Jung’s model of the psyche was a basic one with an immense body of empirical material behind it. It often requires going back to fundamentals to re-think the misconceptions he strove to clarify. More so today than in his time, an object-focused ego-perspective has difficulty connecting with the subjective nature of knowledge he advanced.
The insights of depth psychology: our animalness, our bisexuality (psychically, not sexually) and the inherently spiritual character of the psyche — which general knowledge is supported by the respective disciplines — are more or less loose, dissociated facts until we can incorporate them into a meaningful whole. Today’s specialized disciplines are so exclusive, it’s much too easy to lose sight of the psychological implications of that knowledge. One of the tasks of psychology is to give our search a human direction.
What Jung saw as scientific materialism in the nineteenth and twentieth century — a counter-swing away from metaphysics toward natural inquiry — only gains momentum into the new millennium, as commercial interests enhance and exploit our fascination with things and technology in ever more deceptive ways.
Just as an unconscious worldly spirit worked beneath the surface of alchemy to balance an otherworldly religious perspective and guide it back to earthly reality, the latest extreme swings toward its opposite. Symbolic disorders are replete with projections which, if not in theory at least in practice, are designed to relieve us of our spiritual confusion. What were once religious problems between man, god, and nature are now conflicts between man, his culture, and his own nature.
A neglected soul imparts little wisdom to an intellect bound to the senses, and the universal mysteries once projected into religious ideas have fallen back into the personal psyche. As Jung showed, consciousness can in no way contend with such powerful instinctual forces solely on its own devices. Though we would be superhuman, our animal natures belie our grandiose self-images no less today than a thousand years ago.
Jung intuited the image of man as pre-determined to an unknown extent. Just as every seed contains its future form, each is compelled toward what nature intended it to be. From the dawn of consciousness, symbolized in the story of Eden, through our evolution into civilized societies, natural instinctive processes have guided our development. The idea of being “made in the image of God” was a symbolic intuition of it, intended to carry forward that distant seed of innate natural wisdom.
The specific energy designed by nature to produce consciousness is generated by unconscious conflicts between contending stages of development. Every child is outfitted with the forms corresponding to their progression. On a deeper level than parental instruction, these archetypes support and prepare the developing mind and push it through its evolutionary history into the contemporary stage – give or take five hundred years or so.
The process of becoming self-aware condensed in the story of Eden was felt as disobedience (or opposition) to the law of unconscious wholeness. It reflected a capacity for choice, for weighing possibilities beyond animal consciousness. As it grew, it gradually split the psyche into two separate systems. As the myth says, it was initiated not by a god but by the conflicts of conscious choice amid opposing impulses symbolized by the snake. It requires a natural spiritual function to mediate instinct in a split mind, and all choice is relative to it. Images of space and other worlds still describe our dissociation from earthly reality.
As our double-sided nature evolves, we identify with certain functions which signal new stages of development. New forms supersede older ones, though the old functions don’t disappear. The original Adam (consciousness) who emerged from the blind world of nature constitutes a profound spiritual conflict — one we can no more outgrow than the mind can outgrow the body.
The soul as mediator of spirit, of instinct, in its consciously developed form is a religious function which took centuries to define. Though it was a form of consciousness, intellectual understanding wasn’t necessary to connect with it even a century ago. The development of thought has outpaced the older form of awareness, and today we need psychological tools to understand who we are beneath the subjective veil of conscious focus. As we once bowed to a god as an image of unity, of unconscious wholeness, so we yield to natural laws.
In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann addressed the uneven psychological development of the modern individual: “This betrays itself in many ways — for example, as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity — all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.”
We’re products of nature. Beneath the illusion of conscious unity, we live on in old philosophical assumptions which have passed unexamined from generation to generation: symbols which secretly reveal our split natures. Our scientific materialism today is too deeply opposed to the natural symbolic view to facilitate reconciliation. Its truth is in need of its opposite. The door to that opposite was opened by Jung’s comparative method, and we need to swing it wide to contend with the dangerous extremes produced by our conscious/unconscious natures.
For an idea of the emotional processes which lead back into the symbolic world of reflection, read more here, or visit Amazon.
Dear Evan, the unconscious is a subject which merits a longer dialogue, a very long dialogue. The unconscious is an intelligence service (to use an actual terminology) which collects information from our environment, perhaps also from our body, unbiased, and stores it, all this “behind our back*, to use a remark from Hegel, mysterious for this rational man. A huge and rich repository! And useful, if used positively, I mean constructively, instead of destructively. Which is the instance which decides how the content of this repository is used? The Ego or the Self? Using signifies that a structure is self-organized in our mind which serves our decisions and actions. Self-organization processes can only be influenced by the input which is provided to them at the start.
Breakfast with Ruth. – We discussed whether there is a decisive moment where the choice between constructive and destructive occurs. We concluded that the moment of starting is adolescence. It is a poised state: the young people want to (and must) develop their own identity and therefore refute the advices and opinions of their parents, but their personality is not yet consolidated and, therefore, fragile. Choosing constructiveness means assuming responsibility. In a fragile state this may be frightening. It requires self-confidence to stand it. Is confidence linked to a strong libido?
What do you think? Whatsoever, we must still learn to cooperate (I avoid to use the word: use) with our unconscious.
Peace, inside and outside, with you – Peter
Dear Evan – I read this text again and again, because it is a treasure of incisive remarks concerning a humanity slowly waking up and finding herself in the desert of its misguided spirit. Yes, it is our task “to give our search a human direction” again. The human direction can only signify taking notice of the rules imposed by nature and respecting them. Our brain is a tool given us by nature, but our mind is an emergence and seems no more bound to these rules. But we overlook that we live in an environment which is subjected to these rules. The free space to explore is not in the physical world, but in our interior. That is the space where “our mind can outgrow our body”.
In order to avoid that one of its creations takes control of the whole, nature has introduced the rule of edge-of-chaos, the principle of developing the dualism of order and chaos, of a constructive and a destructive force. Thus, the dualism forms a regulating feedback loop. In the case of man, rational thought and spiritual insight form this loop – should form, because we have broken this loop and, hence, triggered a runaway development. Now the alert bells are ringing.
Last week I met with a friend. He showed me a document with the title “Hypocrates”. The author of this document develops the thesis that the products of our mind fill a repository in a hypothetic space somewhere in the universe. I remarked that this mysterious repository is our unconscious and resides in our mind. A typical subject-object separation. We always use it when we cannot “master” the object (because we don’t master the subject). All the best – Peter
Thank you for your comment, Peter. Of course, I agree with you. I would only add that history is replete with the self-indulgence of consciousness. Your friend’s hypothetical projection is the way we’ve always seen unconscious products — and always will, until there is a general recognition of that psychological fact. My feeling is that this spiritual counterpoint, the need to turn inward, will continue to work negatively against us until we’re able to concede to nature what we’ve rejected in her, i.e., the guidance of an instinctual beast, whose ego struggles for an independence that can never be achieved. The entirety of history tells us this, and yet it’s always somebody else’s fault, and there are always plenty of excuses. This highlights the fact that the object of psychology is the subject, and we are both. Thank you, Peter.