March 25, 2015 · 10:52 am

Superpsychologimysticexpialidocious

Jung’s general ideas on therapy seem especially appropriate today in light of so many forms being available. Whether or not many are based on hit-or-miss assumption is unclear, as what is presented as deduction is often selectively pre-arranged to reiterate the premise. Aristotle introduced the idea of a “petitio principii” in 350 B. C.; but philosophical sophistries aside, there are other factors to be considered. Jung wrote in The Practice of Psychotherapy:

“Each of them rests on special psychological assumptions and produces special psychological results; comparison between them is difficult and often well-nigh impossible… Objective appraisal of the facts shows… that each of these methods is justified up to a point, since each can boast not only of certain successes but of psychological data that largely prove its particular assumption.”

But, consciousness is a partial complex; relative to inner conditions. Without a concept of unconscious psychic functioning, processes outside it can only be seen as physiological. Hazy notions of “drives” and “reflexes” euphemize the instinctual psyche, and the projection of subjective ideas onto objective data results in logical contradictions:

“Thus we are faced… with a situation comparable with that in modern physics… where there are two contradictory theories of light… Contradictions in a department of science merely indicate that its subject can be grasped only by means of antinomies — witness the wave theory and the corpuscular theory of light. Now the psyche is infinitely more complicated than light; hence a great number of antinomies are required to describe the nature of the psyche satisfactorily. One of the fundamental antinomies is… psyche depends on body and body depends on psyche. There are clear proofs for both sides of this antinomy, so that an objective judgment cannot give more weight to thesis or antithesis…

“The existence of valid contradictions shows that the object of investigation presents the inquiring mind with exceptional difficulties, as a result of which only relatively valid statements may be made… the statement is valid only in so far as it indicates what kind of psychic system we are investigating.”

That two psychic systems co-exist in the human head should be apparent to anyone who’s ever looked inside his/her own — a mystery which is profoundly expressed in dreams. It’s a vast and fluctuating continuum of body/mind that Jung showed to be scientifically uncertain territory; where the precision of the concept must replace direct measurement:

“Since the individuality of the psychic system is infinitely variable, there must be an infinite variety of relatively valid statements. But if individuality were absolute… if one individual were totally different from every other individual, then psychology would be impossible as a science, for it would consist in an insoluble chaos of subjective opinions. Individuality, however, is only relative, the complement of human conformity or likeness, and therefore it is possible to make statements of general validity, i. e., scientific statements. These statements relate only to those parts of the psychic system which do in fact conform, i. e., are amenable to comparison and statistically measurable; they do not relate to that part of the system which is individual and unique. The second fundamental antinomy in psychology therefore runs: the individual signifies nothing in comparison with the universal, and the universal signifies nothing in comparison with the individual.”

Here lies the inconsistency in those methods founded on averages and statistics: where the individual coincides with the universal can’t be assumed any more than where body becomes mind. How does therapy proceed from such logical contradictions?

“When, as a psychotherapist, I set myself up as a medical authority over my patient and on that account claim to know something about his individuality, or to be able to make valid statements about it, I am only demonstrating my lack of criticism, for I am in no position to judge the whole of the personality before me. I cannot say anything valid about him except in so far as he approximates to the “universal man.” But since all life is to be found only in individual form, and I myself can assert of another individuality only what I find in my own, then I am in constant danger either of doing violence to the other person or of succumbing to his influence.” 

Considering some therapies today, the danger is more for the patient than the therapist: “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. I must perforce adopt a dialectical procedure consisting in a comparison of our mutual findings. But this becomes possible only if I give the other person a chance to play his hand to the full, unhampered by my assumptions. In this way his system is geared to mine and acts upon it; my reaction is the only thing with which I as an individual can legitimately confront my patient.”

Freudians, Behaviorists, and Eye Rotation therapists may want to leave off here: “Any deviation from this attitude amounts to therapy by suggestion… Suggestion therapy includes all methods that arrogate to themselves, and apply, a knowledge or an interpretation of other individualities. Equally it includes all strictly technical methods, because these invariably assume that all individuals are alike. To the extent that the insignificance of the individual is a truth, suggestive methods, technical procedures, and theorems in any shape or form are entirely capable of success and guarantee results with the universal man — as for instance, Christian Science, mental healing, faith cures, remedial training, medical and religious techniques, and countless other isms. Even political movements can, not without justice, claim to be psychotherapy in the grand manner.”

Jung’s method is a way of asking the questions we need to ask to arrive at a discourse with ourselves. Those who already have answers have no reason to ask questions. It’s a symbolic process that begins with self-reflection.

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March 9, 2015 · 11:48 am

Jung on the Function of Symbols

Culture has changed in the last fifty years as in no comparable period in history. The religious perspective of the last century, indeed centuries, is quickly losing relevance for an increasingly material viewpoint. Media technology now serves and promotes a commercial thing-orientation as calculated and contrived as it is self-serving — and self-alienating.

Beneath the changing viewpoints lies a major shift in cultural values (in case you haven’t noticed). The social networking craze is only one small example of how unconscious effects turn conscious desires into their opposites. Though electronic devices bring the world to our fingertips, they alienate as much as they connect.

(I watched a young couple in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day spend most of the meal texting. Whether they ate or talked — maybe a quarter of the time — their phones were either in their hands or right next to their plates as ready as the silverware.)

The new technological reality is purely artificial: a commercial fantasy-world where relationships are secondary; emotions pre-packed, pictured, profiled, and projected. But, the partial focus required for its manipulation is an unconscious recipe for disaster. Few concede any personal contribution to it; but multiply it by several billion, and it’s easy to see how half the world’s animal species have disappeared since the 1970’s — of those still extant at that time.

The critical thinking which once threatened Church control need no longer be suppressed; merely diverted by subliminal ego-appeal — or simply ignored. A pre-arranged conformity curried to exploit mass consumers is the new norm. A compulsive herding process now begins to replace the values which have taken eons of human sacrifice to evolve. That’s not just personal judgment. The individual struggle for consciousness which has historically directed human evolution is quickly becoming the caricature of a manufactured individualism as collective as it is self-centered.

Jung showed empirically how human behavior is rooted in instinct — natural functions designed for a natural world. ‘Instinct’ and ‘compulsion’ are perceived only negatively — who accepts the idea of being subject to natural laws? Though conscious reality is no less real than its ‘objective’ counterpart, because the first is subject to the latter, conflicts and contradictions occur when they come into opposition.

Any intense interest has a compulsive (instinctual) character. Though its end-effects are as much creative as destructive, our ideas of compulsion are mostly negative descriptions of the mysteries of psychic life beyond our understanding. And if you don’t think our behavior is beyond our understanding, you don’t keep up with world events.

