The Flight into The Unconscious

An Analysis of C. G. Jungʼs Psychology Project, Volume 5

Wolfgang Giegerich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000078244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychische Gesundheit in der Psychologie

Psychological analysis usually sets its sights upon the patient or upon cultural phenomena such as myths, literature, or works of art. The essays in this volume, by contrast, have another addressee, another subject matter: psychology itself. Deeply informed by Jung's insight regarding the discipline's lack of an objective vantage point outside and beyond the psyche, their Jungian author again and again turns Jung's contribution to psychology around upon itself in the spirit of an immanent critique. Cutting to the quick, the question is put: in its constitution as psychology is Jungian psychology up to the level of what its insight into psychology's lack of an Archimedean point would require? Are the interpretations it gives of its various subject matters—alchemy, religion, the unconscious and the rest-matched by its interpretation of itself? Has its meeting itself in them had consequences for itself, consequences in terms of the fathoming of its own truth? Or clinging to the standpoint of empirical observer, did it ultimately demur with regards to the question of their truth and its own - this despite Jung's having characterized his work as an opus divinum?

Topics include Jung's psychology project as a response to the condition of the world, the "smuggling" inherent in the logic of "the unconscious, " the closure and setting free dialectic of alchemy and psychology, the blindness to logical form problematic, the faultiness of the opposition "Individual" and "Collective", Jung's communion fiasco, his thinking the thought of not-thinking, the veracity of his Red Book, the disenchantment complex, and, as indicated in the title of this volume, Jung's psychology project as a counter-speculative "flight into the unconscious."

CHAPTER ONE
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C.G. Jung’s Psychology Project as a Response to the Condition of the World

Every commemoration event in honor of a great mind¹ is an invitation to reflect anew about what his lifework is all about. This is all the more true when, as today, we celebrate both the anniversary of C.G. Jung’s death and the sixtieth year of the Institute named after him. With the phrase “what his lifework is all about” I allude to Jung’s comment in a letter of 1960 where he laments that “Being well-known not to say ‘famous’ means little when one realizes that those who mouth my name have fundamentally no idea of what it’s all about.”² In the following I want to present my attempt at working out what Jung’s psychology project was all about.

But first I have to savor the wording of “what it’s all about.” It? The word “it” is used absolutely; it has no referent; in other words, Jung does not say people have no idea what his work or his psychology is about. His phrase rather means something much more existential, like “what is at stake?,” “what is the enormous problem that we today are confronted with?,” the problem that Jung believes to have struggled with and to which his psychology was his response. Jung is here not speaking as a scientist. A scientist, such as, for example, Ignaz Semmelweis or Alfred Wegener, might suffer from the fact that his discoveries are not accepted and he himself is maybe treated as a crackpot. But in such a case he would never say that his colleagues or the general public have no idea of “what it’s all about,” because what is not accepted is merely specific scientific hypotheses. It is true, Jung, too, felt “misunderstood or completely ignored,”³ but this lack of recognition concerned the question “why there are no men in our epoch who could see at least what I was wrestling with.”⁴ What he was wrestling with was, as he said, a “world problem,” the problem of “an entire world.”⁵ “The great problem of our time is that we don’t understand what is happening to the world.”⁶ Earlier Jung had stated in a lecture, “My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity” (CW 18 § 279). These quotations show how totally different the dimensionality of his concern was, compared with both scientific and consulting room ones.

During the last few years the whole world has also become upset about a problem of the “entire world,” namely the problem of global warming. But when Jung says, “The great problem of our time is that we don’t understand what is happening to the world” he lets us know that he has something very different in mind. First of all the problem Jung sees is precisely not a popular one that makes headlines. It remains unseen and not understood, indeed—so Jung felt—suppressed out of fear.⁷ Secondly, the nature of the problem of our time, as envisioned by Jung, is not such that it could be approached with clear-cut technical and political measures. And thirdly, the world to which global warming is happening is obviously worlds apart from that world that is referred to in the cited statement about our lack of understanding what is happening to the world. This takes me to my first topic of this talk: Which “world” are we talking about when we try to describe C.G. Jung’s psychology project as a response to the condition of the world? There are many notions of world, and at least two very different ones even in Jung’s own thinking.

