by Ruth Snowden
In 1913, Jung began to feel as though ‘there were something in the air’. The whole atmosphere seemed darker, as if his inner oppression was becoming a concrete reality. During a journey he had an overpowering vision of a huge flood that rose up and covered the whole of northern Europe. The mountains rose higher to protect Switzerland, but all around he saw the rubble of civilization and drowned bodies in a vast sea that turned to blood. The whole vision lasted an hour and made him feel quite ill. Two weeks later it returned, with even more intensity.
This gruesome experience was followed by a recurring dream that began in the spring of 1914. In his dream, Jung saw the land frozen to ice in summer time. World War I broke out in August, and Jung knew then that he had to try to understand what had happened and how his own inner experiences had coincided with the outer experiences of mankind. He realized that the only way to approach this question was to begin to carefully record and study his own fantasies and dreams. A huge stream of fantasies began to be released and he felt as if he was enduring an endless series of inner thunderstorms. He knew that he was strong, however, and that he had to find meaning in it all, not only for his own sake, but also for his patients, so that he might better understand their problems.
DISCOVERING ARCHETYPES
Jung found that as he wrote he was often using ‘high-flown language’. He found this pomposity rather embarrassing, and often felt strong resistance to his fantasies, but he tried to treat the whole thing as a sort of scientific experiment. He knew all too well the dangers of becoming prey to his own fantasies, and how easy it would be to slide into psychosis.
In one vision he met a beautiful young girl, accompanied by an old man with a beard. These figures were examples of what Jung called ‘archetypes’ – the recurring images or patterns of thinking which form the basic content of religion, myth, art and legend. Archetypes are part of the collective unconscious and they emerge in the individual psyche through dreams and visions. Jung felt that the old man in his vision corresponded to Elijah, an Old Testament prophet, and the young girl to Salome, the archetypal seductress found in the New Testament.
After a while Jung met another archetypal figure – Philemon, a pagan sage, with the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher. He carried a bunch of four keys, one of which he held as if ready to open a lock. Jung painted a picture of this apparition and shortly afterwards found a dead kingfisher in his garden by the lakeshore. This was most odd, as kingfishers were rare in the area. Jung saw the incident as providing a crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that we do not produce – they produce themselves and have their own life.
Philemon became an important guru to Jung; he began to have lengthy conversations with him, and even went for walks with him in the garden. Philemon explained to Jung that we do not generate our own thoughts: they have an external reality of their own, just like birds in the air, or people in a room. Jung realized that there was something within him that could talk about matters that he did not consciously know about, and might even act against him. Archetypal encounters were very important because they enabled Jung to give a personal form to aspects of his unconscious. Because they were in some way ‘separate’ from himself, he was able to bring them into relationship with his conscious mind and not get too bogged down in some of their more disturbing utterances.
An important archetype for Jung was the wise old man or woman who acts as a kind of internal mentor or guide, showing us the way.
In 1916, a restless, ominous atmosphere was beginning to gather in Jung’s home. The children took to seeing white figures at night, and had their blankets snatched away from them in bed. The doorbell rang frantically all by itself when there was nobody there, and the whole house felt thick with spirits. Eventually, a whole host of them infiltrated the house and Jung began to write a book, Septem Sermones (Seven Sermons), which represented an exteriorization of everything in his turbulent mind. He wrote for three days and then the spirits all vanished from the house and the weird haunting was over. Jung suggests that they were parapsychological phenomena, somehow caused by his own highly charged emotional state.
MANDALAS
Towards the end of World War I, Jung began to emerge from his great darkness. A major event at this time was his discovery of the mandala. The word mandala comes from Sanskrit and means ‘magical circle’. The mandala is an archetypal symbol, found in many religions and in other aspects of many cultures. It is often used as a centring device to help with meditation exercises. A basic mandala is a circle containing a square or other symmetrical figure, but there are many variations. The image may represent the universe itself, or the ‘inner universe’ – the wholeness of the psyche. Every morning, Jung did a small circular drawing of this type and observed the ways in which the drawings changed from day to day. He found that they helped him to observe his own psychic transformations – the ever-changing state of his inner world.