Jung explained compulsive behavior as psychic functions lacking the form and purpose for which nature intended them. When, for instance, the energy specific to symbolic understanding is too literally conceived, an unconscious opposition can give the loftiest ideal a destructive character. Only the symbol can direct the energy of opposed impulses toward a unified flow. Jung:

“… the symbol presupposes a function that creates symbols, and in addition a function that understands them. This latter function takes no part in the creation of the symbol, it is a function in its own right, which one could call symbolic thinking or symbolic understanding. The essence of the symbol consists in the fact that it represents in itself something that is not wholly understandable, and that it hints only intuitively at its possible meaning. The creation of the symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible.”

This is the religious instinct: a vital function of  value and relationship specific to our natures. It’s the first clue of the symbolic side of our commercial, social obsessions. The collective over-valuation of literal fact and the aversion to symbolic needs is balanced by an increasing egotism: the exaggerated effects of a decline in inner value which only deepens unconscious opposition.  Jung:

“… to settle the conflict, it must be grounded on an intermediate state or process, which shall give it a content that is neither too near nor too far from either side… this must be a symbolic content, since the mediating position between the opposites can be reached only by the symbol. The reality presupposed by one instinct is different from the reality of the other… This dual character of real and unreal is inherent in the symbol. If it were only real, it would not be a symbol… Only that can be symbolic which embraces both.

“The rational functions are, by their very nature, incapable of creating symbols, since they produce only rationalities whose meaning is determined unilaterally and does not at the same time embrace its opposite. The sensuous functions are equally unfitted to create symbols, because their products too are determined unilaterally by the object and contain only themselves and not their opposites. To discover, therefore, that impartial basis for the will, we must appeal to another authority, where the opposites are not yet clearly separated but still preserve their original unity.

“It would… be pointless to call upon consciousness to decide the conflict between the instincts.  A conscious decision would be quite arbitrary, and could never supply the will with a symbolic content that alone can produce an irrational solution to a logical antithesis.

“… Thus, besides the will, which is entirely dependent on its content, man has a further auxiliary in the unconscious, that maternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashion symbols in the natural process of elementary psychic activity, symbols that can serve to determine the mediating will.”

For more on the analogical thinking which would re-establish a sense of inner value, continue reading or visit Amazon.

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February 17, 2015 · 12:05 pm

Does Abstract Science Equal Concrete Psychology?

“Concretism sets too high a value on the importance of facts and suppresses the freedom of the individual for the sake of objective data. But since the individual is conditioned not merely by physiological stimuli but by factors which may even be opposed to external realities, concretism results in a projection… of these inner factors into the objective data and produces an almost superstitious veneration of mere facts…”  Carl Jung — Psychological Types.

Jung defined concretism as: “the antithesis of abstraction… The actual meaning of concrete is “grown together.” A concretely thought concept is one that has grown together… with other concepts.” His phenomenological approach was an extension of a philosophical phenomenology generally described as “the study of subjective experience.” But, it was his comparative historical approach which defined his concepts, and his studies of primitive psychology laid the empirical foundations:

“Primitive thinking and feeling are entirely concretistic; they are always related to sensation. The thought of the primitive has no detached independence but clings to material phenomena.” Primitive consciousness, for example, is drawn into the object to such an extent that it “does not experience the idea of divinity as a subjective content.” Hmm.

The primitive mind is so mesmerized by the immediacy of sensory reality that perception is indistinguishable from thought. Jung wrote that thoughts simply “happen” to the primitive — just as dreams happen in the modern mind. The psyche arranges the raw material of perception into patterns which, as science and religion show, reflect specific functions. Today, consciousness is confronted with the task of distinguishing inside from outside on a higher level.

Though modern sensibilities might take offense at such comparisons, without them it’s impossible to determine where we are (and where we’re going) in our development. By observing how the psyche has worked over thousands of years, Jung was able to establish an outline of its natural functioning.

“In civilized man, concretistic thinking consists in the inability to conceive of anything except immediately obvious facts transmitted by the senses, or in the inability to discriminate between subjective feeling and the sensed object.” That the most sophisticated abstract thinking could be concrete at the same time is one of the paradoxes of psychic reality.

The primitive idea of divinity as an external object is closely enough related to the idea of a heavenly god (or the conception of god in matter to which Stephen Hawking referred) to get some sense not only of our psychological development but the opposed nature of the functions dictating it. The most basic one relates us to our environment: sense-perception — and scientific preoccupations reveal as much about our unconscious relations to nature as abstract thinking reveals about our relations to ourselves.

“Concretism… falls under the more general concept of participation mystique… Just as the latter represents a fusion of the individual with external objects, concretism represents a fusion of thinking and feeling with sensation, so that the object of one is at the same time the object of the other. This fusion prevents any differentiation of thinking and feeling and keeps them both within the sphere of sensation…

“The disadvantage of concretism is the subjection of the functions to sensation. Because sensation is the perception of physiological stimuli, concretism either rivets the function to the sensory sphere or constantly leads back to it. This results in a bondage of the psychological functions to the senses, favouring the influence of sensual facts at the expense of the psychic independence of the individual. So far as the recognition of facts is concerned this orientation is naturally of value, but not as regards the interpretation of facts and their relation to the individual.”

Jung here brings into focus the subtle relationship between subjective reality and objective science. The profound opposition in our natures is a fundamental psychic condition, and there is stark evidence of it in everything we do. Only now, with the accelerated advance of technology, are we discovering that the mere recognition of it is not sufficient to interpret its consequences.

Narrow the window of time from several hundred centuries to the last fifty years, and you may get a picture of the trajectory of a highly developed intellect which is unable to distinguish itself from the objects of its attention. What may be seen from one perspective may be invisible from another and, though it’s always been, the last century shows the one-sidedness of consciousness to be an increasing threat not only to itself but to all life.

The value of the individual is presupposed by nature. Just as she formed collective instincts to serve life’s purposes, she also placed a premium on the creative instincts of the individual to achieve them. Jung wrote: “Nature cares nothing for the individual yet prizes the individual above all else.”. The paradox of our opposition, “factors which may even be opposed to external reality”, demands more than that we simply follow the lures of science and technology like herd animals. Our inability to see through its illusion is killing us — and everything we touch.

But, how to begin? Continue reading.

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January 6, 2015 · 5:23 pm

Natural Science in an Artificial Consciousness

I recently quoted Erich Neumann’s observations on the “mass man” and related them to the social-commercial mindset which has been so carefully cultivated since his time. Just as there are historical reasons for what’s happening today, there are also hidden purposes which lend perspective to the unconscious processes behind the causes.

