Thoughts on Jung::
Thoughts on Jung
© 2008, Jonathan Zap
An Encounter with Jung
As a child my psyche was magnetized by emergent archetypal visions from the collective psyche that would appear in my own imagination, and also in many artifacts of popular culture such as science-fiction novels and films. By the time I was nineteen, and a senior in college, I set out to understand these numinous visions and was quickly led to a very personal encounter with Jung. A few years ago I described that encounter as follows:
My first encounter with Jung was intense and had the uncanny stamp of what Jung called ‘synchronicity’ all over it. I was nineteen years old and attempting to investigate certain anomalies. I had had experiences of a parapsychological nature, and found myself fascinated by disturbing fantasies and strange visions, which lit up in my imagination with recurrent intensity, but also appeared, inexplicably, outside of my psyche in sci-fi books and movies. This appearance of artifacts of the inside world materializing outwardly, another example of synchronicity, was especially strange as some of the material pre-dated my incarnation. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, for example, had been written two years before I was born. Even more disturbing was the British 1960 sci-fi movie, Village of the Damned, which was based on the novel, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, written five years before I was born. How could fantasies and visions that I thought weirdly peculiar to my imagination turn up in stories that were older than I was?
Still image from the movie, Village of the
Damned
Unlikely help offered itself to me during
the course of my studies. I was in my last year of college and the Chairman of
the Philosophy Department, though I was an English major, had become my
benefactor and opened doors for me in a highly conservative academic
environment, allowing me to pursue interdisciplinary research projects into
obscure, shadowy areas. But it was actually my mom who suggested that I read what
a Carl Jung had to say about the 'archetypes and the collective
unconscious.'
And so I came to stand before the many
elegant black volumes of the Princeton Bollingen edition of Jung's collected
works. But what could this Swiss psychologist, the son of a minister, who
reached manhood in the nineteenth century, say of any use to a nineteen year
old Jewish kid from the Bronx who found himself obsessed with sci-fi fantasies
like The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a UFO-related incident somehow
resulted in large-eyed, androgynous children with psychic powers and a group
mind? I scanned the index volume for a minute or so and came across a late
work, Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Sky. That was
a bit of a shock, as UFOs were a major part of the fantasies and my esoteric
research. I went right to volume ten, Civilization in Transition, where
flying saucers were considered. This subject seemed to haunt Jung near the end
of his life, and he couldn't let go of it. At the end of the book there was an
afterward, followed by an epilogue, followed by a supplement.
As I glanced through the supplement my
jaw dropped open in amazement. Jung had devoted this lengthy supplement to
analyzing mythological layers of meaning in John Wyndham's The Midwich
Cuckoos! It seemed as if this dead Swiss guy had stepped out of the
bookcase and had holographically manifested himself to look over my shoulder at
the same sci-fi story that obsessed me. Even more amazing, I saw that we had
some parallel ideas about what it might mean.
From the moment of that first encounter, Jung, like a wizard bearing a torch, became my guide as I followed numinous visions of evolutionary metamorphosis down the rabbit hole and discovered what I now call “the Singularity Archetype.” (see the 1978 paper that resulted from this encounter: Archetypes of a New Evolution)
So I am glad to be a Jungian, and not Jung, because I get to be the benefactor of his many decades of heavy lifting. He had the earth-moving power to tunnel deeply into the cultural matrix and uncover the deep program, the core ruling images he called archetypes. If anyone has made a heroic contribution to pulling back the veils of Maya, it is Jung.
If you have not read Jung before, and would like to go beyond this quote
collection, a perfect starting place is Man and His Symbols by Carl
Jung. This book was written by Jung and many of his most brilliant colleagues,
like Marie Louise Von Franz, as an introduction to his work. Jung's part,
entitled Approaching the Unconscious, was completed shortly before his
death in 1961 and represents a mature summing up of his way of psychological
exploration. An alternative starting point or follow up to Man and his
Symbols is Jung's autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. This
book expresses Jung's more personal voice and some of his inner experience so
it as if he were talking to you across from the primeval campfire and is a much
more intimate introduction. Volume 9 of the collected works, Archetypes of
the Collective Unconscious, and volume 10, Civilization in Transition
would be a great follow up to Man and His Symbols. Another inexpensive
and easily available follow up would be The Portable Jung, edited by
Joseph Campbell.
