THE SPIRIT OF JUNG

Clarissa Pinkola Estes said:

"in the old healing arts there are certain people who dream dreams meant to guide the entire village.  It seems to me that, on occasion, Jung dreamed for the world village.  This dream impresses me most.  Jung dreamed of moving against a great wind.  A dark forced bore down behind him.  In the palm of his hand was a little flame.  His task was not to dally with what was behind him, but to move forward into the wind and protect the tiny fire.  This is the heart of writing, activism, and inner life: face into the wind.

Here for me she captures the essence of Jung’s life work.

But we also have the luxury of Jung’s personal reflections to draw on, especially such as those in Late Thoughts in MDR. Where he said:

Here the paradox of Jung the private and personal being and Jung who saw his life belonging to the collective is clear. The “Spirit of Jung” is
both a question about C G Jung the man and about the body of work left by him. .

I once heard the Jungian spectrum described as ranging from the developmental/clinical (maybe neo-Freudian) on one end to the cultural/religious (what I would call symbolic) on the other. It is my view that Jung himself moved further from the neo-Freudian towards the symbolic throughout his life. 

It is important to be open minded, exploring and evaluating all that life puts in my path to see how Jung's world view measures up to the test of experience but I know I can come across as something of a Jungian "purist".  So, when preparing to give this talk for the first time two years ago, my dreams seemed to address this matter I had to listen.. 

In one dream I discovered a manuscript whilst walking along a fire trail in the bush.  It referred to aboriginal relationship to country and a preface explained that the two usual arguments would be offered, firstly the soft, hybrid aboriginal - European position and then the aboriginal purist position.  In the dream I am surprised that I feel identified with the former.  In another dream an octopus follows a down-to-earth irreverent Yorkshire man and then myself through a number of situations before transforming into an old friend, whom I haven't seen for many years, whose job is to repair tiles in a commuter car park and my kitchen.

My surprise at being identified with the soft hybrid view in the first dream is really one of the keys to both.  Although I may at times take a somewhat purist Jungian view the dreams remind me that I have always been an explorer.  Another vital clue to the dreams' import is the reference to the aboriginal notion of country.  Country for aboriginal people, as I understand it, refers to the tribal land but not just in the literal sense. Relationship to the land as country must be understood as a complex set of symbolic relationships which maintain one's connections to one's psychic origins.  One's relationship to country as the physical basis of life is also a relationship to the psychic and symbolic basis of one's existence.  Country is one's point of entry and primary point relationship to the Jukurrpa (Dreaming), it is what enables one to make meaning of one's existence; in essence what Jung called the symbolic life.  Jung's work is very much in this sense my country.  Aboriginal people are exploring a different relationship to country in the modern world but those I've spoken to remain convinced that one cannot remain whole and healthy if one does not return to and re-source one's self in country. 

For aboriginal people relationship to country was not a static schematised matter.  There was of course the Jukurrpa as dreamtime law but, with death of an individual, aspects of the dreaming were lost and needed to be recovered or re-dreamed in the experience of other individuals and re-incorporated.

In my early thirties the discovery of Jung's work provided a coherent perspective in which longstanding intimations that my existence was more than simply physical were able to be brought into focus. The symbolic life, Jung’s equivalent of living within the aegis of the Jukurrpa or Dreaming brought, over time, a whole new notion of who and what I was.  Jung's work remains to this day the best basis for my exploration of that reality; it is my country and no matter what journeys of exploration I make I find that coming back to Jung re-affirms my symbolic life.

The octopus which becomes my long lost friend who repairs car park tiles and the tiles of my kitchen floor reiterates and develops the themes of the first dream.  My friend saw himself, being a gay man in the mid Seventies, as not having access to committed relationships.  He saw my demand for them as irreconcilable with his own situation and our friendship.  Our reunion in the dream when the octopus mandala becomes my friend reminds me that I have always been intellectually “promiscuous”(meaning favouring mixing) and that this activity is the basis of repairing cracks in the foundation of my primary relationship to Jung's work. That is what my explorations seem inevitably to do, reaffirm, for me at least, the validity of Jung's work. That is what ongoing experience of country ought to do, reaffirm and repair the dreaming.

