The Jung Reader

David Tacey, David Tacey

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135723712
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

Carl Gustav Jung was the pioneering founder of analytical psychology, a form of analysis that has revolutionised the approach to mental illness and the study of the mind. In this anthology, David Tacey brings together a selection of Jung's essays from his famous Collected Works.

Divided into fourparts, each with a brand new introduction, this book considers 17 of Jung's most important papers covering:

• the nature of the psyche
• archetypes
• religion and culture
• therapy and healing.

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This accessible collection is essential reading for undergraduates on analytical psychology courses, those on psychotherapy training courses, and students studying symbolism and dreams, or archetypal approaches to literature, cinema, religious studies, sociology or philosophy. The text is an informative introduction for general readers as well as analysts and academics who want to learn more about C. G. Jung's contribution to psychoanalysis, and how his ideas are still extremely relevant in the world today.

Part I

The Nature of the Psyche

The Nature of the Psyche

Introduction

Chapter 1: ‘Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’ (1931)

(From The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works Vol. 8, § 649–688)

‘Basic postulates of analytical psychology’ is a useful overview of Jung’s psychology and a frank self-assessment of its unusual or radical aspects. Jung discusses his soul-centred psychology against a historical background of scientific materialism. Jung’s psychology is a reaction to the bleak psychology of his day, which he calls ‘psychology without the soul’. But Jung refused to adopt a romantic or idealistic conception of the soul. For him it is a subject of scientific scrutiny and only a sober attitude can do justice to its complexities, functions and pathologies. Soul for Jung is not a theological abstraction, such as we find in Western religion, but an empirical reality. He derives the term soul from the Greek word psyche , and thus ‘psycho-logy’ literally means ‘the logos or study of the soul’. Jung wants the discipline of psychology to return to this original foundation. He sees no real reason, apart from modern prejudice and assumptions, as to why psychology has taken a turn to reductive materialism. The study of psyche ought be given back its mystery and philosophical depth. Since soul is primarily unconscious for us today, Jung’s psychology begins with the idea of the unconscious, and this marks it off from mainstream psychologies which are psychologies of consciousness.

Jung admits that in some ways his psychology is not ‘modern’, for to derive a psychology from spiritual principles is to move counter to the reductive bias that is found in everything modern. His psychology represents, in part, a return to ‘the teachings of our forefathers’ (§ 661). Jung distrusts materialism, since for him it purports to be based on scientific principles, yet is ‘a religion or, better, a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason’ (§ 651). He despises the fact that materialism has become fused with scientific enquiry, thus generating scientism. Decades before the philosophy of science and the work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, Jung was arguing that scientific materialism is an ideology and not a science. Materialism is destroying the thinking of our era, and hardly anyone dares to contradict it because:

To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current.

(§ 633)

Jung was aware of the dangers of swimming against the tide, and he practised it on a daily basis. We have to appreciate the personal resolve and professional difficulty that this involved. As we might say today, he must have had enormous resilience and self-belief to withstand the barrage of criticisms that he constantly received.

Jung is not content to assert an opposite position to mainstream psychology; he also turns the tables on this science, arguing that it is inherently irrational in its obsession with material causation. We do not even know what ‘matter’ is, so how can we pretend to be so certain about it? Matter remains, to this day, mysterious to physicists, chemists and biologists, but the popular worldview asserts a ‘materialism’ which pure science cannot support. According to Jung, we have merely supplanted the ‘metaphysics of mind’ that ruled up until the Gothic age with a new ‘metaphysics of matter’. It is a creed without substance, except that it serves the ego in its blindness to the invisible dimensions of being.

In reality we are flying blind into the future, with a recklessness that Jung finds alarming. We have left unattended the invisibles and imponderables of the psyche, and Jung’s intuition is that this is landing us in social chaos and personal despair. The invisibles require study and attention, and their needs have to be taken seriously, otherwise we face a continued downward course into violence and destruction. After the experience of the First World War, Jung adopts a social dimension in everything he writes, and he does not write as if there is no world crisis outside the clinic. He thinks it is our unsubstantiated worldview that is responsible for the rise of social, political and psychological disorder.

