“Alchemical Studies” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

This is another book by Jung detailing how the work of alchemists was a precursor of psychology. He begins, “In medieval alchemy we have the long-sought connecting link between Gnosis and the processes of the collective unconscious that can be observed in modern man.” He opposes this to modernity’s constant striving for greater consciousness, “Such a symbolic unity cannot be attained by the conscious will because consciousness is always partisan. Its opponent is the collective unconscious, which does not understand the language of the conscious mind…. The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of individuation can never do without the symbol. The symbol is the primitive exponent of the unconscious, but at the same time an idea that corresponds to the highest intuitions of the conscious mind.”

For Jung, the alchemists’ project involved projecting outwards towards the material world what was deep within their inner psyche. “In the abstruse symbolism of alchemy we hear a distant echo of this kind of thinking…. But we also find in it a groping towards the future, a premonition of the time when the projection would be taken back into man…. How obstinately it was projected back into matter. Psychological knowledge through withdrawal of projections seems to have been an extremely difficult affair from the very beginning…. It sounds very strange to modern ears that the inner man and his spiritual growth should be symbolized by metals…. After Zarathustra had received the drink of omniscience from Ahuramazda, he beheld in a dream a tree with four branches of gold, silver, steel, and mixed iron. This tree corresponds to the metallic tree of alchemy, the arbor philosophica, which, if it has any meaning at all, symbolizes spiritual growth and the highest illumination.” Pagan myths also contain a certain type of truth. “Even though mythology may not be “true” in the sense that a mathematical law or a physical experiment is true, it is still a serious subject for research and contains quite as many truths as natural science; only, they lie on a different plane.” As far as projected contents, “whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave just like realities.” Jung, later, continues, “The alchemical projections represent collective contents that stand in painful contrast—or rather, in compensatory relation—to our highest rational convictions and values. They give the strange answers of the natural psyche to the ultimate questions which reason has left untouched. Contrary to all progress and belief in a future that will deliver us from the sorrowful present, they point back to something primeval.”

The medieval alchemists considered themselves Christians in good standing. “We can safely call the light the central mystery of philosophical alchemy. Almost always it is personified as the filius…. The filius remains in the adept’s power…. This filius was equated with Christ.” The Rosarium, a medieval alchemical text, states, “From the stone you shall know in natural wise Christ, and from Christ the stone.” Jung elaborates, “And yet that light or filius philosophorum was openly named the greatest and most victorious of all lights, and set alongside Christ as the Saviour and Preserver of the world! Whereas Christ God himself became man, the filius philosophorum was extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer. In the former case the miracle of man’s salvation is accomplished by God; in the latter, the salvation or transfiguration of the universe is brought about by the mind of man—“Deo concedente,” as the authors never fail to add. In the one case man confesses “I under God,” in the other he asserts “God under me.” Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before.”

Although alchemy seemed to be the precursor of chemistry, it was also the precursor of psychology. “The purpose of distillation in alchemy was to extract the volatile substance, or spirit, from the impure body…. This was not an ordinary chemical operation, it was essentially a psychological procedure…. The accentuation of the centre is again a fundamental idea in alchemy…. Its physical counterpart is gold, which is therefore a symbol of eternity. In Christianos the centre is compared to paradise and its four rivers. These symbolize the philosophical fluids, which are emanations from the centre…. Nothing is more like God than the centre, for it occupies no space, and cannot be grasped, seen, or measured. Such, too, is the nature of God and the spirits. Therefore the centre is “an infinite abyss of mysteries.” The fire that originates in the centre carries everything upward, but when it cools everything fall back again to the centre.”

The mind cannot escape the unconscious. “It is a process of coming to terms with the unconscious, which always sets in when a man is confronted with its darkness…. Here the human mind is confronted with its origins, the archetypes; the finite consciousness with its archaic foundations; the mortal ego with the immortal self, Anthropos, purusha, atman, or whatever else be the names that human speculation has given to that collective preconscious state from which the individual ego arose. Kinsman and stranger at once, it recognizes and yet does not recognize that unknown brother who steps towards it, intangible yet real.” When consciousness tries to assert itself, it is always held back in check. “And whenever the conscious mind clings hard and fast to concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands. Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit…. The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious…. The unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude…. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness.””

