Even early on Jung was part of culture. The Dada movement shared the same environment as the budding psychology movement in Switzerland. Hermann Hesse was his patient, he visited the Monte Verita commune at Ascona, and he had a creativity of his own that he desperately tried to come to terms with. Jung also interpreted cultural phenomena in more general ways than Freud, whose focus was usually on the individual and on isolated experiences. Jung focused considerably more on the integration and analysis of myths, religions, customs, and symbols.
In the development of concepts like “archetypes” and the “collective unconscious,” Jung not only looked at isolated myths in themselves but also at their artistic expressions. He claimed that there is an impulse-generating layer in the psyche that is shared by all human beings and that can be directly accessed through introspection, dreams, the study of myths, and personal, artistic work. A certain culture can possess a more rational or “civilized” construction than another, but the basic psychological foundations are in essence the same globally. Jung’s travels around the world and his collection of data confirmed his theories and became an important part of his system.
The general openness that followed after the Second World War—decidedly a necessary pendulum movement—was integrated in both Jung’s life and work in an enormous amount of material telling the story of what had so far gone wrong. The individual’s need to find him- or herself, a healthy individualism in a paranoid and collectivistic world, attractive myths with strong emotional resonances, the integration of one’s own artistic process, and many other aspects eventually contributed to both a liberalization of Western culture in, for instance, the hippie movement—and later in what we today call the New Age movement—and perhaps even to a stronger presence of political liberalism.
One can feel and think what one wants about all of these manifestations but no one can deny the influence that Carl Jung has had on our culture. It’s been there hand in hand with an overall need to find new ways that are not dictated from above or even from the outside but that must be discovered by each and everyone on the inside, in the spiritual and the occulted.
When things are broadened, popularized, and integrated in a culture, the precursors, pioneers, codifiers, and formulators are often lost along the way. Generalization becomes the norm, and old terms are used in new contexts in pragmatically simplified ways. What once originated in advanced psychological reasoning in an open-minded yet empirical method becomes vague sloganeering filtered through pecuniary potential. When there’s money to be made, necessary hours on end on the analytical couch quickly become “success in just ten easy steps.”
A pop-cultural book by Jung such as Man and His Symbols is filled with highly relevant material for a deeper understanding of Homo sapiens as a cultural being. But the main attraction lies in its accessibility and the opportunity to quickly get an attractive overview of the human psyche in an increasingly complex, confused, and fragmented world. One jumps over the conclusions and preferably also the demands of critical thinking to instead find an alluring and irrational solution to personal issues through a very general kind of inspiration. Where Jung claimed that many of our central myths told stories about essential things that each individual must process in a hard and quite often painful process of individuation, the modern interpretation, say from the 1960s and onward, has become one of facing the path of least resistance and adapting to its attractive shortcuts. Where Jung wanted to make us aware of what is already there, inside us, most people still keep looking for outside sources:
I have called this wholeness that transcends consciousness the “self.” The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self. From another point of view the term “entelechy” might be preferable to “synthesis.” There is an empirical reason why “entelechy” is, in certain conditions, more fitting: the symbols of wholeness frequently occur at the beginning of the individuation process, indeed they can often be observed in the first dreams of early infancy. This observation says much for the a priori existence of potential wholeness, and on this account the idea of entelechy instantly recommends itself. But insofar as the individuation process occurs, empirically speaking, as a synthesis, it looks, paradoxically enough, as if something already existent were being put together.1
One could definitely say that Jung is the contemporary norm in these spheres. His terminology rules, if not within clinical psychology, then definitely within popular culture with terms like introvert, extrovert, synchronicity, anima, animus, and so on.
Jung’s integration of myths as an expression of fundamental psychological truths got a push forward through American mythologist Joseph Campbell’s successful books, such as The Masks of God, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and The Power of Myth. Here we also find an accessible focus on the analysis of myths, mainly filtered through religion, fiction, and popular culture throughout the millennia. Although social contexts constitute much of our lives, Jung and Campbell, as well as many other later Jungians, always stressed that development is an individual affair—that it could be no other way:
It has been one of the really painful problems of the modern Western individual to gain release for his conscience from this Levantine assurance of a separation of spirit and nature (mythic dissociation), together with its correlative totalitarian dogma (social identification) of “society”—almost any quorum, it seems, will do: a “people,” a “Church,” even a trade union, or anything calling itself “the state”—as the only vehicle of value, through association with which an individual can achieve worth: when actually the truth is the other way around, that whatever human worth a social group may claim, it will have gained only by grace of the great and little individuals of its membership.2
In the 1960s, even structuralist philosophers like Roland Barthes began writing about contemporary times from a mythological perspective. He showed that phenomena like Greta Garbo, Einstein’s brain, and even striptease must be interpreted in a mythological way. Like Jung, Barthes claimed that myth is essentially a language. Where Jung wrote that this language in itself also constituted an essential content for personal development, for Barthes the mythological language became more of a convenient tool for his own contemporary criticism.
