-tions us about the futility of trying to achievea “final cause” or perfected ideal as Platoposited. Rather, the human spirit must alwaystry to surpass itself, to desire what it lacks andto continually create. He writes, “It is thestriving . . . that forms . . . [a] transcendentalorientation or philosophy of living, and, likethe pursuit of wisdom and contentment, it isa process of becoming” (38). The world isunder constant revision, or, as the philosopherJacques Derrida proposes, the Messiah isalways a venir—“to come.”

Hegel anticipates future conceptions oflife emerging from suffering and death: “Butthe life of Spirit is not the life that shrinksfrom death and keeps itself untouched bydevastation, but rather the life that enduresit and maintains itself in it. It wins its truthonly when, in utter dismemberment, it findsitself” (1809/1977, 32).

Freud’s Unconscious Ontology

Through the antinomy, negation, and synthesisfrom Psyche’s dialectical struggles, an evolving,conscious subject, Das Ich—the “I”—bothfamiliar and defined, along with its “agent ofmoral judgement,” the Uber-ich (43), comeinto being from das Es—the “It”—the uncannyand unknowable “province” of unconscious-ness. We experience the “It” through primaryderivatives like dreams, fantasies, parapraxis(so-called Freudian slips), and symptoms.Preferring soul—the Greek psyche—over“mind,” Freud’s thinking evolved away frommaterialism and reductionism in his earliestneurophysiological theories of mind and fromthe fixity of reified mental structures.7

As developmental and phenomenological,Freud’s conscious and unconscious dialecticencompasses irresolvable “contrary impulses”

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and their integration, where abnormal pathol-ogy and adjusted mental states are determinedby failed or successful expression, discharge andsynthesis of psychic impasses (Freud 1933a[1932]/1966–1995, vol. 22, 73). Freud appearsto privilege the “logo-centrism” of ego differen-tiation, recognizing the destructive pressuresexerted on human consciousness by the primaldrives of the “It.” The urge for civilizations todestroy in order to survive have led to the worstin humanity, falling under the rubric of the“Death-drive.”

Mills considers the death-drive Freud’sgreatest contribution to the understandingof the unconscious psyche. Through Mills’srevisions, he critiques classical and relationalschools of thought that either mechanize derTodestrieb (“death-drive”) or misunderstandthe concept. The original English translationmisinterpreted the German Trieb as “physio-logically determined instincts . . .” that arestatic and genetically imprinted, applyingonly to animal species (48). Freud’s Triebwas meant to convey “drives” as a “dynamic. . . mutability” (48), where psyche is “atemporal flux [arising] from [an] archaic fab-ric of our corporeal nature, [transforming]over time . . .” (48). Psyche is an epigeneticachievement, Mills contends, that evolvesfrom a dialectical, ontological monism (seeAristotle 350 BCE)—where inseparable,interpenetrating elements of lifegiving Erosemerge from Thanatos’s death-drive.

Mills considers “Death” an unconsciousexperience, an interior reality primary to psy-chic existence—not simply an actual life-end-ing state. Negation and death are, in fact,ubiquitous. In the Fort-Da game, for instance,Freud observed the dialectics of the death-drive in the play of his eighteen-month-oldgrandson who struggled with the loss of hismother when she went away for the day

(53–54). Fort translates as “gone” and Da is“there.” Repetitively tossing a yo-yo awaywhile uttering the word, Fort (“gone”) thenbringing it back with the phrase, Da (“there”),the boy imaginatively reenacted his mother’spainful abandonment (a death-like gap) andthen her joyful return (to life).

Ontologically, negative symptoms ofaggression, self-destruction, trauma, and anxi-ety are induced by external stimuli and com-pulsively repeated through excitation andexcess discharges. These lead to an unbindingof these tensions, where a previous state ofpeaceful bliss is restored—an ideal state ofzero tension. The impulse to negate itself indeath is, then, paradoxically, the origin and“aim of all life . . .” (Freud 1920/1966–1995,vol. 18, 38). The death-drive is located, aswell, in the “perverse appeal to suffering”(58), from the repetitions of addiction tosubstances or bad relationships, to cripplingshame, guilt, and self-destructiveness. Thisreveals the drives underlying the ecstasy inpain, or the “jouissance of masochism” (58),what Mills concludes “is an inherent destruc-tiveness imbued in the very act of the pursuitof pleasure” (58).