A recent dream revisited this territory and reminded me that I have my roots deeply in Jung’s actual work, not so much in its modern derivatives. Maybe my language is an antique rather than modern Jungian dialect.

This brings me to an important statements of Jung's which inform all of what I say tonight. 

"I do not want anybody to be a Jungian, I want people to be themselves...Should I be found one day to have created another "ism"' then I will then have failed in all I tried to do."

And in a remark which testifies to his sense of humour:

                "thank God I am C. G. Jung and not a Jungian."

Here Jung calls us to bring his work to life in the cauldron of our own experiences and explorations of life rather than allowing it to remain a matter of concepts or theoretical knowledge.

An "ism" is a philosophical umbrella, an intellectual structure which institutionalises an exploratory process.  Two types of  “ism” seem to have arisen around Jung's work. One in the institutionalisation of his work, which concerned him greatly until the end of his life, and the other in a sort of shadow Jungianism or cultism around Jung. Views characterised as “Post Jungian” often contain elements of both tendencies.   

Post Jungianism can be compared to post modernism to which bears many philosophical likenesses.

The term "post modernism" expresses a position of having gone beyond the modernists, of seeing them and their work as outdated.  The term "post-modern" was coined to express precisely that view.  Philosophically it takes the view that absolutes or essentials are no longer valid or relevant, that life or reality or truth cannot be known or maybe do not even exist. All that can be known are the discourses which describe them. 

I take an alternative view, that it is not that the truth cannot be known, but that our attempts to describe it, which we call discourses in post modern parlance, are always insufficient to capture the reality of the experience. Any one who has seen the BBC “Face to Face” interview in which Jung was asked if he believed in God, to which he replied, “I don’t need to believe, I know.” could not help but be struck by the profundity of that moment: statements of belief are a discourse which attempts to convince others and/or oneself. To know is an experience which most often scapes expression.  (See Note B)

Post-Jungians often suggest having gone beyond Jung, although they seem to want their cake and to eat it too.  By using Jung's name they associate with themselves with him and the public interest in his work, whilst by using the term "post" they suggest, and some say directly, that he's old hat and they've gone beyond him. This seems to be a sort of cultism that denies itself.

Often those using the term post-Jungian seem to lack depth in their understanding of Jung's work.  Their critiques are often limited and speak more of a post modernist position than a rigorous critique based on a thorough knowledge of Jung. To be post Jungian is to refer oneself to Jung. Surely in taking such a position it would be better to have a thorough understanding of what one is referring oneself to? [Why not just call oneself a Jungian and be done with it, or not use Jung's name at all?]

When using any variation of the term `Jungian' we need to be mindful of Jung's attitude. There is no doubt that Jung saw a great danger to the spirit of his work in the possibility of it becoming institutionalised as a body of dogma, or intellectual reference point, as he experienced with Freud. At times Jung seemed to be less than positive even about the C G Jung Institute itself. Laurens van der Post reports that Jung told him the institute `would be lucky not to outlive its creative uses within a generation', and Robert Johnson that Jung never really wanted it to be established. Here Jung was clearly warning against the tendency towards things becoming institutionalised. To anyone who delves deeply into Jung's works, it is evident that his was a character which sought always to question the influence of institutional or collective values on the individual. Not to denigrate or deny their value but to demand always that they be brought under conscious scrutiny. He knew that their source in individual lives must be taken account of consciously. That he may have failed here and there in this endeavour testifies to his humanity rather than bringing into question his intent or the immense value of his work. Jung knew that institutions are prone to lose sight of the spirit of what they purport to serve.

Nor did he want the value of his work hidden behind the superficiality of "cultish" interest or populism such as that which seems to drive the plethora of biographies and popularising books which motivate what could be seen as a Jungian publishing cult or institution.