But the very term mythology was brought forth again and no longer strictly within academic fields like the history of religions or anthropology. From a psychological perspective one could say the concept of myth was made conscious by Jung and his later interpreters. Suddenly it was around in a wider and more public context.
With this, the terms myth and mythology gained more meanings. Where the terms used to signify a group of behaviors and stories that had lived on orally or had been written down and could be focused on, today they have become diluted and can signify anything from a lie to a feeling: “No, that’s not correct, it’s just a myth,” or “That felt totally mythical.” This dilution is of course a part of contemporary Western culture in general. One could almost say that our contemporary mythologies to a large extent consist of upheavals. Not just of old kinds of tradition but also of how we experience them, how we value them. Perception certainly hasn’t been sharpened (which some technophiles like to argue) but rather dulled, and the material we experience consists of impoverished and diluted versions of what once transmitted something substantial.
An example: Our Western dramaturgy is based on what’s usually called a Homeric structure. It ties in to Homer’s stories about Odysseus’s travels toward distinct goals. During his travels Odysseus faces problems and challenges that he, either alone or with others, deals with and solves. This is a very simple setup and yet seemingly endlessly fascinating. The same story has been told in so many ways and in so many different media that it’s mind-boggling when you think about it. The reason for this is very likely the actual weight of tradition. You tell your kids the same story that you were once told yourself. These stories are more important than most parents seem to understand.
But two main things have
happened since the days of Jung: technology-driven mass media is one, and the commercialization of shared public space the other. Both of these have contributed to the fact that the amount of fiction has increased in relation to one’s own thinking. Where previously we chose fiction in a compartmentalized manner and actively took part in it, today we are overrun by TV, the Internet, movies, and commercials of all kinds, and this mainly happens passively. I have stated before (and I’ll do it again) that we now live more in and through fiction than we do in so-called fact-based reality. Fiction has taken over. If we want to break it down one more level, we can say that our own mythologies need our voluntary submission to too much content, too many stories, and all too quickly. Unfortunately, that’s when we leave the original function of myth—education, teaching, and explaining things that are conducive to one’s own mental health—in favor of being driven into a wall of technological rule and perceptual deficiencies at an exponentially increasing speed.
How would Jung interpret our contemporary times? I can of course only speculate—and I gladly will. I believe he would have called it reversion. Where he claimed that the answers lie within ourselves on individual but also culturally integrated levels, and that one needs to work hard to reach these deeper levels, everything today is basically reversed or contrary: we encounter attractive tsunamis of empty promises in commodified and disposable identities together with fictions filled with immediate but evanescent saturation. And, to add insult to injury, these stories are told in narrative structures that “retardify” the partaker: we see what happens, then we see at least two participants retell what just happened as if we can’t get it ourselves. It’s a breaking down of the barriers of human intelligence and dignity.
The result is a kind of anti-Jungian abyss. Stress and existential anxiety increase and are not treated therapeutically, but pharmaceutically. The human being is allowed to believe in whatever she so desires but doesn’t really believe in anything at all. And those who actually do believe in something seem willing to kill all those who don’t share their specific belief.
If you simply exchange a cluster of well-tried and well-meaning myths for arbitrarily created (and often quite non-altruistic) pseudo-myths, then perhaps we simply can’t handle it? The contact with the deeper layers of the psyche may actually be literally essential for the individual. That’s what Jung claimed anyway. No outside structures can act as substantial substitutes for the gnostic and direct contact the individual needs in his or her development. One parallel example could be the fact that we can’t survive if we can’t or aren’t allowed to dream.
One important part of functional myths is relevance. The reason why certain stories still live on is that they’ve transmitted definitive and engaging knowledge and wisdom. What is relevant today? And how should we preserve that in such a fragmented existence as ours? Very likely we’re looking at oral transmission, possibly amplified by physical books. All the so-called digital storage media are highly ephemeral gadgets, and we all know it. They won’t last. And what will actually be told? What’s going to be relevant for those who come next?
Desperate attempts at contact with our own (hi)story and a permeating anxiety about the future are what’s defining a good deal of our contemporary history writing. I recently re-watched the first Planet of the Apes films, and they are like a contemporary mythological gold mine, despite the fact that they are already forty to forty-five years old. At first, some humans led by Charlton Heston land on a planet that reveals itself as earth in the future. The planet is now run by intelligent, talking apes who keep the remaining human population as slaves. This is a simple science-fictional and mythological presentation: you travel in time to show a nightmare scenario. But the interesting thing about Planet of the Apes is that the story goes on. The reason for the power switch between apes and humans in the future is that some of the more benevolent apes in Heston’s company actually go back in time on earth—as intelligent and talking apes—to an existence where they are caught and maltreated because they stir up a riot among the lower kinds of apes. However, their genetic offspring develop, take charge, and eventually enslave the humans. That is, until Charlton Heston shows up several thousands of years later. It’s a very simple yet efficient time-warp–potential-loop scenario in which we are exposed to the problems of xenophobia, anthropocentrism, vanity, and the worship of technology in fairy-tale form. It is a beautiful and substantial myth. Similar examples exist in Lord of the Rings, which very much contains Tolkien’s filtering of medieval European myths spiced with plenty of xenophobia.