Jung is aware that scientific enquirers will demand proof for his assertions, and he struggles with this demand, claiming that an intuitive understanding leads to the conclusion that all is not well with the world. Jung is no more able to provide ‘evidence’ for his position than materialism can supply for its view. This is to frustrate him throughout his career, because he feels the rightness of his intuitions, and yet is helpless to make them plain to others. He often resorts to philosophical rather than scientific methods of argument, while arguing that he is not a philosopher but a scientist. He protests that he has empirical facts, but they are not the facts that his colleagues would find convincing. Jung’s ‘facts’ are often interpretations of symbolic phenomena such as dreams, visions, fantasies, religions and works of art. He is more of a hermeneut than a scientist, a scholar who interprets the world through a particular kind of vision.

Throughout his career Jung is more interested in ‘the West’ as the subject of his analysis than he is in the individual sufferer. Western culture is his ‘patient’, and it is time to analyse this strange specimen and figure out why things are going wrong. His analysis is a psychosocial analysis, or a study of the human condition rather than of any specific group of suffering neurotics. Individuals are suffering because the cultural system is imbalanced, and that is what Jung seeks to address. Our system is wrong because it condones a ‘one-sidedness’ that does not take the whole psyche and its contents into account. Jung’s self-appointed task is to speak on behalf of what has been left out of the Western cultural frame.

Chapter 2: ‘The Role of the Unconscious’ (1918)

(From Civilization in Transition, The Collected Works Vol. 10, § 1–48)

In ‘The role of the unconscious’ Jung moves between two points of view. First there is the psychological analysis of the personality, with an emphasis on the dynamics of the unconscious. ‘The role of the unconscious,’ he says, ‘is to act compensatorily to the conscious contents of the moment’ (§ 21). The psyche is for him an energic system that is striving to achieve equilibrium and a balanced relationship between its parts. It is only in a state of wholeness, he maintains, that the psyche works effectively and achieves health. Second, there is the psychosocial and often prophetic analysis of civilisation, with a focus on cataclysmic events in recent history. This is for Jung a logical extension of the first theme, because he finds civilisation to be diseased and out of balance. The West is in need of psychological, cultural and religious correction.

The editors of the Collected Works have placed this essay in Volume 10, Civilization in Transition. Jung is positioning himself as a therapist of culture and not only of individual neurosis. He is a psychologist who refuses to remain within the confines of the clinic. He gives himself freedom to roam across the spectrum of society, politics and culture, making pronouncements about what is wrong with civilisation, and how things might be made better. Jung was not alone in this movement between clinic and civilisation. His mentor and colleague, Freud, did the same thing. In one instant Freud considered a case study, in the next, he reflected on civilisation as a whole, and wrote books with such titles as Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. In the early days of psychoanalysis, it was not uncommon for pioneers to explore every corner of life and to make some comment. Today, professionals in these fields are more guarded, keeping to their ‘specialisations’ in a way which would have appalled Freud and Jung, who would have seen this as unadventurous.

This essay was written at the close of the 1914–1918 war. Jung set himself the task of understanding war from a psychological point of view. He was not interested in condemning Germany, but his purpose was to ask the psychological question: where has this eruption of evil come from? What can a psychology of the unconscious contribute to understanding the catastrophe? Jung risks criticism in his attempt at interpretation. Political scientists would argue that a psychology of the unconscious has little to offer to the solution of wars. They would claim that war and social catastrophe can better be understood by exploring known factors such as wealth, class, economics, political relations and social inequality. Why bring in the unknown, when the known is complex enough?