Whilst some detractors of Jung talk of a Jung cult the more real "Jung cult" seems to be the cult of Post Jungians and Jung detractors which has flourished in the past 15-20 years.  And the populism and superficial understanding of Jung's work which concerned him appears to have its worst expression in the publishing industry's desire to publish anything relating to Jung regardless of its worth.

At its worst of this can be seen in biographies which distort and misquote Jung's views and fictional works which employ Jung as a character. (See note C.) These works seemed to be driven, apart from the publishing industry's knowledge of Jung's popularity, also  by the authors' fantasies and prejudices than by genuine interest in Jung and his work.  A recent biography which consistently misquotes Jung and gives distorted interpretations of his words and a fictionalisation of Jung based on the reading of that biography and Jung's autobiography characterise this attitude.

Jung said that he thought biographies should show people in their under shirts but I doubt that he would have expected to be paraded in other people's dirty underwear.

Jung was never supportive of an attitude amounting to a `grab-bag' of ideas of and attitudes loosely related and thrown together under the umbrella `Jungian'. Whilst he drew widely and from many and varied traditions he did so with a rigorous and discerning attention. To use Jung's name or `Jungian' to give credence to things which lack a genuine grounding in the work of Jung is not  in the spirit of Jung'. Populism is not the “Spirit of Jung”. It was Jung's view that to live an authentic life one always risked swimming against the tide. That was a risk he took in splitting with Freud and from then on throughout his life. It seems that the further we are beyond Jung’s death the more some who use Jung’s name try to swim with the tide whilst saying they’re swimming against it.

To offer a critique of Jungian psychology is not only valid but essential. To do so without sufficient understanding of Jung's own work is at the least inexcusable ignorance and at worst a sort of disingenuous posturing which uses Jung's name to draw attention to its self. 

So now I'll look at four points which make up a complex of propositions that I see as central factors in Jung's work. These I have come to see as the core of the `Symbolic Life', which has a profoundly indigenous character. They are the basis of a way of life which one might also call the way of individuation.

They are:

-               acceptance of the reality and autonomy of the psyche as an a priori - an essential character of indigenous world views

-               the central place of experience as opposed to intellectual or conceptual orientations in understanding and exploring the above. Indigenous cosmology is fundamentally experience based with a conceptual structure that is intuitive rather than rational.

-               seeing the life of the individual as the root or core reality through which human psychic life is expressed. Living indigenous cultures involve renewal of the mythic traditions grounded in ongoing individual experience.

-               personal commitment to an ongoing relationship to the unconscious or inner life (the question of courage) The notions of commitment and courage are necessary in a particular way to modern non-indigenous people because we live outside a cultural container which affirms the reality and validity of the inner or symbolic life. Initiation ceremonies ensured that as individuals indigenous people were symbolically connected to the life of the tribe.

I see the Spirit of Jung as having a profoundly indigenous quality.

I will now consider these four points in detail and from time to time  examine how certain "post Jungian" approaches relate to them.

1. The Reality and Autonomy of the Psyche

The reality of the psyche and its autonomous existence is at the core of Jung's work, and is what set Jung at odds with Freud. It still sets his work apart from mainstream psychology, post-modernism and the positivist aspect of the `New Age' movement to which Jung is often mistakenly linked.

For Jung the psyche was not a theory or concept but a living reality which  concepts merely attempt to describe. Newton saw gravity as an observable phenomenon which his Laws of Gravity attempted to describe. So it was for Jung with the psyche.  At the time of his split with Freud Jung already saw the unconscious not as some sort of storehouse where all the discarded things of consciousness were heaped up and left but as a living matrix out of which consciousness itself arose. It was capable of autonomous acts and intrusions into consciousness about which he says in Memories Dreams Reflections:

"Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life."

Jung's assertion that the psyche is real is a cornerstone of his work. And he does not mean real simply as a subjective factor.