To say that mainstream psychology has not only failed to address what may be one of the most defining cultural transitions in human history, but actually contributes to its unconsciousness, might seem a harsh statement. But as much as Jung cautioned against giving too much weight to technique and statistical evaluation, current trends confirm his concerns:

There are reasons for the increase in psychological disorders in the last fifty years that reach far below the surface god-likeness of the medical persona, the subjective nature of psychological diagnosis, and psychiatry’s unvarnished partnership with the pharmaceutical industry.

Jung defined two kinds of science: the rational, statistical kind more designed for a concrete world of objects and the subjective, symbolic kind which is relative to how we perceive it. To establish a verifiable science of the inner world of perception required the comparative reduction of ideas to their common properties: instinctual patterns he called archetypes. His was a science of philosophy: a means of accessing unconscious values never before conceived. Here are some empirical facts as Jung described them in, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:

This discussion is on the “… scientific, but purely rationalistic conception of the unconscious. When we speak of instincts we imagine we are talking about something known, but in reality we are talking about something unknown. As a matter of fact, all we know is that effects come to us from the dark sphere of the psyche which somehow or other must be assimilated into consciousness if devastating disturbances of other functions are to be avoided.

“… just as a person can repress a disquieting wish and thereby cause its energy to contaminate other functions, so he can shut out a new idea that is alien to him so that its energy flows off into other functions and disturbs them.” The process I would draw attention to is the increasing repression of the religious instinct. Science and religion today are at odds as never before, and that conflict is certain to have disturbing effects.

“… Under these circumstances, the unconscious seems like a great X, concerning which the only thing indisputably known is that important effects proceed from it. A glance at the world religions shows us just how important these effects are historically. And a glance at the suffering of modern man shows us the same thing — we merely express ourselves somewhat differently.”

Though the jargon of “mental disease” has changed since Jung’s time, his message has not: “Three hundred years ago, a woman was said to be possessed of a devil, now we say she has a hysteria. Formerly a subject was said to be bewitched, now the trouble is called a neurotic dyspepsia. The facts are the same; only the previous explanation, psychologically speaking, is almost exact, whereas our rationalistic description of symptoms is really without content. For if I say that someone is possessed by an evil spirit, I imply that the possessed person is not legitimately ill but suffers from some invisible psychic influence which he is quite unable to control. This invisible something is an… unconscious content beyond the reach of the conscious will.”

Jung’s argument was a response to the prevailing Freudian idea of “mother-fixation” which conceived the problem of ego and instinct in terms of “infantile dependence” on the mother — a literal idea which shows the ego’s disdain for its subjection to natural law. It’s the cold teat of technology, the unconscious pabulum of political ideology, and the projection of a too-child-like psychology onto objects which now trades on our most intimate desires.

Jung described it as an unconscious longing, “… an insistent demand, an aching inner emptiness, which can be forgotten from time to time but never overcome… It always returns… A good deal can be conjectured, but all that can be said with certainty is that… something unconscious voices this demand independently of consciousness and continues to raise its voice despite all criticism.

“… The primitive mind has always felt these contents to be strange and incomprehensible and, personifying them as spirits, demons, and gods, has sought to fulfil their demands by sacred and magical rites. Recognizing correctly that this hunger or thirst can be stilled neither by food nor drink… the primitive mind created images of invisible, jealous, and exacting beings, more potent and more dangerous than man, denizens of an invisible world, yet so interfused with visible reality that… spirits… dwell even in the cooking-pots.”

This, Jung called the natural psyche: the still-living instinctual source of our life-energy. “Our world, on the other hand, is freed of demons to the last trace, but the autonomous contents and their demands have remained. They express themselves partly in religion, but the more the religion is rationalized and watered down — an almost unavoidable fate — the more intricate and mysterious become the ways by which the contents of the unconscious contrive to reach us. One of the commonest ways is neurosis.”

Modern notions conceive it only negatively; a projection of guilt, a peculiarly religious attribute: “A neurosis is usually considered to be something inferior… from the medical point of view. This is a great mistake… For behind the neurosis are hidden those powerful psychic influences which underlie our mental attitude and its guiding principles… Materialism and mysticism are a psychological pair of opposites, just like atheism and theism… two different methods of grappling with these powerful influences from the unconscious, the one by denying, the other by recognizing them.”

Science and religion are not adversaries but complimentary ways of looking at life. So fixed is this duality in the intellect, even for psychology, that a living example of coming to terms with the unconscious would be outside its rational purview.

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December 18, 2014 · 7:53 am

What’d Ya Get for Christmas?

“I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and therewith I, they say, bring joy. Now of the joy I bring to the mother let none speak for miracles are not neatly to be caged in sentences, nor is truth always expedient. To the father I bring the sight of his own life, by him so insecurely held, renewed and strengthened in a tenement not yet impaired by time and folly: he is no more disposed to belittle himself here than elsewhere; and it is himself that he cuddles in the small, soft, incomprehensible and unsoiled incarnation. For, as I bring the children, they have no evil in them and no cowardice and no guile.” Figures of Earth — James Branch Cabell

Not long ago, I wrote a post about the commercialization of culture and its deeper psychological effects based on Erich Neumann’s insights. After seeing an advertisement by Target in which the words “What’d ya get?” were repeated ad nauseam for the reinforcement to our children of what Christmas is really about, I was reminded (post vomitus) of the stork’s soliloquy in Cabell’s, Figures of Earth:

“I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, when I later return, to those that yesterday were children. And in all ways time has marred, and living has defaced, and prudence has maimed, until I grieve to entrust that which I bring to what remains of that which yesterday I brought. In the old days children were sacrificed to a brazen burning god, but time affects more subtile hecatombs: for Moloch slew outright. Yes, Moloch, being divine, killed as the dog killed, furiously, but time is that transfigured cat, an ironist. So living mars and defaces and maims, and living appears wantonly to soil and to degrade its prey before destroying it.“

Were it that time and living the only things that soil and degrade. For Cabell, such ideas were much too vague and convenient to let the real truth of the matter escape unspoken:

“I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and I leave them to endure that which is fated. Daily I bring into this world the beauty and innocence and high-heartedness and faith of children: but life has no employment, or else… no sustenance, for these fine things which I bring daily, for always I, returning, find the human usages of living have extinguished these excellences in those who yesterday were children, and that these virtues exist in no aged person. And I would that Jahveh had created me an eagle or a vulture or some other hated bird of prey that furthers a less grievous slaying and more intelligible wasting than I further.“

So, “human usages” (conscious intent) were the ultimate source of the stork’s disillusionment. An old allegory of Christ as well as the instinct for reflection, the stork (like any animal) symbolizes the laws of unconscious nature which “have no evil in them and no cowardice and no guile.” The openness of children is a source of wonder but, like animals, being still under their direct influence, they’re also easily manipulated by those “intelligent” enough to deem them useful for their own ends.

