Revisiting Carl Jung, Part 3: The Unconscious

Part 3 of a series about Carl Jung’s thoughts.

In this post, I’ll start looking at Jung’s conception of the “unconscious.” It relates to the phrase “psyche” in the chapter “Freud and Jung–Contrasts.” There, he called it the “mother of consciousness.” Here, also, he explains it as a noncorporeal phenomenon with an existence beyond the conscious mind, but he does so in terms that someone steeped in Western rationalism can understand. Having been steeped in Western rationalism, I find this approach helpful. Jung says:

“It would all be so much simpler if we could only deny the existence of the psyche. But here we are with our immediate experiences of something that is–something that has taken root in the midst of our measurable, ponderable, three-dimensional reality, that differs bafflingly from this in every respect and in all its parts, and yet reflects it. . . . If it occupies no space, it has no body. Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear? What is more, life and psyche existed for me before I could say “I,” and when this “I” disappears, as in sleep or unconsciousness, life and psyche still go on. . .” (184)

He shifts from calling this phenomenon the psyche to the unconscious psyche and sometimes the unconscious. Does he consider them the same? Or does he suppose there is a conscious psyche? I can’t tell. Either way, he’s still firmly within Western rationalism when he talks about the functions of the unconscious psyche with a comparison to instinct that operates in the animal world.

“A high regard for the unconscious psyche as a source of knowledge is by no means such a delusion as our Western rationalism likes to suppose. We are inclined to assume that, in the last resort, all knowledge comes from without. Yet today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean a immeasurable increase in knowledge if they could only be made conscious. Modern investigation of animal instinct, as for example in insects, has brought together a rich fund of empirical findings which show that if man acted as certain insects do he would possess a higher intelligence than at present. It cannot, of course, be proved that insects possess conscious knowledge, but common-sense cannot doubt that their unconscious action-patterns are psychic functions.” (185)

I don’t know exactly which “certain insects” were studied pre-1933 and found to have high intelligence, but today I would think about the difference between the ant and the anthill. The anthill possesses its own form of intelligence. An ant, if it thinks anything, if it has a conscious mind, could think it is acting of its own accord. It might be dimly aware of the system that organizes it, or it might not. 

Jung then moves from animal instinct to human instinct:

“Man’s unconscious likewise contains all the patterns of life and behavior inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning. In the conscious life of the adult, as well, this unconscious, instinctive functioning is always present and active. In this activity all the functions of the conscious mind are prepared for.” (185)

So far, his comments are strictly in line with the science in Jung’s time. Like other animals, we are born knowing a lot about how to get along in the world. But he is about to take a big leap away from rationalism with a bold claim:

“The unconscious perceives, has purposes and intuitions, feels and thinks as does the conscious mind.” 

The unconscious mind has purposes? Goals? Does it? What would that mean? If I return to the concept of an anthill, then yes, you could say it has purposes and intentions. But does it feel? Does it “think”? That is a considerable stretch. Speaking as a science fiction writer and reader, though, it sets my imagination on fire.

He goes on to compare and contrast the conscious and unconscious psyche in terms of memory:

“While consciousness is intensive and concentrated, it is transient and is directed upon the immediate present and the immediate field of attention. . . A wider range of “memory” is artificially acquired and consists mainly of printed paper.” (186)

Jung contrasts this with the unconscious, which contains “an immense fund of accumulated inheritance-factors left by one generation of men after another. . . ” (186)

That’s on scientifically conventional ground. But next he makes another big leap and imagines the unconscious psyche as its own personage, even suggesting this entity is called God. Please note that Jung’s God is intersex.

“If it were permissable to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal….Unfortunately-or rather let us say fortunately-this being  dreams. At least it seems to us as if the collective unconscious, which appears to us in dreams, had no consciousness of its own contents-though of course we cannot be sure of this, any more than we are in the case of insects.” (187)

Now he’s back in the world of rational analysis. Just as the ant doesn’t know what, or if, the anthill is thinking, people can’t fathom the intelligence behind the collective unconscious.

