Jung
writes: ‘By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic
processes, conscious as well as unconscious’, (CW6 para 797) so we
use the term ‘psyche’ rather than ‘mind’, since mind is used
in common parlance to refer to the aspects of mental functioning
which are conscious. Jung maintained that the psyche is a
self-regulating system (like the body). The psyche strives to
maintain a balance between opposing qualities while at the same time
actively seeking its own development or as he called it,
individuation. For Jung, the psyche is inherently separable into
component parts with complexes and archetypal contents personified
and functioning autonomously as complete secondary selves, not just
as drives and processes.
It is important
to think of Jung’s model as a metaphor not as concrete reality, or
as something which is not subject to change. The ego Jung saw the ego
as the centre of the field of consciousness which contains our
conscious awareness of existing and a continuing sense of personal
identity. It is the organiser of our thoughts and intuitions,
feelings, and sensations, and has access to memories which are not
repressed. The ego is the bearer of personality and stands at the
junction between the inner and outer worlds. The way in which people
relate to inner and outer worlds is determined by their attitude
type: an extroverted individual being orientated to the outer world,
and an introverted one primarily to the inner world. Jung also noted
that people differ in the conscious use they make of four functions
which he termed, thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. In any
individual, one of these functions is superior and is therefore more
highly developed than other functions, since greater use is made of
it, but each attitude operates in relation to the introversion or
extroversion of the person, as well as in conjunction with other less
dominant functions, giving a number of different theoretical
possibilities.
The ego arises
out of the Self during the course of early development. It has an
executive function, it perceives meaning and assesses value, so that
it not only promotes survival but makes life worth living. It is an
expression of the Self, though by no means identical with it, and the
Self is much greater than it. Jung compared the nature of
consciousness to the eye: only a limited number of things can be held
in vision at any one time, and in the same way the activity of
consciousness is selective. Selection, he says, demands direction and
other things are excluded as irrelevant. This is bound to make
conscious orientation one sided. The contents which are excluded sink
into the unconscious where they form a counterweight to the conscious
orientation. Thus an increasing tension is created and eventually the
unconscious will break through in the form of dreams or images. So
the unconscious complex is a balancing or supplementing of the
conscious orientation.
The personal
unconscious is a product of the interaction between the collective
unconscious and the development of the individual during life. Jung’s
definition of the personal unconscious is as follows: Everything of
which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking;
everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten;
everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious
mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to
it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things
which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness;
all this is the content of the unconscious’ (CW8, para 382).
‘Besides these we must include all more or less intentional
repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these
contents the “personal unconscious”’. (CW8, para 270). 1 One
can see that there is more here than the repressed contents of the
unconscious as envisaged by Freud, for while it does include
repression, Jung also sees the personal unconscious as having within
it potential for future development, and thus is very much in line
with his thinking about the psyche. Complexes Jung considered that
the personal unconscious is composed of functional units called
complexes, and he reached the concept of the complex through some
important and ground-breaking work he did as a young man on word
association. He found that there were internal distractions which
interfered with the association of the subjects to the test words, so
that their reaction time was longer for some words than others. These
responses tended to form groups of ideas which were affectively toned
and which he named complexes or ‘feeling-toned complexes’. The
word association test suggested the presence of many types of complex
not merely, as Freud claimed, a core sexual complex, or Oedipus
complex.
Complexes are
determined by experience but also by the individual’s way of
reacting to that experience. A complex is in the main unconscious and
has a tendency to behave independently or autonomously so that the
individual may feel that his behaviour is out of his control. We
probably have all said at one time or another when we have done
something seemingly out of character: ‘I don’t know what came
over me’. This sense of autonomy is perhaps most marked in abnormal
states of mind, and can be seen most clearly in people who are ill;
whom we sometimes think of as possessed, but complexes are parts of
the psyche of us all. Complexes have their roots in the collective
unconscious and are tinged with archetypal contents.
