1955

Memories, Dreams,Reflections

“We are very far from having finished completely with the MiddleAges, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches

pretend… But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, ouruprootedness, which has given rise to the ‘discontents’ of civilization.”“Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays.He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him;

for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensiblethings.”

“The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished lifebecomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we

are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”

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In a nutshell

Modern life must be enriched by an awareness of dreams, anappreciation of myth, and a sense of mystery.

In a similar veinWilliam James The Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 130)

James Redfield The Celestine Prophecy (p. 210)Gary Zukav The Seat of the Soul (p. 306)

Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (50SHC)James Hillman The Soul’s Code (50SHC)Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (50SHC)

CHAPTER 22

Carl Gustav Jung

Most autobiographies cover the main events of the author’s life,with the reader often left with only glimpses of the inner life.Carl Jung’s autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections,

in contrast, focuses on the great psychologist’s spiritual and intellectualawakenings. The descriptions of his visions, dreams, and fantasies,which he considered his “greatest wealth,” fill the book; this he did notfor indulgence’s sake, but because he considered them the prismthrough which he could perceive the collective psyche of humankind.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections is controversial because it was still inmanuscript form when Jung died, and required further editing tobecome the final version. But it found the popular audience that Junghad always hoped for, and inspired many people to becomepsychoanalysts. Like a Christmas cake, it will be too rich and dense forsome; for others it may inspire a life-long interest in Jungian psychology,which aims to reveal the spiritual forces that lie behind the science ofthe mind and personality.

Jung and GodOther volumes carry Jung’s thoughts on mythological and psychologicalconcepts such as the “God-image,” but Memories, Dreams, Reflections,according to its editor Aniela Jaffe, is Jung’s “religious testament” to theworld, the only occasion on which he really talked about his personalexperience of God.

Both sides of Jung’s family had been pastors and theologians, andhis father was a rather doctrinaire minister. In this environment Jungnaturally grew up dwelling on religious issues. The God he imaginedwas not personal or enlightening, but simply represented the power ofthe universe in all its light, darkness, chance, and infiniteness. Throughdreams he felt led to the conclusion that God actually wants us to think

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“bad thoughts,” thoughts that go against established morality, so thatwe can make our way independently back to God. He felt that the trulyspiritual person is a free thinker who demands experience of Godrather that mere faith.

This idea of the divine as not all sweetness and light, and his beliefthat Christianity had never been able to deal satisfactorily with thequestion of evil, put Jung at odds with orthodox Christianity. Yet heconsidered himself a Christian, and in 1952 wrote to a clergyman, “Ifind that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around thesun, and are irresistibly attracted by Him.”

Everyone has religious ideas in them, Jung believed, feelings aboutthe infinite or intimations of greater meaning. He had observed thatthose who shut them out often developed neuroses, yet such peoplewould not have been “divided against themselves” if they had lived inan earlier time, in which their lives would have been closely tied tomyth, ritual, and nature. Modern people are too objective, he wrote,their spiritual horizons too narrow; many lives are lived almost entirelyon the plane of the conscious, rational mind. Were they to close the gapbetween their ego and unconscious minds, Jung believed, people wouldreturn to full mental health.

His experience with psychiatric patients led him to believe that thepsyche is by nature religious, and that the spiritual dimension is a basicelement in psychology. Though we normally think of him as a psycho-analyst, Jung’s larger quest in his work was definitely spiritual, and in atime of scientific materialism this made his ideas resonate. Asked in atelevision interview whether he believed in God, Jung replied: “I don’tbelieve—I know.”

Integrating the selfWhen Jung was at university in Zurich, he decided to specialize not ininternal medicine, his original choice, but psychiatry, then a new andsomewhat dubious field. In 1900, he began work as an assistant at theBurhölzli mental hospital in Zurich. At this time, psychiatrists werestrangely uninterested in what went through a patient’s mind. Theemphasis was on symptoms and making a diagnosis. As Jung puts it,“the human personality of the patient, his individuality, did not matterat all.” Both Freud and Jung went against scientific opinion by beinginterested in the whole person, not simply their medical conditions, and

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Jung’s first book, on the psychology of schizophrenia, aimed to showthat delusions and hallucinations were not simply random symptoms ofdisease but were closely related to the patient’s personality.

The goal of what Jung termed “individuation” was the uniting ofinner opposites, or recognizing the many contradictions within our-selves. This self-knowledge would allow a sense of unity of purposeabout our life and our personality to emerge. Jung recounted that as aboy, he realized that there were two basic aspects to a person’s being,which he termed personality No. 1 (what we usually think of as theself) and personality No. 2 (the “other”). His own No. 1 was the boywho did his homework and got into fights, but he also sensed a No. 2that rested on a “timeless, imperishable stone” of wisdom.

