Carl Gustav Jung was weird. He spent 20 years building a tower to nowhere, he painted his dreams, he thought long and deeply about alchemy, witchcraft, and UFOs. Though he wrote millions of words in his decades long career, the bulk of his thinking came down to images and impressions which became increasingly difficult for him to describe.
His contributions? The “complex,” a widespread idea in contemporary psychology, is Jung’s construct. He also laid the groundwork for the Myers-Briggs, a version of which I had to take recently when applying to a grocery store (yes, I applied for a job at a grocery store), inspired Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous, and gave us the word association test, in which I say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind. He also, perhaps unfortunately, set the stage for a whole host of shabby New Age thinking with his ideas of synchronicity, transcendence, and the collective unconscious.
So who was this guy? And what did he actually say?
He said a lot. He wrote a lot. He was big, in every sense of the word: tall, loud, affable, rude, an inspired maverick, and for at least six years during the first World War, very close to really pretty crazy. Those six years marked a turning point for Jung, as they marked a turning point for the western world. One might argue the two histories are linked.
The good doctor had just broken with his friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud, and was descending into a creative madness, a hallucinogenic soup that would set the stage for his next five decades of work and life. Europe was sliding into the bloodiest war in its long history of wars, one that wouldn’t, for all intents and purposes, end until a quarter century later with the detonation of two atom bombs in the heavily populated islands of an Asian theocracy.
Out of this six year psychic archeology, this “confrontation with the unconscious,” Jung constructed a loosely patched net of theories about how we are as humans, and what it means. Unlike Freud’s sexual reductionism, Jung saw the human psyche as grand and terrifying, filled with thousands of lifetimes of built in and built up experiences, passed down father to son and mother to daughter, tribal generation to tribal generation, through the ages of famine, sickness, war, birth, death, love, marriage, infidelity, harvests and hunts, predators and prey.
These predispositions, these unacknowledged histories, Jung called “archetypes.” The archetypes reside out of reach of the conscious mind, even below what Jung considered the personal unconscious (that bantam cupboard in which we store our own experiences), in a vast ocean of shared sentiment he named the “collective unconscious.”
The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is off limits, unknowable. It’s like a locked basement. One can never directly access its contents. Nevertheless, the archetypes, though hidden, exert power over each of us. They are, in effect, universally shared ways of perceiving, interpreting, and sculpting meaning out of the flux of phenomena.
And what are the archetypes? There are hundreds, but just to name a few: the child, the victim, the alchemist, the avenger, the sleuth, the goddess, the adventurer. Pick up a comic book and you’ll find Jungian themes on every page.
But I must conclude. This is a blog, after all, and there are limits to what one might say in 700 words.
Therefore, I say Jung was weird. But I say he was only as weird as the depths of the human mind. While there are problems with his idea of the collective unconscious (where exactly is
it?) and syncronicity probably doesn’t stand up to a thorough statistical analysis, I must confess an affinity for Jung because he went beyond the bounds of the rational; he stepped outside of the everyday machinations of the tidy Swiss suburb where he raised his family and earned his living: he plunged, like Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, yes, like Freud too, to the very limits of meaning; he walked out the side door of the workaday world, and stood up and stared into the face of the mystery.
A bold life, Dr Jung. And well played.
(note: the first image on this blog post is what came up when I searched: Jung Photo. I couldn't resist.)
