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One hundred years ago, Gustav Jung declared his differences with Freud and devoted himself to ideas that are still relevant today. Jung suggested looking for meaning, listening to your intuition, and exploring the irrational. Why are his ideas in vogue today?
Worldwide circulation of books on analytical psychology, created by Jung. The words “archetype” or “collective unconscious”, first proposed by him, are eagerly used by the political and even glossy press. On the other hand, any specialist will confirm that Jung’s works are difficult to read, and ideas can confuse any materialist. So what is their attraction?
beyond the mind
Jung’s thought is complex and multidimensional: it stretches from psychology to spiritual practices, wandering through alchemy and astrology, Buddhism and Kabbalah, the plots of the Bible and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
In contrast to Freud’s pessimism, according to which a person is doomed to eternal internal discord, Jung offers us a path to harmony. Thus, it opens up space for our innermost dream – to escape from the rigid laws of reason that rule our mundane world, and to feel the strength of the spirit as the most important force that we possess. What Jung proposes is in tune with our desires. And so it makes sense to discover his ideas for yourself – or rediscover.
True, to do this, first of all, we have to give up the habit of believing only in what can be measured and weighed, and learn to trust intuition and imagination. Mysteries beyond reason are an organic part of the Jungian world. Without connection with them, as well as without spiritual food, Jung did not consider a full life possible.
Here is just one characteristic quote – from his television interview with the English journalist John Freeman: “The soul is not completely subject to space and time. In dreams and visions, you can see the future. Only ignorance denies these facts.”
Three “I”
Our personality in the Jungian view is organized around three elements: the ego and the two unconscious. The ego is the center of consciousness, what allows each of us to remain ourselves and feel like a person. The personal unconscious consists of “forgotten” painful memories and feelings repressed from the ego. Jung agreed with Freud that the problems of some patients can be solved only by working with the personal unconscious and helping to become aware of fantasies, feelings, emotions.
But he also argued that in addition to the individual there is also a collective unconscious. This special psychic reality exists outside of a particular person and long before our birth. It is inhabited by the characters of ancient myths and the most significant images of human culture. We inherit it when we come into this world.
According to Jungian logic, if an apple is handed to a child in a dream, a vague memory of a lost paradise is sure to stir in his soul for a moment – even if no one has yet told him the story of Adam and Eve.
The Internet can be considered the collective consciousness, and maybe even the collective unconscious of our days.
How do these images enter our minds? There is no rational answer to this question. But how can this confuse those for whom the soul is not a figure of speech, but a reality?
“Jung was far ahead of his time,” reflects Jungian analyst, co-chairman of the Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology (MAAP) Stanislav Raevsky, “and it is easier for us to understand him than for his contemporaries. In a sense, many of his ideas materialized before our eyes. So, the Internet can be considered the collective consciousness, and maybe the collective unconscious of our days: it is oversaturated with sexuality, there are many frightening images, and at the same time it influences our lives in many ways.
Freud spoke about the individual unconscious, and for his time it was important – Western society had just grown up to the ideas of individualism. Today the situation is different.
“The need for new forms of collectivity is very great,” continues Stanislav Raevsky. And the deeper we explore the unconscious, the farther we go from the individual. The Russian mentality is communal, and therefore the individual themes of Freud are not as valuable to us as the collective themes of Jung. Even protest moods are not least a demand for new forms of collectivity.”
Human heritage
Passed down from generation to generation, the collective unconscious stores all the typical reactions of the human race – fear, an intuitive premonition of danger, or, for example, love. These are emotional reactions and stereotypes of behavior common to all people, which manifest themselves in the form of archetypes.
There are archetypes in the structure of personality. The most important of these are the archetypes of the Person and the Shadow. A persona is our public face, a mask that we “put on”, adjusting to the expectations of others and striving to be understood and accepted. And the Shadow is those features of our personality that we do not recognize because of their unacceptability. After all, from the point of view of ideas about ourselves, there should not be anything “bad” in our inner world. But everyone has a Shadow, and to reconcile a person with it is one of the tasks of analytical psychology.