Jung found that his mandala drawings linked up with external experiences in his everyday life and also with his dreams. He gradually came to understand that they represented the way in which all paths in the psyche led eventually to a mid point, which is the core, or essence, of what he called the Self. (The capital letter distinguishes it from the more mundane meaning of the word.) The goal of psychic development is the discovery of this unique Self. This process is what Jung called ‘individuation’ and it is one of the central concepts of analytical psychology. Like the mandala, the evolution of the psyche is not linear, but a process of circling around the Self. From Jung’s mandala work emerged inklings of his own personal myth, his all-important ‘story’ that expressed his real being.
THE TOWER AT BOLLINGEN
Jung felt that he was gradually able to put his dreams and fantasies onto a more solid footing and began to understand the unconscious in more scientific terms. He also wanted to make a representation of his innermost thoughts and knowledge in a more permanent solid way than simply writing them down on paper. For this purpose of self-expression, and also as a quiet retreat, he built his tower at Bollingen in 1922. He had a special resting room within the tower where only he was allowed to go. Here he did paintings on the walls and found that he could truly be himself. He found a great sense of inner peace and spiritual concentration within this special room.
Jung kept on adding to the tower throughout his long life. The new bits represented different parts of his ever-evolving psyche. He felt that this was an important part of his own individuation process, as if he was being reborn in stone. Life at Bollingen was kept deliberately simple – there was no electricity, and Jung chopped all his own wood, drew water from a well and cooked all his own food. He enjoyed the sense of silence and living in harmony with nature. All around, he carved inscriptions on stones, expressing different insights. The creative play aspect that Jung enjoyed at Bollingen was very important as a means for him to access and understand his unconscious – a process that many people find difficult.
SUMMARY
Today we have seen how Jung had – and, indeed, cultivated – an extraordinarily rich and intense inner life, and how he used this as a springboard for his ideas about the human psyche. Even in childhood he underwent a succession of near-visionary experiences that brought him into contact with – or so he came to believe – the mysterious underpinnings of human nature. Of course, we might well object that Jung was drawing universal conclusions from very personal experiences. To this, Jung would undoubtedly have countered that it is we who are simply failing to notice and take account of the richness of our own inner lives.
Jung was keen to move psychology beyond the mechanistic version of science that held sway in the late nineteenth century, and towards a more intuitive investigation into the more spiritual, less empirical aspects of human psychology. It was this that essentially led to his rift with the great pioneer of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud – a rift that would enable him to discover and formulate his own unique contribution to modern psychology.
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nbsp; FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. About what was Jung’s earliest recollected dream?
a) A manikin in a top hat
b) A subterranean, phallus-shaped being
c) A boulder
d) A dining table riven in half
2. Which book introduced Jung to the world of psychiatry?
a) Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams
b) Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
c) Richard van Krafft-Ebing’s Text-book of Psychiatry
d) Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion
3. What is spiritualism?
a) An early form of psychiatry
b) A concern with the spiritual aspects of life
c) A concern with the supernatural, including contact with the dead
d) None of the above
4. What is positivism?
a) An approach to science that emphasizes observable laws of cause and effect
b) A positive attitude to science
c) Another word for ‘optimism’
d) None of the above
5. What is a complex?
a) A complicated set of scientific data
b) A psychological disorder
c) A particularly difficult psychiatric case
d) A related group of emotionally charged, unconscious ideas
6. When did Jung first send Freud some of his findings?
a) 1906
b) 1907
c) 1908
d) 1909
7. How might we best characterize Jung’s relationship with Sigmund Freud?
a) Colleagues
b) Rivals
c) Like father and son
d) Brothers
8. Which of the following was not a therapeutic tool in Jung’s approach?
a) Free association
b) Dream analysis
c) Creative play
d) Word association
9. In Jungian thought, what is an archetype?
a) Another word for a stereotype
b) A recurring psychic image
c) A personality type
d) None of the above
10. Which of the following describe(s) ‘individuation’?
a) The discovery of the Self
b) Being yourself
c) Introspection
d) The goal of psychic development
Today we will look at Jung’s key theories about the psyche. Jung emphasized the importance of looking at both the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious when studying the human psyche. Freud saw the unconscious as a kind of dumping ground, where we store unacceptable ideas and thoughts. Jung saw it very differently – for him it was the true basis of the human psyche, ‘the innermost mystery of life’, from which consciousness arose.