The problem for
the individual is not the existence of the complexes per se, but the
breakdown of the psyche’s capacity to regulate itself. Jung held
that the psyche has the ability to bring into awareness dissociated
complexes and archetypal material in order to provide a balance or
compensation to conscious life. He thought that the ego was prone to
making inappropriate choices or to one-sidedness, and that material
arising from the unconscious could help to bring a better balance to
the individual and enable further development to take place. The
further development tends to take place in a situation of conflict,
which Jung saw as a creative and inevitable part of human life. When
unconscious contents break through into consciousness it can lead to
increased development in the individual. However, complexes can
easily manifest themselves without the ego being strong enough to
reflect on them and enable them to be made use of, and it is then
that they cause us (and other people) difficulties. Jung was more
concerned with the present and with future development than with
delving into the past, emphasising a teleological approach and being
concerned with the meaning of symptoms and their purpose.
The theory of the
collective unconscious is one of the distinctive features of Jung’s
psychology. He took the view that the whole personality is present in
potential from birth and that personality is not solely a function of
the environment, as was thought at the time when he was developing
his ideas, but merely brings out what is already there. The role of
the environment is to emphasise and develop aspects already within
the individual. Every infant is born with an intact blueprint for
life, both physically and mentally, and while these ideas were very
controversial at the time, there is much more agreement now that each
animal species is uniquely equipped with a repertoire of behaviours
adapted to the environment in which it has evolved. This repertoire
is dependent on what ethologists call ‘innate releasing mechanisms’
which the animal inherits in its central nervous system and which
become activated when appropriate stimuli are encountered in the
environment.
These ideas are
very close indeed to the theory of archetypes He wrote:‘the term
archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an
inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in
which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a
certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar,
and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a
“pattern of behaviour”. This aspect of the archetype, the purely
biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology’.
(CW18, para 1228). The archetypes predispose us to approach life and
to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns laid down in
the psyche. There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father,
child, archetypal events, such as birth, death, separation, and
archetypal objects such as water, the sun, the moon, snakes, and so
on.
These images find
expression in the psyche, in behaviour and in myths. It is only
archetypal images that are capable of being known and coming to
consciousness, the archetypes themselves are deeply unconscious and
knowledgable. I have mentioned the biological, instinctual pole of
the archetype, but Jung perceived the concept as a spectrum, there
being an opposing, spiritual pole which also has an enormous impact
on behaviour. Archetypes have a fascinating, numinous quality to them
which makes them difficult to ignore, and attracts people to venerate
or worship archetypal images.
The Self for Jung
comprises the whole of the psyche, including all its potential. It is
the organising genius behind the personality, and is responsible for
bringing about the best adjustment in each stage of life that
circumstances can allow. Crucially, it has a teleological function:
it is forward looking, seeking fulfilment. The goal of the Self is
wholeness, and Jung called this search for wholeness the process of
individuation, the purpose being to develop the organism’s fullest
potential. It is a distinguishing feature of Jungian psychology that
the theory is organised from the point of view of the Self, not from
that of the ego, as early Freudian theory was, and the teleological
perspective of Jung is also distinctive. The ego, along with other
structures, develops out of the Self which exists from the beginning
of life. The Self is rooted in biology but also has access to an
infinitely wider range of experience, including the whole wealth of
the cultural and religious realms, and the depths of which all human
beings are capable. It is therefore capable of being projected on to
figures or institutions which carry power: God, the sun, kings and
queens and so on.
