Jungian Themes
In March 2024, Toby Johnson spoke with Suzy Shelor and
Jon Lebkowsky on Plutopia News Network Radio. Here's a link to the 1
hour video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEzJusfvHfA&t=846s&ab_channel=PlutopiaNewsNetwork
Carl Jung was Freud’s younger protégé. They broke away from one another
because the younger man dared to interpret his teacher’s dreams and
psychoanalyze THE psychoanalyst, and because Jung had become interested
in myth and religion, while Freud had become medical and scientific.
Jung’s ideas about psychotherapy are considered dated now. Mental
health medicine has become more focused on medication and/or practical
training in changing personality than the investigation of how one’s
mind works. Behavior conditioning works much more directly than
figuring out why you developed the traits you wanted to change anyway.
But Jung is still very interesting as a philosopher and theorist about
the nature of consciousness. Jung's ideas are really about religion,
and his attitudes reflect religous/spiritual themes of self-improvement
and perfection for thre sake of goodness.
Jung’s biggest idea
The biggest idea is that the mind is composed of conscious awareness of
self; unconscious dynamics that influence the self as compulsion or
appeal; and a set of patterns that affect how the unconscious works
that are shared by all people in a “collective unconscious.”
Patterns in the collective unconscious are like: disciplinary father,
benevolent mother, romantic ideal, wise old man. The most important
are: ego, anima/animus, and shadow.
The ego is who you think you are, and how you present yourself to others.
The anima/animus is the part of yourself you are not conscious of but
are affected directly by AND it is symbolized to the self as opposite
your conscious sex. This is partly because of sex role identification:
men suppress awareness of feminine traits in themselves; women don’t
like to think of themselves having masculine drives like
competitiveness. So your traits that are cross-sexed from your ego self
are pushed into the unconscious. Jung’s theory of heterosexual
attraction is that people are drawn to opposite sexed individuals who
are most like their own oppositely-sexed unconscious. That’s why “love”
is experienced as compulsion and hard to control emotion.
In Jung’s conception, all people have both a masculine and feminine
self. This is a little like the Native American Two-Spirit idea, though
the latter is more involved with homosexuality and transssexuality. The
Jungian ideas might be helpful in understanding what we’re calling
gender-identity these days.
The Shadow
Independent of the masculine/feminine valence of personality traits,
there are things that you don’t like or disapprove of in yourself.
Maybe you have been told you talk too much, so you make an effort to
control your tongue, and don’t like to think that maybe you ARE talking
too much. Or maybe you don’t feel comfortable with slang or crude
language and don’t let yourself say taboo words outloud. The traits
comprise what Jung called The Shadow, the parts of yourself you can’t
see because they are behind you and dark.
Probably Jung’s most famous idea is that traits that bother you in
other people—especially that rile you up or get your goat—are traits in
your own Shadow. So things about other people that really bother you
are things about yourself you don’t want to acknowledge or admit to.
Jung called The Shadow the “royal road to the unconscious,” because it
is the easiest to see. You know what bothers you in others. Once you
understand the notion of the Shadow as projection, you HAVE to see that
your upset is coming from inside you. So recognizing your shadow is a
first step in realizing your conscious and unconscious minds.
The Four Functions
There are some personality tests that occasionally get popularized that
assign you certain qualities like “Thinking-intuitive introvert.” These
derive from the Myers-Briggs scale.
The idea is that the human mind has 4 functions: thinking, feeling,
sensing and intuiting. The first two are about how you value and
analyze information; the second two about how you get the information
in the first place.
You are very good at one of the four. You are unconscious of its direct
opposite. So if you are very good at thinking—like most males it used
to be thought—you aren’t good at feelings and don’t understand what it
means when people, like women, judge by their feelings instead of
rational thought. Traditionally males were thinking/sensing types and
females feeling/intuitive.
The gender-links are probably old hat now, and both males and females have been allowed to be freer in how their minds work.
But the model is still very helpful—especially in explaining how and
why people sometimes just cannot agree on something that seems so
obvious to bother of them.
There is a fifth function called The Transcendent Function which is the
ability to understand the four function model and to be able to rise
above it and see how the model explains what’s going on.
