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An introduction to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols, read by Wes Alwan. After you listen to this, listen to the full episode.
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[…] Listen now to Wes’s introductory precognition of this Jung discussion. […]
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[…] 26 on his most overtly philosophical (and much later) work, Civilization and Its Discontents. Also, this precognition Wes did for our Jung episode also has a really good, concise introduction to Freud on dreams in […]
nice intro, important to note that Jung rejects Freud’s darwinian/reductionist/functionalist accounts of human-being/doings and wanted to introduce instead a kind of transcendent-function that would put Telos back into the equation.
One might wonder this far after the demise of Lamarckian-style genetics what orthodox Jungians speculate as the means/mode of transmission of the archetypes to be…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_%28psychology%29
Freud vs. Jung seems to offer another example of Knowing vs. Being, i.e. the more we insist on logic and rationality, the further we get from wholeness, connectedness and emotional well being. Is this really just vanity, wanting to be the one who knows? But do I have to lose myself to gain the world? This does not feel like a live option for me, or even a fair bargain, so here I remain with Camus on that dizzying crest.
According to Jung, we come into this world with a favorite: Thinking or Feeling as an extension of our Ego (based on his four-polarity concept of personality, Thinking and Feeling being one pole–the others being Introvert-Extravert, Sensing-Intuiting, Judging-Perceiving). Our Egoistic Thinking needs to be balance by non-egoistic feeling, or our Egoistic Feeling needs to be balanced by non-egoistic thinking. All poles need to be balanced (transcended?) by middle age or we have a mid-life crisis, according to Jung’s theory.
So in this sense we do have to loose our Egoistic (ego-syntonic) selves in order to gain our true sense of balance in life: thinkers need to loose their minds in order to gain their hearts and feelers need to loose their hearts in order to gain their minds, etc.
If we don’t have time or inclination for this process, we can just remain clueless in Camus’ sense of the absurd–according to Jung’s theory. Or as Camus would probably say, the absurd (no Ego sense) is the balancing out of the poles of life.
where do you find “balance” in Camus?
Would Jung’s archetypes (as immutable generative perceptions) qualify as examples of Leibnitz’s monads?
I think that “monad” would probably be closer to Jung’s ideas of individuation/Self/psyche, historically at least his archetypes are largely an admixture of Platonic forms, Aristotelian entelechy, Kantian categories, and some mystical sources, Jung wasn’t much for systematic thinking.
Thanks for the thoughts!
By a funny coincidence, I only recently finished working my way through Jung’s magnum opus, Symbols of Transformation, as well as his Psychological Types, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Aion, and Psychological Types and the major works of his three most well-known intellectual heirs: Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces); Erich Neumann (The Origin and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother), and James Hillman (Re-Visioning Psychology) and am wondering whether the return to the subject of Heidegger just before this was mere accident or done intentionally.
I ask because it seems to me that Jung and the Jungians are about the human need to (self-)realize by means of the identifying of a life-project and that this does not seem terribly far what Heidegger asserts in Being and Time. A connection, too, can perhaps also be made to Aristotle’s idea that the soul is something which exists as a potentiality. Whether there are any real connections between the three–Jung, Heidegger, Aristotle–is a question for greater minds than mine (i.e., everyone but me), but I do think the possibility worth thinking about and/or at least Partially Examining.
New to your podcast and loving it. I’m sure this discussion is long forgotten but I felt COMPELLED to write a couple of things here.
1. To the presenter who was able to correctly pronounce Jungian (Yoongian) but could not for the life of him pronounce Jung (instead of Yoong he kept saying Young), please for the love of all things STOP THAT. Thanks babe!
2. Strangely enough I majored in Philosophy in my first degree, but now focus primarily on sexuality and gender. BUT I fell in love in my early days with Jungian astrology. You guys mention it (and kinda scoff at it a little) in your podcast – I don’t expect anything else from people, but I would like to point out that your discussion about how Jung kinda indicated humanity needs some kind of spiritual belief to act as a medium for the expression of his archetypes finds a nice place in modern astrology. And no, that’s not the absolute rubbish you get in newspapers etc. It’s not the wishy-washy New Agey Madame Zelda kind of crap. There are many modern day astrologers who are also psychologists, and use astrology charts very much like a Jungian psychologist might use dreams – as a place where the archetypes are played out, and, through free association and by attaching certain signifying traits to astrological matter (i.e. a planet means this, a zodiac constellation means that, etc) they have a place to start and get to the nitty gritty of a person’s unconsciousness etc. Anyways, it is fascinating and kinda fun.
End rant. Say YOONG not YOUNG. Thanks fellas.