This is a part of
the personality which comes into existence ‘for reasons of
adaptation or personal convenience’. The origin of the term comes
from the mask worn by Greek actors in antiquity and denotes the part
of the personality which we show to the world. The persona has been
called ‘the packaging of the ego’ or the ego’s public relations
person, and is a necessary part of our everyday functioning. One
might say that one’s social success depends on having a reasonably
well-functioning persona, one which is flexible enough to adapt to
different situations, and which is a good reflection of the ego
qualities which lie behind it. However trouble comes when a person is
identified with their persona, and everyone will have come across
people who cannot leave behind their work persona, such as a teacher
who treats everyone as though they were still in primary school, or
bossily tells people what to do. Although this is annoying to be
with, the more serious part of it is that it may leave major aspects
of the personality unrealised, and the individual therefore
significantly impoverished. The persona grows out of the need in
childhood to adapt to the expectations of parents, teachers and
peers, and this may well mean that the persona carries traits of
personality which are desirable, leaving the opposite, undesirable
traits to form part of the shadow.
This Shadow
carries all the things we do not want to know about ourselves or do
not like. The shadow is a complex in the personal unconscious with
its roots in the collective unconscious and is the complex most
easily accessible to the conscious mind. It often possesses qualities
which are opposite from those in the persona, and therefore opposite
from those of which we are conscious. Here is the Jungian idea of one
aspect of the personality compensating for another: where there is
light, there must also be shadow. If the compensatory relationship
breaks down, it can result in a shallow personality with little depth
and with excessive concern for what other people think about him or
her. So while it can be troublesome, and may remain largely
unconscious, the shadow is an important aspect of our psyche and part
of what gives depth to our personalities. The fascination which the
differing, contrasting, or opposing aspects of personality hold for
us, is illustrated in such novels as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or The
Picture of Dorian Gray. The way in which we most immediately
experience the shadow is as we project it on to other people, so that
we can be fairly sure that traits which we cannot stand in other
people really belong to ourselves and that we are trying to disown
them. While difficult and painful, it is important that we work at
owning our shadow to bring it into relationship with our persona, and
so provide some integration of these two complexes within our
personality.
The next two
complexes in the personal unconscious are perhaps the most difficult
to understand and the most contentious. Jung conceived of there being
at another psychic level a contra-sexual archetype, designated as
anima in the man and animus in the woman. These figures are derived
in part from the archetypes of the feminine and masculine, and in
part from the individual’s own life experience with members of the
opposite sex beginning with mother and father. They inhabit the
unconscious depths as a compensation for the one-sided attitude of
consciousness and a way of rounding out the experience of belonging
to one sex or the other. Just as happens with the shadow, these
archetypes are met with firstly in projected form. They carry with
them the numinous quality which accounts for falling in love at first
sight, which one can think of as a projection in a man on to an
unknown woman of an archetypal image and the woman then becomes
fascinating and immensely appealing. While he was influenced by the
gender-based thinking of his time, Jung recognised that the
“masculine” aspects of the psyche such as autonomy, separateness,
and aggression were not superior to the “feminine” aspects such
as nurturimg , relatedness, and empathy. Rather, they form two halves
of a whole, both of which belong to every individual, and neither of
which is superior to the other. One can see this as a development of
the emphasis on the masculine psyche in Freud’s work. These
complexes need to be related to in their “otherness”, and connect
the ego to the objective psyche. Individuation Jung called the search
for wholeness within the human psyche, the process of individuation.
It may be
described as a process of circumlocution around the Self as the
centre of personality. The person aims to become conscious of him or
herself as a unique human being, but at the same time, no more nor
less than any other human being. For Jung, conflict is not only
inherent in human psychology, but is necessary for growth. In order
to become more conscious, one must be able to bear conflict. There
are many internal opposites, as well as those experienced in the
outside world. If the tension between the opposites can be borne,
then out of this clash something new and creative can grow. In Jung’s
view, this ‘something’ is a symbol which will contribute to a new
direction which does justice to both sides of a conflict and which is
a product of the unconscious rather than of rational thought. For
Jung the symbol is something which cannot be fully explained or
understood but has the quality of both conscious and unconscious
worlds. The symbol may be the agent of transformation which brings
about the development which was so important an aspect of his
thinking, and which leads towards individuation as the goal towards
which humans strive.
“Dreams
are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche,
outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us
the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing
else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic
human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its
foundations and run into an impasse.”