The collective unconscious includes a great variety of archetypes. The Holy Grail and Philosopher’s Stone, self-sacrificing heroes and sleeping beauties are classic examples of archetypes that shape our perception of reality and determine, as Jung argued, our behavior.
Let’s say another classic archetype is the Great Mother. The symbol of motherhood is absolutely in all mythologies. The great mother comes to us in dreams or fairy tales: the character is both positive and negative, she is embodied in a good fairy, an evil witch or a cannibal giantess. She is a protective mother, but she is also a stepmother who prevents her daughter from achieving her own femininity.
According to Jung, the eternal conflict between mother and daughter, the fantasy of the ideal mother, the stubborn refusal to understand that the real mother will never love us as we hope, all this is due to the presence in each of us of the Great Mother archetype.
How Jung Became Jung
In 1906, while working in a Zurich clinic, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was carried away by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, with whom he would be associated for several years of cooperation and friendship. Freud calls Jung his scientific successor, but later Jung abandons many of the ideas of psychoanalysis and immerses himself in the study of myths, the history of civilizations and occult practices. The final break – both philosophical and personal – occurs in 1912, after the publication of the book Symbols of Transformation.
In 1914, Jung left the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association and created a new method of psychotherapy – analytical psychology. However, psychoanalysis owes its basic principle to him: every analyst, in order to practice, must himself undergo a lengthy personal analysis.
Another gender within us
We are all bisexual, Jung argued, at least mentally. In any woman there is a masculine part – her animus, the archetype of the masculine. And not only present, but also developing: all the men who leave a mark on her life form elements of her animus, the male archetype. In the same way, a man has to build relationships with a woman in himself – with his anima, the female archetype.
Without anima and animus, we could never imagine what it means to be in love, Jung assured. After all, falling in love, we find in another person the features of our anima or our animus, that is, some part of ourselves. And the fantasies of fusion, pushing us to endless search for someone who will complete us once and for all and relieve us of the feeling of inferiority, testify to the inability to conduct a dialogue with one’s male or female part. Which forces you to look for it in the outside world.
Looking for meaning
The purpose of life is to move from the ego, our “little self”, to the big “I”. Jung called this transition the process of individuation. This refers to the internal movement, the vector of development, thanks to which we must try to “achieve our self”, to realize our uniqueness. This process of searching for harmony, integrity, meaningfulness is a kind of rebirth of a person.
Usually individuation becomes possible after a mid-life crisis, the first half of which is spent under the control of an overactive ego. This is not an easy path: we have to build harmonious relationships with our Shadow, the part that we are ashamed of, and Persona, our social image, with our anima and our animus.
The main reason for Jung’s popularity today is the understanding of the needs of the individual, which are not limited to the framework of the material world.
We need to stop lying to ourselves and denying what worries us about ourselves. Of course, we will not be able to carry out all this in its entirety, but the main thing is to try.
“Perhaps the main reason for Jung’s popularity today,” reflects Jungian analyst Lev Khegai, “is the understanding of the needs of the individual, which are not limited to the material world. By the middle of life, our ego is fully formed, but far from all the needs of the soul are satisfied.
This is a conflict between the ego, which is associated with the traditions of society, upbringing, family, life circumstances, and the second, deeper “I” with its inherent dreams of our special mission, destiny. And speaking more broadly, the conflict between the two levels of human existence is very relevant today.”
Recipe for a decent life
Jung warns that we are far from angelic serenity, and “life under the sign of complete harmony”, without any difficulties, would be “boring and oppressive” for us, even more – “inhuman”. The path of individuation that he proposes can be through work on oneself, analysis of dreams, meditation, prayer, contemplation, reflection on paper. You say – mysticism, idealism, naivety? For some, it’s possible.
But does pure rationalism make us much happier? Does it provide answers to our main existential questions: how to approach happiness, overcome suffering, love, be loved, resist illness, loss, death? In 1946, one of his old friends asked Jung: what should one do in order to end one’s life with dignity? And Jung replied, “Live your own life.” The main thing is to live, that’s all.