by Ruth Snowden
Western man is mainly extroverted, finding meaning in external objects and looking for meaning in the ‘real world’. Consciousness in Western man is too detached from the unconscious.
Eastern man is mainly introverted and looks for meaning within the Self. In Eastern man, the tendency is for consciousness to merge completely with the unconscious.
‘But,’ said Jung, ‘the meaning is both without and within.’ He had discovered that both traditions had their own strengths and drawbacks. Neither point of view was completely right or completely wrong. This insight shows a move towards balance and maturity within Jung’s own psyche – an integration of the two sides of his personality that had troubled him for so long.
Changes in Christian thinking
Jung came to believe that Christianity was of central importance to Western man, but it needed to gain new insights in order to answer the spiritual needs of modern people. For example, he felt that there was an imbalance in the doctrine of the Trinity, which sees God as having three aspects – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jung felt that this idea did not acknowledge a feminine aspect to the divine. Gnostic teaching had actually added a ‘fourth term’ as an attempt to incorporate the hidden and mysterious feminine side. The immense popular appeal of such recent books as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code shows that Jung was not far off the mark in his understanding that the modern mind tends to seek such a balance.
In 1950, the Catholic Church announced a new doctrine – that of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Jung considered this new dogma to be ‘the most important religious event since the reformation’ (Answer to Job). Before this, from early times, the Church had tended to regard the feminine with deep suspicion. The problem had begun with the doctrine of Original Sin, which says that we are all born sinful, ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit (the naughty temptress Eve was largely responsible for this). But people began to realize that new-born babies can hardly have done anything sinful, so they decided that it must be the sexual act itself that causes all the trouble. The Virgin Mary was exempt from this indiscretion, having produced Jesus without having to have sex. In 1950, she gained a further promotion when the doctrine of the Assumption decreed that she was taken straight up to heaven, body and spirit, when she died and didn’t have to wait for the Day of Judgement like the rest of us.
Jung saw this new doctrine as being very important because he felt that it acknowledged an archetypal psychological need. Ordinary people had always shown this need in the way that they regarded the Virgin as a comforting, motherly person, whom one could pray to in times of need. She had definitely been venerated all along, even though she wasn’t ‘officially’ divine. People had visions of her too, and Jung points out that she often appeared to children. ‘In such cases,’ he said, ‘the collective unconscious is always at work’ (Answer to Job).
Jung’s suggestion is that the doctrine of the Assumption is like a subconscious announcement that Mary is now being accepted as part of the Trinity, so that it becomes a ‘Quaternity’. The doctrine ‘expresses a renewed hope for the fulfilment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between opposites’ (Answer to Job). Once again we have the idea of balance. Four is a more balanced number than three and Jung points out that it has often cropped up before – the four evangelists, four seasons, four elements and so on – making it a number that is archetypally satisfying. Just to be difficult, one could suggest that something is still missing from the divine group. If we have a father and a son, then surely we need a daughter as well as a mother? Ought we not to have the number 5 to represent wholeness?
Jung believed that the study of religion was very important in giving us insight into the workings of the unconscious. He stressed that when he spoke of God, he referred to the ‘God within’.
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Insight
I think that what Jung meant by ‘the God within’ is really that he saw God as an inseparable part of us, and not just ‘out there’.
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Whether or not God exists as a separate external entity was for Jung a pointless and unanswerable question, but he believed that it was essential for people to have a spiritual dimension in their lives and that numerous neuroses arose because people overlooked this aspect of their being, especially as they moved into the second half of life. People tend to focus on the narrower aspects of life such as work, marriage or success, but all the while they stay unhappy because they are restricting themselves spiritually. This is why Jung saw spirituality as being vitally important to the achievement of wholeness in the human psyche.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Jung was by nature a spiritually aware person.
He saw the spiritual aspects of human experience as being of vital importance to the health of the psyche.
He studied a wide range of different religions in order to gain insight into archetypal patterns in religious thinking.
Jung found dogmatic fundamentalist religions unhelpful because they lead to disagreement and spiritual stagnation. He emphasized the importance of individual experience in spiritual growth and psychic health.
He concluded that the Eastern religions were mainly introverted, looking for meaning within the Self. Western religions on the other hand were more extroverted, searching for meaning in the ‘real world’.
Jung pointed out that truth lay both without and within and so the path to spiritual maturity is about finding balance.
He believed that religions need to grow and evolve in order to answer the deep spiritual needs of ordinary people.
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10
Jung the visionary
In this chapter you will learn:
more about Jung’s travels
why some people have criticized Jung
key points about Jungian analysis.