Jung next gets into the idea of the faulty dualism involved in the subject/object distinction. “In East and West alike, alchemy contains as it core the Gnostic doctrine of the Anthropos and by its very nature has the character of a peculiar doctrine of redemption…. It is almost impossible for our scientifically trained minds to feel their way back into that primitive state of participation mystique in which subject and object are identical…. Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object and to accept the resultant perception, and the interpretation deduced from it, as objective.” For Jung, the alchemists were doing the best to make sense of the unconscious with the tools available to their epoch. “Willy-nilly they had to submit to the overwhelming power of the numinous ideas that crowded into the empty darkness of their minds. From these depths a light gradually dawned upon them as to the nature of the process and its goal. Because they were ignorant of the laws of matter, its behaviour did not do anything to contradict their archetypal conception of it. Occasionally they made chemical discoveries in passing, as was only to be expected; but what they really discovered, and what was an endless source of fascination to them, was the symbolism of the individuation process…. The alchemists had unexpectedly blundered into the unconscious.”

Jung concludes with a word on how the psyche relates to both its conscious and unconscious parts. “The psyche needs to know the meaning of its existence—not just any meaning, but the meaning of those images and ideas which reflect its nature and which originate in the unconscious. The unconscious supplies as it were the archetypal form, which in itself is empty and irrepresentable. Consciousness immediately fills it with related or similar representational material so that it can be perceived. For this reason archetypal ideas are locally, temporally, and individually conditioned…. The great psychic systems of healing, the religions, likewise consist of universal myth motifs whose origin and content are collective and not personal…. The conscious psyche is certainly of a personal nature, but it is by no means the whole of the psyche. The foundation of consciousness, the psyche per se, is unconscious, and its structure, like that of the body, is common to all, its individual features being only insignificant variants.”

“Psychology and Alchemy” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

This is Jung’s take on how the roots of alchemy and psychology are intimately intertwined. Of course, he weaves in his theories on archetypes, symbolism, religion, and the collective unconscious. Jung begins with the Self. “The self is a union of opposites par excellence…. The self, however, is absolutely paradoxical in that it represents in every respect thesis and antithesis, and at the same time synthesis…. Without the experience of opposites there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. For this reason Christianity rightly insists on sinfulness and original sin, with the obvious intent of opening up the abyss of universal opposition in every individual…. Alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream is to consciousness…. The unconscious does not simply act contrary to the conscious mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner.” The proto-chemistry elements of alchemy were fused with the symbolism of religious myths, digging into the unconscious nature of man. “Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes are concerned with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative language.”

For Jung, the role of the archetypal shadow, his theory of opposites, and religious symbolism relate directly to the formation of alchemical studies. “The problem of opposites called up by the shadow plays a great—indeed, the decisive—role in alchemy, since it leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding.” Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinese yang and yin), are melted into a unity purified of all opposition and therefore incorruptible.”

A large chunk of this book is devoted to analyzing the dreams of the Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Jung mines these dreams for archetypal symbols and other hints at the unconscious. At one point, Jung relates, “The transferring of the water of life to the sister really means that the mother has been replaced by the anima…. This is really a normal life-process, but it usually takes place quite unconsciously. The anima is an archetype that is always present…. The mother is the first carrier of the anima-image, which gives her a fascinating quality in the eyes of the son. It is then transferred, via the sister and similar figures to the beloved…. By acknowledging the reality of the psyche and making it a co-determining ethical factor in our lives, we offend against the spirit of convention which for centuries has regulated psychic life from outside by means of institutions as well as by reason…. The water that the mother, the unconscious, pours into the basin belonging to the anima is an excellent symbol for the living power of the psyche…. [The alchemists] called it aqua nostra, mercurius vivus, argentum vivum, vinum ardens, aqua vitae, succus lanriae, and so on, by which they meant a living being not devoid of substance, as opposed to the rigid immateriality of mind in the abstract.”

Jung examines another of Pauli’s dreams, relating it explicitly to pagan myths. “Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience. Humanity, huddling behind the walls of its culture, believes it has escaped this experience, until it succeeds in letting loose another orgy of bloodshed…. The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother…. It must now be admitted that things exist in the psyche about which we know little or nothing at all, but which nevertheless affect our bodies in the most obstinate way, and that they possess at least as much reality as the things of the physical world.”