A very real danger to the immense value of Jung's work is a sort of creeping reductionism via which the psyche is once again reduced to a by-product of the material realm or everyday human consciousness, or in post Jungian or post modern terms, one among many discourses. When Jung said:

"What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts..." 

                                "Answer to Job" vol 18 p466             

and;

"The `reality of the psyche' is my working hypothesis and my principle activity consists in collecting factual material to describe and explain it."

he actually meant real, not a by-product of the material reality, or a discourse, but an objective fact in its own right; and to quote:

"a presence, a fact, it is there, it happens." it is "hard as granite, heavy as lead".

Descriptions of the psyche, such as aboriginal Dreamtime stories or Jungian psychology, may well be discourses but the psyche itself is, in Jung's view, incontrovertibly real, just Newton seeing the apple falling from the tree was a real experience of what he called gravity. To see the psyche, expressed via myths or religious stories as simply a discourse or mere story is to make it a projection of human consciousness, and return to Freud's view.

From Jung's perspective an inner event be it a dream, vision or mood arising spontaneously, is as much an autonomous reality as an outer one such as stubbing one's toe or eating a meal, or a car accident. It suggests that we need to allow such "inner events” objective reality which we automatically give outer events. If a car comes around a corner and almost knocks you down no one would tell you that the adrenalin in your body caused the car to appear. But we a constantly told that psychic experiences such as dreams and visions are secondary results of biochemical processes. If we do not attend to psychic processes with the same zeal and dedication with which we feel compelled to approach our outer life responsibilities we only live a half-life, and we may well be knocked down by them. We may all feel compelled to pay the rent, wash the dishes and put the rubbish out. Yet how many people really accord equal importance to working with their dreams, active imagination and other `inner' practices?

Here is an example of  this creeping reductionism from an article in a highly respected American Jungian journal by Jungian analysts. In speaking of establishing what the authors refer to as "pure" active imagination they say as one of two cardinal rules:

"....when the imaginal ego acts, it must act in terms of all the considerations it would normally take if he imaginal sequence were taking place in a real life situation."     

                        "Lucid Dreaming and Active Imagination", Hall and Brylowski,

                        (Quadrant, XXIV:1 1991)

This attitude treats a psychic experience as if it were taking place in everyday life. This seems to be a trend in much post Jungian thinking; the symbolic is sought in or referred to external life, the terrain of extraversion, a swing away from Jung's introverted approach.  But, if the psyche is as Carlos Castenada called it, a `separate reality', then why apply to it  "all of the considerations" of the material world.  If the psyche is real and autonomous one has at least to consider Jung’s view that it is not constrained to the laws of time and space.

If Jung had taken the advice above he would never have plunged into his confrontation with the unconscious in the way he did. In that time he chose to set the psyche alongside his everyday life on equal terms.  He gave his experiences of it full value and learned, by doing that, that the reality of the psyche could lead to healing not only madness.

It was here that Jung become what biographer Gerhard Wehr called;

"an esoteric: that is a person who draws upon inner experiences and attains insights that render him alone amongst his contemporaries"

The everyday ego cannot easily separate psychic and physical experiences and so wakes us in fright or moral terror from many dream situations.  Would you ever die, cheat, steal or kill someone in a dream if you simply obeyed the dictates of outer life?  Would Jung have killed Siegfried in one of the critical dreams of his confrontation with the unconscious?

Another part of this reductionism lies in the notion of human beings ensouling the world or objects. This may be a fine point but it is an important one. Such a notion implies (consciously or unconsciously) that matter and objects obtain a soul or psychic aspect via their interaction with humans. This is of course quite antithetical to an Aboriginal view in which the land is clearly a psychic as well as physical reality and bestows meaning on us. It is also quite at odds with Jung's viewpoint in which the psyche is a priori to physical reality. 