These two notions of world and the ensuing danger of equivocation can be seen from the very passage from which the motto for the present anniversary events is taken, Jung’s dictum, ‘’Zuunterst’ ist […] Psyche überhaupt ‘Welt’” (GW 9/I § 291). The Collected Works translate: “[…] ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.” In this translation some nuances are lost. “At bottom” is usually understood as something like in reality,” “in essence,” “in the last analysis.” But “zuunterst” clearly expresses a spatial fantasy, a literal lowness. It evokes the idea of several layers and points to the very lowest of them, something like a sub-basement. A few lines earlier Jung had himself expressly spoken of “[t]he deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche” and said of them that they “lose their individual uniqueness” the deeper one gets. “‘Lower down’ […] they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon.” The immediately following sentence is our motto, and it draws the conclusion from the foregoing reflection: “Hence ‘at its lowest level’ psyche is simply ‘world.’” The sense of “world” here is that of the physical universe, “chemistry,” “carbon.” Jung entertains here a naturalistic fantasy.

Now it is astounding how Jung continues. “In this sense I hold Kerényi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking.” Here Jung does not seem to see that in his own comments and in the idea by Kerényi he refers to, two incompatible concepts of “world” clash. When Kerényi says⁸ that “In the image of the primordial child the world speaks of its own childhood,” and, furthermore, when for him the rising sun, the human newborn, and the mythological child are all equally symbols, he certainly does not have the world as chemical substances in mind. Carbon does not speak. The world that speaks, and that, according to Kerényi’s example speaks in the symbol of the primordial child about its, the world’s, childhood, is the perceived and experienced world, the world of human beings. It presupposes a highly developed awake mind capable of perceiving symbolically, and certainly also a deep mind, but deep as poetry or thought may be deep, not deep in the sense of the lowest layers of the psyche where psyche is “extinguished in the body’s materiality.”

Jung’s layer fantasy operates with the notion of a continuum from chemistry or physiology to fully attained consciousness, from archaic undifferentiatedness to modern abstraction and differentiation, from the collective and universal and unconscious⁹ to conscious uniqueness and individuality. The world-relation that the symbol has for the Jung of our passage, too, is derived by him from the psyche’s own lower, archaic levels, ultimately from the fact that, as he says, “the human body, too, is built of the stuff of the world” (§ 290, my emphasis). That is to say, the psyche’s world-connection does not come about through its outward openness to the world. It comes about through the internal makeup of the psyche, its sharing its material base with the outer world.¹⁰ Kerényi, by contrast, is thinking in terms of an encounter or dialogue between the visible world and soul. For him, the world itself, for example a sunrise, speaks the language of symbols because it speaks to a mind, whereas for Jung here, symbols are naturalistically a kind of outgrowth of the psyche all by itself, from out of its inner rootedness in physis—man so to speak as the mouthpiece of carbon. We can say that such a psyche may materially be world, but it has no world, is worldless.