C.G. Jung Quotes:
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul had gradually been turned into a Navareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better!
Whether this psychic
structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever "originated" at all
is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. The structure is
something given, the precondition that is found to be present in every case.
And this is the mother, the matrix—the form into which all experience is
poured.
The psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the
truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that
is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a "picturing" of
vital activities. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life
has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche
presupposes the living body in order that its images may live.
What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity, and it wells up
wherever the inhibitive action of the conscious mind abates or, as in sleep,
ceases altogether.
Natural man is not a "self" —he is the mass and particle in the mass,
collective to such a degree that he’s is not even sure of his own ego. That is
why since time immemorial he has needed the transformation mysteries to turn
him into something, and to rescue him from the animal collective psyche, which
is nothing but an assortment, a "variety performance."
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in
his greatest passion, idleness.
To have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who
plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason—in the
realm of dogma—he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and
blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human beings. Heaven and
hell are the fates meted out to the soul and to civilized man, who in his
nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a
heavenly Jerusalem.
The world comes into
being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his
containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ...the
primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us
as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid
phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are
undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.
The primitive cannot
assert that he thinks; it is rather that "something thinks in him."
The spontaneity of the act of thinking does not lie, causally, in his conscious
mind, but in his unconscious... His consciousness is menaced by an almighty unconscious.
Science, curiously
enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the
withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first
stage in the despirtualization of the world. One step followed another: already
in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and
animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost
unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them.
Whatever name we may
put to the psychic background, the fact remains that our consciousness is
influenced by it to the highest degree, and all the more so the less we are
conscious of it. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations,
moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of his psyche, and how
dangerous or helpful they may be in shaping his destiny. Our cerebral
consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. But
when the play comes to an end, he must remember his own subjective reality, for
he can no longer continue to live as Julius Caesar or as Othello, but only as
himself, from whom he has become estranged by a momentary sleight of
consciousness. He must know once again that he was merely a figure on the stage
who was playing a piece by Shakespeare, and that there was a producer as well
as a director in the background who, as always, will have something very
important to say about his acting.
Rationalism and
superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter
the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we
are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the
unconscious.
Nowhere and never has
man controlled matter without closely observing its behavior and paying heed to
its laws, and only to the extent that he did so could be control it. The same
is true of that objective spirit which today we call the unconscious: it is
refractory like matter, mysterious and elusive, and obeys laws which are so non-nonhuman
or suprahuman that they seem to us like a crimen laesae majestatis humanae. If
a man puts his hand to the opus, he repeats, as the alchemists say, God's work
of creation. The struggle with the unformed, with the chaos of Tiamat, is in
truth a primordial experience.
The unconscious is the
unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. The conscious mind allows
itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why
St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. The
unconscious is an autonomous psychic entity; any efforts to drill it are only
apparently successful, and moreover harmful to consciousness. It is and remains
beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control, a realm where nature and her
secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but may
not meddle.
Any attempt to
determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same
difficulties as atomic physics; the very act of observation alters the object
observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining
the real nature of the unconscious.
Nobody can say where
man ends. That is the beauty of it. The unconscious of man can reach God knows
where. There we are going to make discoveries.
Before the bar of
nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the
contrary there are severe penalties for it.
Every advance in
culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to
consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an
advance always beings with individuation, that is to say with the individual,
conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden
territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own
being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become
conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity
to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides
the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress.
