by Ruth Snowden
The preconscious is the region of the mind between the conscious and the unconscious, where information is stored that is not conscious at the moment, but can easily be recalled when needed.
Like Freud, Jung suggests that the psyche has three main levels, but his interpretation differs from Freud’s:
The conscious mind – Jung’s concept here is similar to Freud’s. Jung pointed out that our immediate consciousness is personal to the individual and is the only part of the psyche that we can really study experimentally. The ego is the centre of consciousness and the sense of identity. It organizes perception, memory, thoughts and feelings. Everything else within the psyche is unconscious, and can only be accessed indirectly. This can happen by means of dream analysis, creative play and so on.
The personal unconscious – this area of the psyche is unique to the individual. It is formed from repressed wishes and impulses, subliminal perceptions and forgotten experiences. Psychic contents that the ego does not recognize, or are not immediately accessible to it, are found in this area. It has two main types of contents:
(a) Contents that have become unconscious either because they simply lost their intensity and were forgotten, or because they have been repressed – that is, consciousness has been actively withdrawn from them. This includes traumatic memories and material that threatens the ego.
(b) Contents that have entered the psyche but have never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness. This category would include many of the sense impressions that we are constantly bombarded with, because we cannot possibly pay conscious attention to them all.
The collective unconscious – this is made up of archetypes and is not individual, but rather is common to all people. It cannot be built up like the personal unconscious, because it is already fully formed within the individual. Jung saw the collective unconscious as the true basis of the individual psyche.
Jung viewed the human psyche with reverential awe, saying that it had a transcendent dimension and was part of the ‘inmost mystery of life’. He strongly disagreed with the mechanistic view, which tended to regard the psyche as a side-effect of physical and chemical processes. He did not see how one could reduce the psyche to something measurable in a laboratory – after all, how could a mere ‘secretion of the brain’ observe itself and grapple with the nature of the universe? In common with Eastern and shamanic philosophy, Jung did not see any validity in separating ‘material reality’ from the whole of existence. He did not view the body and the psyche as separate entities either, but as part of one and the same being. He recognized that if the psyche is malfunctioning, it can harm the body; just as, conversely, a physical illness can adversely affect the psyche. Modern medical science has only recently begun to catch up with Jung’s thinking and view human beings in a more holistic way. Jung maintained that every science is a function of the psyche and so all knowledge is rooted in it: the psyche, he said, is the ‘greatest of all cosmic wonders’. You can read more about Jung’s views on the structure of the psyche and the way it works in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Volume 8 of his collected works.
The personal unconscious
The concept of people having an unconscious mind that can affect the way they behave was not new when Jung was formulating his theories. In fact, people had been aware of the idea for centuries, but Freud was the first to pull different ideas together and make the unconscious a subject for serious scientific study. Before Freud, the unconscious had been largely overlooked or even ignored altogether by the scientific community. 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. He believed that accessing unconscious repressed memories connected with childhood sexual trauma was the key to combatting neuroses.
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.
Freud’s hostile attitude towards the paranormal irritated Jung, because he saw it as narrow and limiting in its understanding of the psyche. His own aim was to study the many and varied aspects of both the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, even though he recognized that this was an enormous task. One night when he was visiting Freud, he asked him what he thought about precognition and parapsychology in general.
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Insight
Precognition means knowing something in advance, often by paranormal means. But remember – paranormal things and events are ones that cannot be explained by normal, objective means within the framework of current understanding. Jung was not afraid to push the boundaries of what was currently considered to be ‘good science’. This is one of the hallmarks of a great thinker.
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Freud’s reply was terse and dismissive and Jung felt that he had to bite his tongue to conceal his irritation. As he did so he felt his diaphragm grow very hot, and then there was a loud bang in Freud’s bookcase right next to them, so that both men jumped up in alarm. Jung announced that this was an example of ‘catalytic exteriorization phenomenon’ (what we would now probably call psychokinesis). Freud scoffed at this idea, saying that it was ‘sheer bosh’, but Jung contradicted him and predicted a second loud bang to prove his point. This immediately happened, no doubt leaving Jung feeling smug and Freud aghast!
