Modern Man in Search of a Soul. C.G. Jung. (Part II)

5. The Stages of Life

Problems exist because of the growth of consciousness in man; consciousness means turning away from instinct/nature, and that messes with us.

I actually already typed up all my thoughts about this chapter, and I must have done something wrong because Blogger ate them. So I'm going to throw a few interesting points out there and move on...hopefully also moving on from my irritation.


"No one takes the step into life without making certain presuppositions--and occasionally they are false. That is, they may not fit the conditions into which one is thrown" (100). I like this way of thinking about what's "false"--it's not an issue of what's somehow objectively accurate or inaccurate, right or wrong, but rather an issue of what "fits the conditions" in which a person must function. 

Another cool concept in this chapter is what Jung refers to as the "also-I." He says that in the dualistic stage (the stage where a person has become aware of his divided state, realizing he's no longer just easily in line with instinct/nature), "the individual finds himself compelled to recognize and to accept what is different and strange as a part of his own life--as a kind of 'also-I'" (101). It's not really new information, but it's a different way of thinking about the different "parts" of the person-in-transition.

I don't like everything Jung has to say about the so-called stages of life (particularly the things he says about how we don't understand xyz until a certain age--not sure he's spoken to very many kids or teenagers), but I appreciate this: "The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them" (104). I've noticed this phenomenon, and I try to work against it in myself. 

Jung says that the serious problems we deal with are actually good things, in that they push us to grow. He also says they're never fully "solved," and that that's also a good thing, because otherwise we'd stagnate. The point isn't to solve all the problems but to just keep working on them.

At the same time, Jung also states that we shouldn't shy away from death. "As a physician I am convinced that it is a hygienic--if I may use the word--to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose" (112). To make a long story short, he feels that there are different goals we should pursue at different points in our lives, and we shouldn't try to keep focusing on youth's goals once we're past youth (which for Jung seems to be around 35). This is part of what Jung was talking about regarding that whole "entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions" thing, that we can't entrench in youthful goals when we should be moving on toward adulthood's goals.

This is why Jung is pretty favorable toward religion. "From the standpoint of psychotherapy it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition--one part of a life-process whose extent and duration escape our knowledge" (112). He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't necessarily believe in an afterlife (and doesn't necessarily disbelieve, either), but that that's beside the point: What matters is the effect such a belief has. If it's a positive effect, then by all means, go ahead and hold the belief.

Final point: primordial images or symbols. Jung loves 'em. "It is only possible," he says, "to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is neither a question of belief nor of knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious" (113). So we're back to Jung's happy place, which is the unconscious with all its symbols-shared-across-the-human-race.


6. Freud and Jung--Contrasts

This section is short and hilarious. I mean, think about it: Jung on...Freud and Jung. This is one side of a...let's call it a dynamically-disagreeing duo...writing up some of his thoughts on the differences between himself and his not-exactly-nemesis. I haven't read enough about their relationship to have a firm opinion on whether Jung is being fair or not in this section, but I will say he certainly makes himself sound reasonable and Freud (and Adler, for that matter) sound, well, let's go with "rigid" (haha Freud rigid...penis...yeah, I went there).

Actually, I found it kind of impressive. Jung argues that Freud's and Adler's respective theories are useful, but that he has realized that they don't cover every situation. Put that way, his position seems the most reasonable, even generous--it actually incorporates the other positions as useful and worthwhile. Whereas, according to Jung, Freud and Adler are each wedded to their take on psychology being The One True Way.

One of the things I find funny about this is that it kind of matches up with Jung's comments about "civilized" vs. "primitive" man in other chapters of the book. Primitive man can see only his own way, while civilized man can reflect and see a wider, more nuanced picture. WAY TO BE PRIMITIVE, FREUD AND ADLER! I mean, Jung never overtly makes that connection, but it'd be hard to read this book and not connect those dots.

I also enjoyed this: 

The psychology we at present possess is the testimony of a few individuals here and there regarding what they have found within themselves....What Freud has to say about sexuality, infantile pleasure, and their conflict with the 'principle of reality,' as well as what he says about incest and the like, can be taken as the truest expression of his own psychic make-up. He has given adequate form to what he has noted in himself. (116-7)

To be fair, this totally matches with Jung's repeated point that "[o]ur way of looking at things is conditioned by what we are" (117). Jung makes this point in every chapter, multiple times. It's clearly important to him and it truly does seem to be how he thinks about things.

But c'mon, it's also Jung getting kicks out of publicly stating that all the stuff Freud says about sex--all that deviant, freaky unconscious stuff--is really about Freud, himself. Naughty Jung.