It is my experience both personally and as a therapist that when people know the difference between the two realities they can act in ways which open the path to real and lasting change. A simple example of this is the death dream in which, acting out of the considerations of outer life concern at being killed, one wakes oneself in fear. If one knew the dying to be in a dream one could choose to let go and die. The traditional wisdom of many tribal cultures is to do just that in falling dreams and to find out where one is being taken. Experience shows that when this is achieved unexpected revelations occur which take the dreamer through a barrier of fear, in outer life also, which opens up uncharted territory otherwise blocked from conscious access.

2. Experience versus Concepts.

For Jung the reality of the psyche was never reducible to physiological processes or intellectual concepts. It remained a mystery and an objective reality with which we have to contend and find relationship. For him a science or philosophy which denied the mystery of life and believed that all of reality could be reduced to intellectual concepts or by products of the material realm, denied life itself in some fundamental sense.  He said:

"No science will ever replaced myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.  For it is not that "God" is a myth but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man."          C. G. Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections." (see note 1)

In the bracket of intellectual concepts I include such post-modern/Post Jungian notions as the discourse or story. The paradox is that  experience is by its nature subjective and individual and yet that which we experience has an objective reality.  Our recounting of experience is of course a story, or discourse.  But that does not render the source of the experience unreal. If you tell a friend about being bitten by a dog does that render the dog that bit you unreal? I believe this sort of thinking is creeping into a lot of post Jungian discussion.

Jung said also that `intellectualism' is the use of concepts to shield one's self from reality. He once remarked when asked which people he found most difficult to `heal'; "Habitual liars and intellectuals".

In remarking about this Laurens van der Post comments that Jung was referring to an:

"attitude which attributes a final omnipotence to the intellect which...the scorched, disordered scene of our day proved that it did not possess." 

Here Jung is once again offering a compensatory focus to our one-sidedly mental Western outlook. (see Note 2)

Over and again Jung asserted the primacy of immediate experience as the source of knowledge, to which either thinking or feeling bring evaluation and context.  It is important to recall here that for Jung experience includes inner as well as outer events on an equal basis. He said:

                "There is no self knowledge based on theoretical assumptions".

And

                 "People use concepts to avoid experience".

Albert Einstein said of the discovery of physical laws:

"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind appearances."

Einstein's intellect was always a tool in the service of his search for the “impenetrable.....manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and radiant beauty". This is an apt imagery for the Philosophers Stone of the alchemists, or the Self. And for Einstein it was clearly an experienced reality not a theoretical proposition.

The question of meaning is always connected to an experience of the numinous which accompanies the firing of the imagination rather than intellect or superficial feeling experiences. When the imaginative faculty is activated, events which may otherwise remain unconnected or at the most coincidental, are imbued with a sense of meaning which is essentially an individual experience. In such events the simultaneous perception of psyche and matter in immediate relationship, is the essence of what Jung called synchronicity. The experience of the numinous in these events is able to cut through our resistances and initiate a healing process which no amount of intellectual endeavour can engender. This lies at the core of indigenous experiences of the psyche in the land and creatures.

It is the interplay of inner and outer events, each given equal weight as objectively real, which breaks through outmoded attitudes and resistance to precipitate a process of renewal.

Whilst our immediate reactions to such experiences will usually be subjective we are always capable of awareness at a deeper level. If the subjective aspect of the situation is not identified with, (feeling reaction), or rationalised, (thinking reaction), but held and allowed to deepen a more objective reality which lies behind and gives rise to experiences, and the stories that arise from them, may be perceived. In this process we are taken beyond our limited personal reactions or resistances to where healing may occur.

3. The Life of the Individual.

    In "Matter of Heart": Jung is quoted as follows:

"The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.

This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also it makers. We make our own epoch."

To truly embrace Jung's notion of the central place of the individual in human affairs, involves an immense act of faith and courage in oneself and one's relationship to the inner life. It challenges us not to hide in our sense of powerlessness and insignificance, of being victims and passive witnesses. It also challenges us not to hide in the notion of collective actions as the salvation of the world, be they politics, causes, creeds or notions of group consciousness including being Jungians'.

