“Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual in the first half of life, the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it — to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development.” — A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious
In a previous post I introduced the illustrations in my book. Some time ago, I posted three successive articles on the major themes stated in the preface: Part I, PART II, and Part III; each, a brief summary of the ideas which formed the basis of the book.
For the more serious-minded students of Jung’s psychology, I offer the preface in its entirety. It includes brief descriptions of my personal motives in writing the book, as well as cultural analogies of the individual process: an attempt to shed light on the transitional conflicts which seem to me to be shaping collective reactions to the forward movements of the unconscious.
The preface is a discursive outline of the broader premise of the text: the need for a new relation to the unconscious for the purpose of abetting a more conscious transition from a religious conception of nature to a scientific one and beyond — to a psychological one which would better equip us to confront our own natures.