It’s difficult for young minds to conceive life outside the all-pervasive web of commercial deception defining today’s culture; just as it was for my generation to think outside the cult-like religious beliefs of my youth. The narrow views of yesterday, however contrived and self-centered, held one big difference: most were guided by higher values than unabashed material gain.

Though the “particle in the mass” has ever been manipulated for the wealth and power of an elite, there was, historically at least, some purpose behind “human usages” that still reflected the urge for development. However unconsciously, nature herself managed the conflicts between individual and group that pushed humanity forward: Neumann’s centroversion.

“… we prefer to call the sub-man who dwells in us moderns the “mass man” rather than the “group man,” because his psychology differs in essential respects from that of the latter. Although the genuine group man is for the most part unconscious, he nevertheless lives under the rule of centroversion… a psychic whole in which powerful tendencies are at work, making for consciousness, individualization and spiritual growth… in spite of his unconsciousness, in spite of projections, emotionality… the group man possesses… creative powers which manifest themselves in his culture, his society, his religion, his art, customs, and even in what we call his superstitions.

“The mass man lurking in the unconscious of the modern, on the other hand, is psychically a fragment, a part-personality which, when integrated, brings with it a considerable expansion of the personality, but is bound to have disastrous consequences if it acts autonomously.

“This unconscious mass component is opposed to consciousness and the world of culture. It resists conscious development, is irrational and emotional, anti-individual and destructive.“

This collective beast is cultivated outright today, and the “elite” political and corporate interests reaping the immediate benefits not only encourage these qualities but live them. It began with the careful management of consumption in the minds of children, the first to absorb the effects of the powerful new tools of that part-personality called intellect: science, technology, and mass media which took control of our culture in the fifties: the “candied pap of television”, as Philip Wylie phrased it.

Today, we sacrifice our children to a new brazen god who is more opposed to consciousness than any idol history has yet borne in the human mind. You may not live to see the extent of the destruction — but your child will.

Where are the living examples psychology fancied it would provide for the growth of human consciousness? Though it’s a roundabout way which is often opposed to the under-philosophy of today’s technical facade, it is possible to re-connect with the values that reflect our children’s future instead of unthinkingly devouring it in the frenzied consumption which once was Moloch’s, today transfigured by the irony of time.

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December 11, 2014 · 2:24 pm

Gnosis, Diagnosis, and Prognosis

“Psychogenic disturbances, quite unlike organic diseases, are atypical and individual. With growing experience one even finds oneself at a loss in making a diagnosis. The neuroses, for example, vary so much from individual to individual that it hardly means anything when we diagnose…” Jung —  The Practice of Psychotherapy.

Jung’s inner experiences enabled him to recognize the need for broad concepts which could include ideas about what we don’t know of the psyche. His concept of the unconscious was open-ended enough to leave room for the mysteries and not shut them out with preconceptions.

Though his approach was intuitive, his method was empirical. The breadth of his concepts allowed him the flexibility to see connections between assumptions and facts, certainties and mysteries. The medical field knows that symptoms are natural attempts at healing, yet many professionals still treat psychic symptoms as if they were organic:

“It is generally assumed in medical circles that the examination of the patient should lead to the diagnosis of his illness, so far as this is possible at all, and that with the establishment of the diagnosis an important decision has been arrived at in regards to prognosis and therapy. Psychotherapy forms a startling exception to this rule: the diagnosis is a highly irrelevant affair since, apart from affixing a more or less lucky label to a neurotic condition, nothing is gained by it, least of all as regards prognosis and therapy.”

The psyche speaks a symbolic language which tends forward, and its hidden aims and purposes are often misinterpreted, if they’re even considered. Causal, statistically-oriented medical psychologies dismiss them as too fantastic and subjective to be of value; and that’s a problem: its language generally appears in intimate personal images which naturally reflect individual circumstances. The personal aspects, however, are only the surface of a deeper level which forms the historical background of an impersonal psychic context.

Regardless of accidental or unique circumstances, we will respond to them in distinctly human ways. Instinctual functions give shape and form to the personal images, and the disparity between the forms and the direction and content given them by the conscious attitude decides the conflict: if consciousness is tending in a direction which deviates from its natural functioning, then the unconscious creates negative consequences. Jung demonstrated this process empirically.

It’s an illusion that psychological diagnosis can be objective in the medical sense, as it presupposes a knowledge of the individual it can’t possibly have at the outset. Psychiatry in particular still operates under the tangled assumption that psychic problems can be successfully treated through drug therapies which alter brain chemistry:

“Nor should we gloss over the fact that the classifications of the neuroses is very unsatisfactory, and that for this reason alone a specific diagnosis seldom means anything real. In general, it is enough to diagnose a “psychoneurosis” as distinct from some organic disturbance — the word means no more than that… The Greco-Latin compounds needed for this still seem to have a not inconsiderable market value and are occasionally indispensable for that reason.”

If they were only occasionally indispensable in 1945, today this exclusive dialect of disease is the oil in the engine of a profession so closely bound to it that conscious norms (and “market value”) are their most basic criteria; though, as Jung stated, because of the relativity of individual values, Normal is more a social concept than a psychological one.

The collective orientation not only smuggles ethical value judgments into “sick” and “diseased” vs. “normal”, it believes this unconscious “morality” to be objective. But, it’s the knowledge of symbols and the work of reflection that circumscribe the natural values the psyche attempts to reveal through its symbolic language. The focus on scientific objectivity, if it sees it at all, sees the subjective factor as irrelevant, though it not only conditions our thinking as absolutely as any so-called objective factor, it is itself an “objective” factor in the psychological sense.

Jung has also suggested that a “neurosis” contains the seeds of a profound urge to individual consciousness beneath collective values. The conflict becomes an unconscious attempt to drive one inward to reflect on an inner nature which has been neglected or misunderstood. The ethical implication is that “neurotic” behavior is unacceptable to a prescribed norm and perceived as “bad” in keeping with our unconscious interpretations of life (and nature, too!) in terms of right and wrong.

Jung showed “neuroses” to be objective responses to psychic conditions beyond the moralistic valuations of consciousness: subject to an unconscious reality. Who is more or less driven to seek this greater reality consciously is one of nature’s great mysteries. The profound mystery of our current “neurotic” conflicts are signals that nature is calling us to pay attention to her. 

Accordingly, they represent functions which have been deprived of their natural expressions and seek their aims “in a wrong form” — misinterpreted because the symbolic language of the unconscious is not understood. To understand a “neurosis” is to break its form apart by reflecting on the symbolic ideas it contains and relate them to the associations the unconscious further provides to elaborate its aims — an intensely personal task.

