Reflections on Jung

Jung's followed Freud in dividing the “psyche”, or mind, into a smaller conscious part and a much larger sub-conscious, or unconscious, which acts as a reservoir storing our experiences and our drives. In his eyes, ignoring the part played in our lives by our unconscious was dangerous. We may imagine ourselves the masters of our lives, but that is an illusion – a necessary illusion – but an illusion nonetheless. All goes well until our conscious self is faced with the consequences stemming from that vast hidden reservoir written into our behaviour – consequences that we may not feel comfortable about accepting as having originated from within, but consequences they are.

For Jung the unconscious was far from passive. It was, as neural scanning now reveals, highly, but silently, active. We may not be aware of what is happening in the deeper parts of our mind, but we certainly suffer from the consequences. Jung believed that we get glimpses of what is happening in our dreams, in our daydreams, in our fantasies, in our make-believe, in our play, and in what he called “active imagination”; and if we look carefully we can also get glimpses in the reflections we get back from the world around us; just as when you look through the glass of a shop window you not only see what is on display, but superimposed over it an image of yourself looking at what is on display. Careful examination of how we see the world, how we feel and respond to events, can give us insights into the workings of our unconscious self – into that deep, silent part of our mind.

At the boundary between our deep mind and our consciousness we can be aware of thoughts and feelings forming and emerging. Once they are in play we own them, we live them, they form our stream of consciousness. We are, or so we believe, in control of them. For Jung there were four different ways in which we can process the emerging content of our unconscious: inflation, suppression, projection and integration. Only one, integration, is entirely healthy, the others can all be pathological to a degree.

Inflation and suppression are interesting, and we can observe them at work in our lives, but it is in many ways projection that is the most interesting for it is seen in the way we understand the world around us – in how we believe the world to be. It colours that world for good or ill. It projects content on to it, and merges those projections with what there is. We largely do not realise that how we see the world to be is a mix of what is there, and what we have projected. They merge, and we assume that what we see as being there is what is there; that the reality we experience is totally separate and independent from us, quite free of any contamination by ourselves, unconscious or not. Unless we become deliberately conscious of our projections, just as we can become conscious of our reflection in the shop window superimposed over the images of the models in the window, we can mistakenly assume that we have a pristine and undistorted view of how the world is. For Jung disentangling our projection from our experience of the world was an important step in becoming a mature individual – part of the process he called “individuation” – of attaining the wholeness in which we have successfully integrated the content of our unconscious rather than being its unwitting victim.

For Jung one of the most powerful, and in many ways most troubling projections, was what he termed “the god image”. He was not interested in the ontological question of whether there was an objective existence over which that image might be projected – that was beyond human knowing. He even said it was “unspeakable” – that is not capable of being spoken about. He was very dismissive of those who sought to substitute “belief” in place of knowing, reminding his patients that – “If you know then you do not need to believe. If you believe then you are not sure you know” – stressing that what they should attend to is not belief but their actual experiences, noting that some of those are especially powerful and profound – “numinous” to use his preferred term.

Jung thought that the god-image would project itself over whatever was culturally available. In some cultures that was a powerful monotheism. In others it took polytheistic forms. Yet others were hybrids, such as trinitarian Christianity, particularly where the cult of Marianism was included, or the worship of bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism.

He felt that the externalisation of spiritual experience by worshipping the projection was a failure of integration and was capable of leading “believers” into some very dark places. Consider the zeal shown by witch hunters, heretic hunters, or those who would murder blasphemers or apostates. Righteous zeal has a terrible force. A force that is driven by inflating that sense of righteousness that is itself the result of attempting to align with the demands of a deity – demands which are collective projections of the unconscious of the community of believers. Pathology for Jung was not purely an individual phenomena, but could be collective and deeply infectious. Like it or not we are all vulnerable to the pull of the “participation mystique” – a mechanism of our deep minds which gives us that powerful sense of belonging which makes us align with other people. So much of who we think we are – our identity – is expressed through belonging; and that sense of belonging – of being bound together by the participation mystique – can lead us into forms of collective madness, as genocides demonstrate only too clearly.

Jung came to see how, in the absence of a religious icon of belief on which to project the god-image, substitutes would more than suffice, be they the Nation, the Great Leader, or the Cause. Jung had witnessed all these in the devotion shown to Hitler and Destiny of the German Nation, or to the Greater Good of the People under Stalin's Communism. He had seen how a peoples' participation mystique could be engaged to terrible effect through their feeling of being bound to the object of their projected god-image; their devotion finding fulfilment in obedience.

