C.G. JUNG

C. G. Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul was one of the books in the four boxes I took with me during my Wanderjahr 1976-77 after pressing the eject button from merchant banking. I remember being struck by his remark that all his patients in the second half of life were seeking a spiritual outlook. Around the same time, my mentor Rev. Norman Cockburn gave me a substantial part of his library, including Jung’s Collected Works. So I was able to read a great deal more and deepen my understanding of this extraordinary work emanating from what Jung himself called the Spirit of the Depths, the level of his Number 2 personality (Number 1 is the conscious ego). His existential depth is I believe a factor in why he is so little studied in academic psychology. In this profound series of essays, Jung’s long-time colleague Marie Louise von Franz reflects on the central themes of his work. Some of these chapter titles give a good indication of the scope: the underground God, mirror-symmetry and polarity of the psyche, the Anthropos, the mandala, Mercurius, the philosopher’s stone, breakthrough to Unus Mundus, and individual and society.

Von Franz herself analysed some 65,000 dreams, citing here many of the most significant in the course of Jung’s long life. What he writes about psychology – that the psyche is both the object of study and the practitioner – also applies to consciousness studies: there is no Archimedean point outside the psyche, and scientists like the rest of us live mainly on the surface ego-level. Jung was different, resembling the traditional Shaman in his attitude to dreams and visions and his kinship with nature, especially when he was at Bollingen. He was also highly empathic with respect to his patients, and it is significant that many of his closest colleagues were women. He felt that the image of God as our highest value had been lost, and that renewal and reconnection could only come from the depths. He also engaged with people from his whole being.

The individuation process is about a progressively deeper integration of matter and spirit, body and mind, masculine and feminine, Logos and Eros, conscious and unconscious. He regarded the individual as the bulwark against mass consciousness, and the only genuine carrier of culture and value (see The Undiscovered Self). He recognised the danger of ideology in substituting identification with the group for free and conscious feeling-relations among individuals; in the first case, there is the dissolution of the individual into the mass, as we have seen since 2020, also with the demonising of dissidents. The ground of the psyche is always unitive – wholeness, oneness, the centre, the Self - the Unus Mundus prior to differentiation and symbolised by the mandala. However, Jung regarded God as a coincidentia oppositorum – simultaneously, the highest love and the most inhuman cruelty, which got him into trouble with theologians and made him sympathetic to the Gnostics. We are all responsible for coming to the fullest expression of consciousness: ‘the longing for light is the longing for consciousness.’ At the same time, we need to acknowledge our individual and collective shadows rather than project them onto others as is only too evident in the simplistic Western media characterisation of the Russian president (previously applied to Gaddafi and other Middle Eastern leaders) and the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. As Russell and Einstein said in the 1950s, we now need to remember our humanity and forget the rest.

Jung’s affinity with Goethe and Nietzsche is an interesting one, with Faust representing Goethe’s Number 2 personality and Zarathustra that of Nietzsche. All three men were ‘alone and ruled by the genius of creativity.’ Jung located the Number 2 personality in the unconscious, but I wonder whether he could have made the New Thought distinction between Superconscious as transcendent and the subconscious. Goethe and Jung were both strongly driven by Eros and had a common interest in alchemical transformation. One of Jung’s earliest dreams featured an erect phallus, and it is interesting to see a Gnostic text quoted with an image of men with arms outstretched upwards and correspondingly erect phalluses, which is interpreted as striving from the lower to the upper things, towards the world of light – a new one on me….

The chapter on Unus Mundus engages with synchronicity as a form of complementarity between inner and outer that cannot be adequately accounted for by purely materialistic approaches. He called this a demonstration of acausal orderedness in the psyche, recognised as such and self-authenticating. Likewise, the operation of the I Ching is regarded as another manifestation of the Unus Mundus. Von Franz quotes a Chinese scholar to the effect that in their view ‘all existence is grounded in an all-embracing continuum which contains its own laws within itself.’ (p. 229) Number is also regarded as an archetype of order while synchronistic experiences are characterised as ‘an empirical indication of an ultimate unity of all existence’ (p. 232) – which is also an indication of a transcendental background.

For Jung, it was crucial for individuals in finding meaning to be related to the infinite and to embody the essential: ‘if we do not embody that, life is wasted.’ In 1944, he himself had the experience that ‘I was what I had been and lived.’ He further remarks that we as individuals require an inner experience of the transcendental if we are to hold our own against the physical and moral power of the world with its group spirit. Interestingly, writing in 1996 (the original lectures were given a few years before), von Franz remarks that signs of the shadow are even more apparent than in Jung’s lifetime: ‘Violence, blackmail, lies and coercion of the individual are everywhere in evidence,’ and we, like Jung, have the responsibility of standing ‘in a compensatory counter-position to the trends of the time,’ especially in the light of the looming transhumanist agenda where we are in danger of surrendering our humanity to technology and machines. Readers will find much to ponder in reflecting on Jung’s life and work and the necessity for us to become more fully conscious and correspondingly morally responsible.