Jung understands this critique, but moves on regardless. The collective crisis is derived from his analysis of the individual. Jung believes that in the early stages of development, a typical pattern emerges whereby we identify ourselves with the good side of our personalities, and disidentify from our dark or evil aspects. This leads to the suppression of aspects that do not fit our idealised self-image. Suppression, or pushing away this unwanted aspect, is followed by repression, a more serious forgetting of the negative aspect, and dissociation from it. This serves us for a time, and helps us to consolidate our lives and gain moral stability and orientation. However, if we do not put an end to repression and begin to retrieve the psychological aspects that belong to our personality, we fall victim to projection, hatred of others and social conflict.

Jung defines projection as a process whereby ‘an unconscious content of the subject … is transferred to the object, and there magnifies one of its peculiarities to such proportions that it seems a sufficient cause of the disturbance’ (§ 41). We find the evil aspects of ourselves in others and despise them for the realities we fail to see in ourselves. This is hardly a new idea, it is found at the heart of religious and cosmological systems. For instance, we read in the New Testament: ‘Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your brother, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own?’¹ Jung is providing a modern approach to this age-old insight. He argues that we project our negative contents onto those who are ‘more or less suitable objects’ (§ 41), and the task of withdrawing projections is all the more difficult because we think we have just cause for our criticism of others.

Wars develop when nations claiming to be ‘good’ attack those deemed to be ‘bad’. The state of the world is a reflection of the dissociation within the individual. The upwelling of evil and violence comes from within all of us. We all stand responsible, in his view, for the eruption of evil. Paradoxically, we can only get out of the grip of evil if we befriend it. The cure, Jung felt, is homeopathic: take in and imbibe some of the poison. If we move toward it with awareness, it might not overtake us in such devastating ways. Evil has accumulated in the West because we have been identified with the good for too long. This is why there is a sense of urgency about evil, and why the ‘problem of evil’ can no longer be relegated to philosophy seminar rooms. It is a problem that each of us has to encounter.

The discovery of the unconscious has forced this awareness upon us. Prior to this discovery, we might have set our minds on the good and repressed the dark side, or projected it upon our neighbour. But now that we are made aware of the totality of the psyche, we have to take responsibility for the darkness that piles up in the inner world. We have to face the darkness within, or ‘encounter our own shadow’, as Jung was later to put it, as a part of our developmental task. This is a responsibility that confronts individuals, societies and nations. At the time of writing this essay, Jung had not developed his theory of the shadow as archetype, although the essay is moving in that direction.

At the heart of Jung’s psychology is a moral philosophy. He sometimes denies this in the attempt to present himself as an empirical scientist, but there is a definite philosophy in his psychology. His philosophy appears to be a Western version of the Taoist philosophy of China, which calls for a balance between opposite forces. There is a secret symmetry between conflicting or rival energies, the yin and the yang, and if we bring them into relationship the rivalry can shift to complementarity and vital force. One takes what initially looks like an enemy agent and transforms it into a source of energy. By facing the shadow, we may find our lives are given a new moral integrity, and things move in a more coherent and creative way. In Taoism, the ‘Way’ is discovered when one discovers the key to a balanced wholeness. Then the psyche can be expected to recover its direction and sense of flow.

Jung did not literally import this philosophy from China, but one could say he had a natural predisposition to think in this way. The West does not have to go to China to discover this approach: it can also be found, to some extent, in the gods of ancient Greece. Apollo, god of the sun, and Dionysus, god of passion and ecstasy, seem to represent a pair of opposites, in which Greece recognised the need for acknowledgement of the light and dark sides of existence. It is sometimes important to respect the light, but at other times it is equally important to recognise the ‘dark’ side, which was symbolised in the festivals of Dionysus. Only Christianity, Jung argues, fails to provide a cosmology in which humanity can regulate its experience of the opposites. Christian civilisation lost this balance by worshiping a God of light and turning the historical Jesus into a spotless and perfect figure of myth. There is little room in the Christian story for evil or darkness, except as features to be demonised as Satan or Devil.

