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Jung in Context
JUNG IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT:
RECONSTRUCTING JUNG
RUNNING H EAD: Jung in Context
David Johnston
ABSTRACT
In this paper I present some of Jung’s principle ideas in a relatively unorthodox way, reconstructing Jung. My purpose is to emphasize the Self rather than the ego, particularly the contaminated, illusory ego. I begin with the Self and, in turn, discuss the archetypal dimension of the psyche and then the individual dimension. I also discuss the contemporary context and the individual in relationship to the new world that, I believe, has already been born. In this respect, for individual participation, there is a need to assimilate qualities of the chthonic spirit.
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Running Head: Jung in Context
JUNG IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT:
RECONSTRUCTING JUNG
Introduction
My intention this afternoon is to make a presentation on my understanding of Jungian Psychology. I am taking a somewhat different tact than is normally taken in that rather than beginning with a discussion on the ego, I am beginning with the Self. I will then work my way through the archetypal dimension of the psyche, then the individual dimension and finally the individual in the relationship to the new world, which I believe is already in the early stages of manifestation. I am taking this unusual and, from the Western empirical and scientific point of view, backwards approach for the simple reason that I want to put an emphasis on the Self. I find that many people misunderstand and misrepresent Jung, usually because they miss or downplay the nature of the Self. Yet, it is of utmost importance in understanding what his psychology is all about, as I intend to show you.
Basically, what I am endeavoring to do is to share with you my own experience and reflections. In the process, I may say some things that you find contradictory to the way you understand and evaluate life and, for that matter, your own appreciation of Jung and what he had to say. My intention is not to attack anybody, but to educate and bring to consciousness challenging ways of looking at life and its purpose. In order to do that I feel the need to clear the way of potential misconceptions or worldviews that that differ from the one that I wish to present.
We live in the most propitious times. We live in the worst of times. We live in a time that has been variously called Post-modern, the Age of Anxiety, the Age of Discontinuity, the Age of Alienation, the Age of [too much] Information and the Age of Narcissism and Confusion. We live in the Age of Confusion. According to Hindu Mythology, such times are the result of God Himself stirring up the milky oceans of creation and mixing up people’s values and ways of life while preparing the way for a new dispensation, a new aeon, a new age. This is possible for, according to India’s sacred scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, when people have lost their way and no longer live according to the sanatam dharma, that is to say the eternal laws, there is a descent of the Avatar or Messiah to reinterpret these laws in order to set things right again.
Psychology: Determinism and Acausal Order
Some one hundred years ago, the German philosopher and prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead. As Jung, [1988] observed, when God is dead, then man becomes God. What he meant by that is that the human ego becomes puffed up and inflated beyond all measure. A process that began in the Renaissance about 500 years or so ago, when man became the measure of all things and the earth was considered to be the centre of the universe, has indeed reached its point of culmination today.
Now, however, we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that our sun is but a star, and our universe is but one amongst millions of universes. Moreover, theoretical physics and other sciences have come to the conclusion that the world is not as it appears to be, that the surface laws of determinism, of cause and effect, are only of secondary value. Yet, psychiatry and mainline psychology doggedly persist in basing their healing methods on these very outdated laws. Psychiatry, with its medical model, believes in biochemical determinism; change the biochemical balance and change the person for the better, it asserts. Mainline approaches to psychology, from Freudian or Neo-Freudian to Cognitive-Behavioral approaches, each in their own way, operate on the assumption that a change in belief and attitudes about oneself and the world, changes the person in a healthy and healing way. The emphasis in those cases is on the ego and its adaptive mechanisms. Whatever the practical value of these approaches to healing, and let us admit that there are some, the question is, to what world is one adapting and with which beliefs and values. In today’s narcissistic world the answer, it seems to me, is obvious.
At this juncture, I would like to report on a dream by a contemporary middle-aged woman, which, I think is relevant to our discussion. Sometimes dreams have a message, not only for the dreamer personally, but for the collective and the community as well. The reason is that we get in touch with a realm deeper than the personal unconscious, what Jung called the collective unconscious, a realm which pertains to us all. It is, perhaps, more common than people think. Such dreams carry a message that is pressing for realization, a phenomenon that I will go into in more detail later when I discuss the nature of the archetype. But, for now, let us examine the dream:
I am walking in Bastion Square in downtown Victoria. I meet a man in a suit, who tells me that he is a cognitive psychologist. He says that this type of psychology is now finished. He also seemed to indicate that everything will now begin to change.
The message of the dream is pretty clear. It suggests that psychology centered in the intellect and an externalized cause and effect science of psychology, with all its self-help literature, will begin to give way to a greater truth.
In actual fact, despite claims for objectivity, the findings of Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology, which studies externalized behavior, beliefs, values, symptoms and reported emotions, are very limited, time-bound, and of relative value only. Its findings regarding the psyche are roughly equivalent to the student of mineralogy studying the ingredients that make up a mineral and then trying to produce an exact replica. In fact, physicists have now penetrated to the core of matter and have undertaken the examination of sub-atomic particles. They have reached the conclusion that, although there is cause and effect and determinism, the most fundamental laws of physics are relative and acausal. Thus, existing particles have only a probability of continuing to exist from moment to moment, and new particles are created at every moment. The science of the human psyche must come to a similar conclusion. Surely, human nature, with all its complexities, follows laws beyond those of a mechanical cause and effect determinism.
