C. G. Jung (1875–1961)

The eleven chapters in this work are, save one, lectures delivered by Jung prior to its 1933 publication. Carl Jung snipes at times at the wide target of Freud’s narrowly focused psychology, such as observing that free association merely leads to projecting one’s own complexes. But, at times it seems the crowded dreamscape of Jung’s own archetypes may be a projection of his own issues. Still, I enjoy reading vintage Jung since his relentless probing of the human psyche seems to have show more given him a sagacity causing such wise observation as from "Stages of Life,"

"The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behavior. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many -- far too many -- aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes."

And from “Psychology and Literature”: “It is always dangerous to speak of one’s own times, because what is at stake in the present is too vast for comprehension.”

I also love his take on the criticism process: “The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself… the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art — but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet."

Jung also dives into the materialism vs. dualism argument: “The objection has already been raised that this approach reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and so we achieve a psychology without the psyche. From this standpoint, it must be confessed, the psyche does not exist in its own right; it is nothing in itself, but is the mere expression of physical processes. That these processes have the qualities of consciousness is just an irreducible fact — were it otherwise, so the argument runs, we could not speak of the psyche at all; there would be no consciousness, and so we should have nothing to say about anything. Consciousness, therefore, is taken as the sine qua non of psychic life — that is to say, as the psyche itself. And so it comes about that all modern "psychologies without the psyche” are studies of consciousness which ignore the existence of unconscious psychic life.” Thus, Jung is revealed as a subtle spiritualist.

Finally, from “The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology”, Chapter IX of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung nearly wins me over to his archetypes idea. Perhaps it is true … indulging and reading his arguments reminds me of the feeling I get watching a really good cable TV U.F.O. documentary, I want to believe:

“It would be positively grotesque for us to call this immense system of experience of the unconscious psyche an illusion, for our visible and tangible body itself is just such a system. It still carries within it the discernible traces of primeval evolution, and it is certainly a whole that functions purposively — for otherwise we could not live. It would never occur to anyone to look upon comparative anatomy or physiology as nonsense. And so we cannot dismiss the collective unconscious as illusion, or refuse to recognize and study it as a valuable source of knowledge…

It would certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of their late descendants; and it is just as wrong, in my opinion, to regard the unconscious as a derivative of consciousness. We are nearer the truth if we put it the other way round.” show less

As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a lifelong influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members show more of his inner circle about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies.

Since there was at that time no thought of the seminar notes being published, Jung felt free to joke, to lash out at people and events that irritated or angered him, and to comment unreservedly on political, economic, and other public concerns of the time. This seminar and others, including the one recorded in Dream Analysis, were given in English in Zurich during the 1920s and 1930s. Source: Publisher show less

Modern Man in Search of a Soul collects ten lectures on psychotherapy, cultural mentalities, and religion, given by Jung in the late inter-war period. They were translated into English by Baynes in 1933 and supplemented with an essay by Jung on the distinctions between his psychology and that of Freud. My copy is a Harvest/HBJ mass-market paperback that I can easily imagine littering college campuses in the 1960s.

Jung says,"To the psyche, the spirit is no less the spirit even though it be show more called sexuality" (73), and in this point he seems to be opposing the Freudian focus on "sexuality" to Jung's own preference for construing issues in terms of "spirit." The key subtext here, however, is the critical identity and continuity between spiritual and sexual phenomena. Since Jung avoids mentioning sex at least as often as Freud insists upon it, this continuity is useful to keep in mind when reading either thinker.

Although I have been accustomed to seeing Jung as the primary representative of the "right wing" of the psychoanalytic tradition (contrasted with Reich and Marcuse on the left), there are passages here which prompt me to suspend that judgment. For example he declares, "My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature--a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified" (66). Thus Jung identifies his therapeutic goal with the loosening of character, and the subjection of identity to a changeable individual will.

In the lecture "The Stages of Life," Jung presents a theory of climacteric personal development. Very significantly he uses a solar metaphor identifying birth with dawn and death with sunset. He also remarks--with particular reference to his patients--that 20th-century Western culture suffers a poverty of institutions capable of psychically orienting individuals to the "afternoon" of life, and claims that "Our religions were always such schools in the past" (109). In this last point, I think he errs. Religions have always had a much wider range of functions, and it is in particular the orders of initiation (most often embedded in religious contexts) that supplied the desideratum.

The individual passage of the book that made the most striking impression on me was in "The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology," where I take Jung to be painting an eloquent picture of what Eliphas Levi called The Baphomet of Mendes, a pantheistic and magical figure of the absolute: "If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change ... he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasurable experience, he would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay" (186).

Lectures of less esoteric interest include "Aims of Psychotherapy," which elaborates a context in which to situate Freudian, Adlerian, and Jungian approaches to the discipline, as well as "A Psychological Theory of Types," which expands Jung's introversion/extraversion polarity with the two additional dimensions of thinking/feeling and sensation/intuition, but without the perception/judging axis that would complete them in the now-ubiquitous MBTI. The lecture "Psychology and Literature" focuses on visionary literature, and is thus actually more concerned with spiritual states and phenomena than literary production as such. It even touches on one of my particular favorite works in this vein, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (157, 166).

The book's final two chapters stand out for Jung's discussion of religion as a barometer of collective spiritual states. In "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" he discusses the "deep affinity with Gnosticism" expressed by contemporary spirituality, and he also treats at length the extent to which the "repellent" strains of occultism, Theosophy, and imported Oriental mysticisms both demonstrate the obsolescence of established religious forms and may serve as the seedbeds for their successors. "Psychotherapists or the Clergy?" treats the conundrum of secular psychotherapists being preferred to clergy by clients whose actual demand is for what traditionally would have been considered spiritual direction. show less

Just as Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism at the end of his career, in which he analyzed the Hebrew religious tradition; Jung wrote Answer to Job late in life as an attempt to integrate the Christian God. It is sometimes hilariously chatty, as when he remarks that "the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles." (p. 31) The central thesis is that the motive for the Christian Incarnation was to redeem God, whose moral inferiority had been disclosed by the events of Job. show more Jung's text culminates in a discussion of the Apocalypse.

Although Jung at first claims to be limiting his treatment to the psycho-symbolic dimensions of the Apocalyptic narrative, without discussing their parallels in historical events, he eventually succumbs to the latter temptation. Specifically, he points out the Roman Catholic church's doctrinal acceptance of the Assumption of the Virgin as a socio-historical realization of the Patmos vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

In my reading, it occurred to me that the Catholic church can function like a great mythic barometer of Western society, because of its vast population, tightly integrated through an organismic hierarchy. And I wondered what "archetypal" conditions might be augured by that church's current focus of attention: priestly child abuse. The paternal figure of the priest, denoted as benevolent and an agent of divine forgiveness, is now shown to have a terrible hidden aspect more fearsome than that of the God of Job. While that God was merely unjust in authorizing the torment of a righteous man, the God of the abusive priest is cruel in having his ministers victimize the innocent.

Of course, this cruelty is not entirely without biblical precedent. The plague on the firstborn of Egypt was, at least, visited on the offspring of tyrannous, non-Yahweh-respecting, unregenerate pagans who were thus understood as estranged from God. But the molestation of Roman Catholic children who have been brought to church for blessing and instruction is more reminiscent of Herod's massacre of the innocents, which usually portends an array of dark and worldly forces opposing God's attempt at sacrificial incarnation. In this case, though, it is God who sends the sacerdotal predators, like He sends the locusts from the bottomless pit in Revelation IX:

"For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails [were] like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt." (v. 19) show less