Listen now to Wes's introductory precognition of this Jung discussion.
On 8/7/13, we recorded a discussion of Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols
This reading (written shortly before Jung's death in 1961 and published afterwards) was recommended to us by some Jung fans on our Facebook page. It provides a straightforward overview of his psychology, written for laymen with only a couple of lightly treated case studies to bolster his claims. So it seems to be a good window into what he thought, which is interesting, but not so much a piece of philosophical argumentation. He approaches this idea of "the perennial philosophy" that we've discussed on a few occasions (most recently with Heidegger) by inquiring into its origins. Many religions and philosophies discuss something fundamental yet inexpressible lying at the edge of our experience, and Jung is interested in why this might be the case. The answer is that the human psyche has evolved over time just like our physiology, and just as we retain traces of our mollusk-like ancestors (as evidenced by embryological similarities between us and current mollusks and other animals), so our psyche is equipped with instincts from our pre-historic pasts.
Add to this a model of the psyche which is not just one Cartesian, decision-making, free subject, but a multiplicity of teleological centers, i.e. of personalities, most of which are not conscious. So before we become all self-conscious, able to reflect on and thus more comprehensively control our own behavior, we're essentially in the psychic state of primitive man (so that's more or less the state of infants), and the civilized veneer we paint over this to create our mature personality is really just one small part of our psyche, which doesn't even end up controlling the bulk of what we do. Jung thinks that we repress the rest of it, which can cause complexes, and that if we think that we're overall rational creatures, we're just fooling ourselves, and dangerously so.
So what's in this repressed mass? Well, some of it is what Freud talked about: excess energy, things related to our childhood, etc., but Jung found Freud's reductionist analysis too constricting. While some complexes are about infant sexual hangups, the therapist needs to listen carefully to the patient and use such models as Freud's only as rules-of-thumb: the explanation has to come out of an analysis of the patient, not an imposition of a theoretical model on the patient. So one of the theories that Jung worked up to best explain cases such as one he cites where a young girl was reporting on dreams that involved a lot of mythological imagery is that man's psychic pre-history involves what he calls the collective unconscious, which is not a shared repository of specific symbols but more just instincts to express certain fundamental relations we have with the world. So there's a mother-figure archetype that gets expressed in numerous myths and religious customs and stories from disparate cultures, and a hero archetype, and an all-father archetype, and many others, such that he thinks to analyze someone's dreams requires a lot of research into the historical use of various symbols. In short, we come equipped with a symbol-making capacity that is older even than language itself, and which language perpetuates by giving each word, in addition to whatever explicit, definable meaning it may have, a prenumbra of idiosyncratic associations that amount to the word's psychological feel.
All this is in line with Jung's model of personality classification, which stresses that conflicts such as those between "thinking" and "feeling" are not a matter of the former being rational (i.e. philosophically correct) and the latter being soft in the head, but are a matter of value-neutral personality differences. So modern personality tests such as you might take as part of an employment application are derived from Jung's classifications, and one of the polarities of personality (besides introvert/extrovert and thinking/feeling) is sensing vs. intuiting, where the former is just dealing with the literal, quantifiable content of each situation, and the latter is drawing conclusions by bringing together lots of disparate sensations, many of which may not have been the central focus of any given perception. So a word's definition would correlate to sensing here, while its function as symbol correlates to intuition.
Jung's goal for psychology is for us to achieve inner harmony, to not be so warped in favor of one one these personality characteristics or another, as we of course have all these tendencies inside of us. It's not going to be possible to bring all of the unconscious into consciousness (we'll need to remain partially examined), but we can at least not adopt a stance that's actively hostile and repressive toward the mass of our own unconscious. Jung thinks that the modern mindset--characterized by a particular take on reason and technology (again, this point is similar to Heidegger)--leaves us divorced from ourselves, full of psychological complexes and unable to solve social problems. Understanding ourselves requires understanding our own symbolic expressions, which would involve, for instance, understanding at a gut level why one might embrace religion, which is not, for Jung, a matter of saying you believe or don't believe certain obviously unprovable propositions. We need to understand that much of what we do now is motivated by the same things that motivated ancient people to venerate the sun or some current backwoods tribes to declare that their spirits are actually located in nearby bushes or any number of other crazy-seeming practices. We all need meaning to get us through the day, and much of our current, supposedly rational and freely chosen objects of our veneration (science worship, patriotism, our aesthetic choices) involve just as much irrationality at their core as anything else. The solution is to understand our need for the numinous (i.e. for things that have psychological power over us, e.g. symbols that really resonate with us in ways that are too strong for us to understand) and try to get to know this strange landscape inside of our heads instead of proceeding headlong in self-ignorance.
