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Jung and collective unconscious |
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Written by Howard Jones
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Monday, 31 March 2008 16:10 |
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist who was brought up in a family background that included medical men, preachers and mystics. Jung was born in the small village of Kesswil, on the shores of Lake Constance in Switzerland, but before Carl was four, the family moved to Basel where Jung’s paternal grandfather, a respected physician, became Rector of Basel University.
Jung’s father was a Protestant pastor. His maternal grandfather was also a theologian but one who had a deep interest in the occult. His cousin, Hélène Preiswerk, was a medium and details of her seances were to form part of Jung’s Doctoral thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Experiences. This family background of spiritualism, theology and medicine was to shape Jung’s future career path and his world view.
Because his mother was rather emotionally unstable, the family home was far from providing him with a happy relaxed atmosphere. This drove young Carl within himself, which was not necessarily a bad thing for this introverted, introspective personality served him well in adulthood in understanding the minds of others as he had been driven to understand himself. He was much more at home in the personal world of dreams, day-dreams and mystical visions than in the external world of real people.
Jung’s first academic paper was presented to a student debating society at Basel University. It was called ‘On the Limits of the Exact Sciences’ and in this he criticized orthodox science for its inflexible materialism and reductionist approach.
At the start of his professional career Jung worked with Freud for six years, but then differences emerged in their approach to analysis which demanded that they go their separate ways.
Jung did share the views of Freud and Adler about the importance of the unconscious, but his views were rather different. Jung, like Freud, accepted the importance of the unconscious mind in shaping the development of the personality but, expanding on the ideas of Freud, Jung suggested a four-fold division of functions of the mind.
Jung defined the preconscious and conscious divisions of the mind in much the same way as Freud, but considered that the unconscious comprised two separate and distinct components. He defined the personal unconscious, which includes repressed wishes that are socially unacceptable and traumatic experiences, corresponding to the ‘unconscious’ of Freud’s first analysis of mind function. But then Jung postulated another division of mind called the collective unconscious.
It was Jung’s belief that we all have a predisposition to act in well defined ways under a particular set of circumstances. The reason we do this, he maintained, is because certain intuitive images are passed from each generation to the next, and even from one culture to another. These patterns of action or primordial images appeared in dreams or imaginings and found practical expression with recurrent themes found in myths, legends and rituals of many indigenous tribal groups whose spirituality had not been corrupted by technological advances.
He called these patterns of behaviour archetypes, which he defined as ‘a priori, inborn forms of ‘intuition’ . . . of perception and apprehension . . . Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns’.
The archetypes correspond to Plato’s Ideas or Forms that provide us with the templates for our conceptual notions. The realm in which the Ideas exist is effectively the same as the collective unconscious or Hegel’s Geist or Sheldrake’s morphic field, the spiritual medium through which the thoughts of one individual are transmitted through space and time to another.
Jung considered that the human propensities for religion and myth were universal expressions of these archetypes residing in the collective unconscious. Certain religious icons, like that of a divine redeemer son, may be found in Babylonian, Egyptian and even in Hindu and Mayan mythology as well as in Christianity.
We are clearly shaped by both nature and nurture. Our genes may provide the predispositions to develop in a particular way, but our home environment and other external factors that we encounter on life’s journey will determine the path our lives take. Modern biological research indicates that these life events feed back information to the genetic material in every cell of our bodies.
We cannot alter the structure of our DNA but we can it seems modify the way it performs through changes in our RNA. It is in our response to the environment that we exhibit our ability to resonate with the domain of the collective unconscious.
Jung believed that as we grow older we develop a realization of our full potential in the state that he called individuation, achieving the whole spiritually content individual as part of society and the natural environment. We have achieved our material goals during the acquisitive phase and found contentment and meaning in our lives in the inquisitive phase. As ecologist Thomas Berry said: ‘Nothing is itself without everything else’. Individuation was the goal of life which Jung equated with wisdom.
Part of this process of individuation, said Jung, was admitting to ourselves, if we were male, that we had a gentler, more emotional, sensitive and compassionate side to our natures – qualities that we generally associate with our ideal feminine: Jung called this the anima. The corresponding quality in women, when they needed to be more aggressive or logical Jung called the animus – a reflection of how women thought the ideal man would behave.
Women still occupy a subordinate role in many societies: it is more difficult for them to be promoted, especially to top jobs, and they are usually paid significantly less, even for doing the same job, despite gestures by politicians at establishing equality with men. We still have a long way to go to enable women to play a fulfilling role in our society, to their detriment and ours generally.
Jung’s introversion was probably one reason for the personality clash that he had with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, who was certainly more of an extrovert. Another would have been that Freud, with his scientific training, was always looking backwards in time in the sense that he always sought causes and origins of things – a typical reductionist.
Jung, on the other hand, looked forwards in that he was a dreamer who was more concerned with an individual’s motives, goals and objectives (working towards individuation) and he envisaged some ideal unifying spiritual realm amongst humankind as a whole. The collective unconscious could be thought of as fulfilling just such a role.
As a spiritually oriented introvert personality, Jung had many psychic experiences himself and believed that many of his ideas came from his spirit guide that he called Philemon, an old man with a white beard and wings of a kingfisher – the archetype of the wise old man. The winged image recalls the Faravahar icon central to the Zoroastrian religion.
From these personal encounters, and the experiences described to him by Hélène Preiswerk, Jung had no doubt about the validity of psychic visions. When he was 68, Jung suffered a pulmonary embolism which nearly killed him. It was in this state that he had a near-death experience, with the usual concomitants of seeing oneself from afar (or, in Jung’s case, the whole planet Earth from out in space) and a certain resentment at being brought back to real existence again. Happily, he recovered and lived to within a month of his 86th birthday.
This essay was first published in the Winter 2008 edition of the Tree of Life magazine - www.treeoflifemagazine.com
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