Freud’s early “infantile sexuality drive-the-ory” fails to take environmental or epigeneticchange into consideration. His mature dialec-tical structure of the organization of theunconscious posits that the sexual or aggressivedrives originate in our somatic embodimentbut are drawn to the object. The biologicaldrives are not reductive but relational seeking(49). Mills buttresses the old master’s opusagainst contemporary psychoanalytic critiqueof his outgrown theories, richly illuminatingFreud’s unending theoretical revisions, self-examination, and meaningful discourse aroundhis evolving ideas. Jon Mills is proud to “standwith Freud.”

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Lacan’s Epistemology

Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories arepolemical, brilliant, revisionist, and at timesinaccessible. His radical ideas were generallyrepudiated by French and American propo-nents of the classical Freudian growth andadaptation model for ego development. (Thefeeling was mutual!) His subversive notion ofan imaginary “mirror stage” depicts “the six-month-old child [who] ‘recognizes’ himself inthe mirror and falsely identifies the reflection[that his mother shows him] as an image ofthe unified wholeness and mastery he does notin fact possess” (Kimmel 2011, 1). The I itselfthat takes form here is an artificial representa-tion, a self split between its idealized mirrorimage and “[his] fragmented body/self with itsaccompanying experiences of terror . . . uncer-tainty . . .” and persecutory phantasies (Lacan2006, 78; Kimmel 2011, 1). For Lacan, theimaginary has a primarily pejorative implica-tion, considering it a narcissistic realm of illu-sion that negates the subject’s embodiment inthe flow of life out of defensive demands.

While the imaginary “ego” is the first dis-covery of self, albeit a socially constructed illusionor wish, it is intersubjectively formed from thesubject’s lack and its alienation of desire. Theunbearable internalized anxiety and paranoia pro-duced by images of the subject’s fragmented bodymust be split off, necessitating the manufacture ofthe mirror-stage’s “perfect imago,” an illusion ofa soothing, stabilizing, and unifying function.

In Lacan’s “Symbolic register,” we are borninto a preexisting world of cultural, historical,and linguistic givens that determine the groundof the human subject. The unconscious isa category of culture, a “discourse of theOther.” Lacan situates the epiphenomenon oflanguage as an exteriority that brings humansubjectivity into being. The conscious Ego can

never exist autonomously from the a prioriconstitution of the Other. Mills makesa strong argument against what he considersLacan’s reifying of language and his environ-mental determinism, suggesting that it rigidlydecenters intrapsychic agency.

Mills finds great vibrancy in the order of theReal, the mystery that is “foreclosed from episte-mic awareness” and is impenetrable to the imagi-nation or the symbolic (97). A preeminentontology of the unconscious is revealed beneathits opacity. Contained within the register of theReal is Das Ding (Lacan 1959–1960/1992), theunconscious remainder never realized, the lackthat drives all desire. In Lacan’s lexicon, the subjectrefers to what is unconscious and alien to self-awareness.

Heidegger’s penetrating discourse onaletheia (“unconcealment”) expands on thepre-Socratic’s original concept. Heideggerdescribes it paradoxically as the “unforgettingof [truth]—previously hidden” but alwaysthere—that is revealed (7). However, whensomething is disclosed, something else becomescovered over. This version of truth may never befully known and averts the danger of a fall intoidealism. Heidegger’s considerable influence onLacan is evidenced by the latter’s own “dialecticof being in relation to lack” (116). For Lacan,the Real is what is lacking in the symbolic, itsiterations only differentiated by the symbolicbut never known in itself—“subjecting con-sciousness to the paranoid abyss of the ineffable”(117). The Real interpenetrates the imaginaryand symbolic, where consciousness becomes anillusory shroud over unarticulated gaps beyondbeing—the true abyss.