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Insight
Psychokinesis means moving things by mental effort, without using any known natural force. Again, one must stress the word known.
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Like Freud, Jung was convinced that the unconscious had enormous influence, but Jung viewed the unconscious in a totally different way. Freud’s influence in current thinking had turned the unconscious into a sort of mental rubbish heap, a ‘dump for moral refuse’. For Jung, though, the unconscious was much more than that – it contained all aspects of human nature, ‘light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly’. Jung saw this balancing of opposites as basic to the structure of the psyche.
COMPLEXES
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. Jung first became aware of this phenomenon when his cousin Hélène Preiswerk manifested the character of Ivenes in her mediumistic trance state. In cases of mental illness or neurosis, complexes may be in conflict with one another, or their energy may b
ecome 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 as to where we have become unbalanced.
The collective unconscious
Jung made a great discovery that led him to a whole new approach to psychology. He said that, ‘just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.’ In other words, the unconscious was no mere rubbish dump, as Freud had maintained, but was infinitely mysterious and full of the seeds of future events and ideas, as well as those from the past. 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.
The collective unconscious is different from the personal unconscious because it does not evolve out of personal experience and is therefore not a personal acquisition, unique to the individual. The personal unconscious is composed mainly of contents that have at some time been in consciousness, and have then been forgotten or repressed. The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, have never been conscious and they are not acquired, but inherited. The collective unconscious has two main aspects:
archetypes – the psychic patterns that help to give form to our understanding of unconscious ideas
instincts – the innate biological drives that determine our behaviour. Examples are the 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
The word ‘archetype’ is derived from the Greek words arche meaning ‘first’ and type meaning ‘imprint’ or ‘pattern’. Archetypes are seen as being like deposits of experiences that have been frequently repeated in the history of mankind. These patterns are present in all humans from birth, and reside as energy at a deep level of the unconscious. They can be encountered inwardly in dreams and fantasy, or externally in myths and religious teaching. An archetype can be experienced in many ways – as a story; as a pattern or an image, such as a mandala; as a mythical or archetypal character; or even as an emotional feeling.
To explain better how archetypes operate, Jung gives the example of the universally observable phenomenon of the daily journey of the sun across the sky. This gave rise to the myth of the sun-hero, who typically dies and is reborn in an endless cycle. Variations on this theme are fundamental to many religions. In this way a natural, physical process gives rise to a subjective fantasy, which is then incorporated into a universally recognizable myth. Jung says that archetypes are usually religious in their nature, and are accompanied by an atmosphere of the numinous when they appear in our dreams and fantasies, impelling us to behave in ways that re-enact the original process.
Archetypes are patterns or images and have no physical existence in the material world, but Jung emphasizes that this does not mean that they have no separate reality of their own. Of course, this makes them hard to envisage as biological entities, and Jung was inclined later in life to steer away from the strictly biological aspects of his psychology. On the other hand, he says that the problem of whether the archetypes ever ‘originated’ at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. He was more interested in exploring how archetypes actually work, and how they affect human behaviour, rather than in attempting to explain their origins. A good example of the way Jung understood archetypes is shown in his spirit guide Philemon, who is an archetypal sage or wise man, who seemed to have a ‘separate’ identity of his own. In fantasies like this the archetype is manifesting as an image, which helps us to understand deeply unconscious ideas by making them into something we can grasp – a bit like drawing a picture of something in order to explain how it works.
People will form different archetypal images according to the culture in which they live, but the archetype itself remains the same. Everyone is familiar with archetypal figures that appear in myths and fairy stories. Other examples are the old woman, the trickster, the youth, the fool, the ‘baddie’, and so on. Archetypes have both positive and negative aspects, which reflect the wholeness and balance of the psyche. For example, the mother archetype is reflected in the many different faces of the mother goddess, which include a nurturing goddess of grain and harvest, and a wild boar who devours her own offspring.