When we must deal with
problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity
and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget
that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and
emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon
all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
"Reflection"
should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather as an
attitude. It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the
compulsion of natural law. As the word itself testifies ("reflection"
means literally "bending back"), reflection is a spiritual act that
runs counter to the natural process; an act whereby we stop, call something to
mind, form a picture, and take up a relation to and come to terms with what we
have seen. It should, therefore, be understood as an act of becoming conscious.
Gleaming islands,
indeed whole continents, can still add themselves to our modern consciousness.
There are many people
who are only partially conscious. Even among absolutely civilized Europeans
there is a disproportionately high number of abnormally unconscious individuals
who spend a great part of their lives in an unconscious state. They know what
happens to them, but they do not know what they do or say. They cannot judge of
the consequences of their actions. These are people who are abnormally
unconscious, that is, in a primitive state. What then finally makes them
conscious? something really happens, and that makes them conscious. They meet
with something fatal and then they suddenly realize what they are doing.
An inflated
consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own
existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of drawing
right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore
cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must
strike it dead.
The stirring up of
conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict
engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it
has two aspects, that of combustion and of creating light. On the one hand,
emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence
and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes...But on the other hand,
emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for
emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness
to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.
Nothing is so apt to
challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One
can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of
the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and
bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility.
Without consciousness
there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us
only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a
precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic
principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with
the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the
individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the
contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of
consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding
empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate
manifestation of the psyche.
...All Nature seeks
this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed
and most fully conscious man.
Archetypes are like
riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again
at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of
life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it
has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water
will return to its old bed.
Our personal
psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology.
The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the
surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and
collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of
our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring
about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical
intellect...The archetypal images decide the fate of man.
...They (the
archetypes) may be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in
a saturated solution. As a priori conditioning factors they represent a
special, psychological instance of the biological "pattern of
behavior," which gives all living organisms their specific qualities.
Sooner or later
nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together
as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions,
push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the
atom, the other with that of the archetype.
I can only gaze with
wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial
universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over
millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My
consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it
is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And those
images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The
most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of
their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place the
spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the
universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through
the medium of the body, so I reach that world though the medium of the psyche.
The organism confronts
light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural
process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye
catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and
spontaneous creative activity matter, the primordial image expresses the
intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. The primordial image is
thus a condensation of the living process.
It is a great mistake
in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word or concept.
It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the
living individual by the bridge of emotion.
The so-called
"forces of the unconscious" are not intellectual concepts that can be
arbitrarily manipulated, but dangerous antagonists which can, among other
things, work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. They are
everything one could wish for or fear in a psychic "Thou." The layman
naturally thinks he is the victim of some obscure organic disease; but the
theologian, who suspects it is the devil's work, is appreciably nearer to the
psychological truth.
All the true things
must change and only that which changes remains true.
Nobody doubts the
importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance
of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more
truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.
In order to do
anything like justice to dreams, we need an interpretive equipment that must be
laboriously fitted together from all branches of the humane sciences.
As in our waking
state, real people and things enter our field of vision, so the dream-images
enter like another kind of reality into the field of consciousness of the
dream-ego. We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as
if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their
own laws.
Anyone who wishes to
interpret a dream must himself be on approximately the same level as the dream,
for nowhere can he see anything more than what he is himself.
Dreams are as simple
or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit
ahead of the dreamer's consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any
better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have
the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream
interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one's own
dreams.
The art of
interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good
only when we can get along without them.
Only the man who can
do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands.
So difficult is it to
understand a dream that for a long time I have made it a rule, when someone
tells me a dream and asks for my opinion, to say first of all to myself:
"I have no idea what this dream means." After that I can begin to
examine the dream.
...The whole dream
work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theater in which the dreamer
is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the
public, and the critic.
Just as the body bears
the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence
there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language
of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.
Nature commits no
errors.