Jung went out of his way to listen to this part of himself because hefelt it to be his most valuable, and his lifetime’s work in exploring thevarious sides and dimensions of the self means that today we are notafraid of talking about this No. 2 personality (variously called the“shadow,” the “higher self,” and the “true self”). We appreciate that itsintegration is necessary for mental health. Without such integration, wetend to project onto other people or things what we do not recognize inourselves, with often harmful consequences.

Freud and beyondAt their first meeting in Vienna in 1907, Freud and Jung talked for 13hours straight. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describesFreud’s The Interpretation of Dreams as “epoch making,” and states,“By evaluating dreams as the most important source of informationconcerning the unconscious processes, he [Freud] gave back to mankinda tool that had seemed irretrievably lost.”

Their famous split came about because Jung could not acceptFreud’s belief that most human behavior and any instance of thespiritual in art or in a person was the result of “repressed sexuality.”From Jung’s point of view Freud, who so abhorred the religiousimpulse, wanted to turn his scientific ideas into a religion. “When Iparted from Freud,” Jung writes, “I knew that I was plunging into theunknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing; but I had taken thestep into the darkness.”

In this darkness Jung would develop many of his now famous ideas.Though he coined the psychological terms “complex,” “introvert,” and

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“extravert,” he went out on more of a limb with his idea of the“collective unconscious,” a larger human mind of which every individ-ual is a part, manifested in the images, symbols, dreams, and mythsthat seemed to emerge in all cultures. He also developed the concept of“archetypes,” ways of being or acting that people unthinkingly adoptbut that are also patterns in this broader collective psyche.

Another of Jung’s famous ideas, “synchronicity” or the occurrenceof seemingly meaningful coincidences that go beyond the realms ofnormal probability, suggested a universe in which the boundaries thathumans normally perceive between mind and matter may in somecircumstances fell away. Synchronicity is now a key concept in the NewAge movement (see James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, p. 210),but was also given credence by Jung’s friend, Nobel physicist WolfgangPauli. Jung was equally interested in numerology, particularly the sig-nificance in art and mythology of the number four, and became ascholar of alchemy, Gnosticism and the Bible. He understood the realmeaning of alchemy not as turning ordinary metals into gold, but asthe transformation of the psyche, an awakening.

In 1913, Jung had a powerful vision of all the land between the NorthSea and the Alps being flooded. On closer inspection the water wasshown to be blood, in which floated the drowned bodies of millions. Atfirst he thought this indicated that a revolution would take place, then itdawned on him that the Great War was about to break out in Europe.

Jung’s personal powers of precognition led to his delving intoparapsychology, and the credence that he gave, as a scientist, to non-physical causality was met with derision by Freud. Only time will tellwhether Jung or Freud was right on these non-traditional areas ofscience, but it is reasonable to say that Jung’s star has risen in the lastfew decades, while much of Freud’s thought has been reassessed.

Final commentsJung admitted that his “mythologizing” gave life a glamor that, onceexperienced, was difficult to do without. But then, he asked, whyshould we do without it? To the intellect, matters to do with dreamsand the unconscious may seem like a waste of time, but if they enrichour emotional lives and heal a divided mind, surely they are valuable. Ifwe have a purely rational, artless existence, never taking account of ourdreams or fantasies, we become one-dimensional. In seeking perfect

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explanations, we never dwell on the “incomprehensible things,” asJung described the mysteries of time and space; yet that which is myste-rious also gives meaning to life.

If you are tired of the shallowness of materialist, consumer culture,this book may be exactly what you need. Jung’s account of travels inAfrica, America, India, and Italy are fascinating, as is the chapter onthe tower house he built at Bollingen on the shores of Lake Zurich toget away from it all. The descriptions of dreams and visions thatappear throughout the work will not hold everyone’s attention, but formany they will spark a new interest in the unconscious mind as aprovider of guidance and wisdom.

Carl Gustav Jung Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, in 1875, the son of a Protestantminister.

In 1895 he enrolled at the University of Basel to studymedicine, and when his father died the following year had to borrowmoney to remain a student. He began to specialize in psychiatry, andfrom 1900 worked at the Burhölzli clinic in Zurich under thepioneering psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. In 1903 he married EmmaRauschenbach, a Swiss heiress. Under Swiss law Jung had access to herfortune, and they built a large house in Kusnacht for their youngfamily.

In 1905 Jung became lecturer in psychiatry at the University ofZurich, and the same year senior lecturer at the Psychiatric Clinic, apost he relinquished in 1909 due to a burgeoning private practice.

Jung was a prolific writer. His books include The Psychology ofthe Unconscious, Psychology and Religion, Psychology and Alchemy,and The Undiscovered Self. Many writings are included in TheCollected Works of C. G. Jung. He died in 1961.

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