Carl Jung (1875-1961) - I. Introduction, Initiation, and the Collective Unconscious

by Sean Jobst

26 July 2020

   Today is the birthday of a great thinker who has been one of my influences these past three years, primarily for giving me a framework to make sense of my inner journey. He provided concrete form and terms to the deepest aspects of the internal self, that which cannot always be named much less quantified. Carl Jung (1875-1961) is more than a psychologist, for he went beyond the rigid scientism of his peers into a way of thinking that was new only insofar as it challenged the dogmas that dominated his field. Despite the "youth" (jung) of his name, he tapped into the most ancient wisdom that remained latent all these centuries.  

   Not only a Swiss psychologist, Jung was a European mystic and a Germanic shaman, aware that the Siberian term described spiritual realities that had parallels under other names across the world, including among Germanic peoples. He thus became a 20th century mystic and shaman, speaking within the language of his century while shedding light on the primordial underneath various myths, symbols and patterns. He traveled across various worlds of the self into a holistic frame for the timeless adage "Know Thyself". Aside from my inner journey, his work has also helped me make sense of other people's motives, allowing a better picture of the psychology behind political ideologies and current events all the while conveying that these come and go, but that which truly matters will remain timeless.

   Confrontation with Freud. Jung tapped deep within the well of our European ancestral knowledge, whereas proponents of his colleague, Sigmund Freud, blended the latter's assumptions in a political marriage with the Marxism of the Frankfurt School and harnessed it to purposes of mass manipulation via Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays - all enabled by well-funded networks.(1) Jungian Psychology is about truly knowing yourself while simultaneously better knowing others: "My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality. Everything can be explained from this central point and all my works relate to this one theme."(2)

   In contrast, Freud's dogmas are a distortion of the self, an escape from the Shadow Work essential for any lasting personal growth, instead melting into a herd mentality that is a mere image of one's own projections. Freud was obsessed about what he termed a "Semitic vengeance", using the historical figure of Hannibal to represent himself and a nebulous "Rome" as the projection of his own insecurities.(3) Underscoring the stark differences in how the two psychologists applied historic examples to modern times, Jung wrote: "In those times the omnipresent, crushing power of Rome, embodied in the divine Caesar, had created a world where countless individuals, indeed whole peoples, were robbed of their cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy. Today, individuals and cultures are faced with a similar threat, namely of being swallowed up in the mass."(4)

   Much social and psychological conflict was born out of their confrontation on the central factor behind the development of personality. While Freud identified this as the libido, hence why most of his theories were obsessed about sexuality, Jung upheld the collective unconscious - memories and other inherited features from one's ancestors. "I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, 'My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.'"(5) Sexuality has been socially cheapened, adding a "shame" and "guilt" ridden with taboos disguised as a "liberation", whereas Jung gives it a healthy function within a broader personal development that includes many deeper factors. This was a symptom of Freud's appeal to authority and dogmas, both rejected by Jung as anathema to his commitment to truth and wisdom.

   Their second primary disagreement centered around the nature of the Unconscious, with Freud reducing it solely as repressed emotions and desires. The latter Jung clarified as the "personal unconscious", in contrast to a more collective Unconscious revealing itself through various archetypes across time and space.(6) Any shamanic journey traverses boundaries and the profound truth uncovered by Jung was that the Unconscious worked in the same way, so that one who goes deeper into their selves can go on their own journey. The guideposts along the way are your intuition and ancestors: "The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity."(7)

   Jung's Initiation. In a profound 1909 incident, Jung and Freud were arguing over the role of precognition and parapsychology, with Jung upholding their value and Freud dismissing it as not quantifiable, when the former predicted a book loudly falling from a nearby shelf: "That is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon."(8) We can take this as a symbolic victory of his approach, for he cut through dogmas into the intuition that manifests through synchronicities - or "meaningful coincidences" and patterns in life. I have experienced these in my own life the past few years, balancing out a strict left-brain "book learning" with a right-brain intuitive and creative impulse which finally produced changes in my own life. This incident sparked Jung's "Dark Night of the Soul", similar to what I observed about Walpurgisnacht, in which he tapped into dreams and visions, and drew Mandalas, all the while seeming to be guided by a deeper force beyond his conscious as he later wrote:

   "The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then."(9)

   An unfolding process revealed itself through the bull symbol of the ancient Persian and Roman mystery religion of Mithraism. In May 1910, Jung gave his first public lecture on the topic of Mithraic myths and images. Still on speaking terms, Freud wrote to him in June that Mithras' slaying of the bull represented "the killing of the animal ego by the human ego, as the mythological projection of repression, in which the subliminated part of the human being (the conscious ego) sacrifices (regretfully) its vigorous drives." Jung responded in a letter on 26th June: "there must be something very typical in the fact that the central symbol of fecundity, the useful and generally accepted (not censored) alter ego of Mithras (the bull) is slain by another sexual symbol [scorpion biting the bull's testicles]. The self-sacrifice is voluntary and involuntary at once (the same conflict as in the death of Christ)." Jung further noted on the authority of the great Flemish scholar of Mithras, Franz Cumont, that "the Mithras Myth has undergone an adaptation to the calendar."(10) 