Jung’s Metaphysics

Mills works conscientiously to elucidate Jung’stheory of the archetypes of the collective

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unconscious. As a psychologist, philosopher, andhumanist schooled in empirical logic, however, hecannot reasonably argue for the existence ofa psychic reality that originates froma primordial, eternal, and omnipresent animatingforce, “superimposed on human experience” andpassed on through the generations throughouthistory (120). Rather than this alleged psycholo-gism, Mills makes the argument that “humanexperience becomes memorialized as communalknowledge that gives rise to social practices, sym-bols, rituals and linguistic order that inform cul-tural anthropology; and that these historicalremembrances become trans-generationally andtransculturally transmitted over the millennia”(141). Akin to Lacan, Mills conceives ofa humbler vision of archetypes as psychic materialoriginating from one’s own interiorized experi-ence of images from the cultural, historical, andenvironmental surround we are born into, pene-trating our nascent minds and on throughout ourlifetimes.

Mills does struggle admirably to bridle hisreason, recognizing the futility in trying to com-prehend Jung’s intuitive and “felt noetic” opusthrough strictly rational thought. After fifty yearsof study I tend to agree. To understand Jung’sgifts to psychoanalysis, we indeed must entera world of phenomenological experience compris-ing the interior and intersubjective, based in livingwith equal parts enigma and knowing. Jungspeaks of the numinous archetypal process thatshatters an individual as well as a nation-state(139). Jung’s research into the dialectics ofalchemy produced his greatest scholarship.Jung’s revelations emerged out ofa “mythopoetic,” hermeneutical, unconsciousprocess of unending interpretations, unconcealedby the “dark sister” of the egoic complex—itselfsituated in an equal, horizontal relation to multi-ple unconscious complexes (and not the verticalhierarchy of Freud’s tripartite configuration).

Jung famously gets in his own way by sub-jecting his experiential depth work toa burdensome defense of his archetypal ontologyas an “all encompassing psychic category[explaining most] facets of human psychology”(142) . . . “a universal theory of mind” (121).The collective unconscious forms the matrix ofall things—the Neoplatonic idea of animamundi where psyche and world interpenetrateone another. Jung relies on Kant’s “categories,”but more essentially on Platonic formalteleology—what he called the final standpoint—as a basis for his archetypal theory.8 Thelatter, pitted against Jung’s dialogical, clinicalhermeneutics, illuminates the profound theoret-ical split that I believe prevented Jung fromachieving the integration in his opus that he sodesired. Given these things, Mills is justified inquestioning the inconsistencies in Jung’s meta-physical theories. At the same time, he acknowl-edges Jung’s original contributions, histremendous scholarship, and the vision herevealed to us through his own “creative ill-ness”—that of a “symbolic life” from whicheach individual might discover a path towarddeeper meaning and authenticity in their lives.

Final Reflections and Critique

Given the stated parameters of his project, Millshas sought to uncover integrative, shared, andperhaps syncretic elements in diverse, oftenopposing systematic ontologies situated throughhistory, while wielding a skeptic’s blade andcritical eye throughout. His choice to critiquethese great minds is, as they say, the highest formof flattery. We might consider his work trans-disciplinary.

The philosophical systems Mills describes inUnderworlds attempt to integrate the complexmental phenomena at the heart of the humancondition—namely, “[t]he powers of negation,

Kenneth Kimmel, Kimmel Reviews Mills 131

conflict, anxiety and death” (145). Humanactions are determined, in part, by causes thatare independent of our will, either “internallydriven [Hegel, Freud, Sartre] . . . or externallyimposed . . . or given [Heidegger, Lacan, Jung]”(145). Each of these theories shares a commonthread—“the unequivocal avowal of the uncon-scious as a dynamic process” (145).

Teleology

Mills’s explication of teleology is exemplifiedthroughout his book by the ontologies ofAristotle, Hegel, Freud, Jung, and Whitehead.9

At times, he faithfully represents the essential“final causality” of teleology and, at other times,offers important revisions and critiques.

The conception of Plato’s FormalTeleology is depicted in Timaeus, where theCreator desires to inscribe corporeal Chaoswith order, by restoring the original Unitythrough formation of an eternal, perfectAnima Mundi that will bring about comple-tion of the “Final Cause.”10 From this pointof view the ordered, unchanging “Same” isdualistically and hierarchically privileged bythe Creator over the temporal, imperfectnature of the “Other” (Plato 2010, 1841).