Pauli had many dreams centered around the mandala symbol. Jung relates, “A dmigs-pa (pronounced “migpa”), [is] a mental image, which can be built up only by a fully instructed lama through the power of imagination…. No mandala is like any other…. The true mandala is always an inner image, which is gradually built up through (active) imagination, at such times when psychic equilibrium is disturbed or when a thought cannot be found and must be sought for…. They are all based on a quaternary system, a quadratura circuli…. They are among the oldest religious symbols of humanity.”

Jung goes on to expound on the ambivalent role of intuition in the dream process, “We should not rise above the earth with the aid of “spiritual” intuitions and run away from hard reality, as so often happens with people who have brilliant intuitions. We can never reach the level of our intuitions and should therefore not identify ourselves with them. Only the gods can pass over the rainbow bridge; mortal men must stick to the earth and are subject to its laws…. Man’s earthiness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. He is compounded not only of his best intuitions, his highest ideals and aspirations, but also of the odious conditions of his existence…. Man may have lost his ancient saurian’s tail, but in its stead he has a chain hanging on to his psyche which binds him to the earth…. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots.” Here, in a footnote, Jung makes another explicit connection to the traditions of pagan myth, “The Homeric chain in alchemy is the series of great wise men, beginning with Hermes Trismegistus, which links earth with heaven. At the same time it is the chain of substances and different chemical states that appear in the course of the alchemical process.” Jung continues, “But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt.”

While using Pauli’s dreams as a jumping off point, Jung, again, riffs on the relation of the Self, the psyche, and the unconscious, “It would be wildly arbitrary and therefore unscientific to restrict the self to the limits of the individual psyche, quite apart from the fundamental fact that we have not the least knowledge of these limits, seeing that they also lie in the unconscious. We may be able to indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the unknown psyche and for that very reason illimitable because indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space and time…. When we attempt to give these numina the slip and angrily reject the alchemical gold which the unconscious offers, things do in fact go badly with us…. We can at least comfort ourselves with the reflection that the unconscious is a necessary evil which must be reckoned with, and that it would therefore be wiser to accompany it on some of its strange symbolic wanderings, even though their meaning be exceedingly questionable.”

In the latter part of this book, Jung dispenses with the dream interpretations and analyses directly alchemical symbolism, imagery, and processes. “The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language…. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery—his own unknown psychic background…. I am therefore inclined to assume that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators…. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself…. What he was really experiencing was his own unconscious…. The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades…. That dark realm of the unknown, exercises a fascinating attraction that threatens to become the more overpowering the further he penetrates into it.”

After hundreds of pages analyzing specific alchemic imagery for their hidden meanings, in minute detail, Jung finishes this opus by bringing it back to the unity of the psyche, “Only by virtue of psychic existence do we have any “being” at all. Consciousness grasps only a fraction of its own nature, because it is the product of a preconscious psychic life which made the development of consciousness possible in the first place. Consciousness always succumbs to the delusion that it developed out of itself, but scientific knowledge is well aware that all consciousness rests on unconscious premises, in other words on a sort of unknown prima materia; and of this the alchemists said everything that we could possibly say about the unconscious…. We are then confronted with the underlying human psyche which, unlike consciousness, hardly changes at all in the course of many centuries…. From this point of view, the recent past and the present seem like episodes in a drama that began in the grey mists of antiquity and continues through the centuries into a remote future. This drama is an “Aurora consurgens”—the dawning of consciousness in mankind.” Jung continues with the historical development of alchemy, “Owing to the impersonal, purely objective nature of matter, it was the impersonal, collective archetypes that were projected…. The state of relative unconsciousness in which man found himself, and which he felt to be painful and in need of redemption, was reflected in matter and accordingly dealt with in matter…. The projection of the redeemer-image, i.e., the correspondence between Christ and the lapis, is therefore almost a psychological necessity, as is the parallelism between the redeeming opus or officium divinum and the mastery…. The Christian earns the fruits of grace ex opere operato, but the alchemist creates for himself—ex opere operantis in the most literal sense—a “panacea of life” which he regards either as a substitute for the Church’s means of grace or as the complement and parallel of the divine work of redemption that is continued in man.” 