Though the conflict is acted out concretely, symbolic behaviors describe natural functions that have a far different meaning than appears on the surface. At the deeper levels, it’s usually a religious or philosophical one, because that’s the historical form in which the unconscious expresses its urge to consciousness. How many psychologies would themselves qualify as neurotic if viewed from this natural perspective? How does a culture measure it’s own sanity by its own artificial criteria?

Continue reading for an example of the symbolic process of re-connecting to the psychic depth below the collective values which describe our current cultural neurosis.

 

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November 17, 2014 · 4:27 pm

The Science of Psychology: When Subject is Object

One misconception of mainstream psychology seems inescapable: beneath the studies and statistics, for anything to be known there must be a perceiving subject. Subject and object form a basic pair of philosophical opposites in the history of ideas; the confusion between them is only magnified when the subject is an object of science.

Jung’s work penetrated to the core of this problem, though his comparative method remains almost as misunderstood today as it was a century ago. An understanding of it begins with the facts of perception.

As he showed in Psychological Types, the argument has always turned around the projection of more or less extraverted and introverted viewpoints. These two ways of seeing the world determine how we experience it. To get a clearer picture of their effects on psychology, Jung’s general description of how we perceive is important:

The introvert is “… oriented by the factor in perception and cognition which responds to the sense stimulus in accordance with the individual’s subjective disposition. For example, two people see the same object, but they never see it in such a way that the images they receive are absolutely identical. Quite apart from the variable acuteness of the sense organs and the personal equation, there often exists a radical difference, both in kind and degree, in the psychic assimilation of the perceptual image.“

Though the extravert’s accent is on a concrete world of objects, due to the subjective nature of perception, Jung’s description applies to both viewpoints:

“The difference in the case of a single apperception may, of course, be very delicate, but in the total psychic economy it makes itself felt in the highest degree, particularly in the effect it has on the ego.“

The scientific method began as the study of objects by those whose interest tended toward so-called objectivity. Projections flowed only in one direction; repetition, verification, and prediction reduced the subjective effects of individual viewpoints to the extent that certain physical processes could be considered more or less objective, though lacking sufficient understanding of the subjectivity of perception. Jung cautioned:

“We must not forget — although the extravert is too prone to do so — that perception and cognition are not purely objective, but are also subjectively conditioned. The world exists not merely in itself, but also as it appears to me. Indeed, at bottom, we have absolutely no criterion that would help us to form a judgment of a world which was unassimilable by the subject.” Perception is relative to a subjective judgment which is not quantifiable. 

Jung explained that because of this subjective factor, “absolute cognition” is impossible. We are only as objective as our senses allow. Objectivity is relative not only to the limitations of the senses (even when artificially magnified) but to personal judgments about what we perceive and for what purposes. Beyond these unconscious pre-conditions, the mere accrual of information is “the effect it has on the ego.”

This is “… an attitude of intellectual arrogance accompanied by crudeness of feeling, a violation of life as stupid as it is presumptuous. By overvaluing our capacity for objective cognition we repress the importance of the subjective factor, which simply means a denial of the subject. But what is the subject? The subject is man himself — we are the subject. Only a sick mind could forget that cognition must have a subject, and that there is no knowledge whatever and therefore no world at all unless “I know” has been said, though with this statement one has already expressed the subjective limitation of all knowledge.

“This applies to all psychic functions: they have a subject which is just as indispensable as the object. It is characteristic of our present extraverted sense of values that the word “subjective” usually sounds like a reproof… brandished like a weapon over the head of anyone who is not boundlessly convinced of the absolute superiority of the object.” The freight train of objective science has steam-rolled psychology into a glaring contradiction:

“By the subjective factor I understand the psychological action or reaction which merges with the effect produced by the object and so gives rise to a new psychic datum.” As surely as we identify images with things, they are at once personal, collective, subjective and objective. Here’s the stick dangling the apple in front of a scientific psychology:

“Insofar as the subjective factor has, from the earliest times and among all peoples, remained in large measure constant, elementary perceptions and cognitions being almost universally the same, it is a reality that is just as firmly established as the external object. If this were not so, any sort of permanent and unchanging reality would be simply inconceivable, and any understanding of the past would be impossible. In this sense, therefore, the subjective factor is as ineluctable a datum as the extent of the sea and the radius of the earth.“

A fact is a fact, right? Not until we have a wider conception of how relative the rational and irrational may be to a perceiving medium. Grandiose notions of a “theory of everything” will sooner or later stumble onto these limitations:

“By the same token, the subjective factor has all the value of a co-determinant of the world we live in, a factor that on no account can be left out of our calculations. It is another universal law, and whoever bases himself on it has a foundation as secure, as permanent, and as valid as the man who relies on the object. But just as the object and objective data do not remain permanently the same, being perishable and subject to chance, so too the subjective factor is subject to variation and individual hazards. For this reason its value is also merely relative.“

For an example of how Jung’s comparative method may be applied to find subjective meaning beyond the limitations of intellect, read more.

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November 5, 2014 · 1:35 pm

The Hidden Language of Symbols

Jung’s historical studies are a sturdy, empirical foundation for uncovering the hidden meaning in dreams and fantasies. His comparative method produces real results and provides essential tools for interpreting the strange picture-language of unconscious functioning.

I remember my confusion when I first applied myself to his concepts. I could understand every word in sentences I couldn’t yet comprehend. For my causal thinking, even the notion of symbols baffled me. Many conceive them as signs or metaphors, but Jung discovered that symbols and the associations they give rise to are images concealing unconscious ideas.

Often, however, they’re embedded in an historical context which isn’t accessible by association. As Jung showed, the collective unconscious contains images of instinctual processes which are only partially translatable to consciousness. Its depth, like nature, is impersonal and inexhaustibly creative, and it works unceasingly to inform us of where we are.

As an example, I’d like to relate how I became aware of this symbolic language. In the course of studying Jung at mid-life, I was compelled to write a song, a parody of today’s culture. After going over it for months, it dawned on me that it had also created another picture beyond my intent.

Consciously, it was about our evolution; the fascination with technology, our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, growing obesity, and artificial viewpoints. I wanted to paint a satirical picture of future possibilities and like all psychic products, it can be read symbolically. Hidden in the song was an unconscious description of what was happening in me.

The end of the first stanza reads: “When all of nature’s circumstances quietly concur/Consider all the prospects which this process can incur.” Then the chorus: “My genes it seems got carried away with me!/ Help! I’m evolving into something I can’t see!/Is it fate or choice or probability/That’s turned me into what I seem to be?”