Jung’s friend and colleague, the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade, basically shared and amplified his views: “An object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ i.e., it lacks reality.”3 The archetype is, as we know, a strictly Jungian term and concept. Archetypes are the forces or symbols that individuals can meet in the inner world, in dreams, visions, and in daydreams and that clearly reflect, if only symbolically, variants of current existential issues. This leads to the question: Do Eliade and Jung mean that those who haven’t yet acknowledged the archetypes lack a sense of reality, or that they themselves are unreal? It’s a highly relevant question for us today. If we are actively opposed by flamboyant superficiality and angst-ridden identity crises, then we can at most reflect each other: thin surfaces that reflect other thin surfaces. When this is passed on to new generations the result is an increasingly accentuated weakness.
Eliade also claimed that basically all relevant myths retell the original story of creation, regardless of which culture tells it. There is a need to be reborn, and one does that by acting out ritualized creations, or “active symbols” as Jung would call them. This is also interesting from our contemporary perspective: exactly which story of creation is permeating our culture and individual interpretations? Although it’s tempting to answer “none,” I think it’s more interesting to look at one main current theme: active dissociation from the earth. In fiction, the threat has always come from beyond (the bend, outer space, another country, etc.). We create and enjoy life here, in our own little paradise. But as the threats of real life increase (terrorism, pathogeny, asteroids, etc.) and thereby disturb the smooth recreation stories in/of paradise, the current expressions (mythic or simply escapist) also reflect that increase. Hence we are flooded with stories of space dystopias (us going out, “them” coming in), supernatural creatures disrupting death (zombies, vampires, etc.), urban malaise, sexual confusion, more and more superheroes, and so forth. Entertainment not only reflects but also actively leads the way. Acclimatization to inner voices and spiritual helpers is regarded as a facet of insanity, while Pokémon Go takes off like wildfire.
We are permeated by an illusion of empowerment. One example could be the first Hobbit film. It’s a distant part of a genuinely interesting work of Tolkien based on mythology. The first trilogy of film adaptations found a strong resonance with the zeitgeist and became an immense success. But in the first Hobbit film there are scenes that are distinctly plucked from another medium—that of the computer game. The dramaturgy, aesthetics, and experience transcends the story in itself to create a comfort zone in an abstracted tool or, as it’s called today, a platform. It is storytelling without a real story. Is there any difference between that film scene where Legolas is jumping up and down on moving blocks and the one in the computer game? The difference is one of illusory empowerment: you can “be” the character in question in the game. It’s like when children play: “I’ll be this one and you be that one.” The difference is that it’s still a passive existence inside the computer game, without any connection to active imagination, daydreaming, associative fantasy, and so on. It’s not a therapeutic process but rather just a dulling one. Hence it’s not a myth but just mere escapism.
So how can we awaken the power of mythology if we be
lieve, like Jung did, that it’s beneficial for health and existence? Well, the mere study of myths is fascinating and rewarding. Jung can be hard to read at times, but there’s no escaping that Man and His Symbols is a great introduction. Joseph Campbell too. Campbell created pop culture out of subjects previously reserved for academic specialists. In reading Jung, Campbell, and even Eliade we understand the weight and importance of mythology, which opens us up to looking at the world with new and wider eyes, and makes us connect even the smallest things with larger meanings. The fairy tale is the child’s first contact with an abstracted world beyond the immediate family, and thereby a strong contribution to how one deals with one’s own life later on. If, instead, you press an iPad or a cell phone with a blinking, buzzing game in the hands of a child to silence him or her, how will that turn out?
For Jung himself, being an ardent empirical scientist, it was difficult to open up to the inner visions he experienced early on in life. At times he even discarded them as “psychotic incidents.” But gradually he trusted his own intuition and began work on the book that may be his most important: the “red” book, or Liber Novus. It was simply a book he wrote and illustrated for himself and which grew and grew with time. It contains religious writings, visions, and symbolic images all stemming from his own depths. We can’t really say that Jung was a traditional Christian but he was most definitely a Gnostic. Many of his texts are Gnostic, in the sense of early Christian writings that claimed it was perfectly possible to maintain a direct contact with God without proxies like priests or churches. Jung didn’t want Liber Novus to be published or even shown during his own lifetime, but when it eventually was, in 2009, it became obvious that the work on the book had been extremely influential for many of his thoughts and theories. And that he was actually a very talented visual artist too. It was during the work on this book that Jung developed his ideas on the collective unconscious, the sphere that he claimed all specimen of Homo sapiens share, like a general DNA of the soul, and to which you can return to access both information and inspiration in life.
Occulture Page 12