Travels
Jung travelled quite a lot during his life and went to some far-flung parts of the world. This was partly because he wanted to learn about cultures that were utterly different from his own in order to find out more about the collective unconscious. In order to do this, he went to places where non-European languages and religions other than Christianity prevailed.
Jung visited North Africa more than once. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections there is a copy of a letter he sent to his wife Emma in 1920, beginning with the words, ‘This Africa is incredible’. He goes on to give her glimpses of a brilliant morning in Algiers with bright houses and streets and dark clumps of tall palm trees. He then continued on by rail, a 30-hour stint to Tunis, whose classical Arab atmosphere mesmerized him until he was ‘dissolved in the potpourri which cannot be evaluated’. Archetypal presences appear in the letter when he describes the rising sun as a ‘great god’ who ‘fills both horizons with his joy and power’; he says that the moon at night ‘glows with such divine clarity that one cannot doubt the existence of Astarte.’ (Astarte is an ancient Semitic goddess whose widespread devotees included the Syrians, Phoenicians and Egyptians – in the Bible she is unkindly referred to as ‘the abomination’.)
Jung saw so many interesting sights on the long train journey that although his descriptions are vivid, he says that he could not find enough words to describe everything properly to Emma. He was enthralled to stumble upon Roman remains everywhere, and see ancient amphorae for sale in the markets. ‘I do not know what Africa is really saying to me,’ he wrote, ‘but it speaks.’ And there were strangely synchronous events too – on arrival at Sousse with its white walls and towers, he was astounded to see a sailing ship with two lateen sails that he had once painted. On another occasion, getting off a boat at Alexandria, Jung had his hand read by a chiromancer, who promptly announced that Jung was one of the very few great men he had seen and waived his normal fee.
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Insight
On a trip to East Africa, Jung met Ruth Bailey. She was to be a life-long friend and after his wife Emma died she became his
companion, housekeeper and nurse until the time of his death.
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Jung was struck by the way time seemed to slow down more and more the further he travelled into the Sahara, even threatening to move backwards. In a letter to a friend, he described an encounter with a figure all swathed in white and seated upon a black mule whose harness was studded with silver. This man rode by without offering any greeting, but his proud bearing and the sense that this person was somehow wholly himself, struck Jung as a stark contrast to the average European with his ‘faint note of foolishness’ and his illusion of triumph in great achievements such as steamships and railways. He concluded that the driven attitude and suppression of emotion that characterizes modern Western culture have been gained at the expense of intensity of living. This has resulted in people forcing down into the unconscious much that is real and life-giving.
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Insight
Jung’s insight that we are cut off from the world of nature and the ancestors seems ever more relevant today when many people live in huge cities, almost totally divorced from the natural world and its rhythms.
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In 1924 Jung visited New Mexico, and here too this point was brought strongly home to him by Ochwiay Biano, a Pueblo Indian chief. This wise man graphically described the typical white man’s face as being cruel and staring, as if they are always seeking something. His people, he added, did not understand what drove the white man in this way – they thought he was mad. When Jung asked him why this should be so, he replied that it was because they think ‘with their heads’. Jung, surprised, asked him what he thought with himself, and the man indicated his heart – ‘we think here,’ he said. When Jung talked further with Ochwiay Biano, he discovered that his people had a strong belief that their religion was of benefit to the whole world, because they worshipped and encouraged the sun on its daily course across the sky. Jung concluded that this gave the people a sense that their lives were cosmologically meaningful: it was this deep sense of connectedness that had been lost by so-called civilized Western man.
Jung also visited Equatorial Africa where, in the primal stillness of the great plains that thronged with gigantic herds of many kinds of beasts, he had an important revelation. Here was a world that had always existed in such a way since time began, before there were any people to know that it was there. Seeing this, Jung suddenly grasped the cosmic meaning of consciousness – man was like a second creator. In observing the world and being consciously aware of it, he gave it objective existence – and so man was indispensable for the completion of creation.
Shortly before the Second World War, in 1937, Jung was invited to visit India by the British Indian government. This was to be the last of his great expeditions to study foreign culture. Some of his observations on Indian spirituality have already been discussed in Chapter 9. He realized that in India, as in many of the other cultures he had visited, people still lived in the whole body and had not retreated to live only from the head as they had in the West. On a visit to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, he observed that India still includes sexuality as an integral part of religion, quite unlike the way it has been totally banished in Western thinking. The entire pagoda is covered from top bottom with incredible obscene sculptures that were explained to Jung as being a means to achieve spiritual enlightenment. He questioned this, pointing out that the young men standing looking at the sculptures surely had nothing further from their minds. But that, apparently, was the whole point – they were there to remind people of spiritual laws and help them to clear the way to enlightenment by first fulfilling their karma. Jung advises anyone who is feeling morally superior to travel to Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin, and contemplate all their own reactions and feelings.