Jung concludes by bringing it all back to modernity and man’s trouble with his own consciousness, “It seems to me of some importance, therefore, that a few individuals, or people individually, should begin to understand that there are contents which do not belong to the ego-personality, but must be ascribed to a psychic non-ego…. Of course, what we discover is there is nothing that can be held up to the masses—only some hidden thing that we can hold up to ourselves in solitude and in silence…. The psyche is a reality which we cannot grasp with our present means of understanding…. I hold the view that the alchemist’s hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion…. The alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change…. In the last analysis, it is exceedingly doubtful whether human reason is a suitable instrument for this purpose. Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art,” feeling—and rightly so—that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience…. Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding.”

“Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

Jung relates his work on the traditional archetypes with a theory of the nature of the Self. He begins with the role of the unconscious in the human mind, “The contents of the collective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present from the beginning…. The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego.” For Jung, an understanding of the archetypes is necessary for any understanding of Self, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge…. Examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality…. It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting…. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

Much of Jung’s book relates archetypal symbols to Christian and Gnostic theology. Jung posits, “As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter.” Elsewhere, he expands, “Modern psychology is therefore confronted with a question very like the one faced by the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self? In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. I have tried to show how the traditional Christ-image concentrates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype-the archetype of the self…. The Christ-image is as good as perfect (at least it is meant to be so), while the archetype (so far as known) denotes completeness but is far from being perfect. It is a paradox, a statement about something indescribable and transcendental…. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness…. Christ is the perfect man who is crucified. One could hardly think of a truer picture of the goal of ethical endeavor.”

Jung next explains the notion of the world-soul, “The ocean is the “spirit of the world”…. The “spirit of the world” is a somewhat unusual term, because the expression more commonly used was the “anima mundi.” The world-soul or, in this case, the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious…. This idea is nothing more than an analogy of the animating principle in man which inspires his thoughts and acts of cognition. “Soul” and “spirit,” or psyche as such, is in itself totally unconscious. If it is assumed to be somewhere “outside,” it cannot be anything except a projection of the unconscious…. In alchemy “our sea” is a symbol for the unconscious in general, just as it is in dreams…. The symbol of the self appears here as an “extremely small” fish in the vast ocean of the unconscious, like a man alone on the sea of the world.”

In general, for Jung, the symbols in myth play a large role in digesting the meanings of the unconscious. “Cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness…. The dawn-state corresponds to the unconscious, in alchemical terms, it is the chaos, the masa confusa or nigredo…. Oxen stand for the motive power of the plough. In the same way, the fishes represent the driving forces of the coming world of consciousness. Since olden times the plough has stood for man’s mastery over the earth: wherever man ploughs, he has wrested a patch of soil from the primal state and put it to his own use. That is to say: the fishes will rule this world and subdue it by working astrologically through man and moulding his consciousness…. The alchemical work starts with the descent into darkness (nigredo), i.e., the unconscious.”

For Jung, alchemy was the precursor to modern science. He puts heavy stock into alchemy’s symbols and what they foretell about man’s probing of the unconscious and the Self. “Dorn was the first thinker to recognize with the utmost clarity the extraordinary dilemma of alchemy: the arcane substance is one and the same, whether it is found within man or outside him. The “alchymical” procedure takes place within and without. He who does not understand how to free the “truth” in his own soul from its fetters will never make a success of the physical opus, and he who knows how to make the stone can only do so on the basis of right doctrine, through which he himself is transformed, or which he creates through his own transformation…. Dorn came to realize the fundamental importance of self-knowledge…. The expectations you put into the work must be applied to your own ego…. The secret is first and foremost in man; it is his true self, which he does not know but learns to know by experience of outward things…. Anyone who seriously tries to know himself as an object is accused of selfishness and eccentricity. But such knowledge has nothing to do with the ego’s subjective knowledge of itself…. The distinction between “quis” and “quid” is crucial: whereas “quis” has an unmistakably personal aspect and refers to the ego, “quid” is neuter, predicating nothing except an object which is not endowed even with personality…. The difference between knowledge of the ego and knowledge of the self could hardly be formulated more trenchantly than in this distinction between “quis” and “quid.”… Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible so long as they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much.”