Hegel’s dialectical oeuvre resonates withelements of Plato, where consciousness emergesfrom an unconscious abyss, arising froma moral imperative to bring unity to Spiritand order to humankind’s destructiveinstincts—humankind’s “will to power” andevil inclinations—through knowledge. “Allmen by nature desire to know” (Aristotle, 350BCE, Part 1). Can our so-called EssentialTruths, driving the telos of moral development,overcome the resistance waged by the primitivedrives of the unconscious? Or, from anotherperspective, has our striving for the light ofconsciousness become the deeper problem,

when ever more light inevitably casts a darker,more power-driven shadow? In the wake of theAge of Enlightenment haven’t our greatestadvancements in science and technology oftencontributed to the unleashing of the greatesthorrors upon humanity?

The postmodern age raises these questions.Mills touches on them, as well, at the end of hischapter on Hegelian dialectics. “Does the abyssresist being integrated into spirit [conscious-ness]?” Does spirit itself struggle with a dualityof desire or purpose, when the drive towardintegration of the Absolute is simultaneouslymet by a rival impulse to draw back “withinthe abyss of spirit’s unconscious beginnings . . .toward the pit of its feeling life” (37)? If thisnocturnal pit is home to the most primitive,destructive, and unconscious drives, then coulda “true believer” obsessed by the attainment ofAbsolute Truth and Purity become the unwit-ting spawn of these horrors? After all, the mostterrible atrocities throughout history have oftenbeen committed in the name of purity.

Not Knowing

Hegel’s and Freud’s ontologies recount Spirit’sand Ego’s respective ascensions from the nega-tion of unconsciousness to executive roles thatattempt to preside over the whole of psychiclife. The goal of psychoanalysis is to thwartignorance, overcome suffering, seek truth, andbring awareness to a self in the process ofbecoming. By valorizing the ego’s evolutionaryachievements, where Darkness comes into theLight, sensuous nature strives to be Spirit, andEs—the horse—gives way to Ich—the rider,Mills seems to diminish the importance of thevia negativa in its own right, as the unknow-able alterity of the abyss.

One could argue that a remainder is alwaysleft behind, beyond knowing, reason, or ontology,

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an idea that Mills attributes to Lacan’s critique ofknowing.11 One central idea prevailed betweenLacan and Jacques Derrida—différance—Derrida’s signifier for the unknowable gaps andabysses between and beyond presence and being,the absence that defines presence.12

Other beyond Being

Mills’s great criticism of the post-moderns istheir attack on subjectivity and, more specifi-cally, “consciousness and the teleology of thewill” (73). In their defense, however, philoso-phers like Emmanuel Levinas and Derrida alertus to the solipsism in the conception ofa “Grand Self.” Instead, they privilegea humble subject that answers first to thehuman other before him, in whose face a traceof Otherness lies, exterior to all being, infinitelyunknowable, and irreducible to a “self.” Levinascalls this the mystery of “what is not yet . . .moreremote than the possible” (1969, 254–255).

This is an abyss without categories andbeyond being, whose différance could never beannexed into an ontology of a finite psychicunderworld within the totality of a psyche.Levinas reverses the privileged order in Plato’sAnima Mundi,13 where ethics “for the Other”—signifying immanent temporal existence—pre-cedes the unchanging perfect order of the“Same.” Appropriating the other’s utter unique-ness by “totalizing” it andmaking it into the same,Levinas contends, is the origin of all violence.

Franz Rosenzweig was a primary influenceon Levinas. A former Hegelian scholar,Rosenzweig renounced the promise of academicfame, writing in 1917 of his deep disillusionmentregarding the hubris of Hegel’s grand system ofGerman Idealism and its “all-embracing WorldMind.” His polemic cited failures to recognizeindividual human suffering in the world in thewake of the horrors of the First World War

(Rosenzweig 1930/1971, xiv). Rosenzweigwrote, “The concept of the order of this world,is thus not the universal, neither the arche nor thetelos, neither the natural nor the historical unity,but rather the singular, the event, not the begin-ning or end, but the center of the world” (quoted inSantner 2001, 14–15).

In concert with Rosenzweig, Mills admir-ably proposes his own antidote against anexalted Idealism. He turns our gaze to Aristotleand his depiction of soul as a monism consti-tuted of soma and psyche—differing embodiedelements sharing the same essence and situatedsoundly in relation to terra firma.

