Jung’s five stages of psycho-cultural development

Being an Eva Koch Scholar at Woodbrooke was an utter indulgence in being able to completely immerse oneself in a chosen subject: unlimited access to the library; supportive tutors; the other scholars to discuss ideas and relax with; Woodbrooke's wonderful gardens to wander and contemplate in; the support and friendship of the FiRs (Friends in Residence) and of the staff; being provided with three meals a day and a private en-suite room; nothing to do but study  – what could possibly be better?

In return you are encouraged to share the fruits of your researches with the wider Quaker community. My time at Woodbrooke was only part of what proved to be a six year process, that also involved using Friends House Library in London and visiting the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva in order to see the archives of the Switzerland Yearly Meeting. The result has the working title Jung, the Quakers and Hitler, the text of which is now in the hands of a publisher. 

This blog is in part about the process of research and writing – the incidental discoveries and surprises on the way, as well as the challenges – but also about how that has affected me. It is a way of my processing and reflecting on the impact – something that is still ongoing. You cannot explore the psycho-spiritual journeys of your subjects without shadowing that yourself. 

I was already using this blog to explore my own spiritual journey before encountering Irene Pickard's archive. The avalanche of material that inundated me as a result of that encounter has carried me to many places that I would never have chosen: I had too many prejudices, too many barriers, too much spiritual hurt and antipathy. 

Alison Bush, who invited me to look at Irene's archive, introduced me to N, a friend of hers and a Jungian Psychologist, who was studying for a doctorate at the University of Essex at that time. Alison suspected I would need a Jungian mentor if I was to make sense of her mother's archive. Indeed she was right. 

It just so happened that, eighteen months later, whilst luxuriating in my time at Woodbrooke, N was one of the two tutors running a Jungian weekend course there – Dreaming Jung. I signed up. 

On the Saturday evening, the participants were let loose in the art room to prepare props for the role play that was to happen the following morning. I am a terrible participant on courses – far too undisciplined and anarchic. I inveigled N to sneak off and have a cup of coffee with me so that I could discuss with her some of the difficulties I was having understanding Jung. As it happened, one of the other Eva Koch scholars, who was a Professor of 'The Science of Religion' at a European University, was by the self service bar. The wonder of liminal spaces is that they can be the most dynamic and creative spaces of all. What transpired between the three of us was one of the most profound discussions about the nature of belief I have ever encountered. It even drew an audience of fascinated onlookers. The meat of it was N's explanation of Jung's five stages of psycho-cultural development, as she called them, if I understood her correctly.

Psycho-cultural because Jung was suggesting that they were stages both of cultural development, resulting from evolutions in the collective unconscious, and stages in individuation, in the maturation of the individual psyche. 

The stages could be seen in the history of religions and the societies that embraced them because they were manifestations of the collective unconscious which set the milieu and climate in which the individual unconscious was marinated: it was its growth media. The conscious self grew out of the individual unconscious, but also fed into it, just as the individual's words and actions fed into the collective unconscious through their impact on others. There is a dynamic and evolutionary process at play between the publicly conscious, privately conscious, individually unconscious and collectively unconscious levels. This is why Jung could talk of a mass-psychosis having overcome the German people under Hitler. Hitler was a product of that mass-psychosis, but he also fed into it, intensifying it and giving it shape, substance and direction.

At an individual level, the five stages may be witnessed as a child grows into adulthood and, if they are not blocked along the way, then matures on through life, often via a mid-life crisis, to reach a deeper and fuller realisation of the 'self' (their total being). A more benign state that is reconciled with the fact of their impending death. Too often individuals become stuck at some point on this path of individuation, or even regress, and are likely to become damaging to themselves or others: an all too common fate! Individuation can involve a great deal of hard work and struggle, often marked by crises and breakdowns. 

Later that evening, before going to bed, I made a note of what I thought the five stages were. The problem with profound conversations is that they can also be ephemeral. The following list is my late night distillation of what I understood.

Jung’s five stages of psycho-cultural development:

1. The pantheistic god: god as everything: god is the tree, etc.

2. The panoptic god: god is spirits in things: god is in the tree, but is not the tree itself.
 Nature as a lens through which to see god.
   
3. The transcendent god: god is above everything looking down and controlling: god the lawgiver, the all-seeing, etc: the god of judgement.

4. The death of god: there is no god: the bubble of the illusion is burst: an entirely secular world: a godless, god-free world. [c.f: if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.]
 Secularism, not atheism, replaces religion. The progression is agnosticism, atheism, secularism: the complete disenchantment of life.
   
5. The projected god: god as the spiritual relationship we feel with the tree, etc: god as our participation mystique with the universe and the realisation of that mystique as a felt, experienced reality. The re-enchantment of life by discovering the outwards reaching of our inward spiritual centre (the god-archetype – the deep centre – the 'selbst').
   

In terms of European history, stages one and two correspond to the increasingly mythologised paganism of the pre-Christian period, evolving from "nature is god" to "the gods are present in nature" – genus loci – but also above nature – the Olympian gods. Stage three comes with the appropriation of the Jewish god, Yahweh, as "God the Father" of Christianity.  Stage four is a consequence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution – the redundancy of God! – followed by the shock of the two World Wars – the intolerability of a God that would allow suffering on that scale. The extent to which the 'death of god' is spreading can be judged from the decline in participation in religion in the UK, perhaps the country that has progressed furthest in the fourth stage. Similar declines can be charted across the rest of Europe and in North America. The beginnings of the fifth stage can be observed in an increase in spiritual questing. The fourth stage creates a hunger, a longing, a need. The fifth stage sees people seeking to satisfy that need. The rise of New Age spirituality and of increasing interest in a sanitised Buddhism, indicated by the proliferation of Buddha statues in gardens or as household ornaments, or an ersatz Hinduism that focuses on Yoga and mediation set against a vague Brahman(ish) background, are indicators of the onset of the fifth stage. 

For me, I certainly suffered stage four. The proffered God of my culture was not just dead, but hammered to death with rigorous logic and spurned with revulsion: the twin shadows of the holocaust and of Hiroshima falling over the dwindling remnants of 'the god of love' revealing it to be the 'god of infinite hypocrisy'. However, there was a unacknowledged need, a discomfort, that gave rise to my attempting to deconstruct Zen just as I had deconstructed Christianity. Silly me: of course Zen was going to win – it was me that was deconstructed! That opened me to a wider questing, which came to rest where I am now: disciplined by sitting regularly in the gathered silence of a Quaker community and beginning to allow that re-enchantment, that discovery of the outwards reaching of an inward spiritual centre.