He goes on to talk about how people in “past ages” would have characterized the collective unconscious. People of past ages “held the individual soul to be dependent upon a world-system of the spirit. They could not fail to do so, because they were aware of the untold treasure of experience lying hidden beneath the transient consciousness of the individual. These ages not only formed a hypothesis about the world system of the spirit, but they assumed without question that this system was a being with a will and consciousness-was even a person-and they called this being God, the quintessence of reality. He was for them the most real of beings, the first cause, through whom alone the soul could be understood.” (187-188)

That’s a view of the collective unconsciousness as God. Is this true? Is it real? There’s no way for us to know. Jung has gone beyond science into philosophy and metaphysics. As a psychologist he’s in trouble here, and he is honest enough to say so:

“In the foregoing I have shown where the problems lie for a psychology that does not explain everything upon physical grounds, but appeals to a world of the spirit whose active principle is neither matter and its qualities nor any state of energy, but God.” (188) 

He begins to ground the question in the context of psychoanalysis, where there is a patient’s life at stake: “we are not free to set up theories which do not concern our patients or may even injure them. Here we come to a question which is often attended by mortal danger–the question whether we base our explanations upon matter or upon spirit.” (188)

Neither the physical world nor the spiritual world is sufficient to explain our experience, he says, but the “modern” psychologist unfortunately ends up believing two contradictory ideas–the physical and the spiritual–and this leads to opportunism. I’m not sure which practitioners or practices he might have been referring to, but I can see the risk in a medical authority claiming to understand the spiritual world behind a patient’s mental illness.  

Jung has a solution to this apparent contradiction, and it is surprisingly elegant. By the time he gets to the end of his reasoning, he has proven a ghost is just as real as a fire.

“The conflict of nature and mind is itself a reflection of the paradox contained in the psychic being of man. This reveals a material and a spiritual aspect which appear a contradiction as long as we fail to understand the nature of psychic life. Whenever, with our human understanding, we must pronounce upon something that we have not grasped or cannot grasp, then–if we are honest–we must be willing to contradict ourselves, and we must pull this something into it antithetical parts in order to deal with it all. The conflict of the material and spiritual aspects of life only shows that the psychic is in the last resort an incomprehensible something. Without a doubt psychic happenings constitute our only, immediate experience. All that I experience is psychic. Even physical pain is a psychic event that belongs to my experience. My sense-impressions. . . are psychic images, and these alone are my immediate experience. . .. Here there is a reality to which the psychologist can appeal–namely psychic reality.” (189-190)

So here is his solution to the contradiction:

“If I change my concept of reality in such a way as to admit that all psychic happenings are real–and no other use of the concept is valid–this puts an end to the conflict of matter and mind as contradictory explanatory principles.” (190)

To illustrate his point, Jung compares the pain caused by being burned by fire to the fear of a ghost. “[J]ust as the fire is the psychic image of a physical process whose nature is unknown so my fear of the ghost is a psychic image from a mental source; it is just as real as the fire, for my fear is as real as the pain caused by the fire.” (190)

To recap and expand on this point, from a psychoanalyst’s point of view, the material fire and immaterial ghost both cause “psychic events” and there is no need to speculate on whether the ghost has any existence outside the patient’s mind, because the treatment is the same.

I gave my children fits because they knew me to be honest, and once they were old enough to question Santa Claus, I swore up and down that Santa Claus was real. “Are the cookies eaten? Are your stockings filled? Do presents arrive? Is it the same for children all over?”

The world of the imagination is real. This concept actually terrifies me, because humanity is capable of both great good and great evil. All the things we can imagine, we can make real. I think about this when I see one group of people demonizing another, as maga is doing to migrants and immigrants. They are afraid of their own shadows, and so they create demons, and violence follows. And if I am afraid of maga, what is in my imagination? God help us all. Speaking of God. . .

In my next post I will explore Jung’s idea of God, the collective unconscious, and religion.

Today’s featured image is a picture of “Sfera Grande,” a sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro. What do you see in it? A world, a mind, a broken thing? Light and shadow? I think I see typewriter keys.