Another important difference Jung points out between his approach and Freud's and Adler's is that he doesn't focus on negatives. Here it is in his own words: "Both schools, to my way of thinking, deserve reproach for over-emphasizing the pathological aspect of life and for interpreting man too exclusively in the light of his defects" (117). He says Freud's ideas really only apply to people in neurotic states, but not to "the healthy mind" (117). And if you're wondering what the healthy mind is and whether anyone actually somehow has it, yeah, we're on the same page--maybe a page heavily influenced by Freud and his "over-emphasizing" of "the pathological aspect of life"?

I'm going to get into it elsewhere, so I won't address it here, but this is a chapter in which Jung's ideas about religion--and the fact that he's criticized as a "mystic" for them--surface pretty solidly. I may end up pulling from this chapter in another section, where I really get going about Jung's whole religion thing.


7. Archaic Man
This could probably go without saying considering that Jung wrote this book in 1933, but he considers the people of Africa to be prime examples of "archaic" or "primitive" man. He also refers to some of the people as "our Negroes" and "our boys" (139), which makes the modern reader cringe despite its being no surprise. 

Overall I found this chapter unnecessarily long and tedious. It felt like Jung kept making the same point over and over, albeit admittedly with interesting anecdotes about his time in...Kenya, I think? He said he was south of Mount Elgon (which is on the border of Uganda and Kenya) and he mentioned a situation where someone was brought in from Uganda, so that's my best guess. His few other references to local area names don't seem to match anything I can find online.

Jung talks about how both "primitive" and "civilized" man live based on assumptions, and neither tends to examine his assumptions. This sets us up to hopefully see some of the differences between primitive and civilized man not as deficits on the part of the former, but merely as, well, differences. Jung talks about how one sees different thinks based on one's point of view, which may lead one to notice things someone else might not or, similarly, overlook things someone might not. 

Jung points out that primitive man puts more significance on "the caprice of chance," whereas civilized man focuses on "regularity and conformity to laws" (135). This seems to be what he sees as the major difference between primitive and civilized man, and he explains it as an issue of context: primitive man's beliefs are appropriate to his world and survival, and civilized man's beliefs are appropriate to his. Actually, far from simply criticizing or writing off the "primitive" worldview, Jung takes the approach of pointing out ways in which civilized man's point-of-view contains some weaknesses. He acknowledges that primitive man's views contain contradictions, but he also points out the following:

We have universities where the idea of divine intervention is considered beneath dispute--but where theology is a part of the curriculum. A research worker in natural science may hold it obscene to attribute the smallest variation of an animal species to an act of God, but may have another drawer in his mind in which he keeps a full-blown Christian faith which he likes to parade on Sundays. Why should we excite ourselves about primitive inconsistency? (149)

Good point, Jung. And really...is inconsistency wrong? Are contradictions necessarily a problem? Why can't it be possible to hold two mutually exclusive ideas or worldviews together and just let both exist? But this is suddenly me rather than Jung, which probably means it's time to move on to Chapter 8.


8. Psychology and Literature
Jung breaks this chapter into two sections: the first is about "the formation of a work of art," and the second is about "revealing the factors that make a person artistically creative." He acknowledges that "[i]t is of course possible to draw inferences about the artist from the work of art, and vice versa, but these inferences are never conclusive" (152). You can learn things about the art from the artist and the artist from the art, but ultimately they're separate things and must be treated as such.

I love this: "The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject" (161). Yes! I'm in absolute agreement, and if I could convince my students to agree, I'd be a happy instructor. Many of them tend to come to class under the impression that the writer's interpretation of his or her own work is The Final Word. Once the writer says "here's what I meant" or "that's not what I meant," the discussion is over. No way! I should make them all read "The Death of the Author."

Jung's ideas about the artist are a mix of mystical and psychological (which should come as no surprise at this point). He says, "The primordial experience is the source of [the artist's] creativeness; it cannot be fathomed, and therefore requires mythological imagery to give it form" (164). So as I read what Jung's saying here, the artist is pulling directly from that primitive, primordial place of symbolic images, and then is struggling to somehow put it all into words. 

In Jung's opinion, things that are off-kilter and out of balance in our world "come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch" (171).