Jung was anxious to point out that he had not totally invented the idea of archetypes – they are often described as appearing in myths as ‘motifs’, and they also appear in other guises in anthropology and comparative religion, for example as ‘primordial thoughts’, or ‘categories of the imagination’. Jung said that in order to understand the meaning of contents of the deep levels of the psyche we need mythology, because all myths are a sort of projection from the collective unconscious. This is a bit like using analytical techniques to understand the real meaning of a dream. He gives as an example the way people form constellations from the chaos of the stars in the night sky. These are then given numinous significance in the form of heroic and mythical figures and give rise to the idea of the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. What is really at work is the unconscious, introspective activity of the collective unconscious. In a similar way, archetypal figures are projected in myths and legends, and also onto real historical figures. A good example is that of the King Arthur legends, where a man who was probably a real-life British chieftain has been enormously magnified into a mythical hero.
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Insight
Jung is suggesting that a myth is an expression of ideas that lie deep within the collective human psyche.
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INSTINCTS
Instincts are unconscious impulses or actions, and like archetypes they are inherited and collective. They compel us to act in specific, biologically determined ways. Whereas archetypes affect the ways in which we perceive and understand the world, instincts affect our behaviour. They exist in animals and birds as well as humans. Like the archetypes, instincts are very ancient parts of the psyche, and as such they are very conservative in their form and functioning. Jung says that they appear in the mind as images, which express their impulses visually. He gives the example of the yucca moth, which has a symbiotic relationship with the plant of the same name. If we could explore this moth’s psyche, we would find a pattern of ideas that compel it to seek out and recognize a yucca plant.
Jung reflected that civilization has forced us to separate from our basic instincts, but they have not disappeared altogether. We still have instinctual drives towards finding food, having sex and so on. But these are often repressed because, in order to live in society, we have to learn that it is not always appropriate to act instinctually. This means that instincts tend to show themselves indirectly, for example as neurosis, or as unaccountable moods. They may also appear in dream images, or manifest as slips of the tongue or memory lapses.
Jung says that the unconscious is dominated by two fundamental instincts – the sexuality drive and the power drive. These two basic drives clash with one another, because the sexuality drive is basically to do with the preservation of the species, whereas the power drive is to do with the preservation of the individual. This is why society needs moral rules, in order to avoid the ensuing conflicts as much as possible.
However, Jung wanted to move away from the idea of separate instincts such as hunge
r, sex and aggression. He found this approach too concrete and decided that it was more helpful to see the various instincts as being different expressions of a single psychic energy. He called this motivating psychic energy ‘libido’, from the Latin word for desire or urge. He compared the concept with the one in physics, where heat, light and electricity are all different aspects of physical energy. Freud had used the term ‘libido’ to describe the sexual drive, claiming that it was the main motivating drive in the psyche, but Jung stressed that it is important not to pick on one single motivating instinct in this way, any more than the physicist would say that all forces derive from, say, heat alone.
For Jung the psyche is a dynamic system, constantly changing and self-regulating. Libido flows between two opposing poles, which Jung calls ‘the opposites’. There are many opposites in the psyche, for example conscious/unconscious; sleeping/waking; thinking/feeling; anger/peace. The greater the tension between two opposites, the greater the libido. The opposites have a regulating function in the psyche: when an extreme is reached the tendency is for libido to flow to the opposite state, so that, for example, rage becomes calm or love becomes hate.
Jung also says that there are two basic movements within the psyche. Forwards movement is called ‘progression’ and is concerned with adaptation to the environment. This echoes Jung’s Number 1 personality, which was concerned with getting on in the world. The opposite state is backward movement, which is called ‘regression’. This is concerned with the inner needs of the individual, and so we can relate this to Jung’s Number 2 personality, which was concerned with play and the inner world of dreams and fantasies. Both states are necessary in a balanced psyche. If natural balance is not found, then libido tends to flow into the unconscious, where it will build up until it is expressed through some outlet such as fantasy, rage or even, in extreme cases, psychosis. Perhaps this is one reason why our modern society feels so unbalanced – we are all so busy working and progressing that we have no time for rest and restoration, play and dreams.