Conversely to projection, suppression would detach the individual from an essential part of their personality – their spiritual lives – leading them into the wasteland of anomie. Often he observed patients attempting to cover the suppression by becoming ever more rational – the typical style of the iconoclastic atheist. He found that the more in denial they were, the more iconoclastic they became. Reconnecting his patients with their spiritual lives, he felt, was the key part of his method. He preferred to let his patients discover that dimension, rather than overtly directing them to it. To be of any therapeutic use it had to be an organic process led from within.

Jung was also aware that projection of the god-image gave power to those who orchestrated the public performance of religion, which was an abdication of responsibility by surrender on the part of the “believer”. He insisted that his patients take back control – that spirituality was their personal experience not something to be directed externally, and they must take responsibility for it.

Instead of becoming directed by the supposed commands of the object of their projection, or more often by the commands issued by the custodians of that object – often called the teachings of the church – he encouraged his patients to examine the source of their projection, which he termed the “god-archetype”, and through engagement with it to integrate what it inspired into their lives. This he felt would need to be done by opening up to that “still quiet voice”, and by understanding that the mythologies of religions were projections of the inner process of the human mind. The death and resurrection mythology of Christianity was one such projection – an encoding in narrative form of the mind's deep struggles with death.

That deep interest in the mythologies of religions – in which he found many universal themes – stemmed from the realisation that they were cultural encodings of the processes of the deep mind – of the unconscious. He also came to suspect that religious performances had evolved to evoke responses in the unconscious, aiding it on the path of individuation, helping to engage the participation mystique, and providing the individual with a sense of identity. He even suggested that the performance of rites should be exact, because alternation would invoke different responses in the unconscious.

He was sure of the positive value of religion to peoples' lives, noting that very few people who were deeply engaged by their particular religion ever needed his services; they only came to him at a time of religious crisis, or when their religion conflicted with their deeper needs. However, he was also aware that as soon as a religion no longer served to provide a satisfactory belief structure to contain someones life, it ceased to be of any value, even becoming a hindrance. If it no longer “spoke to their condition” it would be discarded. He had met many whose religion had failed to provide any adequate sense of meaning when confronted with the carnage of the First World War: people for whom religion had simply died.

What was true for individuals, he also felt was true for entire societies. Once a religion ceased to provide for the peoples' psychological needs it would fall away to be replaced by another: one which answered those needs more exactly. He saw in the rise of Communism and Fascism one such transfer of devotion – but he also saw that those too would also fail massively. In his later works he suggested that the era of Christianity was coming to an end, and that in time it would be replaced. However, that fundamental need for an embracing living myth would still remain.

His reading of Eastern religions, and of Buddhism and Taoism in particular – he wrote introductions to a number of translations of classic Eastern religious texts – led him to realise that what he called the god-archetype, which he regarded as the source of the god-image as experienced in the West, could, in different cultural contexts, produce immense senses of profound connection and oneness without generating a god-image. However, he doubted the ability of anyone brought up in the Western “weltanschauung” (world-view) with its millenniums of Christianity built on top of earlier layers of paganism, to fully be able to achieve this. They would be too embedded in their culture to be able to detach sufficiently from its deep collective unconscious in which the archetype found expression by naturally generating a god-image. The iconoclasm of atheists being a clear indicator of their struggles to suppress the latent potential of the archetype to produce such an image in the Western mind. He felt that it would be more successful for Westerners to engage with the mystical traditions within their own cultures, such as the teachings of the Christian mystics, or the esoteric side of alchemy, as he did himself.

In 1934 in a letter written to Irene Pickard, one of the Geneva Quakers, he said “ … I was always interested in the Quaker position, believing that they were the only true Christians.” For, unlike those Christians who faced outward and worshipped the cultural symbols over which the god-image had been projected, the Quakers faced inwards ready to integrate what was generated by the god-archetype – their deep-centre, as P.W.Martin called it, or Selbst, as Jung called it in German – that location in the deep mind where the god-archetype can be found. They faced that internal source of spiritual life, that well-spring of being, and unlike their contemporaries, they did not become entangled with the machinations of theology, of doctrine, of dogma, of ritual, and of creed, but were open to the leadings that came from within as to how to live their lives. The Quaker re-discovery of “that which is of God within” was a radical re-centring requiring re-connecting with the deep-centre itself – the source of projection – making the relationship both natural and normal through a process of integration. This, to Jung's mind, was psychologically valid and healthy. It was a process of integration, one which might use the symbol of the Christ as an agent of the process – hence their being Christians – but one which did not lead to projection of the god-image and all its attendant problems. Essentially, Quakers used Christian symbols to activate the deep-centre of their being but were also alive to “new light, from whatever source it may come”: Christian yes – but not exclusively so; rooted in Christianity, but not confined by it.