It calls us to take up the challenge of living a meaningful life in the one and only place we can do it, in our own day to day lives. This is not intended as a denigration of group activity but as a call for the individual to remain true to her or himself. A call to understand that each collective event is in the final analysis, a summation of realities first constellated consciously or unconsciously, in individuals. When collective events seem so powerful and beyond the capability of individuals to influence, it is not proof that Jung's assertions are incorrect. It is an indication of the degree to which their source in individuals is indeed unconscious.

Jung saw the fate of the world as hanging on the thin thread of humanity's relationship to the psyche. He says:

               "The salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul".

This brings home with absolute clarity his perception of the central role of the individual in that relationship. Such a statement of Jung's still seems very radical today and is at odds with directions being taken by such commentators as James Hillman and Robert Sardello. In a recent biography Jung is accused of being senile because he suggests such an approach to a correspondent enquiring as to what he can do about the state of the world. Sardello said in "Facing the World with Soul":

"....romanticism turned to decadence, at around 1885. The decadents attempted to live the inner life and only the inner life.....This tragedy, I believe, resulted from separating imagination from the world. Modern Jungian psychology tends toward a similar exhaustion."

Such comments may apply to modern American Jungian psychology, suffering from the very institutionalisation which Jung foresaw and warned about.  They do not apply to Jung's outlook. To dismiss Jung because Jungians do not understand him really misses the mark.

For Jung the imaginative faculty was the bridge between the psychic and physical life. Via it one experiences the mystery of inner and outer as simultaneous expressions of an unknown and unknowable source (Self). Jung saw both the psyche and the material realm as objective expressions of Einstein's "sense of the mystical" or "that (which) is impenetrable".

Clarissa Pinkola Estes (well known for her book "Women Who Run With Wolves") is a wonderful example of someone who understands the import of Jung's approach for the collective life. Having grown up in an underprivileged situation she knew hardship and the need for social action. She was involved in civil rights, women's movement and gay and lesbian campaigns over many years and drawn to Jung by his commentaries on the First and Second World Wars in "Civilisation in Transition" (CW vol 10).

She does not use rhetoric and ideological positions in outlining her political concerns.  She says one must "name the problematic elements part by smallest part", placing the source of the collective problem in individuals. The great American social activists she says, and names among others Martin Luther King,

          "relied on a paradigm wherein valuation of inner life and that of outer action are held together in a single thought."

and says;

"This world view functions with an awareness that specific grounds for injustice or imbalance arise both within and without, not just one or the other. Taken together these constitute a trans-psychic truth that fires not just personal action, but more so, calls the soul to action; the fierce, image making soul... "

In this regard one recalls C G Jung's considerable efforts to provide a framework of support for progressive psychoanalysts under threat from Nazism. Pinkola Estes says also;

"Among the leaders I've lived and worked with during my life, it was their vigorous attention to their inner lives that funded their work in the world...keeping them solid and strong."

              "Face Into the Wind...Protect the Flame" Interview in Psychological Perspectives

This, it seems to me, is what is lacking in most of our political leaders today. Rare exceptions are people like Aung San Su Chi, Nelson Mandela and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Jung's focus on the `inner' life or life of the psyche, was a call for the complementary focus which would enliven and enrich outer life. It is not a denial of the importance of collective life but an acknowledgment of the need for external culture to be balanced against conscious relationship to the inner life.

Jung understood only too well the power of what he called `collective consciousness', the cultural values of the time. He suggests that if these values are rebelled against or held unconsciously, it is the collective life itself that suffers, as its renewal or re-dreaming through individual experience is blocked.

The notion put forward in some `post Jungian' commentary, that Jungian psychology is obsessively subjective and egocentric, also misses the point where it fails to source itself in Jung's own writings.