The second stanza goes: “My eyes are getting bigger from all the things I watch/From TV’s to calories to clocks./My body hair has yielded to my shirts and pants and socks/And all of these anxieties are thinning out my locks./My pelvic girdle’s widening, my girth is growing round/From the gravitational pull of sitting down./My legs are short and stunted, the circulation’s poor/As they dangle from the chair’s edge and never touch the floor.”

The third stanza: “My mouth’s become a cavern of enormous shape and size/From all the pull and pressure it withstands./My functions of ingestion are so greatly mechanized/That prudence must be practiced in not swallowing my hands./My arms are long and wiry from reaching out to grasp;/Their joints are more elastic I can vouch/From the constant craning motions for all the things I ask/To gratify my cravings without getting off the couch.”

The last stanza begins: “Well, nature’s got the best of me, I readily admit./Like some modern Humpty Dumpty, here I sit…” The conclusion describes a humanity which is consuming the world that sustains it. At the time, I had no notion that it also referred to the deeper process consuming me. Unaware of it, I projected it onto society, the body, even genes.

As I considered earlier dreams, I began to relate associations. I’d dreamed of a man pointing at me penetratingly, “It’s time for you to have a baby!” I thought I was crazy, until I read an alchemical parable of a king “who had a baby in his brain.” Psychologically, pregnancy and birth symbolize new psychic contents: my widening pelvic girdle, my growing girth, and the gravitational pull of the unconscious.

I thought of how the song depicted my legs, my emotional foundations: short and stunted, unable to reach the floor: the depth of an unconscious reality. As I compared and collated the ideas, they began to form a broader image.

The third stanza found me ravenous, consuming everything within reach, my arms exaggerated tools for grasping hands to feed the enormous cavern my mouth had become. Around that time, a friend told me: “I dreamed you were stuffing food into your mouth feverishly, eating everything in sight! It was crazy!”

Erich Neumann wrote that eating in dreams is an analogy for the digestion of unconscious contents. My friend’s unconscious had taken note of what was happening in me and described it in his dream.

The idea of self-consumption is expressed; the mouth as a cavern, an entrance to the dark internal depths, Jonah and the whale, the ancient idea of self-fertilization, the alchemical serpent with its tail in its mouth to form a circle: all symbols of nature’s transitional cycles. The core of these ancient ideas evolved into the ritual of Communion: the eating of Christ’s body and the drinking of his blood as the symbolic taking in of the spirit.

Another dream found me in the kitchen of a restaurant amid the rush of workers busily preparing meals. At the entrance, a man was was taking reservations. He looked at me uncannily, “You need to finish your art project!” He tossed me an egg which fell out of my hands and broke on the floor. There was nothing in it.

It was the Humpty-Dumpty of the last stanza, the egg of potential which, filled with personal experience and nurtured with devotion, brings the spirit to birth. “And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”: a reference to the individual nature of coming to terms with the unconscious.

These processes are embedded in the history of symbols, and only when we understand their impersonal context can we connect with the personal realities they express.

Jung and Neumann meticulously described how symbols reveal the history of our functioning. Psychological knowledge and reflection can bring these realities into consciousness. The wider our exposure to ideas, the greater our ability to understand what’s working in us.

For an example of mid-life development and the symbolic elaboration of ideas using Jung’s comparative method, read more.

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October 29, 2014 · 1:49 pm

The Land of Two Truths

James Branch Cabell’s, Jurgen and Figures of Earth, continue to occupy me. Because they derived from medieval folk tales and were worked by anonymous authors over centuries, the ideas in them contain symbols and analogies which have long been left behind in the modern search for objective truth.

Like alchemical philosophy, they revolved around natural processes outside conventional belief: aspects of inner life which dwell in “the land of two truths” beyond the dual thinking of traditional religion. Studies of symbols suggest that we’re entering a new phase of consciousness in which the repression of the unconscious that characterized centuries of Christian philosophy is slowly altering old ideals as its shadow begins to surface.

This process is revealed in shifting religious devotions, exaggerated dependence on science, technology and consciousness, the breakdown of traditional notions of marriage and family, obsessions with sex and violence and the more animal aspects of nature: signals of unconscious values in need of development.

Their tensions find us grasping at the certainties of fact and knowledge, along with more modern fantasies of technological diversion — not to understand the nature within but to further control it and repress it…

“Well, sir,” says Manuel, as he is entangled in the unconscious, “you may be right in a world wherein nothing is certain.” This reflective attitude is echoed by Jurgen: “You may be right; and certainly I cannot go so far as to say you are wrong: but still, at the same time — !”

The core of this unconscious creative realm was described by Jung as the symbol-making function. Goethe’s Faust descended into this void where, “There are no locks; no bars are to be riven;” Where, “Through solitudes you will be whirled and driven.” Manuel saw it, too, courtesy of Queen Freydis — down where the image-makers toil:

The magicians chanted strange, unintelligible verses in the dim obscurity of fire-light as they fashioned clay images. “What is the meaning of all this?” Manuel asked Freydis.

“It is an experimental incantation… in that it is a bit of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not yet been found: but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and… will live perpetually, surviving all those rhymes that are infected with thought and intelligent meanings such as are repugnant to human nature.”

Manuel: “Are words, then, so important and enduring?” Freydis answers: “Why, Manuel… In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?” Like Alice in Wonderland, this world is reflected in opposite form and is upside down or backward from the conscious view because it compensates it. Manuel “… would have said that words are used by men.

“There is give and take, of course,  but in the main man is more subservient to words than they are to him… think of such terrible words as religion and duty and love, and patriotism and art, and honor and common-sense, and of what these tyrannizing words do to and make of people!

“No, that is chop-logic: for words are only transitory noises, whereas man is the child of God, and has an immortal spirit.

“Yes, yes, my dearest, I know you believe that, and I think it is delightfully quaint… But, as I was saying, a man has only the body of an animal to get experiences in, and the brain of an animal to think them over with, so that the thoughts and opinions of the poor dear must remain always those of a more or less intelligent animal. But, his words are very often magic, as you will comprehend by and by when I have made you the greatest of image-makers.

“… Manuel talked with Freydis, confessing that the appearance of these magic-workers troubled Manuel. He had thought it, he said, an admirable thing to make images that lived, until he saw and considered the appearance of these habitual makers of images. They were an ugly… short-tempered tribe, said Manuel: they were shiftless, spiteful, untruthful and in everyday affairs not far from imbecile: they plainly despised all persons who could not make images, and they apparently detested all those who could… What sort of models… were these insane, mud-moulding solitary wasps for a tall lad to follow after? And if Manuel acquired their arts (he asked in conclusion), would he acquire their traits?