[Collected
Works Volume 10, paragraph 317
Jung
saw the mind/body/feelings (or what he called ‘the psyche’) as
all working together. Even negative symptoms could be potentially
helpful in drawing attention to an imbalance; for example, depression
could result from an individual suppressing particular feelings or
not following a path that is natural and true to their particular
personality. In this way he saw the psyche as a self-regulating
system with all psychic contents – thoughts, feelings, dreams,
intuitions etc. – having a purpose; he thought the psyche was
‘purposive’.
Jung
saw dreams as the psyche’s attempt to communicate important things
to the individual, and he valued them highly, perhaps above all else,
as a way of knowing what was really going on. Dreams are also an
important part of the development of the personality – a process
that he called individuation. Whilst Freud thought that dreams
expressed forbidden wishes that had to be disguised (he
differentiated the manifest content of a dream – what was on the
surface, from the latent content – what was hidden), Jung saw
dreams as expressing things openly; he wrote:
“They
do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise …
They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does
not know and does not understand.” [CW 17, para. 189]
If
dreams are sometimes difficult to comprehend it is because we need to
understand that dreams express themselves through the use of symbols.
Of symbols Jung wrote:
“A
symbol is the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown
psychic content”.
He
also wrote, the dream is “a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic
form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” [CW 8, para.
505]. A symbol doesn’t just tell us about what the dream may appear
to be about on the surface, but has meaning and resonance above and
beyond the particular situation.
In
expressing what is not known, particularly related to an imbalance,
Jung thought that dreams were a form of compensation. One of Jung’s
own dreams gives a good example of compensation; the dream concerned
one of his patients. She was an intelligent woman but Jung noticed
that increasingly in their sessions there was a shallowness entering
into their dialogue. He determined to speak to her about this, but
the night before the session he had the following dream:
He
was walking down a highway through a valley in late-afternoon
sunlight. To his right was a steep hill. At its top stood a castle,
and on the highest tower was a woman sitting on a kind of balustrade.
In order to see her properly he had to bend his head far back. He
awoke with a crick in his neck. Even in the dream he had recognised
the woman as his patient. [Memories,
Dreams and Reflections,
p. 155]
Jung
said that the interpretation was immediately apparent to him. If, in
the dream, he had had to look up to the patient in this fashion, in
reality he had probably been looking down on her – the dream had
been a compensation for his attitude toward her.
Jung
wrote:
“I
have noticed that 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.” [CW 18, para. 244
Last
week I talk to my inner wounded child/ I dream that I find a note
from a young child, he tells me I am not listening to him. The next
day I end up without a voice suffering from tonsillitis. The dream
reflects directly my inner sate and gives it a physical
manifestation. As above so below so within so without.........
Jung
had a much more positive view of the human psyche and unconscious
than Freud.For Jung, the unconscious is not only full of wild and
destructive drives; it is a source of creativity, spirituality and
the capacity for relationships. Similarly, dreaanotheuntrustworthy
"texts" that Freud deciphered. Rather, they tell
tdreameexactly what is going on in their psyche. In Jung's idea of
"individuation"wesemapping
of the relations between an individual and the group ocollective (and
Jucoined the term "collective unconscious" to indicate what
all humans have in common from a psychological point of vie
Today
there is a collective agonising over what is meant by "the
west". Easy to define in contradistinction to a supposedly
fanatical Islam (itself a political and media concoction), what it
means to be western is a much more complicated topic that cries out
for a Jungian input. Jung saw himself as a sort of therapist for
western culture and, if his criticisms of it do resonate with what
many Muslims are saying, then that strikes me as all the more
significant.
What
Jung saw in western culture is very familiar to what its contemporary
critics perceive. He despaired of the over-rational one-sidedness of
western culture, the way it has got cut off from nature (Jung is the
pioneer of what is now calledecopsychology).
