Revisiting Carl Jung, Part 1: Introduction

My featured image comes from the National Museum of African Art, collection 96-23-1, by artist Gavin Jantjes. I chose it for this post because my heart said, “Yes, that’s it, exactly.” Well, I say “heart,” but I could also say “imagination” or “spirit” or “soul” or “unconscious.” It’s easy to get all tangled up in words. My conscious mind asks: “What do you mean? What is it about this particular image?” It’s the empty space. Three outlined figures dancing against (in front of, amid. . .) a backdrop of stars. It’s telling me something I need to know. Some images are like that. They say, “A-ha!” even though I don’t know what or why. I listen quietly.

I studied Carl Jung in my early college years, not as a college course but as part of a local group that my father and stepmother belonged to. I learned and practiced a method of dream analysis, to the great benefit of my self-understanding and creativity. I also read and sometimes outlined a couple of books:

• Modern Man in Search of a Soul, first English printing 1933
• The Undiscovered Self, copyright 1957
• Man and His Symbols, copyright 1964

These titles point to a few key frustrations I have with his work. Humanity is all he/him. Man is broken into “modern man” and “primitive man.” The world is broken into the Western world and the “other.” All those cultural biases from those times.

All the same, they were foundational to the way I understand the landscape of our collective mind. Spirituality, art, stories, philosophy, science — everything. I have something I would like to say, but I realized that to express my thoughts, I would need to dip back into these books. I was surprised at what I had underlined, highlighted, and marked with highlighter pen.

In this series of posts, I will examine Carl Jung’s ideas as a way of retracing my steps back from the beginning to the way I now think about the psyche. The full series is:

• Introduction
• The Psyche
• The Unconscious
• Collective Unconscious
• A Warning
• Hope
• Beyond Jung (forthcoming)

In my next post, I will talk about the chapter “Freud and Jung–Contrasts” from Modern Man in Search of a Soul.