Each human being must, at core, be unique with a unique destiny, and not simply an object to be conditioned from birth to the grave. Do you not agree? This is an important assumption of Jungian psychology. The baby does not come into the world as a tabula rasa or blank slate, but with a unique angle on life and a mysterious accumulation of wisdom. Similar to the laws of physics, the basic law of the human psyche is not cause and effect determinism, but acausal, beyond the laws of statistics and probability. This understanding is in sharp contrast to both the medical model and Cognitive-Behavioural psychology, each of which reduces human nature to conditioning and these very laws.
The Self
There is an acausal core to the human psyche which Jung called the Self. In his model, healing requires an influence from this acausal source, in one way or another. Individuation, the drive to be oneself and to consciously fulfill one’s unique destiny, ultimately requires a continuous dialogue between the ego and the Self, and all of the various components of one’s nature, a life-long process.
We begin our discussion on the nature of Jungian psychology, then, with the Self, the acausal centre of Being. In my estimation, without this dimension one cannot truly understand the significance of Jung’s contribution to either psychology or culture. Not the ego or sense of “I”-ness, but the Self is the centre of being, with the ego as a delegate or satellite. In Jung’s (1965) later life, he had a couple of dreams that made him realize this very explicitly. In one case, he saw a yogi with his face sitting tailor-fashioned in deep meditation in a roadside chapel. The chapel contained a lovely flower arrangement (p. 323). To his shock, Jung recognized the yogi to be himself and that he was meditating his own 3-dimensional existence. He knew that when the yogi came out of his meditation, the existential Jung would no longer be. It seems that we see the world the wrong way around! We see it from the outside instead of from the inside. The ego believes that it is the cause of all its fortunes and misfortunes whereas, from a deeper perspective, it is the Self that creates our world and experience.
In the Nietszche-Zarathustra seminars, and elsewhere, for instance in Misteruium Coniunctionis, Jung [1988, p.p. 417, 423] referred to the Hindu Tantric conception of the bindu creative point [.] as being the best expression of the Self. It is conceived simply as a dot or point and represents the self-absorption of the whole manifestation back into its source or origin as well as the potential for all manifested creation [Norelli-Bachelet, (1974, p. 69-70). It is, of course, no accident that in the so-called “Big-Bang” theory, physical creation is depicted as a spewing out of an intense light and energy from a single point, in an event referred to as the singularity.
I spent some time in India a number of years ago living in Pondicherry at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. While I was there I dreamt, in essense, that Jung would be my guide in understanding Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, and what Jung himself referred to as the individuation process. This has turned out to be a very accurate symbolic statement of what has actually transpired. In the context of this part of our discussion, what is most relevant is that both men wrote of a process involving an ascent, one might say a human aspiration for consciousness and an answering descent of a spiritual Force emanating from the Self. With Sri Aurobindo, it is very explicit, and he referred to the Force as the Mother. With Jung, it is less explicit, although a description of this process can be found scattered throughout his writings on alchemy and elsewhere. He referred to the descending Force as the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost which was originally conceived of as Sophia, the feminine aspect of the Godhead. A sincere aspiration for the light of consciousness is answered by a descent initiated from the Self.
The result of such a descent is that consciousness lights up increasingly deeper and darker aspects of one’s nature. It is the light that shines in the darkness that we read about in the Gospel according to John: verse 1:5. Most importantly, it comes with Force and the power of transformation.
In mystical literature and Hindu thought, this transcendent Self is considered to be Brahman or God. In the past and even today, when people have intense experiences of the Self through a particular image and/or sound, which is culturally and historically relative, they refer to it as God. Jung hesitated to make such metaphysical assertions as he felt it necessary to stay with empirical experience. So, generally, rather than insisting that these experiences of the transcendent Self are experiences of God, he referred to them as archetypal experiences of the God-image. Jung preferred to call it the God-image for the sake of a scientific attitude.
Yet in his more poetic writings he referred to God and the Self inter-changeably Jaffé, (1989, pp 63, 64). For instance, he observed that the new myth, that is to say the new way of life for humankind, is that of putting one’s life in service of the transformation of God. Ultimately, this is the significance of individuation. He also wrote that “the real history of the world seems to be the progressive incarnation of the Deity,” Jung, (as cited in Jaffé, 1989, p. 81). Elsewhere, he noted that individuation eventually involves the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, resulting in a Christification process (Jung, 1967, 1975, p. 468).
I would, now like to quote from Sri Aurobindo’s [1970] marvelous epic poem, Savitri to give a sense of what is involved, what is, in fact, being initiated from the transcendent Self.
O sun-word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to light
And bring down God into the lives of men,
Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
Book XI, Canto I, p. 699
The sun-word referred to here is the Divine Mother. Otherwise, the lines, I think, speak for themselves.
The Cosmic Dimension
From my point of view, then, an accurate understanding of Jung involves accepting the reality of a transcendent Self and its potential for a massive transformation of both the individual and culture. The transformative aspect is there because of the fact that not only does experience of the Self involve an enlargement of consciousness, but it also comes with a force or power of transformation. I am no longer just referring to the bindu creative point [.] as a symbol of the Self, but to a symbol of the wholeness of the manifest world as well, the circle [O] [Norelli-Bachelet, 1974, pp. 64, 65]. Now, we have the dot and the surrounding circle [O], symbolizing both the transpersonal Self and the cosmic or manifested Self [p.70].