More Jung

These last few days my inbox has been crowded with desperate messages from frenzied readers begging me to educate them on the understanding of Jung’s psychology and myth, so as to enlarge their trifling intellects and give them the chance of adding something of real worth to our rapidly decaying society. (I’m kidding actually, so far I’ve only had 150 people reading this blog, the lion’s share of that probably consisting of friends and family, but anyway). Being the paragon of sagacity, I am of course above such plebeian concerns as actually indulging in requests (though they are fictional!), but I will relent here and actually present you with the first instalment of a sumptuous exposé on Jung and myth!

Son to a Swiss Reformed pastor, Jung was the founder of analytical psychology and an influential thinker who made extensive enquiries into the nature of myth and religion and mankind’s relation thereto. For Jung myths were not only indispensable tools in trying to understand the psychic life of individuals and societies, but also the purest expression of ideas coming from what he called the collective unconscious. Myth was so important to Jung that it became a guiding line for his own life and he kept researching it and its myriad components until his death at the age of 85.

In Jung’s thought myth and religion are interdependent terms. Religion’s most important function is the experience of God, or the unconscious, that it provides and myth is the means by which this experience is best conveyed. Religion and myth thus work in a dual fashion, both ensuring the means of each other’s continued efficacy. As a German speaking Swiss, Jung shows himself to be an inheritor of the leading figures of German philosophy in his theorizing about the nature of religion and myth, in particular of Kant. Like the idiosyncratic philosopher, Jung held to the principle that inquiring into the nature of God (although it is probably better to speak of the unconscious here, Jung started to treat the two terms as synonymous towards the end of his life, because he believed that they both referred to something ultimately unknowable) was impossible for the human mind. According to Kant, we can never know the noumenal reality of a thing (the Ding an sich), but only the phenomenal reality of it, which is constricted by the fact that our mind cannot think outside of the boundaries of space and time (this is why a concept like infinity can never be properly expressed by us humans).  Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is reflected in Jung’s distinction between the unconscious and the conscious and the archetypes and their symbols.

Jung mentions  that he was put on the path of mythology through Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810-1812, “Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, particularly the Greeks”). In this book Creuzer argued that the true religion of the Greeks could be found in mystery cults like that of Eleusis, and that it had its origins in the clerical Brahmanism of ancient India. Creuzer himself was heir to the German Romantic school of thought that considered mythology to be a unique fusion of poetry and religion that expressed the spirit of an entire nation. Many of the Romantics therefore called for a new German mythology that would unify the (in their opinion) fragmented society. 

Jung was furthermore influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887). Although he was mostly known for his hypothesis that in its earliest form human society had been matriarchal, Bachofen also postulated that myths were constructed by a “guiding thought” that was not bound by “specific localities or persons”, clearly prefiguring Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. (Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, p. 199) It was at Jung’s suggestion that certain sections of Bachofen’s writings were translated into English and subsequently published by the Bollingen series of Princeton University Press (named after the place where Jung built his famous tower).

The collective unconscious is a substratum of pre-existent forms that underlies the whole of humanity. This collective unconscious (different from the personal unconscious which consist of an individual’s memories) is the heritage of an age-old collection of human reaction patterns and a sort of container for the “constantly repeated experiences of humanity.” (Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 69)  Archetypes are the specific reaction-patterns that the collective unconscious urges on to us. In short, an archetype is an unrepresentable element of the psyche’s instinctual structure (the collective unconscious), and it arises as a kind of physiological urge or instinct that tries to tell you what to do in a certain situation. According to Jung there are just as many archetypes as there are normal human situations. Because archetypes can only be experienced and not consciously understood, the entire process of constructing them into archetypal images happens unconsciously. When the conscious mind becomes aware of the archetypal images communicated to it by the archetypes, it makes sense of them by constructing them into a narrative form, namely myths. So, while the archetypes are the transcultural structures of human experience, the archetypal images are time and culture-bound representations of them, which accounts for the radical differences of the religious traditions of the world, but also explains the coinciding of many of their basic themes.

In essence, the function of archetypal images is to mediate between the conscious mind and the unconscious archetypes. For Jung the mental health of an individual came down primarily to a question of balance. It was the most important duty of one’s life to attain a mental equilibrium between the forces of the unconscious and the predispositions of the conscious mind. This harmonizing act, symbolized by the uniting of opposites and constellated by the archetype of the self, was in Jung’s mind one of the most poignant vocations of myth and religion, and it also led him to make detailed excursions into alchemy and Gnosticism. Quintessential archetypal images that Jung liked to refer to were the shadow (the negative and socially unacceptable inclinations of one’s personality) and the anima (the female aspect of the male psyche) and the animus (the male aspect of the female psyche).

I can already hear the cheap, inferior cogs and wheels within your ailing brains grinding to a halt while processing this marvellous summary. I imagine that the extraordinary clarity is blinding your mind’s eye. Best to lie down for a bit and rest your fragile and decrepit senses.

Next part coming soon....