Jung expands his theory of the Self by further relating the symbols of fairytales, myths, and religious dogma, “That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated…. For the alchemist it was clear that the “centre,” or what we would call the self, does not lie in the ego but is outside it, “in us” yet not “in our mind,” being located rather in that which we unconsciously are, “the quid” which we still have to recognize. Today we would call it the unconscious, and we distinguish between a personal unconscious which enables us to recognize the shadow and an impersonal unconscious which enables us to recognize the archetypal symbol of the self…. The centre was paradoxically in man and yet at the same time outside him.”

Modernity and tradition do not mix. Today, there has been a tendency to toss out the irrational and the arcane. Jung states, “Like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.” He feels that modernity has gone terribly awry. “Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.” Elsewhere, he expands, “The destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism with its utopian chimeras forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it.”

Jung puts great stake in the role of opposition in the formation of the Self. “Most people do not have sufficient range of consciousness to become aware of the opposites inherent in human nature. The tensions they generate remain for the most part unconscious, but can appear in dreams. Traditionally, the snake stands for the vulnerable spot in man: it personifies his shadow, i.e., his weakness and unconsciousness. The greatest danger about unconsciousness is proneness to suggestion. The effect of suggestion is due to the release of an unconscious dynamic, and the more unconscious this is, the more effective it will be. Hence the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis. With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down. Instinct no longer affords the protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans. Rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct is proof against no absurdity.” Jung expounds on the symbol of the snake, “Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other.”

Finally, Jung relates that the Self is ever-changing, “Consciousness and understanding arise from discrimination, that is, through analysis (dissolution) followed by synthesis, as stated in symbolical terms by the alchemical dictum: “Solve et coagula” (dissolve and coagulate)…. The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.” The circle is the proper symbol, “The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail…. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.”

“Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this essay, Jung explains why the dream world is as important to the psyche of an individual as is his consciousness. He begins with symbols. “What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or an image which in itself may be familiar to us, but its connotations, use, and application are specific or peculiar and hint at hidden, vague, or unknown meaning…. A term or image is symbolic when it means more than it denotes or expresses. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect—an aspect that can never be precisely defined or fully explained. This peculiarity is due to the fact that, in exploring the symbol, the mind is finally led towards ideas of a transcendent nature, where our reason must capitulate…. We also produce symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in our dreams…. Dreams are indeed the chief source of all our knowledge of symbolism…. One cannot invent symbols; wherever they occur, they have not been devised by conscious intention and willful selection.” Symbols are not mere signs. “A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and the symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight…. A symbol does not disguise, it reveals in time…. In former times men lived their symbols rather than reflected upon them.”

Jung broke away from Freud’s manner of dream interpretation by forgoing the practice of free association. Instead, he stuck to a closer reading of the dream. “I no longer followed associations that led far afield and away from the manifest dream-statement. I concentrated rather on the actual dream-text as the thing which was intended by the unconscious, and I began to circumambulate the dream itself, never letting it out of my sight…. If one wants to understand a dream it must be taken seriously, and one must also assume that it means what it manifestly says.” Jung follows and expands on Freud’s role of the archetype in dream motifs. “They are what Freud called “archaic remnants”—thought-forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life, but seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited patterns of the human mind…. The archetype is… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs—representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.” When interpreting dreams, context also matters. “Two different individuals can have almost the same dream, yet if one is young and the other old, the problems disturbing them will be correspondingly different, and it would be absurd to interpret both dreams the same way…. Interpretation of dreams and symbols depends largely on the individual disposition of the dreamer. Symbols have not one meaning only but several, and often they even characterize a pair of opposites…. The correct interpretation depends on context, i.e., the associations connected with the image, and on the actual condition of the dreamer’s mind.”

