Where Freud was the arch-detective of the unconscious, Carl Jung became its high priest. Influenced by myth and religion more than by the scientific method, Carl Jung’s influential ideas represent the farther reaches of psychology, at the boundary with mysticism.
The art of interpreting the unconscious reached new levels of sophistication in the work of Freud’s time disciple, Carl Gustav Jun g (1875- 1961). Born in Switzerland, Jung studied medicine, specializing in the new discipline of psychiatry, and worked with psychotic patients in a mental hospital. Jung listened to his patients, trying to learn from their mental illness, and on reading Freud’s great work, The Interpretation of Dreams, he recognized a kindred spirit – someone who tried to make sense of the irrational. The two met in 1907 and soon became great friends and intellectual collaborators.
At first, Jung agreed with Freud’s theories on the unconscious, but soon, he began to question his mentor’s opinion that everything could be reduced to sexuality. Jung sought a broader context for the fundamental energy of the psyche, which eventually led him to value the spiritual quest as the primary means to psychic wholeness and general well-being.
To Freud, this was a heresy. Freud considered himself a scientist and even believed that his theories about the unconscious would eventually be substantiated by neurology. He could not countenance Jung’s excursion into superstition, religion, and spirituality, and the two great psychiatrists argued and became bitterly estranged.
To Jung, the unconscious had two regions. One, the personal unconscious, was similar to Freud’s notion – it was the storehouse of our repressed memories. The second was the collective unconscious, and this was Jung’s idea. This, he believed, contained the collective experience of all humanity – the instinctive behaviors, thoughts, and fears inherited from our distant ancestors.
Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious came from studying his patients’ dreams and the widespread myths and traditions of humankind. He came to believe that certain key themes arose repeatedly in groups so diverse they could not have had direct contact. The ideas must, therefore, have arisen from some source to which all humans have access – a collective unconscious. One of his patients, for example, dreamed of an erect phallus attached to the sun, wherein the dream of the wind arises. Jung found a similar idea in an ancient Mithraic liturgy, of which the patient could not have had any conscious knowledge.
Archetypes and individuation
Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious comprised the archetypes – primary forms that direct the flow of images in the mind {rather like a magnet below a sheet controls an arrangement of iron filings on the surface).
Jung maintained that the greatest challenge in our lives is to integrate the ideas welling up from the collective unconscious into our conscious lives. This process, which Jung called individuation, was, for him, a journey through which we encounter the archetypes. First, the ‘ shadow’ archetype – aspects of ourselves that we – unconsciously loathe or fear – must be recognized; second, in a man, the female aspects of the mind (the anima) must be integrated. As the journey continues, the individual encounters the deepest roots of human experience via the archetypes. Jung also viewed symbols as access points for the archetypes. He considered a whole class of symbols to be ‘unitive’ – that is, expressing the urgency of the psyche to unite opposites, especially its own conscious and unconscious realms. Jung regarded the mandala, which features prominently in Buddhist and Hindu traditions, as the most potent unitive symbol and as representing the self.
Jung’s view of individuation was influenced by his study of the medieval practice of alchemy. Jung saw the alchemists’ dream of turning base metals into gold as symbolizing the quest to bring to fruition the true nature of our personality – the self, our inner gold.