Here's something with which I entirely disagree: 

The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation--and even a sin--in the realm of art. (168)

Mind you, that could be explained by things Jung has previously said about how we live in our assumptions without typically examining them all that much. He also mentions a couple of pages before this that "[e]very period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic ailment" (166). Perhaps I'm merely expressing a bias of our age, as far as art goes, and he's expressing a bias of his. I prefer mine for various reasons, of course, not the least of which is that his assumes a "universal" life experience. THANKS, HETEROSEXUAL WHITE GUY. I WONDER WHOSE EXPERIENCE IS "UNIVERSAL" AND "OBJECTIVE." It's interesting, because at points Jung criticizes the way he sees psychology as leaving out the life experiences of the "other," especially those of other races and nations.  Dammit, Jung, get it together.

Here's some more fun gender stuff:

The creative process has feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths--we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. (170)

And to this I say, yes, Jung, you're right: Women are terrifying. <3


9. The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology
The main thrust of this chapter is that currently in the popular imagination everything is all about matter/the physical body, and a fellow--say, a psychologist!--will be ostracized if he insists on taking seriously the psyche. Neither of these ways of seeing, he explains, is necessarily better or worse. "There is nothing," he says, "to prevent the speculative intellect from treating the psyche, on the one hand, as a complicated biochemical phenomenon, and at bottom a mere play of electrons, or, on the other, from regarding the unpredictable behaviour of electrons as the sign of mental life even in them" (174).

"[I]f we maintain that mental phenomena arise from the activity of glands, we are sure of the thanks and respect of our contemporaries, whereas if we explain the break-up of the atom in the sun as an emanation of the creative Weltgeist, we shall be looked down upon as intellectual freaks" (175). Talking about anything other than the bodily and physical is taken, he says, as a sin against the spirit of the age.

I know I'm overdoing the quoting here, but I kind of love how outraged Jung is about this. Also, I rather agree with him. I'm less interested in which view is "right" or "accurate" (in part because I don't really think that distinction has much meaning) and more interested in how what's seen as right and accurate is determined by the spirit of the age, the bias of the epoch.

To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual.He is stupidly swimming against the social current. Just as formerly the assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise from the creative will of a God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from material causes. (175)

All right. Can you guess why Jung thinks things have swung so hard toward the material? Balance, of course! Previously, things were all about the spiritual, so of course now we've gone the opposite direction as a response.

Another major idea that Jung explores in this chapter is that all experiences are psychic, in that they're translated through the psyche in order for a person to have them. "We are in all truth so enclosed by psychic images that we cannot penetrate to the essence of things external to ourselves. All our knowledge is conditioned by the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real" (190). It's an interesting way of defining "real," anyway. There's more to this--he has a whole thing about how we can reconcile mind and matter by accepting that all psychic happenings are real, and that some come from a material environment while others come from a mental source, but honestly I think that part's kind of hokey and so not terribly interesting.


10. The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man
In short, it seems the problem is that once man has "outgrown" religion--as Jung puts it, "as soon as this religion can no longer embrace his life in all its fulness" (202)--then we have a problem. This isn't because Jung necessarily thinks any particular religion is "right" and that we're in peril of our immortal souls if we don't buy it, but because we need some kind of formalized way to express our souls."Whenever there is established an external form," he says, "be it ritual or spiritual, by which all the yearnings and hopes of the soul are adequately expressed--as for instance in some living religion--then we may say that the psyche is outside, and no spiritual problem, strictly speaking, exists" (201). But now we've got this issue where man "outgrows" religion, and then he has a spiritual problem.

It's important to note that Jung doesn't consider this a bad thing, per se. Remember, he's a fan of problems because they promote growth. So it may be painful to have to struggle in the absence of religious belief, but it's also an opportunity.

Here's an example: "We used to regard foreigners--the other side--as political and moral reprobates; but the modern man is forced to recognize that he is politically and morally just like anyone else" (203). Is that a bad thing to figure out? I don't think most people would say so. Recognizing that other people are just like you (instead of using them as the scary "other" against which to compare your wondrous self) is a positive, useful outcome. But it doesn't come without pain.

Anyway, so we've got this move away from religion, and a concomitant fascination with "all sorts of psychic phenomena," (206) including spiritualism, astrology, theosophy, and various others. People are, Jung says, looking for something to replace the religion that no longer works for them. And Jung doesn't seem to have an answer to this problem; rather, he explores it. And I guess it's safe to say he roots for a kind of balance...and an acceptance that (as I mentioned earlier) the struggle is "the thing," really. We shouldn't expect to solve every problem but should expect to continuously struggle on with it.

I actually found the rest of the chapter more interesting, personally. It's mostly to do with the Occident (the so-called "Western World") vs the Orient (the so-called "Eastern World").