Jung continues by assessing the dream material. Dreams can look forward, as well as back. “One must always bear in mind that dream material does not necessarily consist of memories; it may just as well contain new thoughts that are not yet conscious.” For the individual’s psyche as a whole, what one does not remember consciously can be as important as what one does. “Forgetting is a normal process, in which certain conscious contents lose their specific energy through a deflection of attention. When interest turns elsewhere, it leaves former contents in the shadow…. Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates…. “Forgetting” may be defined as temporarily subliminal contents remaining outside the range of vision against one’s will. But the forgotten contents have not ceased to exist…. Among the lost memories we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state (and their incapacity to be reproduced at will) to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. These are the repressed contents…. In spite of their apparent non-existence they can influence consciousness.”

Jung posits that the unconscious compliments the ego, completing the psyche. “The message of the unconscious is of greater importance than most people realize. As consciousness is exposed to all sorts of external attractions and distractions, it is easily led astray and seduced into following ways that are unsuited to its individuality. The general function of dreams is to balance such disturbances in the mental equilibrium by producing contents of a complementary or compensatory kind.” Man has become divorced from this complementary aspect of himself to his detriment. “Moral and spiritual tradition has collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation…. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer…. In reality we are confronted with anxious questions, the answers to which seem nowhere in sight.” Modern man could do worse than to take his dreams more seriously. Their symbols have not lost their meaning just because we have forgotten and ignored them in our rush to subvert what we cannot consciously understand.

“The Undiscovered Self” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this essay, Jung seeks to extricate the individual from the grip of society. In doing so, he challenges the preeminent position of the State, the reliance on scientific rationality, and the very nature of modernity. Jung states that the individual “as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.” He claims that the onus of morality has been abrogated by the individual into the hands of the State. “The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State…. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea.” Jung posits that man is not so removed from his past that he can ever do away with religion. “The religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.” The State has replaced the Church as the altar to which rational man worships.

Jung needs to keep reminding us that the human life is so much more than just his rational ego and the outside world. “The life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or by social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority.” Consciousness and the unconscious are two sides of the coin that make up the entirety of the Self. “Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being…. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it.” The individual is a subjective beast, alone in the world. “Subjectivation (in technical terms, transference and countertransference) creates isolation from the environment…. As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge…. The individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions.” Modern man began to equate himself solely with his conscious ego, that is to say, his own conception of himself. “The result is that modern man knows himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself…. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources…. He forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being…. Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side…. Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism…. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all the irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.” Jung suggests that modern man would do well to reach within himself, instead of relying on the outside world for his salvation. “Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life—these can be experienced only by the individual and not by the State…. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated.”

“Answer to Job” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this short book, Jung brings his close reading of Biblical texts to an esoteric interpretation of the story of Job. He begins by putting himself in Job’s head. “[Job] has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself is doing him injustice and violence…. This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God…. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good…. [Yahweh] is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” This dualism in no way contradicts monotheism, the opposites are contained within one god. “The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness.” Jung makes the case that Yahweh wantonly chooses not to consult his own omniscience and, instead, is swayed by his son, Satan. “His faithful servant Job is now exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.”

Jung goes into more detail about the nature of God. “It is behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”” In a footnote, Jung expands, “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic…. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.” This god-beyond-morality is how Jung allows evil and suffering into our world.

Job is singled out as the scapegoat. As with the Girardian scapegoat mechanism, here the scapegoat is the most innocent among men. He is the victim and the one who is wronged. “One cannot doubt Yahweh’s connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan’s murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat…. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a grueling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness…. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself…. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”

Man was first corrupted when he chose knowledge over faith in the Garden. Wisdom has become a corrective for Yahweh’s wrath. “Fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom.” Jung posits that after Job, Yahweh has changed. He wants to feel human. “There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself, or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer…. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”

Jung makes much of opposites in his discussion of Saint John’s Revelation and the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, he also brings the unconscious to the fore. “But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave.” John tries to see only a loving God, but must resign himself to his terrible nature, as well. “Just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of Yahweh. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God can be loved but must be feared.” God is the totality of consciousness and the unconscious. “God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite…. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite…. The God-concept, as the idea of all-embracing totality also includes the unconscious, and hence, in contrast to consciousness, it includes the objective psyche, which so often frustrates the will and intentions of the conscious mind. Prayer, for instance, reinforces the potential of the unconscious.” The human quest for enlightenment is bound to fail, because it can never be the complete totality of experience. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowledge boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

“The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hill).

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.”