Memories, Dreams & Reflections — The Thinking Of Carl G. Jung
Delving deep into the unknown without even waking
Carl Gustuv Jung blows my mind every time I attempt to understand his ideas and I just can’t comprehend how his teachings aren’t included in the educational systems.
His intense interest in the unconscious content of the mind – likely because of his own experiences in early life with vivid dreams and psychic events – has led to a system of understanding the psyche and human behaviour like nothing else.
As a psychiatrist, he could explore this world deeply. His work with schizophrenic patients in Burghölzli mental hospital, Switzerland, alongside his personal research led him to develop insights into the ego, archetypes, the collective unconscious, as well as personality.
It was Jung that first conceptualised the di-pole pattern in personality that is well known today as ‘introversion vs extraversion’.
Modern personality tests put this on a scale or within a ‘type’. For example, in the Big Five Scale of personality, I score extremely low in extroversion – in other words I am very inwardly focussed. As the ancient Greeks termed it in the 4 temperaments — melancholic.
Although individual difference is a fascinating subject, Jung didn’t stay in this domain. He had an immense capacity and gift to link the individual to the whole. As important as it is to ‘know thyself’ it is much more beneficial to know thyself /within/ context.
Through his research into ancient traditions like mythology, alchemy, Western and Eastern religion, even hermetic texts, he sought to balance the overly rational modern mode of thinking (if only he could see how much worse it is now).
The microscope would be a fitting symbol for today’s perspective. Rationality hyper focusses on the disconnected details of the material realm.
“When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead in our hands.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
Looking too closely at an object but not truly seeing how it connects to everything else. Context changes everything. Taking something out of context can really ruin a good joke. Thinking that because we can list an impressive array of facts and processes that we’ve calculated and tested, that we know what that thing is in its entirety – this is the narrowly focussed perspective that our world occupies now.
The terrifying reality is that there is an unknowable amount of unknown out there in the world, and as individuals, we sit directly upon an immense amount of unknown material within our own minds. We comfort ourselves by describing who we are through personality, but it’s merely a table cloth.
Jung proposed that our minds were all connected at a deep level – through what he termed the ‘collective unconscious’. Where dreams spring forth from. Where archetypes and shadow figures dance around.
This ‘unknown’ material seeps into consciousness – or rather, it is experienced through consciousness, facilitated by ‘ego’.
When I read of Jung describing the ego and its complexes, an image of a web comes to mind. An interweaving, supporting structure that allows the subject to be oriented within a dynamic system. I think that the fascia of our bodies is also a direct analogy to the ego.
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
This interconnected web allows us to experience… everything.
A failure of the ego is to become overwhelmed by the monumental forces of the unconscious. Think of a tiny spider without its web – squished almost immediately, at least in my room.
At its worst, an unstable ego results in schizophrenia or psychosis. Unable to function meaningfully or productively. No linearity of thinking to hold and sustain. Overcome with projections of the unintegrated shadow to the point of self annihilation.
To be over identified with the ego is perhaps just as destructive and the current state of our culture reflects this disappointingly accurately. We just love to identify ourselves wholly with the ego. Our obsession with identity and individuality has become a sickness, a blindness. We have taken ourselves out of context.
We are looking at our own selves through a microscope.
Because we are not just our ego. The ego is a necessary but small aspect of the entire Self. The ego helps us to navigate the external and internal worlds and even though it inevitably becomes rigid in certain spots – giving us complexes – we mustn’t let it become completely rigid.
Think of the web again, or fascia – that’s less icky to me.
When the fascia that’s interwoven through our muscles becomes rigid, we get sore and tight and go OUCH when someone tries to pull us beyond our comfortable range of motion. Maybe even angry – how dare you!
But to deny that pull would be to deny a fundamental aspect of life – that it seeks to balance us. In order to become whole – or to individuate – we travel through life taking our egos seriously but lightly. Allowing them to be influenced by unconscious symbolic and archetypal material that balances us.
Being triggered is misinterpreted these days as a signal for that person or material to cease and desist. “Don’t come near me with that ego threatening idea!” And it is a threat. If you believe that the ego is all you are. But it’s not even half of what we are if we take Jung’s ideas seriously.
A triggered response is an immensely interesting indication that you’ve hit a complex. Time to get the ointment out and gently rub the area.
There is so much more to Jung’s thinking but I have to stop somewhere. I’m not going to let this man blow my mind into smithereens again.
If you can take home anything from Jungian thinking, just pay attention to the projections on the screen of your mind. The things that you don’t have a choice in thinking about:
Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung