Analytical Psychology and the English Mind (Psychology Revivals)

And Other Papers

H.G. Baynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317518372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1950, the name of the late Dr H.G. Baynes was already well-known as a leading exponent of and translator of the writings of Professor C.G. Jung, as author and as psychotherapist.

The essay which gives it title to this varied and interesting collection of writings, shows clearly Dr Baynes's gift for illuminating a familiar subject with fresh insight drawn from his wide knowledge of the unconscious mind. He can make the unconscious real to us, and can convince us that myth and dream are expressions of vital problems of the human soul.

The collection includes material to interest many types of reader, from The British Journal of Medical Psychology, from Folk-Lore, from The Society for Psychical Research. But perhaps most full of interest for the majority of readers are the first three chapters of an unfinished book – What It Is All About; here we find an admirable introduction, given with a wealth of illustration, to the main concepts of Professor Jung's analytical psychology.

Dr Baynes made Professor Jung's thought his own, without loss of his own originality. He can touch with significance any subject on which he writes, whether it be the problem of the individual or the kindred problems of humanity.

The Unconscious as the Real Object of Psychology¹

I am told that my title is hard to swallow; for how can a thing that is unconscious be an object of science? There is an advantage in a provocative title in the fact that it forces us to take stock of our terms. This one has the added advantage of introducing our theme. My main argument or thesis is that extraverted science, religion and education deal in great detail with the relatively inessential containers of human interest, while ignoring the essential things. The intellect, with all its satellites, is overfed with a surfeit of fact, while the soul is parched of meaning. If we follow the centrifugal intellectual movement in any direction we come upon all the manifold objects of natural science. But the essential meaning of things is at the centre, not at the circumference. Our culture is like an ever-expanding ring, with a hollow centre.

Analytical psychology is the one introverting science: its direction is towards the centre. All the essential things which extraverted culture has overlooked are to be found as pregnant contents of the unconscious. It is an empirical fact that the unconscious is overcharged with the vital human contents which our civilized consciousness lacks. This is why it is almost unbearably true to say that the unconscious is the real object of psychology.

But there is another sense in which we can say that the unconscious is the real object of our science; in as much as the products of unconscious activity are projected spontaneously upon the field of consciousness without contamination or critical interference.

The word 'object' means literally something that is thrown before the mind. In apprehending the object the subjective variable can never be ruled out, since the mind must always be the recipient in every act of cognition. But by insisting upon the verification of observations by several minds and by introducing invariable mechanism for the purpose of recording objective processes, science has to a large extent excluded the irrational, spontaneous psyche from the scientific field. Psyche, it should be remembered, is the Greek word for butterfly.

Thus it comes about that the great body of science consists of facts which invite no difference of opinion or feeling, and offer no field for the free projection of psychic images.

We have accepted this mechanization of knowledge fatalistically; even, perhaps, with a smothered sigh, asserting it to be a great triumph of the human intellect. Yet we remember with delight that the awakening of science in the mind of primitive man, when he first began to inquire into the meaning of dreams or tried to probe the riddle of human fate, was a winged flight, unaided by any apparatus whatsoever, except such as nature had thought fit to provide.

Both dream-interpretation and astrology were intuitive sciences concerned, at bottom, with the problem of individual fate, and both were based on the assumption that objects in the external universe, like the stars and the special objects pertaining to augury and divination, were just as relevant to human destiny as the objects of the inner world appearing in dreams.

To these first scientific inquirers, the world of matter was as mysterious as the world of the mind. The starry heavens presented an uncharted field upon which the impersonal contents of the unconscious could be projected. Dream-imagery presented another objective field upon which the human mind could project its meaningful interpretations. Later, alchemy found or created the field of chemical processes, upon which the mystical quest for the imperishable value could be projected.