"The Occidental burns incense to himself, and his own countenance is veiled from him in the smoke. But how do we strike men of another colour? What do China and India think of us? What feelings do we arouse in the black man? And what is the opinion of all those whom we deprive of their lands and exterminate with rum and venereal disease" (213)? There are multiple things going on here (including...is the black man of the West not Occidental, then? Is his blackness enough to differentiate him that much from his location?), but I'm left overall with the thought that I don't really know what Jung's contemporaries would have thought of him asking such a question--of him caring about such a question. And it gets more intense, actually:

My friend had recognized, without being able to name it, the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land--even those that concern him not at all. And he had also noted that megalomania of ours which leads us to suppose, among other things, that Christianity is the only truth, and the white Christ the only Redeemer. After setting the whole East in turmoil with our science and technology, and exacting tribute from it, we send our missionaries even to China. The stamping out of polygamy by the African missions has given rise to prostitution on such a scale that in Uganda alone twenty thousand pounds sterling is spent yearly on preventatives of venereal infection, not to speak of the moral consequences, which have been of the worst. And the good European pays his missionaries for these edifying achievements! No need to mention also the story of suffering in Polynesia and the blessings of the opium trade. (213-4)

I don't love everything Jung has to say, but I was rooting for him pretty hard during this paragraph. GO JUNG GO.

He also points out something else about the Eastern Other: "We have never yet hit upon the thought that while we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold upon us from within" (215-6). I don't believe he was going a paranoid route here; I don't think he was saying this as a negative, a warning to watch out for the scary, colonizing Easterners. I think, as in other chapters, he's attempting to point out that the culture from which he comes is arrogant and ought to recognize that other cultures are just as powerful, though the forms power takes may be different.


11. Psychotherapists or the Clergy
Well, that's a chapter title. I may have mentioned this before, but oh my...I'm sure Jung's contemporaries in the field of psychology were thrilled by yet another connection being drawn between psychology and religion, while they were trying so hard to associate psychology with the sciences. Not mystic, not woo-woo, totally a hard science, here. And then there comes Jung.

Oops, looks like we've found Jung's answer to The Spiritual Problem discussed in the previous chapter:

Among all my patients in the second half of life--that is to say, over thirty-five [bite me, Jung]--there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. (229)

Okay, looks like he does think people need to get religion. He reiterates, though, that "[t]his of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church" (229). So as it generally goes with Jung, this isn't about what's true or right or accurate; it's about what's effective and allows a person to live their best life.

I get what Jung's saying here, but I do find it pretty suspicious that the guy who believes everyone needs religion just happened to find that alllllll his patients ended up needing religion. I'm sure there couldn't have been any confirmation bias there, right? Hmmm. I mean, I bet Freud was finding that all his patients needed [something related to sex] and Adler's patients curiously enough all needed [something related to power]. Wink wink, nudge nudge. It's really easy to trick yourself into confirming your own beliefs.

Okay. So modern man needs religion, but Jung says he also has an aversion to traditional beliefs and wants to experiment and explore and figure things out for himself.

As far as the chapter title goes--Psychotherapists or the Clergy?--Jung seems to feel it's easier for people to talk to a good psychotherapist than to a clergyman.While the psychotherapist can't just agree with anything a patient says, he can't condemn or judge, either, whereas the clergy are typically sort of on about sin and morality. Though "even doctors have moral scruples" (234), avoiding condemnation is part of their job--because condemnation doesn't help. "We cannot change anything unless we accept it," Jung says. "Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses" (234). I was very interested in this position, as it made me think of the move from CBT (which in this case means not cock-and-ball torture but cognitive behavioral therapy...sorry, kinksters) to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT puts a certain emphasis on accepting yourself where you are--not that you might not want to change things, but that you work from a place of self-acceptance.

Ultimately, Jung seems to be advocating for a be-true-to-yourself model as the way to avoiding becoming neurotic. He even expresses it in religious terms: "Are we to understand the 'imitation of Christ' in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications" (236)? In other words, should we copy literally what Jesus did with his life, or is the thing we're supposed to copy the way in which he was true to himself in how he lived? According to Jung, it's all about the latter.

And in helping a patient pursue being true to himself, Jung says you have to support him in his egoism. The idea seems to be that he'll pursue it so far that others will reject him, and eventually he'll figure out in that state of loneliness how important the love of others is. "What we observe here," he says, "is a fundamental law of life--enantiodromia--the reversal into the opposite; and this it is that makes possible the reunion of the warring halves of the personality and thereby brings the civil war to an end" (238).

There's more, but--while I appreciate him--I'm about done with Jung for now. I'll leave you with the final paragraph of the book, which is...well, very Jung.

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree. (244)