Scholarship

In conclusion, I wish to acknowledge theenormous energy that Mills has brought tohis project. His attention to detail is impec-cable. He refers us to primary sources andprovides his own translations to texts, attest-ing to his brilliant scholarship. His commandof the German language has freed the richernuanced meanings of words burdened downby technical “antiseptic” English translationsof the Hegelian and Freudian lexicons (40).

I have often heard that the practices of psy-choanalysis and psychotherapy are the instrumentsand operations of philosophy. I wonder if theimpetus behind Mills’s book originated froma grave concern he has that the scientific materi-alism of the day is systematically severing ourdiscipline from psyche’s roots. Our over-specialized emphasis on results-driven, neuro-cognitivebehavioral treatment has orphaned us fromPsyche’s foundations as Soul and source of ourdeveloping singularity. Western philosophythroughout its long history (and endless territorialbattles) has faithfully defended this truth, andI believe Mills’s volume provides the thread forthose of us lacking even a rudimentary

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philosophical education that leads back to theorigins of Psyche’s awakening from her uncon-scious slumber. Without reservation, I commendhim for his effort and encourage anyone inter-ested in the philosophical origins of the uncon-scious to read this important contribution.

ENDNOTES

1. Due to space limitations I will be expoundingon most, but not all, of the chapters thatspeak the strongest to me and are most rele-vant to this readership, while only brieflymentioning the nonclinical work of philoso-phers, Sartre and Heidegger, and Whitehead,respectively. Their exclusion here is in noway reflective of their lack of importance toMills’s project.

2. Mills illustrates how teleology can rangebetween a “‘formal,” “final cause” that realizesoriginal preexisting Ideals or Essences, anda self-creative, ongoing, epigenetic process ofbecoming that is not pre-formed in design.

3. Donna M. Orange’s Thinking for Clinicians:Philosophical Resources for ContemporaryPsychoanalysis and the HumanisticPsychotherapies (2010) is worth noting asa comparison, although lacking in the scopeand weight of Underworlds.

4. Inductive reasoning is a logical process in whicha general truth is drawn through observingparticular phenomena that are believed to betrue or are true most of the time.

5. References to Mills’s work are cited by pagenumber only.

6. Mills privileges monism throughout his surveyof philosophies to avoid religious conflicts.

7. I’m afraid many Jungians still carry the oldprejudices of “Freud’s reductivism” due, in part,to Jung’s oversimplification of Freud’s views onsexuality and the failure of many Jungians toacknowledge the evolution in Freud’s thinking.

8. Jung’s section is strategically placed before Mills’schapter on Alfred North Whitehead—aphilosopher of the natural sciences and an athe-ist. They share common ideas, though differ intheir epistemology. Whitehead’s “individuation”process, which “unifies” material of the cosmos,is framed by a teleology containing never-endingepigenetic transformations unbound to history or

final cause, unlike Jung’s general adherence toa formal teleology of the archetypes—his “finalstandpoint.”Mills calls into question Jung’s ideaof psyche, imbued by a “world ensouled,” in favorof the scientific proposition of Whitehead who“makes God an abstract unifying principal—thenon-temporal [coalescing] of all eternalobjects . . .” (148).

9. Telos, meaning “end, purpose, or destiny”; logos,meaning “reason or explanation.” I refer youto Horne, Sowa, and Isenman (2000).

10. I refer you to Hinton et al. (2011).11. Lacan is credited with some version of this

saying, “The more that knowledge piles up,the more the soul screams.” Ladson Hinton,personal communication.

12. See pages 7–8 in Mills for the pre-Socratic dis-course on aletheia—the “unconcealment of thehidden while simultaneously, something else iscovered over,” which Heidegger later expoundsupon (Heidegger 1930/1977, 78).

13. See “Teleology” (page 132) of this essay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 350 BCE. Metaphysics. Translated byW. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive,Part One. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html.

Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of theUnconscious. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 1886–1940/1966–1995. TheStandard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud, translated and editedby James Strachey, in collaboration with AnnaFreud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson.London: Hogarth Press. Hereafter referred to asSE and volume number.

——. 1920/1966–1995. Beyond the PleasurePrinciple. SE Vol. 18.