He hit out at the materialism and loss of individuality in our world,
focused on the mind-body split, on mechanical approaches to sex, and
the west's loss of a sense of existential and spiritual purpose and
meaning. He even, in a characteristic moment of imaginative genius,
tried to be the therapist of the Judeo-Christian God, in his
iconoclastic book Answer
to Job.
Yet
as far as Jung's reputation is concerned, it would be wrong to end on
an upbeat note. As a Jungian analyst I have always insisted that
Jungian analysts and scholars acknowledge
and apologise for his antisemitism in
the 1930s and try to fix those parts of the theories that are
misguided or plain wrong: for instance using the word "parasite"
in connection with the Jews, to refer to an alleged lack of a culture
of their own and their supposed need to use the forms of other "host"
cultures.
Jung
defended himself against the accusation that his ideas chimed with
Nazi ideology, but to some his expression of regret seemed inadequate
and insincere. He helped numerous Jewish psychoanalysts to flee Nazi
Germany – yet he was also an ambitious man and saw an opportunity
to become the leading psychologist in central Europe in the 1930s:
distinguishing Jews from "Aryans" chimed with the politics
of Germany and Austria. He was not a crude antisemite. He was an
intuitive person and, though his writings on what he called "Jewish
psychology" (ie psychoanalysis) are often deeply offensive,
there are some nuggets therein that give one pause for thought.
For
example, his protest at the imposition of one system of psychology on
everyone anticipates today's transcultural and intercultural
psychologists and therapists, which makes him an inspiring teacher
for therapists struggling to work in a multicultural society. And
Jung's musings about how the Jewish people's possession of land, so
far from their historic experience, would affect their group
psychological functioning contributes in a very challenging way to
our understanding of yet another of today's hot political topics –
the situation in the Middle East.
In
his clinical work with patients he anticipated the "relational
turn" in psychotherapy: writing that the therapist was as much
in the treatment process as the patient, and stressing the importance
of the "therapeutic personality" as opposed to the
mechanical application of the technical procedures. He was an alert
and compassionate therapist – another reason we should avoid only
concentrating on his personal life.
Addendum
For
my own outlook the implications are that a holistic universe is
necessarily a mystical system. Scientific theories, which claim that
all things and people are interconnected in a non-empirical realm of
the world, are necessarily mystical theories. Jaffé has described
the same conclusion in the following way: share essential aspects
with ancient practices in an evolved way. In her appealing book, “Was
C. G. Jung a Mystic?”,
Aniela Jaffé [30]
has described fascinating aspects of Jung’s mysticism, which
confirm our view:
“If
the concept ‘mystic’ suggests the immediate experience of the
numinous or the perceiving of an originally hidden transcendent
reality, the ‘other side’, then it involves an experience which
also plays a central role in Jung’s approach to analytical
psychology; that is, the consideration of images and contents which
enter into consciousness from the hidden background of the psyche,
the collective unconscious. (…) [which] must be conceived of as a
realm with neither space nor time that eludes any objective
knowledge. What we perceive are its effects.”.
([30],
pp. 1–2)
At
this point I might ask: Does it all matter? Why should I care? Our
answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by
understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living
in accordance with it. Carl Gustav Jung has shown that, living in
accordance with the order of the universe is a prerequisite for a
wholesome life. This means that we have to recognize the invisible
background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life
The
state of being innate upholds a Cosmic Order that lets us think that
we are part of it, that we are born in it and that we are it, but we
don’t know it. In agreement with Jung’s Weltanschauung, Quantum
physics confirms William James’ thesis, that modern science can
no longer deny the non-empirical:
“[The]
unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces
effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually
done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men,
and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world
upon our regenerative charge. But that which produces effects within
another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we
had no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world
unreal.”.
([42],
p. 516)
The
view that reality has a non-empirical background can be found at
various times in the history of philosophy. We find it, for example,
in the theses of the Greek Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri
(420–380 BCE). “God is a circle”, he wrote, “whose centre is
everywhere and circumference nowhere”.
([43],
p. 581)
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