In the beginning of culture the scientific attitude was indistinguishable from the religious. We have evidence, for instance, in the early Sumerian epic Gilgamish, that the gods rewarded Uta-Napishtim with the unprecedented boon of immortality, because he was not only wise enough to attend to the dream (imparted to the walls of the Reed hut by Ea, to warn him of the coming deluge), but was also faithful enough to act upon it. Ea-Oannes explains:¹

Sooth, indeed 'twas not I of the Great Gods the secret revealed,
[But] to th' Abounding in Wisdom² vouchsafed I a dream, and [in this
wise]
He of the gods heard the secret. Deliberate, now, on his counsel
[Then] to the Ark came up Enlil; ³my hand did he grasp, and uplifted
Me, even me, and my wife, too, he raised, and, bent-kneed beside me,
Made her to kneel; our foreheads he touched as he stood there between us,
Blessing us; 'Uta-Napishtim hath hitherto only been mortal,
Now, indeed, Uta-Napishtim and [also] his wife shall be equal
Like to us gods; in the distance afar at the mouth of the rivers
Uta-Napishtim shall dwell.'

In this passage we are informed that the scientific quest of dream-interpretation was united in the same person and in the same act with true religious piety—piety to which even Enlil, the originator of the deluge, was prompted to do honour.

Not to confound magic with religion, we could say that in the moment when that individual man emerged from his little necessitous cave and first wondered: 'I made this fire—then who made the sun?' or some such deeply questing thought—in that moment the first scientific inquiry and the first truly religious feeling were united.

There are indications in the Gilgamish epos that the early science of astrology was also associated with a ritual of religious initiation. Out of astrology grew the still more amazing science of astronomy. Although ostensibly the objective field of the two sciences was the same, their real aims were poles asunder. The astrologers were not, in fact, interested in the real nature of the stars, and only incidentally in their objective behaviour. For them the stars were the gods. The macrocosm without and the microcosm within were both infinite, but the latter was in some way dependent upon the former. Therefore all that could be learned about the one revealed the nature of the other.

Similarly, as we now understand, the alchemists were not interested in the nature of matter as such, but only in so far as it was the vessel or vehicle of the primordial contents of the unconscious which they projected into it.

Now it is a fact of the greatest importance to psychology that as soon as the primordial or intuitive sciences, astrology and alchemy, were superseded by the scientific disciplines of astronomy and chemistry, the former practically disappeared. Astrology, it is true, managed to survive in the somewhat dingy purlieus of occultism, but without a genuine scientific status. While alchemy was relegated to the cultural museum as a curious mediaeval conceit.

The third of the great intuitive sciences of antiquity, namely, dream-interpretation, was never superseded; it remained outcast on the shores of the primitive world until the beginning of the present century, when the dream was rediscovered by Freud, as a possible object of science.

The importance of the disappearance of these primordial forerunners of science will begin to emerge when we consider that in no case was the real object of the primordial science satisfied or fulfilled by that which superseded it. Our understanding of the factors which constitute human fate, for example, has not been materially advanced by astronomy. Nor has the individuating passion which expressed itself, somewhat confusedly, in alchemy, been answered or satisfied by chemistry. Coming to dream-interpretation—our little Cinderella among her queenly sisters—I cannot believe that the realistic imagination of early man, which conceived the mana dream as the voice of the Great Spirit, could ever feel satisfied with the wish-fulfilment theory of mechanistic science.

We know beyond the shadow of a doubt that these forces or contents of the primordial psyche which have not been expressed and fulfilled on the conscious level, will be found latent but living in the unconscious. The primordial mind is inextinguishable and it cannot be cheated or swindled. If the intellect is so constructed that it can only make reality clearly visible to itself with the aid of mechanisms wherewith to measure, weigh and number the objective universe, it does not follow that the ultimate truth is therefore a mechanism. It only tends to confirm the self-evident truth that, if in our search for reality we exclude every other function of the mind but the one which venerates the machine, we are likely to conclude that the universe is, in fact, a machine.