“The answer is perhaps no, and not impossibly yes.” replied Freydis. “For… they extract that which is best in them to inform their images, and this is apt to leave them empty of virtue. But, I would have you consider that their best endures, whereas that which is best in other persons is obliterated on some battle-field or mattress or gallows…”

The strange personifications in this creative realm of unconscious activity are the conflicts of opposing tendencies inherent in our natures. What we perceive as deceptive, hostile, and even imbecile (especially in everyday life!), are the raw undeveloped material, the clay, by which human animals are fashioned. We may perceive only that which is best in them to inform our images of ourselves and take the virtues for our own, yet only nature dictates the mud of human predicament.

You may read more about the spiritual predicament of the modern mind here, or visit Amazon.

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October 23, 2014 · 9:57 am

Symbolic Thinking: Combining Two Realities

“Often tymes herde Manuel tell of the fayrness of this Queen of Furies and Gobblins… insomuch that he was enamoured of hyr, though he neuer saw hyr: then… made he a Hole in the fyr, and when he had spoke with hyr, he shewed hyr his mynde.” Figures of Earth — James Branch Cabell.

Jung wrote of two kinds of thinking: the concentrated, directed kind which demands language for clarity and the fantasy-thinking which flows through images. The differences between conscious thought and unconscious perception are clearly revealed in the confusing language of dreams.

He later evolved his theory of types to show the influence of the two ways of thinking and how they inform the differences in perception of what we so off-handedly and euphemistically refer to as “reality”. The antagonism between introverted and extraverted viewpoints is so subtle, it can’t be resolved by “normal” dialogue in our current form of consciousness.

Jung also demonstrated cultural swings, beyond the subtleties of individual types, in which the spirit of the times may be more or less extraverted or introverted according to shifts in the collective unconscious. He traced their historical ebb and flow through his interpretations of religious conflicts and their gradual development through philosophy into modern scientific thought. Beneath individual and cultural differences, Jung explained the empirical facts of two fundamental and contradictory psychic realities.

I cite this as psychological background for the writings of James Branch Cabell. A contemporary of Jung, extraverted critics classed his writings as fantasy and escapist, though what he described was a symbolic, literary example of Jung’s research material. In Figures of Earth, Manuel, a folk analogy of Christ, seeks the spirit, not in the conventional heavenly sphere but through the natural, earthly figures in the unconscious.

An obligation, a “geas”, has been conferred upon him by his mother (the unconscious) to fashion a clay figure of himself in the world until it is to his liking and then to animate it, make it real — his life’s work. In this inner journey, he meets the shadowy wraiths who will aid him in the fulfillment of his strange “geas” whom no one understands.

Through various sources, Manuel learns of Queen Freydis, who alone can animate the clay figures he has fashioned. She can be summoned only by magical incantation and only when the moon is full. She’s dangerous and able to change into frightening images at will, and these must be confronted and endured to catch hold of her in human form.

When Manuel has made the sacred fire from which she would appear according to the rites, a giant serpent leapt upon him, and he clutched it desperately. As he held it at bay, it changed into a monstrous black pig with great tusks “which possessed life of their own, and groped and writhed toward Manuel like fat white worms.” He recited the magic words per instruction.

“Now Manuel was grasping a thick heatless slab of crystal, like a mirror, wherein he could see himself quite clearly. Just as he really was, he, who was not familiar with such mirrors, could see Count Manuel, housed in a little wet dirt with old inveterate stars adrift about him everywhither; and the spectacle was enough to frighten anybody.” Suddenly, Manuel found himself “grasping the warm soft throat of a woman.”

“… do you take no thought for me,” says Queen Freydis, “who am for the while a human woman: for my adversary is a mortal man, and in that duel never yet has the man conquered.” She described her kingdom:

“… So do I tread with wraiths, for my lost realm alone is real. Here all is but a restless contention of shadows which pass presently; here all that is visible and all the colors known to men are shadows dimming the true colors; here time and death, the darkest shadows known to men, delude you with false seemings: for all such things men hold incontestable, because they are apparent to sight and sense, are a weariful drifting of fogs that veil the world… So in this twilit world of yours do we … appear to be but men and women.

“… I am Queen of all that lies behind this veil of human sight and sense. This veil may not ever be lifted; but very often the veil is pierced, and noting the broken place, men call it fire. Through these torn places men may glimpse the world that is real: and this glimpse dazzles their dimmed eyes… and this glimpse mocks… Through these rent places, when the opening is made large enough, a few men here and there, not quite so witless as their fellows, know how to summon us… when for an hour the moon is made void and powerless… and we come as men and women.”

The veil of the senses was rent large by Jung for those who would see beyond it by reflecting on their own images. With the knowledge he discovered and these earthly figures, you may glimpse such erstwhile contradictions in contemporary form, though it’s mirror may yet be a very frightening spectacle to a scientific philosophy caught in the senses, now without any religious values to support it.

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September 22, 2014 · 2:30 pm

How Conscious Are We?

Philosophical ideas of what consciousness is have been debated for centuries. Wikipedia quotes Max Velmans and Susan Schneider: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience one of the most familiar and most mysterious aspects of our lives.” True, but we need empirical concepts to move the debate beyond philosophy.

Jung defined consciousness as “… the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego.” He defined ego as, “… a complex of ideas which constitutes the center of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity.”

His association tests proved ego to be one among a number of complexes which range from dimly perceptible to wholly unconscious. As the central complex of consciousness, it relates only to contents with which it identifies. His concept of projection asserts that complexes of ideas not associated with its identity will appear outside it…

The accidental nature of life presupposes creative functions which correspond to it: instincts designed to anticipate fluid conditions. In another post, I cited Erich Neumann’s description of the “image-symbol”: the instinctual readiness to a given situation which is shaped by personal experience. It originates internally and is as much emotional as sensual.

Immediate awareness, however, is further confined to those images which excite attention: the measure of energy by which instinct compels action. Our initial responses are to images which reflect inner and outer conditions equally.

As physics illustrates, the reality beneath appearance is often counter-intuitive to sensual experience. Jung showed how the unconscious mediates psychic reality for purposes of development beyond conscious perception.

This example is of the pious priest, Abbe Oegger, taken from a story by Anatole France. Jung wrote that the priest was “… much given to speculative musings particularly in regard to the fate of Judas: whether he was really condemned to everlasting punishment, as the teaching of the Church declares, or whether God pardoned him after all.”

The priest concluded after much reflection that Judas was an indispensable instrument in the attainment of God’s work — still, he had great doubts. In his conflict, he prayed to God to give him a sign of His benevolence.

He felt a touch on his shoulder and was convinced that God had forgiven Judas. He resolved to go out into the world and preach God’s mercy. It signaled a new dimension of his personality; one he helped create by the attention he gave to the problem.