It would be a mistake to pin Jung down to this view. In fact, Jung harbors two Jung’s within his breast, a naturalistic, scientific one, for whom the psyche’s world-connection comes about through its biochemical roots, and a truly psychological one, who explicitly warded off the naturalistic, biologistic conception of the soul, for example by saying that “the human soul is precisely neither a psychiatric nor a physiological problem, nor a biological problem in a general sense, but a psychological one. It is a field of its own with its own peculiar laws. One cannot derive the nature of the soul from the principles of other sciences […]. The phenomenology of the soul is therefore not limited to facts accessible to natural-scientific methods, but also encompasses the problem of the human mind, which is the father of all science” (CW 16 § 22, transl. modif.).¹¹ For this latter Jung, the world is not speaking all the more in a symbol, the more physiological or “material” the symbol is. No, for him as for Kerényi, it is the world that is speaking in a symbol because “[t]he psyche mirrors Being as such and knows it…” (GW 16 § 203, my transl.). Mirroring, reflection, knowing. There is an interplay between psyche and world and thus a duality. This duality comes to a head in what one might call Jung’s ontological thesis: “The existence of the world has two conditions¹²: the one its being, the other its being known” (CW 16 § 201, trans. modif.), a thesis that Jung explains by saying “that without a reflecting psyche the world would be virtually nonexistent, and that, in consequence, consciousness is a second creator of the world.”¹³ Whereas before we had the idea of a continuum from the materiality of the body to the most abstract, rationalistic consciousness, now we have the idea of two absolutely irreducible sources of the world in an intricate paradoxical (if not dialectical) relation to each other. For as the second creator of the world, the psyche is not merely a passive mirror for what is given, not merely receptive and completely determined by what there is; it is also active, spontaneous, free. But its freedom is also not an abstract freedom. Being only the second creator, psyche is in turn dependent on the other irreducible source. This theory is in a way reminiscent of Kant’s elaborate philosophical argument of theoretical freedom, according to which what is given by the senses can only be given to a consciousness in the first place on the basis of a spontaneous productive a priori synthesis performed by the imagination.¹⁴

This view of the relation of psyche and world also makes impossible that monistic naturalistic idea of the relation between body and soul that we found expressed in our motto, “Hence ‘at its lowest level’ psyche is simply ‘world.” In a letter Jung pointed out

the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious (i.e., dreams and other products from the “unconscious”) refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly “symbolized” images. For along time I have considered this fact as negative evidence for the existence of a subtle body or at least for a curious gap between mind and body. Of a psyche dwelling in its own body one should expect at least that it would be immediately and thoroughly informed of any change of conditions therein. Its not being the case demands some explanation.¹⁵

There is a fundamental gap between body and mind. Body and psyche are really separate. That Jung finds here this fact “peculiar” and “curious,” that he thinks “one should expect” that a psyche dwelling in its own body would be immediately informed about that body’s conditions, is due to the fact that in this passage it is again the naturalistic Jung who is speaking. But what he is telling us amounts to the truth of the psychological Jung; it is his admission that the naturalistic presupposition is not born out by the facts.

Yes, the psyche dwells in its own body, and yet there is this gap. This gap is not merely a simple caesura. It is more. It has the nature of a reversal. In animals,¹⁶ their instinctual impulses go uninterruptedly and immediately over into their behavior. In man this immediacy and oneness has been radically burst asunder so that he was catapulted from out of his body, indeed from out of himself, and has a priori his place, as a veritable expatriate, in what we call mind or soul. As psyche and conscious being, man is inevitably in the status of ek-sistence (Heidegger). It is for this reason that he is primarily “informed,” and determined in his actions and decisions, from “outside” and “above.” In ancient times, in order to orient himself in the world he looked up to gods and down to the dead, to the ancestors; to gain guidance he turned away from himself to observe the flight of birds, to analyze the intestines of animals or the cracks produced by a heated bronze rod in a tortoise shell; he threw yarrow stalks and consulted the I Ching; in cases of illness he had to ask a shaman, just as we today need to consult others, doctors, when we feel sick; we turn to science when we encounter technical or theoretical problems; we institute committees to come up with solutions, and we move through the world with the help of GPS. We humans get our knowledge even about our own bodies not from within ourselves, but conversely by looking fundamentally from outside in, through dissecting corpses, through X-rays or, more recently, magnetic resonance imaging. True, we also speak of gut reactions, but we know that this is a metaphor and that these reactions do by no means come from our literal guts; they come from sunken ideas or prejudices.

As this expulsion from body and self, the gap between body and psyche does not have the nature of a literal “space between.” Rather, it has the nature of a logical negation of the biological basis of human existence and thus of a pushing off from it, which is also why the alchemists, concerning the soul-process, spoke directly of the opus contra naturam, the work against nature. The indispensability of this logical negation can even be demonstrated empirically. I mention one small example from the most primitive stage of the development in early childhood of the human ability to think symbolically. Up to the age of 18 months, when shown pictures of things babies manipulate the paper, trying to grasp the object depicted. After this age, they are generally able to understand the difference betwee...