   Under the influence of his disciple and lover Antonia "Toni" Wolff, Jung developed an interest in astrology which he applied to Mithras. He wrote to Freud on 12 June 1911: "My evenings are taken up largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." Noting Freud's astrological sign of Taurus, Jung later symbolized his break with him as Mithras killing the bull. He elaborated on these topics in "The Sacrifice," a chapter in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), where he linked the Mithraic tauroctony with both Taurus and sexuality: "Taurus is astrologically the Domicilium Veneris." Mithras himself was the "sacrificer and the sacrificed....it is only his animal nature that Mithras sacrifices, his instinctuality."(11) This later matured into his view that the bull personified the alter ego of Mithras. As for the common motif of the serpent, he said in a 1925 seminar: 

   "The snake has a fascinating appeal, a peculiar attraction through fear. Some people are fascinated by this fear. Things that are awe-inspiring and dangerous have an extraordinary attraction. This combination of fear and attraction is shown, for instance, when a bird is hypnotized by a snake, for the bird flutters down to fight the snake, and then becomes attracted and held by the snake. The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater. The snake is also Yin, the dark female power. The Chinese would not use the snake (i.e., dragon) as a symbol for Yin, but for Yang. In Chinese, the Yin is symbolized by the tiger and the Yang by the dragon."(12)

   In a vision, Jung saw himself with outstretched arms and a large snake around his body, his head morphing into a lion's head much like other Mithraic symbolism. He saw himself increasingly tapping into the distant indigenous European past which was inescapable: "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. They form part of the ancient mysteries. In fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries."(13) In addition to the Mithraic images ultimately connecting back to Iran and India - perhaps he was also aware of the Mithraeum in Swabia, homeland of his paternal family - in his visions and induced trances, he saw Hellenistic and Egyptian images. "There are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life," he recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. As his perception deepened, Jung increasingly looked into his own Germanic archetypes, especially with the god Wotan as I'll expand upon in Part 2. 

   Collective Unconscious and Archetypes. This is what he termed his "deification" experience, in which the old gods of the pre-Christian era are embedded deeply and firmly within the European Unconscious, beneath the Abrahamic repressive mask of the Conscious. This sparked a lifelong shamanic journey wherein he knew there was no going back. For he came to know himself as a spectator of his thoughts; that what he would term the Archetypes were working through the psyche, so that the deities of one's most ancient Ancestors live on within the descendants of a tribe or ethnic group. The deities being Archetypes does not make them less "real" to those aware of the Animistic reality that there is a consciousness within all things. A denial of these Archetypes is like denying yourself and the ego, what makes the individual truly unique. Monotheism is an aberration in human history, with Polytheism accepting the innate multiplicities of Nature, the Cosmos, and the Psyche. 

   Jung added the essential ingredient to our entire understanding of Archetypes. The term itself had already been used in the German Romantic movement, with Goethe (whom Jung was convinced had some connection to his family) using it in relation to "primordial image". Another influence was the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, with Jung seeing biology as a vessel for that repository of ancestral memories and impulses called the Unconscious. Jung formulated his theory following a dream he had with three descending floors - the top one was contemporary, the middle was a Roman style, and the lowest level was a prehistoric cave. Rather than being linear, it could be that all three combined in a cycle of death, birth, and rebirth - much like the three-fold Fates or Norns motif - all having a part within the Unconscious. And just like he found himself a spectator of his own thoughts, Jung observed that these Archetypes often work without the individual's awareness.

   Whereas the personal unconscious originates after birth, the Collective Unconscious is a storehouse of inherited images not based on personal experiences. These ancestral memories are more important than individual memories, and come forth as needed in various situations of a person's life. Jung was profoundly affected by the same images and archetypes recurring in his German and Swiss patients' dreams, especially with Wotan, so there had to be some deeper force behind this phenomenon. "The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths."(14)

   Jung makes an incredible analogy: "Archetypes are like river beds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed."(15) Our Ancestors believed the water to be conscious, so that these Archetypes also hold a consciousness. Archetypes erode the subconscious over time, but the riverbed remains ready to be filled with them even if that conscious force now seems "dead". The way this river flows may change and shift, but the basic elements remain the same. So it is in how these Archetypes act over an individual's life, as we shall see with Wotan and other examples.

Footnotes:

(1) For example, via the elitist Institute for Policy Studies, as I discussed in my article about the BLM leaders' Communist and Globalist connections: https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2020/07/blm-leaders-have-communist-and.html.

(2) Carl Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961, p. 206. 

(3) See Thomas Szasz. The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978, pp. 146-147, citing Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

(4) Jung, op. cit., p. 212.

(5) ibid., p. 150.

(6) Jung, "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious," 1936; in Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, New York: Pantheon Books, 1959, p. 43.

(7) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 236.

(8) ibid., p. 155.

(9) ibid., p. 21.

(10) Richard Noll, "Jung the Leontocephalus," in Jung in Contexts: A Reader, ed. Paul Bishop. London/New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 67.

(11) ibid.

(12) Jung, "Notes on the Seminar," 1925, p. 102.

(13) Quoted in Noll, op. cit., p. 60.

(14) Jung, "The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche," p. 230; The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 1, eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, et. al. New York: Bollingen Foundation and Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 112.

(15) Jung, "Wotan," Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zürich), III, March 1936, pp. 657-669; and Aufsatze Zurzeitgeschichte (Zürich), 1946, pp. 1-23.