It is essential that we recognize the god we actually serve, since this determines the aspect reality will eventually assume in our eyes. This truth was demonstrated by Sir James Jeans, who confessed that the only mind which could have conceived and created the universe which astronomy revealed was that of a mathematician.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am committed to the scientific Weltanschauung, as every educated man of the West must be. We have no choice: the universe which the scientific intellect discovered is altogether more comprehensive and intelligible than the one our forefathers believed in. We cannot go back on that. But those of us who have to do with the unconscious are made profoundly aware, on the one hand, of the one-sidedness of consciousness and, on the other, of certain primordial elements of the mind which this one-sidedness has repressed.

We are aware that no vital element of the mind is ever obliterated. We know how a certain content can lie dormant in the primordial psyche for centuries; until at last, when the repressive conscious influence is exhausted, it leaps suddenly into life again to shout its native truth to the heavens.

An instance of this is clearly demonstrable in the Nazi revolution. We must remember that the pagan Teutons—the ancestors of modern Germany—were bundled into the Church at the point of the sword, during the totalitarian phase of the Holy Roman Empire. Also that the pagan Wotan worship did not go over into Christianity, whereas the Druidic religion in this country accepted the Christian graft without great difficulty. Pagan Germany was repressed by the conqueror and lay dormant for centuries, until, reawakened, it rose once again and proclaimed its rather queer truth to a startled world.

What happened in Germany is only one item in the transitional upheavals of the present epoch. Christendom is essentially a millennial formation. The crusading, extraverted momentum of Christianity was an attempt to overleap the slow process of evolution and to supersede, with the Christian ideology, everything that had gone before. In the long run, however, the evolutionary process resumes its own gait. For a time it seemed to be jostled on one side by the millennial rush of Christianity: but now we have the backwash, and things which nineteenth-century optimism regarded as past and done with emerge once more from the unconscious, demanding their place in life.

This does not mean that we must return to paganism or try to unlearn our scientific knowledge. No return is feasible. Even in Germany, in spite of the mediaeval pogroms and the brutal intolerance; in spite of the holy Roman-Berlin Axis, the Wotan-worship, the new furor teutonicus which staggered the world like a typhoon— in spite of all this self-evident regression to the former unfulfilled transition, we cannot say that it is a mere historical rechute. We know it is not. The German nation was by no means demoralized. It went back with deep instinctive purpose to recover a primitive soul which it left behind with those blond pagan heroes of long ago. If only the nation had known what it was seeking, it might have found a leader of a different sort; one who could have conducted that great enterprise without leading the whole nation into dishonour.

I have to mention this tragic example because the Germans are not the only people who left part of their soul behind. Those distant quests of the primordial mind have still to be reckoned with. Superseded by scientific disciplines, their essential longing has never been satisfied. These contents of the general unconscious come up again because science has given no answer and no profound study to the essential problems of individual being. Only those things are finally superseded which have been lived out and therewith exhausted of meaning. The primitive form may be superseded but not the essential content.

Take, for instance, the mystery-rites of antiquity which were superseded by the Christian mass. All the pagan mystery-cults were chthonian or earth-cults. The presiding deities were feminine: Demeter, Kore, Hecate, Isis, etc. Pluto, the god of the underworld, is really a secondary figure. The central figure is the great mother, the earth-goddess upon whom the whole fertility of the earth, the cattle and the human family depends.

With the advent of Christianity, the father deity, or logos-principle, superseded the magna mater, and lent an exclusively masculine character to Christian theology. But during the Middle Ages the essential content of the pagan mystery religions came up in the form of the cult of the Virgin, who took over from her pagan forerunners qualities of fertile motherhood.

Throughout the history of culture we can trace this resurgence of the essential content of an earlier cult emerging in the characteristic framework of the later form.

Alchemy presents a rather different problem. In one very real sense, alchemy is the chemistry of the Middle Ages: in another it is a concealed religion. The idea of the transmutation of base metals into noble ones arose probably among the Alexandrine Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian Era. In the writing of Zosimus and Synesius we can trace an obvious derivation from the Persian adepts. In Greece the idea of transmutation had a philosophical basis. This central philosophical core was of the utmost value to the developing science of Chemistry, for it focused and unified scientific effort which, without this centralizing principle, was always liable to spend itself on mere empirical acquaintance with a mass of disconnected technical processes.