So why, Jung asked, was the priest so concerned with the legend of Judas? “We are told that he went out into the world to preach the gospel of God’s unending mercy. Not long afterwards he left the Catholic Church and became a Swedenborgian. Now we understand his Judas fantasy: he was the Judas who betrayed his Lord. Therefore he had first to assure himself of God’s mercy in order to play the role of Judas undisturbed.

“Oegger’s case throws light on the mechanism of fantasies in general. The conscious fantasy may be woven of mythological or any other material; it should not be taken literally, but must be interpreted according to its meaning. If it is taken too literally it remains unintelligible, and makes one despair of the meaning and purpose of the psychic function. But the case of the Abbe Oegger shows that his doubts and his hopes are only apparently concerned with the historical person of Judas, but in reality revolve around his own personality, which was seeking a way to freedom through the solution of the Judas problem. Conscious fantasies therefore illustrate, through the use of mythological material, certain tendencies in the personality which are either not yet recognized or are recognized no longer.”

Jung wrote that they usually turn around ideas which are incompatible with the conscious attitude “… whose conscious realization meets with the strongest resistances. What would Oegger have said had one told him in confidence that he was preparing himself for the role of Judas? Because he found the damnation of Judas incompatible with God’s goodness, he proceeded to think about this conflict. That is the conscious causal sequence. Hand in hand with this goes the unconscious sequence: because he wanted to be Judas, or had to be Judas, he first made sure of God’s goodness. For him, Judas was the symbol of his own unconscious tendency, and he made use of this symbol to reflect on his own situation — its direct realization would have been too painful for him.”

The priest was thrown back on himself for reasons far beyond his conscious knowledge. The images compelling his attention anticipated what he did. He was Judas in the sense that his unconscious personality was opposed to the collective ideas of God he’d been given.

When we reverse the mirror of thought through attention and reflection, it allows some of the mystery to appear through it. Which are the facts: hypothesis or experience? This is what separates gods and devils for those who would reflect on it.

The facts of Abbe Oegger’s experiences were precisely as they were when seen through the mirror of reflection. He did relate his problem to Judas, he did leave the Church, he did spread the gospel of God’s unending mercy. These are psychic facts beyond philosophical meanderings about Church doctrine: the subjective facts of a mind which took the meaning of its own existence seriously.

For a contemporary example of how the subjective mind may discover meaning in a world governed by collective notions of objectivity, continue reading.

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September 15, 2014 · 2:17 pm

Metaphysics and Jung’s Psychology

I’m impressed by Wikipedia’s definitions — a model today’s psychologies might want to consider. It defines metaphysics as “a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world… notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility.”

It sounds like what psychology and religion might be concerned with were they more attuned to the advancement of consciousness than cultivating subjective ideologies for purchase by consumers.

“Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as… natural philosophy.” Science is: “knowledge of, originating from epistemology. The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment unlike the rest of philosophy.” After the eighteenth century “… metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.”

Etymology traces it through “Latin scoliasts” as “the science of what is beyond the physical” to the Greek “… science of the world beyond nature…  of the immaterial.”

It evolved from the Greek skeptics, “How do you know?” to “epistemology (how we know)… and this led to science (Latin to know) and to the scientific method (the precision of which is still being debated). Skepticism evolved epistemology out of metaphysics. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical inquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

“Since the beginning of modern philosophy during the seventeenth century, problems that were not originally considered within the bounds of metaphysics have been added to its purview, while other problems considered metaphysical for centuries are now typically subjects of their own separate regions in philosophy… In some cases [italics mine], subjects of metaphysical scholarship have been found to be entirely physical and natural, thus making them part of science proper (cf. the theory of Relativity).”

Metaphysics then is the language of imagination, of the psyche. To think that anything could exist outside nature is an illusion with profound implications. There’s no other reality; how human thought ever arrived at two distinct perceptions of it can be examined historically.

Because of the psyche’s fluid nature, we can’t observe ourselves with the same objectivity we apply to inanimate objects. The subjectivity of perception and thought, the unconscious exchange of projections, and the artificial conditions of test methods find psychological experiment to be so relative to unknown factors that it can be only superficially objective.

Jung transformed the studies of religion, philosophy, and epistemology into empirical activities; his method, however, derived less from experiment than the comparative study of ideas and symbols. The ever-changing flux of perception dictates that the only fixed reference-point by which psyche can be pinned down  is an historical one.

One of his basic assertions was that the psyche is the medium of all experience; with no perceiving subject there is only the timeless world of unconscious impulse. Natural functions translate psychic experience through images. To apply an empirical method to their study, they must be confined to that medium.

His subject was not what objects are in themselves, but the mind. There we have the possibility to understand the ideas we conceive: images reflect objects but also unconscious responses to them — their usefulness, our needs and desires for them — as well as reflections of the medium itself.

Jung’s psychology was the study of our mental functioning through images, not their literal forms. If you believe that only concrete objects can be real, you can’t conceive spiritual ideas as symbols of psychic functions.

The fantasy-thinking that led theologians in the Middle Ages to argue over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin was a formal stage of thought; it conceived ideas as concrete things, as many still do today. But, we can see how our thinking has changed since then. Jung conceived a new exploratory method for the age-old philosophical problem of fantasy vs. reality: a symbolic one.

He showed how the metaphysical world could be described empirically, just as natural science studies the material world. Since the unconscious is outside awareness, it’s a natural, objective reality no less observable than the external world. To understand its symbolic nature, however, we need broader concepts than conventional science can furnish.

Erich Neumann described their nature: “… the psychic image-symbol “fire,” as something “red,” “hot,” “burning,” contains as many elements of inner experience as of outer experiences. “Red” possesses not only the perceptible quality of redness, but also the emotional component of heat as an inner process of excitation. “Fiery,” “hot,” “burning,” “glowing,” etc., are more emotional than perceptual images. We contend, therefore, that the physical process of oxidation, fire, is experienced with the aid of images which derive from the interior world of the psyche and are projected upon the external world, rather than that experiences of the external world are superimposed on the inner… In human development the object becomes disentangled only very gradually and with extreme slowness from the mass of projections in which it is wrapped and which originate in the interior world of the psyche.”

Jung’s method of disentangling ideas from objects was a great advance in our attempts to view ourselves with any objectivity. Neumann’s statement derived from in-depth studies of symbols and ideas, their evolutionary development, and how our perceptions of them compare and contrast over time: the only reference-point outside a given historical viewpoint.

Their studies provided a new perspective on epistemology, philosophy, and religion — based on empirical evidence. It’s no less scientific than black holes, the extra dimensions of string theory, or the parallel universes of theoretical physics. Wikipedia will be compelled to update its definition of metaphysics — when the rest of science catches up to Jung’s ideas.

For an example, based on Jung’s discoveries, of the analogical thinking required to come to terms with a symbolic reality, continue reading.

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