Jung was concerned by what happens when we fail to deal with life as an interplay of inner and outer. If our subjective concerns are seen only via projections on the outer world, either on other individuals or collective situations, neurosis either individual or collective is inevitable. Then the experience of the numinous is projected on material life and the psyche is obscured, its healing balance to outer life lost from sight. It is in these situations also that the madness of mass killings, war and fanaticism arise.

For Jung the development of genuine consciousness within any collective frameworks rests squarely with the individual and the ability to make personal ethical choices. Such a responsibility requires a high degree of awareness of one's individual shortcomings or the shadow. Here one must contend with the real possibility that what one sees as needing to be changed in the world must firstly be attended to in one's personal life. The confrontation with the unconscious is at once both a subjective and objective, individual and collective, personal and impersonal experience. Here one faces existence as a totality, both as inner and outer, psyche and matter. In this process one's own soul and the `Soul of the World' are found through direct experience, and found to be inseparable.

It was paradoxically in his highly individual and subjective experience of confrontation with the unconscious that Jung saw himself as finding the context of his life within the collective, he said:

"It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality".

This is very much in accord with Aboriginal notions in which the Dreaming Stories (which are collective realities) are continually redreamt by individuals. Through the incorporation of such individual experiences by the group, not only the soul of the world (the land), but that of the tribe and the individual are sustained. One who dreams and truly gives value and weight to such an individual experience is doing sot not only for herself but for the whole world.

4. Personal Commitment and Courage

The question of whether focussing on personal issues and experiences is not just subjectivity and egocentricity, arises again and again in analysis. People fear that the commitment of time, energy and money to therapy is selfish. They ask whether they ought not to be doing something for others, their family and friends, the poor or underprivileged or the starving in other countries.

No doubt raising the question of how individual and collective wellbeing are interconnected is partly the intent of post Jungian commentators like Robert Sardello, James Hillman and others. Critiques which swing to the extreme of dismissing individual work and lives, except those of exceptional individuals, in favour of focussing on collective life can badly miss the point. For most of us it is all too easy to project our own issues into the world and onto famous people, instead of attending to them where we have most power to affect them, in our own lives.  We only need to look in the local newsagents at the plethora of magazines devoted to the lives of the famous and infamous to see that this is so.  ( See Note 4)

No truthful and courageous attempt to attend to one's own life can leave the collective life of humanity and the world unaffected. The whole is after all a conglomerate of individuals.

Neither should we forget a truth which was once taken for granted, that each individual is part of the whole In John Donne this is succinctly imaged:

"No man is an island entire of itself, everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee."

When Jung says in "The Undiscovered Self";

            "The salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul"

I believe he echoes this view in psychological form. These issues of self-indulgence versus self nurturing in therapy and in life as a whole, are vital to the understanding of Jung's outlook. Anyone who has read Jung would know that he never countenanced evasion of one's worldly responsibilities. He saw commitment to the inner life as the vital process of taking up one's life responsibilities in a more complete and effective way.

Robert Sardello remarks about what he sees as egotism and calls for the renewal of group life, commenting that:

"....as individual freedom becomes more conscious, group life becomes less so....as freedom strengthens so does egotism...."

 I cannot agree. In such a view the whole (group) is less than the sum of its parts, which is in direct contrast to how Jung saw the relationship between group and individual. A group is not conscious or unconscious, free or not free, individuals are. And the nature of consciousness within the group rests with the individuals which make it up.

In much American `post Jungian' literature there is an attitude that the ego is the problem. This aligns with many traditional religious, `New Age' and Freudian views but indicates a lack of understanding of Jung's approach to the ego.

Jung commented that the egocentricity of the ego reflected the Self-centricity of the Self. Understanding the implications of such a comment reaches to the core of Jung's work. For Jung's "psychology of individuation", as Lauren van der Post calls it, is truly ego psychology. We must understand that for Jung the ego was not what it was for Freud or what it is in common usage. That ego, the social mask, is connected to what Jung called the persona. 

