Aug 27, 2023 (Medium.com)
For the psychologist Carl Jung the modern condition is not one inherently different from that of our far past. However it is one we are forced to interpret differently. He says:
I recall a professor of philosophy who once consulted me about his cancer phobia . He suffered from a compulsive conviction that he had a malignant tumor , although nothing of the kind was ever found in dozens of X-ray pictures. “Oh . I know there is nothing.’ “ he would say. “but there might be something. “ What was it that produced this idea ? It obviously came from a fear that wasn’t installed by conscious deliberation . The morbid thought suddenly overcame him. and it had a power of its own that he could not control . It was far more difficult for this educated man to make an admission of this kind than it would have been for a primitive to say that he was plagued by a ghost. The malign influence of evil spirits is at least an admissible hypothesis in a primitive culture , but it is a shattering experience for a civilized person to admit that his troubles are nothing more than a foolish prank of the imagination . The primitive phenomenon of obsession has not vanished : it is the same as ever, it is only interpreted in a different and more obnoxious way. (Jung, Man and His Symbols)
For Jung much of the modern world, by refusing to partake in the symbols that might allow us to understand our unconscious minds, means we find ourselves paralysed by an inability to properly relate to the parts of our minds not superficially accessible to us.
Indeed as the world has been increasingly literalised we have come to believe that aspects of our minds, emotions, instincts, behaviours are either transparent to us or else are or in time will be transparent the investigation of the physical sciences. We might observe that in the age of hyper-technology forms such as social media cause us to become even more driven by impulse and self-projection. Jung again says in Man and His symbols:
What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion. This may be by means of physical symptoms in the case of a neurosis, or by means of incidents of various kinds, such as unaccountable moods, unexpected forgetfulness, or mistakes in speech. A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.
Yet for Jung the solution lies in his own psychological work. Much of Man and His Symbols focuses on the importance of things such as dream interpretation, and the understanding of the unconscious psyche through Jung’s schema of mythology and psychology. Myths and dreams both have an importance in Jung’s work.
Yet some problems arise for anyone who tries to make coherent sense of Jung’s body of writings. Some of his observations have become integrated into modern language (such as introvert/extrovert) but many have largely been rejected or are seen as too mystical for science to take seriously. At times Jung’s reliance on his own dream interpretations seems to border on the superstitious, and his assimilating of all religious and mythic traditions into his own scheme mean a heavy reliance lies upon his own ability to winnow and interpret. As profound as some of his observations may be Jung is the centre of his own religion. So what can we learn from Jung’s observations at the very cusp of the modern world?
Perhaps we can learn the obvious but disregarded idea that stories, myths and images relate us to ourselves in a way that is as useful as anything else. While there is some use in understanding ourselves physically, seeking psychological wholeness involves a wider comprehension of ourselves as selves in a narrative and symbolic world.
We might consider this from the perspective of the problem of perception. When we look at a table we see a table, but no physical analysis can understand how this is so. There are no “table atoms”, just atoms, nor is there some constituent substance that makes a table partake in table-ness and so make it in some sense the same in kind as any other table. We interpret the world in forms that have their own meaning, and a belief that these forms can be reduced to some underlying reality that is more real than the forms themselves leaves us no nearer properly understanding them. The current approach of much modern neuroscience and philosophy is to use words like “illusion” or “epiphenomenon”, or to use language such as Anil Seth in his Ted Talk titled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”.
Yet we find unavoidably as Jung has pointed out that metaphors and stories have a kind of truth we lose if we simplify them to mechanistic explanations. Even if it were true that the brain “hallucinates” reality, however contradictory such a phrase may be, it leaves us no closer to understanding ourselves, let alone finding a path to wholeness. To consider Jung’s earlier comparison between a person haunted by a ghost and a person who has some neurosis they know is neurosis but seem to in some sense not have control over themselves, we see the same problem manifesting itself. Sometimes we have not gained anything by refusing to call a table a table.
You could argue in many ways Jung tried to create a psychological religion, one that synthesised myth into his own Scheme and turned them into his own psychological heuristics. Perhaps this in itself could be argued to be a kind of reductionism, one that does not allow us to see the context of religious ideas. But Jung like many other great thinkers and philosophers of the pre-hypermodern age foresaw many of the profound problems we ourselves now have to find a path beyond.
Written by Matthew
I’m not here at all, you’re dearly fooled. https://thisisleisfullofnoises.substack.com/