If you're interested in Jung, consider joining the Not School study group I'll be leading in August to discuss an earlier and somewhat more literary (i.e. hard to read) work by Jung: Answer to Job
Lovely analysis of Jung-unfortunately, in terms of his psychotherapy, he got overly invested in symbols/archetypes so that they became tautological -I think he was a much better philosopher than
psychologist. Dream analysis may be useful, but it is only one path to greater awareness-,many modern day Jungian Analysts rely way too much on dreams and not the myriad other ways of opening awareness and taking “distance” from stuck patterns of being. I was trained as a Freudian Analyst and do not practice any orthodox treatment. I agree with some of Jung’s criticism of Freud’s early work (and later, too) but there were personal and group issues between them at work as well that led to their split.
Patricia–
Nice observations of Jung, although I’m interested in how you see his investment in symbols/archetypes as tautological per se. I would think more abstract or nonspecific rather than turning in on itself. I still am drawn to metaphor/symbol/archetype as often better descriptors of reality than behavioral, cognitive, or emotive. Am interested in what form of non-orthodox treatment you practice (perhaps more specific than eclectic as in the theorists you follow most), especially in light of the philosophical nature of this site.–Wayne
Jung’s early work on feeling-toned complexes still has powerful resonances with recent research into our embodiment, he was unfortunately given over to waxing philosophical and was a rather poor philosopher.
So many of these folks start out with solid work in phenomenology and than fall under the spell of the “witch” of meta-psychology/physics.
“We need to understand that much of what we do now is motivated by the same things that motivated ancient people to venerate the sun or some current backwoods tribes to declare that their spirits are actually located in nearby bushes or any number of other crazy-seeming practices. We all need meaning to get us through the day, and much of our current, supposedly rational and freely chosen objects of our veneration (science worship, patriotism, our aesthetic choices) involve just as much irrationality at their core as anything else. The solution is to understand our need for the numinous (i.e. for things that have psychological power over us, e.g. symbols that really resonate with us in ways that are too strong for us to understand) and try to get to know this strange landscape inside of our heads instead of proceeding headlong in self-ignorance.”
Brilliantly extrapolated Mark. Really looking forward to the podcast examining this area of Jung’s work, thank you.
I’m very much looking forward to your discussion being a listening participate AND hope to critique a paper I thoroughly enjoyed writing, utilizing Aldous Huxley’s introduction to “Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God” and Perennial Philosophy–what Huxley describes as the four fundamental doctrines.
Because it was a history course I didn’t get the feedback from a philosophical perspective I was hoping would give me better clarity on if I was understanding the material or utterly of topic. But, I did have a lot of fun and discovered parallel philosophical ideas with Daoism. Of course, this prompted more questions re the origin of PP and what is time? Is time a cyclical and/both or and/or linear processes of unfolding?
I especially like eastern philosophy because I think there’s a strong philosophy of the interrelatedness of all life, the harmonics and mathematical discoveries underlying reality as we know it or happened to recognize in fleeting moments, where words seems utterly useless in the face of the beauty that surrounds us when we are able to lose our self and just be in the present moment. I don’t know if I said that correctly, but I do think we all experience these moments that simply captivate us relinquishing the need to judge. More, just acknowledge the simplicity and joy of life.
Regarding synchronicity I have read a book by Deepak Chopra titled “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire.” Now, I have to say I get mixed messages about what “desire” is and seems to be in tension with what Buddhism has to say about human desire and suffering.
That said, since I’ve devoted my summer learning to Daoism it seems to me the Daoist philosophy doesn’t reject human desire as the counter Confucian philosophy does, which I think shares many similarities with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But, I don’t know. I do know I find the ideal of inner harmony attractive vs. a type of dualistic “mind-body” that seems prevalent in Western philosophy of religion.
I’m going to name-drop because I read a critique “Taoism and Jung: Synchronicity and the Self” by Harold Coward, who argues Jung is a Gnostic disguised in modern day dress ware. In contrast, the Daoist scholar, James Miller, states the fundamental understanding of Daoist philosophy is “inside, outside like one” meaning there’s ultimately no difference between what is outside our bodies and what is inside our bodies.
That said, I can’t understand why some would consider Jung a Gnostic?
BIG CORRECTION….
Harold Coward’s argument on a closer read argues, “Failure to recognize the Taoist background to Jung’s thinking, has, I will argue, resulted in the mistake charged that Jung is simply a gnostic in modern psychological dress.” Hence, his argument does NOT contrast James Miller’s; both emphasize the balance and interdependence of one’s inward and outward experience of the world we live in. Apologies!
Jung is a fascinating character and was certainly very taken with aspects of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and William James, though he was not a very careful reader/user of any of them. It would be a mistake to underestimate the theological tendencies in his work which put him more in line with folks like Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin than thinkers more in with Darwin like Daniel Dennett and co.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48337632/Kerslake-Deleuze-and-the-Unconscious
for an insightful Hegelian reading of Jung see:
http://www.cgjungpage.org/pdfdocuments/EndofMeaning.pdf