In Jungian analysis one seeks the possibility of a genuinely Self centred outlook.  But to understand this we must understand what Jung meant by the Self, for in common usage self and ego are synonymous. For Jung the Self was not the everyday self, ego or persona but something akin to what Twelve step programs call the "higher power".  In the post modern, post Jungian world of everything being relativised and just another discourse the acceptance of an absolute such as the Self or "higher power" is not fashionable because it implies that we do not simply run our own lives by force of will. This Self of Jung's is both an individual and collective reality which calls a person to a paradoxical commitment to fulfilling his/her individuality whilst understanding it as inseparable from the whole. 

This is a `SELF INDULGENCE' which the world could do with more of and through which we serve the life of our own soul simultaneously with the `soul of the world'. What is required is the attitude of openness to the deeper responsibility of the individual, who realises that he dreams for the culture and the whole world, as Aboriginal people understand their responsibility for `the Dreaming'.

In Jung's terms it is the ego, which, accepting its place as `under the auspices' of the Self, is capable of real consciousness. The maturing ego discovers that it is not simply working through issues or a neurosis but discovering its mysterious roots in the collective reality of humanity, all life forms and the planet itself, as a living totality. The journey of the ego into this terrain, past its subjective concerns and into confrontation with the objective reality of the inner and outer worlds, is always an act of immense courage. Laurens van der Post put it thus:

"Few of us today recognise the imperative of courage in the life of the imagination and how it alone can make us free from fear and open to the fullness of reality. Its `cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no man fathomed' demand a heart as brave as that of any soldier going into battle or any mountaineer pioneering a new way up Everest. Only those who have never hung     over the cataclysmic abyss of their own spirit hold such exercises to be cheap."

Such courage is not a quality of groups, or the collectivity, within which we shelter from the awesome reality of such experiences. It is in the final analysis a quality of individual women and men.

Conclusion

There is a rich deep vein of ore which runs through Jung's work which is by no means exhausted. It may be lost from sight in many ways but will always be available to those willing to submit themselves "to the irrational facts of experience"  which Jung saw as the essence of a religious life.  

In finishing I return to my beginning and quote Jung again from “Late Thoughts” in MDR:.

"Love `bears all things' and `endures all things' (1 Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to said: nothing can be added to them.....Being part man cannot grasp the  whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it.   Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. `Love ceases not'  - whether he speaks with the `tongues of angels' or with scientific exactitude traces the life of a cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown - ignotum per ignotius - that is by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependency; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error."

C G Jung "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" p.354

Appendices

A.     It was night in an unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I held my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind regardless of all dangers.  When I awoke I realised at once that the figure was a “spectre of the Brocken”, My own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this light was my consciousness, the only light I have……………MDR

B.       Belief is adherence to a particular discourse to the exclusion of others  which nonetheless the leaves open the possibility of change/conversion.  Knowing brings us face-to-face within expressible and leaves us foundering.

C.      “Jung” by Frank McGlynn and “Pilgrim” by Timothy Findlay

1.             This relationship to psychic life is put another way by Albert Einstein,

"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms, this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness."

2.             Lauren van der Post also reports that Jung was appalled at the number of people becoming "mass producers of concepts" and at the amount of "thinking for thinking's sake without any obligation to the rest of the personality". These things Jung saw as symptomatic of our "profound collectively pathological dissociation from our past". The implications of this for a viable future for humanity obviously concerned Jung deeply. Such statements challenged the increasingly prevalent view that the intellect alone held the key to the answers to all the mysteries of life.

3.             Probably the best example of this in Jung's recorded work is found in the case of a very rationalistic young woman client with whom the analysis had become very stuck. Jung reported that after trying to find a way through her intellectual defences:

"I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up...I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric...she had an impressive dream...in which someone had given her a golden scarab...while she was telling me this I heard a tapping at the window...it was a fairly large flying insect knocking against the window from the outside...to get into the dark room. This seemed very strange. I opened the window...and caught the insect as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed (it) to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience...broke the ice       of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results."

4.             Sphere of influence versus sphere of concern.