C. G. Jung

The Basics

Ruth Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317270959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

C. G. Jung: The Basics is an accessible, concise introduction to the life and ideas of C. G. Jung for readers of all backgrounds, from those new to Jung's work to those looking for a convenient reference.

Ruth Williams eloquently and succinctly introduces the key concepts of Jungian theory and paints his biographical picture with clarity. The book begins with an overview of Jung's family life, childhood, and relationship with (and subsequent split from) Sigmund Freud. Williams then progresses thematically through the key concepts in his work, clearly explaining ideas including the unconscious, the structure of the psyche, archetypes, individuation, psychological types and alchemy. C. G. Jung: The Basics also presents Jung's theories on dreams and the self, and explains how his ideas developed and how they can be applied to everyday life. The book also discusses some of the negative claims made about Jung, especially his ideas on politics, race, and gender, and includes detailed explanations and examples throughout, including a chronology of Jung's life and suggested further reading.

C. G. Jung: The Basics will be key reading for students at all levels coming to Jung's ideas for the first time and general readers with an interest in his work. For those already familiar with Jungian concepts, it will provide a helpful guide to applying these ideas to the real world.

1

The unconscious

Attitude

To approach the subject of the unconscious requires a mind open to unknown possibilities. It is a difficult idea to conceptualise as it seems at first to be talking about an absence of something, consciousness in this case. It may seem as if we are chasing something invisible. Well – at the risk of talking in riddles – it is invisible, but may be discerned. To explain. There are fundamental features of life which are invisible such as air and gravity, yet they exert indisputable influence over our existence. Gravity was ‘discovered’ when Newton made the mental leap to realise gravity could be inferred. He saw the apple drop and understood the implications – there must be some force drawing the apple to the ground.

In the same way, we can infer the presence of the unconscious by reference to parapraxes (usually called Freudian slips), and by analysing dreams (the manifestation par excellence of unconscious processes) and referring backwards to see something dynamic was at play. It may initially help to suspend judgement about what the unconscious is and whether it exists; to maintain an agnostic stance. What is required might be something akin to what poet John Keats (1795–1821) called ‘negative capability’, which conveys the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess. I am invoking this idea in the spirit of allowing what is mysterious or unknown to remain hanging in the air as a possibility.

A helpful metaphor for the unconscious utilised by writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) in Steppenwolf (1972 pp.192–209) would be the way the theatre stage at any given instant, like a dream or the unconscious, might be seen as encompassing everything – the cast waiting to come on, the backstage crew, the audience, the writer, and so on.

History

Let’s briefly look at how and when the unconscious was first discovered.

The earliest figures are Gustav Fechner (1801–87), who is regarded as the founder of experimental psychology, followed by Theodore Lipps (1851–1914), both of whom gave the unconscious “a place of decisive importance” (Jung 1954, par. 354). Although it was philosopher Christian von Wolff (1679–1754) who was the first to speak of ‘empirical’ or ‘experimental’ psychology (in his Psychologia empirica of 1732) (ibid. par. 345 and n4). Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), also acclaimed as a founding father of experimental psychology, taught the first course in psychology in 1862. His Principles of Physiological Psychology was first published in Leipzig in 1893. The psychological treatment of neuroses was pioneered by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) at the Salpetrière Hospital in Paris, and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), also based in Paris (who published L’Automatisme psychologique in Paris in 1889, followed by Néuroses et idées fixes in 1898). At around the same time Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy was working in the area of treating neuroses by suggestion by following in the footsteps of A.A. Liébeault. They both published works in 1866, with Bernheim’s being translated from French to German by Sigmund Freud, who was apparently greatly inspired by Bernheim’s work and laid the foundations for his own project. Central Europe was in a ferment of creativity in this area of exploration during this period. (This was also the case in terms of art and furniture-making and creativity in a much broader sense, which is beyond the scope of this volume.) Both Freud and Jung went to the roots of this movement to study, Jung to work with Janet, and Freud with Charcot.

In 1902 William James (1842–1910), American psychologist and philosopher (the brother of novelist Henry James), wrote:

I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that … there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual center and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extramarginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs.

(1982 p.233)

The discovery in 1886 to which he refers is the positing of a “subliminal consciousness” by Frederick W.H. Myers (see n23 in Jung 1954 par. 356), a pioneer of parapsychology, the study of ‘occult’ phenomena and spiritualism.

What is the unconscious?

I am deliberately avoiding discussing the subject of consciousness at depth as it would require an entire volume. While consciousness may be seen as encompassing simple awareness of the objects around us in a very literal way all the way up to spiritual awakening and development, likewise unconsciousness can stretch from a simple lack of awareness of something, to a dense unknowing or unknowable sense, which is the stuff of the psychological unconscious I will be referring to. I would emphasise that there is no negative judgement implied in something being unconscious. Indeed many things must remain unconscious or we would be utterly overwhelmed by a welter of data. Jung:

[T]‌he unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious.

(1954 par. 382)

Psychoid unconscious

Jung then adds: “We must also include in the unconscious the psychoid functions that are not capable of consciousness and of whose existence we have only indirect knowledge” (ibid.). Jung first posited the notion of a psychoid unconscious, completely inaccessible to consciousness, in 1946. This is where things start to get more complicated. He went on to link this to the idea of the unus mundus, or ‘one world’, in which everything is connected on a subtle level, which may initially seem irrational. It relates to the unitary nature of reality beyond the Cartesian split between mind and body. This gives us a framework to understand the uncanny experiences we all have from time to time such as ringing someone at the moment they are calling you, intuiting someone’s intention so you ‘know’ what they are feeling; even feeling an unexplained affinity for someone. In much the same way telephone wires – or WiFi waves nowadays – connect us all from whatever physical distance, we may think about this idea of the ‘one world’ as invisibly connecting us. This has been conceptualised in a variety of ways. Jung calls the unus mundus a “metaphysical speculation” (1944 par. 660), a theory which helps us think about something so intangible. The psychoid archetype/unconscious:

has a tendency to behave as though it were not located in one person but were active in the whole environment. The fact or situation is transmitted in most cases through a subliminal perception of the affect it produces…. As soon as the dialogue between two people touches on something fundamental, essential, and numinous, and a certain rapport is felt, it gives rise to a phenomenon which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly called participation mystique. It is an unconscious identity in which two individual psychic spheres interpenetrate to such a degree that it is impossible to say what belongs to whom.

(Jung 1958 par. 851–2)

Jung here provides a theoretical framework to understand the existence of a non-duality which many of us intuit. We have uncanny experiences but had no previous way of making sense of them. This has found great appeal among New Age thinkers.

Similar notions of interconnectedness and wholeness may be found in the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake when he writes about fields of ‘morphic resonance’ (2009) (discussed below); in Laszlo (2004), who refers to the Akashic field (Akasha being the Sanskrit word for ether which is added to the other four elements: earth, fire, water, air); and in Bohm (1980) who talks of an implicate order. David Bohm (1917–92) was a pioneering theoretical physicist and a former protegé of Albert Einstein. These are all deep ideas that warrant exploration.

Synchronicity

Jung located the psychoid archetype

beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of the physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and… forms the bridge to matter in general

(1954 par. 420)

One might say it is where psyche and matter meet. Main encapsulates the complexity when he suggests the concepts:

of psyche and matter and space and time merge into a psychophysical space-time continuum… To express this ambivalent nature – at once psychic and physical yet neither because beyond both – [Jung] was led to coin the term ‘psychoid’.

(1997 p.36)

Jung sees the psychoid as possessing parapsychological qualities which he groups with synchronicity. Synchronicity is probably one of the features of Jung’s thought w...