——. 1933a (1932)/1966–1995. New IntroductoryLectures on Psycho-analysis and Other Works.SE Vol. 22.

Hegel, G. F. W. 1809/1977. Phenomenology ofSpirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1930/1977. On the Essence ofTruth. In Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell,113–142. New York: Harper Collins.

Hinton, III, Ladson; Ladson Hinton, IV; DevonHinton; and Alex Hinton. 2011. “UnusMundus Transcendent Truth or ComfortingFiction? Overwhelm and the Search for

134 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 13 : 1 / WINTER 2019

Meaning in a Fragmented World.” Journal ofAnalytical Psychology 56: 375–396.

Horne, Michael, Angela Sowa, andDavid Isenman. 2000. “PhilosophicalAssumptions in Freud, Jung and Bion:Questions of Causality.” Journal ofAnalytical Psychology 45: 109–121.

Kimmel, Kenneth A. 2011. Eros and the ShatteringGaze: Transcending Narcissism. Carmel, CA:Fisher King Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 2006. “The Mirror Stage asFormative of the I Function.” In Ecrits, trans-lated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.

——. 1959–1960/1992. Das Ding. In The Seminarof Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, 1959–1960, translated byDennis Porter, edited by Jacques-AlainMiller. New York: Norton.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity.Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh,PA: Duquesne University Press.

Orange, Donna M. 2010. Thinking for Clinicians:Philosophical Resources for ContemporaryPsychoanalysis and the HumanisticPsychotherapies. New York: Routledge.

Plato. 2010. Timaeus. Translated by B. Jewett.London: Pantianos Classics. Kindle.

Rosenzweig, Franz. 1930/1971. The Star ofRedemption. Translated by WilliamW. Hallo. Foreword by N. N. Glatzer.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,Inc., University of Notre Dame Press.

Santner, Eric L. 2001. On the Psychotheology ofEveryday Life: Reflections on Freud andRosenzweig. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

KENNETH KIMMEL is a Jungian analyst, author, andco-founder of The New School for AnalyticalPsychology. His published works include Eros and theShattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism (FisherKing Press, 2011); “Dreaming the Face of the Earth:Myth, Culture and Dreams of the Maya Shaman,”a chapter in The Dream and Its Amplification (FisherKing Press, 2013); “Shatter, Emptiness & DivineIndwelling Presence: Beyond the Essentialism ofPlato’s Anima Mundi” (IAAP Congress Proceedings,Kyoto, 2016); and “Clemency on the Way to theGallows—Death, Dreams & Dissociation (Journal ofAnalytical Psychology 62[5], 2017). Correspondence:219 First Avenue South, Suite 405, Seattle,Washington 98104. Email: kenkimmel@comcast.net.

ABSTRACT

This essay reviews Underworlds: Philosophies of theUnconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics by JonMills. Ancient Egyptian and Greek tales, depicting theeternal soul’s journey through death’s abyss to immor-tality, are followed by Aristotle’s nondualistic concep-tion of soul, dependent on embodiment, that consistsof elements of the same substance—soma and psyche.From Aristotle’s germ cell, the author’s logical dis-course unfolds, elucidating the most systematic andcoherent accounts of Western unconscious ontologiesover the last two-hundred years in chapters that featureHegel, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre, Lacan, Jung, andWhitehead. The dialectical process underlies the risingof consciousness from a psychic abyss, not froma universal, supernatural one. Mills adeptly interpretsand synthesizes diverse, complex theories. The author’srevitalization of misunderstood concepts in theFreudian lexicon, such as der Todestrieb—the DeathDrive—contains his greatest insights.

KEY WORDS

aletheia, Aristotle, collective unconscious, deathdrive, Derrida, drive, dialectics, Freud, Hegel,Heidegger, Jung, Lacan, metaphysics, monism,ontology, psyche, Sartre, soma, soul, spirit, subla-tion, teleology, totalizing, Treib, Whitehead

Slipping and SlidingBetween Fact andFiction

The New Myth?DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY

Review of: Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How

America Went Haywire. A 500-Year History,

New York: Random House, 2017.

“People will believe anything if you are prop-erly dressed.”

John Dickens, in the 2017 film biogra-phy of Charles Dickens, The ManWho Invented Christmas

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Slattery Reviews Andersen 135