Now supposing that
these (dream) interpretations also go astray, the general inconclusiveness and
futility of our procedure will make itself felt soon enough in the bleakness,
sterility, and pointlessness of the undertaking, so that the doctor and patient
alike will be suffocated either by boredom or by doubt. Just as the reward of a
correct interpretation is an uprush of life, so an incorrect one dooms them to
deadlock, resistance, doubt, and mutual desiccation.
Many people who know
something, but not enough, about dreams and their meaning, and who are
impressed by their subtle and apparently intentional compensation, are liable
to succumb to the prejudice that the dream actually has a moral purpose, that
it warns, rebukes, confronts, foretells the future, etc. If one believes that
the unconscious always knows best, one can easily be betrayed into leaving the
dreams to take the necessary decisions, and is then disappointed when the
dreams become more and more trivial and meaningless.
Experience has shown
that a slight knowledge of dream psychology is apt to lead to an overrating of
the unconscious which impairs the power of conscious decision. The unconscious
functions satisfactorily only when the conscious mind fulfills its task to the
very limit. A dream may perhaps supply what is then lacking, or it may help us
forward when our best conscious efforts have failed.
To concern ourselves
with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves—a way of self-reflection. It is
not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention
to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the
unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ergo but on the
self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from
the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because we
have estranged ourselves from it through the aberrations of the conscious mind.
Anyone who wants to
know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.
He would be better advised to put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his
study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of
prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and
gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist
meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and
hate, through the experience of passion in every form in hos own body, he would
reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him,
and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.
An ancient adept has
said: "If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the
wrong way." This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in
sharp contrast to our belief in the "right" method irrespective of
the man who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the man and little or
nothing on the method.
True art is creation,
and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner; Learn
your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle
of the living soul. Not theories but your creative individuality alone must
decide.
If I wish to treat
another individual psychologically at all, I must for better or worse give up
all pretensions to superior knowledge, all authority and desire to influence.
We cannot change
anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
When the ego has been
made a "seat of anxiety," someone is running away from himself and
will not admit it.
Among neurotics, there
are not a few who do not require any reminders of their social duties and
obligations, but are born and destined rather to be bearers of new cultural
ideals. They are neurotic as long as they bow down before authority and refuse
the freedom to which they are destined. As long as we look at life only
retrospectively, as is the case in the psychoanalytic writings of the Viennese
school, we shall never do justice to these persons and never bring them for the
longed-for deliverance. For in this way we train them only to be obedient
children and thereby strengthen the very forces that made them ill—their conservative
backwardness and submission to authority.
Where love reigns,
there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is
lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.
In spite of all
indignant protestations to the contrary, the fact remains that love (using the
word in the wider sense which belongs to it by right and embraces more than
sexuality), its problems and its conflicts, is of fundamental importance in
human life and, as careful inquiry consistently shows, is of far greater
significance than the individual suspects.
The love problem is
part of mankind's heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should be ashamed of
having to pay his tribute.
It is a favorite
neurotic misunderstanding that the right attitude to the world is found by
indulgence in sex.
So far as we know,
consciousness is always ego-consciousness. In order to be conscious of myself,
I must be able to distinguish myself from others. Relationship can only take
place where this distinction exists.
For two personalities
to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at
all, both are transformed.
It must be admitted
that a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions. Were that not so, most
people would long since have acquired a little wisdom.
Sentimentality is the
superstructure erected upon brutality.
Most men are
erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with
sex. A man things he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses
her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one.
Our life is like the
course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it
reaches the zenith-heat of high noon. Then comes the enatiodromia: the steady
forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength.
Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling
an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the
obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture
everything that assists the descent.
If there is anything
that we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see
whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Take our
enthusiasm for pedagogics. It may be that the boot is on the other leg. It may
be that we misplace the pedagogical need because it would be an uncomfortable
reminder that we ourselves are still children in many respects and still need a
vast amount of educating.
Our whole educational
problem suffers from a one-sided approach to the child who is to be educated,
and from an equally one-sided lack of emphasis on the uneducatedness of the
educator.
Children are educated
by what the grown-up is and not by what he says.
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