Now it is boldly assumed by scientific thinkers that this energizing psychical core of the alchemical apple was concerned, at bottom, with the science of chemistry. Liebig asserted, for example, that 'Alchemy was never at any time anything different from Chemistry'. It is one of the most remarkable features of our successful extraverted culture that it blithely assumes everything which preceded it to be merely a preparatory step in its enlightened progress.

Let us disinfect our minds of this charming arrogance and look once again at the origins of alchemy to see if the expectations with which it started have been fulfilled by the science of chemistry. Numerous legends cluster around its origin. According to one tradition it was founded by the Egyptian god Hermes (Thoth): hence alchemy was called the hermetic art. Another legend asserts that the fallen angels taught the principles of alchemy to the women they married, their instruction being recorded in a book called Chema. A similar story appears in the Book of Enoch, and Tertullian has much to say about the wicked angels who revealed to men the knowledge of gold and silver, of lustrous stones and of the power of herbs, and who introduced the arts of astrology and magic upon the earth. Another legend, from Arabic sources, asserts that alchemy was revealed by God to Moses and Aaron.

Very early in the Greek tradition we find the philosophical theory of the prima materia, the elementary substance which was identical in all bodies, but which received its individual form by the adjunction of qualities expressed by the Aristotelian elements—earth, fire, air and water. Thus we find alchemy in its first inspired flight revealing the familiar quarternary symbolism of individuation. The legends of its origin from divine or infernal sources are tantamount to a clear statement that the central idea of alchemy came in the form of a revelation from the collective unconscious. The first projections of profound philosophical ideas, from the primordial unconscious into the temporal sphere of human existence, tend to bring about strange admixtures, which are so far beyond the limits of contemporary understanding that they are liable to be explained away as fantastic aberrations of the human mind.

A somewhat similar example occurred in Egypt in the religion of Aton. It arose like a queer exotic island in the main stream of Egyptian culture, revealed through the royal mediumship of Akhnahton (Amenhotep IV); but because of the conservative hostility and lack of understanding in the contemporary mind of Egypt, it subsided once again into the unconscious. Its essential content emerged again in the Christian revelation, and became the energizing mystical core of the succeeding wave of culture.

Alchemy, then, contained an admixture of opposing elements. It was the spirit, or germ, of a new religion in conflict with scientific materialism. But the spirit of the new religion was not so much a faith as a way or method whereby the supreme individual value could be transformed out of common human elements. The elixir, or philosophers' stone, by whose virtue the transmutation could take place, was a mystical substance, corresponding with that spiritual key to life which Christ called the Kingdom of Heaven. In every mystical religion the goal is also the means. Through the power of the Kingdom or elixir we can attain unto the Kingdom: or because of the love of God in man, man is able to love God.

But the essence of alchemy was concerned with the discovery of the way by which the divine work could be achieved. From this standpoint alchemy can be regarded as the Yoga-system of the West; inasmuch as all the various systems of Yoga are concerned primarily with the teaching and practice of a specific method of spiritual development rather than with precise forms of faith.

When we claim alchemy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Foreword
• Contents
• 1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AS THE REAL OBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGY
• 2. A DEMONSTRATION OF ANALYTICAL PRACTICE
• 3. ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ENGLISH MIND
• 4. THE PROVISIONAL LIFE
• 5. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF THE PARENT-CHILD RELATION
• 6. FREUD VERSUS JUNG
• 7. THE IMPORTANCE OF DREAM-ANALYSIS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
• 8. THE GHOST AS A PSYCHIC PHENOMENON
• 9. JUNG'S CONCEPTION OF THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY IN RELATION TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
• 10. ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
• 11. WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT
• INDEX