Jung, in this collection of essays, seeks to explain how culture, myth, and tradition can create a collective unconscious within modern civilization. This is a very different concept than the repressed personal unconscious found in Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung begins, “so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with archaic or—I would say—primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” These types are expressed in tribal lore, myth, and fairytale as a form of esoteric knowledge embedded within tradition. He continues, “the term “archetype” thus applies only indirectly to the “representations collectives,” since it designates only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience…. The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.”
Many archetypes exist for Jung- the anima, the shadow, the trickster, the child, the mother, and the old man, among many others. Jung begins by describing, in general, how archetypes of transformation work in his schema. “They are not personalities, but are typical situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question…. They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible.” Thus, archetypes are able to reveal almost limitless meaning and references. “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.”
Jung then clarifies, “archetypes are not disseminated only be tradition, language, and migration, but… can rearise spontaneously, at any time, at any place, and without outside influence…. There are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious but nonetheless active—living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions…. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only.”
Jung explains how the conscious mind interacts with the rest of the Self. “Our conscious intentions are continually disturbed and thwarted, to a greater or lesser degree, by unconscious intrusions whose causes are at first strange to us. The psyche is far from being a homogenous unit—on the contrary, it is a boiling cauldron of contradictory impulses, inhibitions, and affects…. The unity of consciousness or of so-called personality is not a reality at all but a desideratum.” Jung, however, does not overplay the power of the unconscious, either. “The “omniscience” of the unconscious components is naturally an exaggeration. Nevertheless they do have at their disposal—or are influenced by—subliminal perceptions and memories of the unconscious, as well as by its instinctive archetypal contents. It is these that give unconscious activities their unexpectedly accurate information…. The unconscious is not a second personality with organized and centralized functions but in all probability a decentralized congeries of psychic processes…. The unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future—precisely because of the instinctive readiness for action of the factors that determine man’s fate.”
Jung is concerned with the development of modern man. He often expresses the worry that today’s civilization has been divorced from its cultural past to man’s detriment. He states, “the psyche has attained its present complexity by a series of acts of introjection. Its complexity has increased in proportion to the despiritualization of nature.” What in the past was viewed as a part of nature has become embodied within modern man. “Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.” For Jung, the role of ancient myth is immensely important in the forming of the collective unconscious. “The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes…. They are the psychic life of the primitive tribe.” Contemporary man would do well to reconnect with these traditions of his ancestors. “In myths and fairytales, as in dreams, the psyche tells its own story.” Furthermore, “the animal has always symbolized the psychic sphere in man which lies hidden in the darkness of the body’s instinctual life…. Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings.”
Jung stresses the fundamental role of the archetype in uniting modern man back with his past. “The archetype, because of its power to unite opposites, mediates between the unconscious substratum and the conscious mind. It throws a bridge between present-day consciousness, always in danger of losing it roots, and the natural unconscious, instinctive wholeness of primeval times…. Progress and development are ideals not lightly to be rejected, but they lose all meaning if man only arrives at his new state as a fragment of himself, having left his essential hinterland behind him in the shadow of the unconscious, in a state of primitivity or, indeed, barbarism.” Man must also give up the Manichaean interpretation of life. Instead, man must accept the confrontations that “life is always bringing us up against: namely the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of good and evil, and the remorseless concatenation of guilt, suffering, and redemption…. [Life] is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure; a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God’s sake only, without assurance and without sanction.”
On an individual level, Jung is concerned with the lifelong process of individuation- the uniting of the whole Self, including spirit and soul, as opposed to just the ego. One, among the many archetypes that Jung explores, is the child motif. He claims, “The child is potential future…. It anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality. It is therefore a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole…. The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self.” The child, as archetype, is at once vulnerable and magical. Another aspect of individuation is a limiting of the Self from the object world around it. “As an individual phenomenon, the self is “smaller than small”; as the equivalent of the cosmos, it is “bigger than big.” The self, regarded as counter-pole of the world, its “absolute other,” is the sine qua non of all empirical knowledge and consciousness of subject and object. Only because of psychic “otherness” is consciousness possible at all. Identity does not make consciousness possible; it is only separation, detachment, and agonizing confrontation through opposition that produce consciousness and insight…. The object lost the attribute of absolute reality and, in some systems, became a mere illusion.” The stakes are high indeed. “Psychic experiences, according to whether they are rightly or wrongly understood, have very different effects on a person’s development.”
Jung is concerned with modern man, not just for the sake of his own development, but for the future of humanity. Politics and social systems have rushed ahead of the capabilities of individual humans to cope. Consciousness is lost in a world untethered. Jung sees this disjointed man, disconnected from his past, and, therefore, forced to grope towards a nerve-racking future. He warns, “psychic evolutions do not as a rule keep pace with the tempo of intellectual developments. Indeed, their very first goal is to bring a consciousness that has hurried too far ahead into contact again with the unconscious background with which it should be connected…. It is a task that today faces not only individuals but whole civilizations…. The tempo of the development of consciousness through science and technology was too rapid and left the unconscious, which could no longer keep up with it, far behind, thereby forcing it into a defensive position which expresses itself in a universal will to destruction…. The masses are not changed unless the individual changes…. The bettering of a general will begins with the individual, and then only when he makes himself and not others responsible.”
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