When he talks about the ‘psyche’, Jung means the whole of the mind or spirit, both conscious and unconscious. The individual psyche is always seeking growth and wholeness and balance is of paramount importance. Conscious attitudes are always balanced by unconscious attitudes: if a conscious attitude grows too strong then the unconscious will always seek to restore equilibrium. The unconscious will express its ideas by means of dreams, spontaneous imagery, slips of the tongue and so on. If the unconscious message is ignored, then neurosis or even physical disease may result.
THE PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS
Freud’s work had made people much more aware of the unconscious and the ways in which it operated, in both the adult and the developing child. Freud believed that accessing unconscious, repressed memories was the key to sorting out neuroses. His influence on current thinking had turned the unconscious into a sort of mental rubbish heap, a ‘dump for moral refuse’. For Jung, the unconscious was much more than that – it contained all aspects of human nature, good and bad. It was no mere rubbish dump, but was infinitely mysterious: not only could it look forward as well as back in time, it could also reach beyond its individual boundaries into the world of the collective unconscious.
Freud was a convinced mechanist and tried always to be strictly scientific in his approach. Jung was also trained in the scientific method and tried to understand the workings of the psyche in terms of biological processes. However, unlike many scientists of his day, Jung never lost his interest in the psychic and paranormal aspects of the human mind. He acknowledged that there was much in life that we cannot yet understand, but this did not mean that one had to pretend it did not exist. In a lecture to the Society for Psychical Research in 1919, he expressed this point of view when he remarked, ‘I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.’ This difference in attitude was one of several key factors in the rift between Freud and Jung.
In Jung’s view, the personal unconscious consists mainly of ‘complexes’. These are related groups of emotionally charged ideas, thoughts and images. Many complexes may appear in the same person, but they do not have to be negative in effect. They are psychic phenomena that tend to group together because they work more efficiently that way. This is because they tend to be related to a particular archetype. A commonly cited example is the ‘mother complex’. There is an inbuilt instinctual ability to recognize the mother’s nipple and this is our first experience of ‘mother’. Gradually, we add to this all kinds of information about our own mother, and mothers in general, and build up an inner data bank – this is the mother complex. This is constantly expanding and changing as a person matures, so that we may add to it a whole host of other ideas, such as ‘mother earth’, ‘mother nature’, ‘mother country’ and so on. All these relate to the mother archetype and help the psyche to be more organized and efficient.
Complexes can act as a kind of sub-personality, and at times these can manifest themselves as a different character. Such a character may appear in dreams, fantasies or trance states. In cases of mental illness or neurosis, complexes may be in conflict with one another, or their energy may become blocked off. The more negatively charged complexes a person has the more disturbed he or she becomes, because these act as pathological, disrupting factors in the psyche. The immediate goal of analysis of the unconscious is to root out these negative complexes so that their content becomes conscious and the person can stop ‘acting out’ from them and being ruled by them. The unconscious is always in danger of becoming too one-sided, keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in dead ends. We are all familiar with the idea of somebody having ‘a one-track mind’. Jung stressed that we are never done with working on the unconscious, and should always pay attention to our dreams and fantasies, because they will give us pointers to where we have become unbalanced.
THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Jung’s interest in the collective unconscious began as a result of his work with psychotic patients and his own midlife crisis. He decided that it has two main aspects:
• archetypes, which help to give form to our understanding of unconscious ideas
• instincts, which are the innate biological drives that determine our behaviour, e.g. sex drive, hunger, and aggression.
Both these components belong in the collective unconscious because they exist independently of the individual psyche and contain universally recognized, inherited aspects.
ARCHETYPES
Jung says that archetypes are usually religious in their nature, and are accompanied by an atmosphere of the numinous. They are images and have no physical existence in the material world, but this does not mean that they have no separate reality of their own. A good example of an archetype is Jung’s spirit guide, Philemon, who is an archetypal sage or wise man. People form different archetypal images according to the culture they live in, but the archetype itself remains the same. Everyone is familiar with archetypal figures that tend to appear in myths and fairy stories, for example, the old woman, the trickster, the youth, the fool and so on.
An archetype, Jung wrote, emphasizing once again the organic, biological nature of the psyche, ‘is an
inherited mode of functioning corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest…’
INSTINCTS
Jung reflected that civilization has forced us to separate from our basic instincts, but they have not disappeared altogether. Because they are often repressed, they tend to show themselves indirectly, for example as a neurosis or as an unaccountable mood. They may also appear in dream images, or manifest as slips of the tongue or memory lapses.