Mythology
Jung was fascinated with religion and myth, and saw this whole side of
human nature as a clue to the dynamics of the mind. He called these
patterns archetypes. They are sort of like the filing system of the
mind. Thoughts and feelings about your mother get filed in a folder in
your mind that says Mother; also in that folder are myths you learned
about the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Goddess Kali, memories of favorite
school teachers, loving movie characters, or fairy tales and TV shows.
Jung was fascinated with dreams. He observed that collective myths are
very similar to individual dreams. His idea of analytic psychology was
to tell your therapist about your dreams and let your mind loose
associate and amplify the meanings in order for you to see how your
mind operated.
Besides dreams, the other “royal road” into the unconscious was your
Shadow. By seeing—and telling your analyst—about things that bother you
in other people, you could begin to see how you are driven by your
unconscious and you can look to bring your Shadow into consciousness.
Just as an individual’s dreams show the structure of their psyche, so
the collective myths show the structure of the racial/planetary psyche.
Alchemy
Jung was fascinated with medieval alchemy, the use of chemical
reactions to demonstrate and symbolize psychological changes. Alchemy
was really a spiritual mystical practice that derived from the
underground religions and Greek mysteries that had coexisted with
mainstream Christianity in Europe and the Near-East. The transformation
of lead into gold symbolized the development of the mind from common
sense to spiritual enlightenment and oneness with God. Burning red
mercuric oxide powered rock in a glass tube will precipitate out shiny
silver, liquid mercury. A miracle. By performing the chemistry and
meditating on the transformation you got something like a sacrament
that showed how you became more Godlike.
Synchronicity
Part of human experience that seems inexplicable—and therefore
imaginary—by scientific rules and models, but that remains VERY
psychologically powerful is meaningful coincidence. We all notice
coincidences; we are often fascinated by them. They seem like they must
be “signs from God”—or at least from one’s own unconscious that caused
you to notice them and to be in awe.
Jung thought synchronicity has to be some kind of pattern in reality
parallel to, but different from, causality. Certainly noticing
coincidences is one of the ways the “unconscious” communicates with the
conscious ego. But these things seem so much more magical than that.
Sometimes they involve the real outside world, as when, for instance,
you are driving your car and mulling over your life and you ask a
question of God or address the Universe as though it were a being of
itself, and then a car pulls up at the red light next to you and a song
begins to play on the other’s driver’s radio that to you perfectly
answers the issue you just posed. How does that happen? Is there a
larger part of ourselves that can actually change how things are going
to happen and drops clues and gives hints at what that bigger self is.
Individuation
Jung’s goal in therapy, i.e., what he thought the purpose of
therapy —and religion— was to help a person become conscious of all parts
of him- or her-self, so that they make decisions and judgments and they don’t act
from compulsion. It was not just to train people to conform to society—as so much of psychotherapy actually turns out to be. The self naturally wants to move toward self-awareness
and self-control, being one’s own person. That’s what Jung called
Individuation, being an individual and understanding one’s own mind—with
that transcendent function.
It’s a little like seeing with God’s eyes, that is, with disinterest.
One of Jung’s loveliest things is from a letter he received from a former patient who wrote:
“Out of evil, much good has come to me. By
keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by
accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them
to be – by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and
unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I
always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some
way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by
accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them.
So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever
comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in
this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative
sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How
I tried to force everything to go according to way I thought it ought
to."
A former patient of C. G. Jung (Alchemical Studies, pg 47)
Toby Johnson, author of some ten books, including Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell,
trained in San Francisco as a psychotherapist in a Jungian-oriented
psychology program at the California Institute of Integral
Studies. While in grad school for his PhD, he worked as a
Psychiatric Technician at the psych emergency room, called the Crisis
Clinic, at Mt Zion Hospital. Mt Zion, the Jewish hospital, was also
home of the Psychoanalytic Institute of San Francisco. He had the
peculiar opportunity to be be exposed to both "New Age," progressive
theories of psychotherapy and traditional Freudian theories, and the
modern approaches of medical-model psychiatry. He brings an unusually
broad perspective to understanding different—and conflicting—models and
theories of human psychological functioning. He has struggled
throughout his life to transcend the conflicts and develop a concept of
mind that includes psychology, mythology, religion, and spirituality.
Johnson is a native San Antonian and has lived in Austin off and on
since 1988.
Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. 