Our notions of mental health are as much cultural as medical. Not even doctors are immune from the spirit of the time, and unconscious assumptions grounded in material philosophy, statistics, and causality artificially conceive the idea of disorder apart from any concept of development. Jung showed empirically that they’re inseparable.
Life’s transitions are the conflicts of individual development. Though steadily gaining momentum into mid-life, Erich Neumann demonstrated that what we see as the stages of life are the ‘fits and starts’ of a continual process which is present from the beginning and becomes conscious only at certain critical points.
Whatever you’ve been taught by those who benefit from your lack of knowledge (and theirs, too), transitional problems aren’t ‘diseases’. You may feel like they are as a result of having had no instruction about their underlying purposes; though, as Jung suggested, their design is to compel inner attention. The tension between individual and culture is a basic psychological conflict which aim is development. How else can we perceive an objective inner nature through a collective lens which sees the unconscious, if it sees it all, as regressive?
Confronting unconscious demands is a difficult task for anyone, but doubly so for the extraverted mindset today. We’re conditioned to see material and social needs as foremost. Psychic conflicts outside that ideal are symptomatic, partly because inner development is strange and confusing to it. Who hasn’t asked themselves: ‘what’s wrong with me?’
But they appear this way also because we’re causally oriented. Causes are plenty for those who look for them — but, without a concept of unconscious purpose, there is only a backward picture of the most defining aspect of psychic energy.
Though the unconscious guides most through life’s transitions with relatively little friction, if one can’t repress the conflicts and they become consuming, one is “in the soup”, as Jung referred to it. If not channeled into social ideals, it’s a ‘disorder’. The fact is, though, fewer and fewer are able to repress them today — a sign that our unconscious natures are coming into increasing opposition to cultural direction.
The biblical statement puts unconscious ideas into perspective: “Thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth; so is every man who is born of the Spirit.” Beneath the persona, we’re not just prisoners in dark and lonely cells of existential angst, but profoundly individual beings with psychological needs intended to relate us to ourselves, too. Our most intimate problems are our relation to the inner spirit. Nature has set a high premium on this function in the only real carrier of life: the individual.
The spiritual function is not rational. Some concept of the psyche’s irrationality is needed to understand the purposes of symbolic ideas. It’s no coincidence that unconscious intuitions of humanity’s future from a developmental perspective, ‘life after death’, are major factors in religious philosophy. Without such guiding ideas, ego exists only for itself in present-time.
Despite conscious illusions, the most basic statements about how the psyche works reveal that we don’t know who we are: it’s a process of becoming, and the more preconceived, the more elusive is self-knowledge. Undeveloped aspects of the personality revolve around complexes of ideas. If we can’t relate to them, they remain split off and acquire an energy which leads to problems we don’t understand and can’t control. Dissociation is a natural condition not confined to pathology.
Jung showed that the conflicts created by split-off complexes are attempts at healing which work through the least developed function. It’s the bridge to the unconscious, and it has a spiritual, philosophical character. That these conflicts are considered diseases is a revealing statement about the atrophy of the religious function today. That it’s conceived this way by a psychology which sees itself as science is further testament to its misunderstanding. The religious function may now be obscured by the scientific perspective, but it in no way implies that we’ve outgrown the historical enigma of what it means to be human.
Jung stressed its psychic reality, and consciousness is not its arbiter. To pretend otherwise is fantasy. It’s the source of evolution and the cornerstone of religion, and it’s everywhere but in the intellect. How do we evaluate an objective psyche so far beyond our comprehension that all humanity before us conceived it as a god? We would do well to reconsider our contemporary notions of spirit and compare them with those historical intuitions which were much closer to psychic truth than our present rationalism.
The concepts to do that are here now. We can no longer conceive the old fantasies literally. The mind of the past lived a different world than we know today. Though the fantasy-symbols were carefully manipulated to maintain power, on earth where it really counted, all were in some way devoted to a higher power and a distant future however fantastically conceived.
Science has filled the black hole of projection which once created the gods, the ancient image of potential which so long ago intuited conscious development. It has extracted from that image only the intellectual part which would make grand an uncertain earthly creature so afraid of its own unconscious nature, it views its own development as a disease.
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