Jung thought this was its downfall, and it is bringing the West down with it, due to the accumulation of vast amounts of evil. The reason evil is running amok is because we have no symbolic container to hold it. His essay focuses on Germany as a nation in which evil has accumulated without any myth or religion to transform it. Christianity, he argues, ‘domesticated the brighter half’ of the German psyche, ‘but the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second spell of domestication’. He adds a prophetic warning:

Until then, it will remain associated with vestiges of the prehistoric age, with the collective unconscious, which is subject to ever-increasing activation. As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences.

(§ 17)

It has been remarked that this statement is an accurate anticipation of the spectre of National Socialism and the Nazi uprising of the 1930s and 1940s. The ‘blond beast’ did awaken from its ‘underground prison’ with ‘devastating consequences’, as Jung suggested. This shows that his psychology, by reaching into the deeper levels of experience, can not only analyse the present but predict the future as well.

Every time we walk in the light, or reach for the light, we cast a shadow which we almost never surmise. Often it is others who point out the shadow to us, since although we do not see our failings, others have the knack of spotting them right away! The shadow is projected onto others and plays a role in determining how we experience other people and the outside world. However, it is by no means the case that the shadow is entirely evil or negative. Jung writes:

The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth.

(§ 20)

He continues:

The unconscious contains the dark springs of instinct and intuition [and] all those forces which mere reasonableness, propriety, and the orderly course of bourgeois existence could never call awake. [It contains] all those creative forces which lead man onwards to new developments, new forms, and new goals.

(§ 25)

The shadow is a paradoxical reality, containing not only undesirable elements but all the darker, primal, secret impulses that are responsible for creativity, originality and spontaneous expression. A person who places too much emphasis on the light ends up pallid, empty, bloodless, and devoid of adventure – and unprepared for the onslaughts of evil. The shadow is a ‘dangerous peculiarity’ and a ‘valuable and congenial asset as well’. Some Jungians have written about the ‘gold’ in the shadow, believing that what consciousness rejects is often the stuff of life that gives it its highest value.² However, this is to idealise the shadow and put a halo around it. While he points to the paradoxical nature of the shadow, Jung warns against an overvaluation of its positive aspect:

Nevertheless, to value the unconscious exclusively for the sake of its positive qualities and to regard it as a source of revelation would be fundamentally wrong.

(§ 20)

It would be a mistake to sentimentally distort the unconscious and make of it a personal boon rather than a difficult moral challenge.

Chapter 3: ‘The Stages of Life’ (1930/1931)

(From The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works Vol. 8, § 749–795)

In ‘The stages of life’ the personality is perceived as a battleground of opposing forces. To the extent that we seek to become more conscious, we rally behind the forces that seek civilisation. But to the extent that we seek to lose ourselves in the unconscious, we support the forces of inertia:

Everything in us that still belongs to nature shrinks away from a problem, for its name is doubt, and wherever doubt holds sway there is uncertainty and the possibility of divergent ways. And where several ways seem possible, there we have turned away from the certain guidance of instinct and are handed over to fear.

(§ 750)

We fear that civilisation might not prove as reliable a guide as instinct. ‘We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness – our Promethean conquest – may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature’ (§ 750). We have departed from the ways of instinct, but wonder if this has been a wise choice. We fear that the light of consciousness will be snuffed out by the problems that beset us. Are we interlopers in the grand scheme of things? In some moments, we are proud of our Promethean theft of fire from the gods. But in darker moments, when we are enshrouded with uncertainty and fear, the child within us cries out for the surer path of nature, the certainty of instinct, the strength of nature. In dark times, we feel as helpless as an orphan, flung out in an unforgiving universe. Indeed, as I will explore, the conquest of consciousness may be styled as a masculine protest against mother nature.

Rage as we might against our isolation in the world, Jung claims we have no alternative but to tread the path we are on. There is no going back, only a movement forward:

Every problem brings the possibility of a widen...