While he was in India, Jung had one of his ‘big’ dreams. He dreamed that he was looking at a castle on an island off the south coast of Britain, which he recognized as the home of the Holy Grail. He realized that it was his task to swim across alone to bring the grail home to this castle from an uninhabited solitary house on another small island. For Jung, this dream was a timely reminder that he needed to return to focus on his own people and culture. India was not his goal – it was simply a part of the road that was carrying him closer to his goal.
Jung and psychotherapy
Although Jung was such a great man, he never claimed to be infallible as a therapist. He believed that about a third of his patients were really cured, another third considerably improved and the final third hardly affected by his efforts – although he acknowledged there was a problem in that beneficial effects might not show up until years later. Sometimes, if he felt that he was getting nowhere with a patient, he would refer them to a different type of analyst, acknowledging that no one approach represented the whole truth or would resonate with everybody. Where Freud believed that sexual repression was at the root of all neurosis, and Adler thought it was all about the struggle to achieve power, Jung believed that many people became neurotic because of a split in their psyche between the modern and the primitive. Deprived of the mythical truths of their ancestors, and cut off from the world of nature, they developed a huge gulf between the ego and the unconscious. In being helped to close this gulf, a person can begin to achieve healing.
Jung always encouraged his patients to view him as a human being and he tried to establish very real relationships with them during their sessions, with a real sense of give and take. He never saw himself as a remote, clinical authority – he had realized while he was working at Burghölzli that unless the doctor got involved with the patient and allowed himself to be affected by their exchanges, he could not hope to help a person to heal. Jung always emphasized that only the wounded physician can heal, and even then only to the extent that he has managed to heal himself.
Unlike many other psychotherapists of his day, Jung sat face to face with his patients. This was quite unusual because many therapists followed Freud’s methods, retaining a degree of anonymity and authority by sitting behind their patient, who reclined on a couch. Jung’s was a more intimate approach and it helped his patients to see him as a human being, not just as a doctor. He did not carry this familiarity too far however – outside the consulting room he tended to be formal and polite, setting a little distance between himself and his client. He enjoyed helping people to explore their inner worlds, driven always by a sense of adventure and an insatiable curiosity, but he was not always interested in his clients’ outpourings. On occasion, his behaviour could be quite rude and dismissive – one woman who came to see him dissolved into copious tears during every session and he dealt with this by reading the newspaper!
Jung saw his role as being a guide, showing a person what was going on in their unconscious, but never dictating to them what they ought to do about it. He emphasized that he never claimed to understand a person fully – a person’s inner world was their own territory and, as such, it had to be respected. Not only that – inner growth is hard work and nobody can do that work for somebody else. Jung recommended that people walk their own path steadily, one step at a time, and simply keep on doing whatever presents itself as the next thing to be done.
When people came to Jung to ask if they could be trained as analysts, he always stressed that they must first work on understanding themselves. Nowadays this means that during training, analysts must undergo analysis themselves and they must continue to work on their inner world all the time. Because transference usually occurs during the course of analysis, it is very important for therapists to be well acquainted with their own neuroses and the dynamics of their own psyches – this helps them to recognize when projection is occurring. It is also a good idea for therapists to have a mentor – someone more experienced than themselves, to whom they can turn for help and advice. This is because individuation is a process that we all need to go through and is never completely finished. Unlike analysts from other schools, Jung always stressed that it is important to take feelings into account
– both those of the patient and those of the analyst. He said that only if feeling is present will true healing occur – it is not possible to achieve this through working only in an analytical way ‘in the head’.
One of Jung’s most important pupils was Barbara Hannah (1891–1986). Born in England, she travelled to Zurich to meet Jung and stayed in Switzerland for the rest of her life, working as a psychotherapist and teaching at the CG Jung Institute. She wrote many books developing Jung’s ideas.
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Insight
Barbara Hannah wrote a biographical memoir of Jung and also other books that developed Jung’s ideas further. She was especially interested in active imagination and the symbolic meanings of animals in myth and dreams. You can find some titles of books by her in Further reading at the end of the book.
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Another major follower of Jung was Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–98), who lived in Kusnacht. She met Jung in 1933 and carried on working with him until the time of his death. She was a founder of the CG Jung Institute and wrote widely on many subjects including psychotherapy, dreams, alchemy, fairy tales and personality types.
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Insight
Marie-Louise von Franz wrote extensively on many other subjects related to Jung’s work, including active imagination and the archetypal aspects of maths and numbers. She and Barbara Hannah were lifelong friends.