Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
July 22, 2018
‘The shadow coincides with the “personal” unconscious (which corresponds to Freud’s conception of the unconscious)’ (Jung 1939: par. 513).
CW 9i
Jung asserts that consciousness grows out of the unconscious psyche which is older than it – not that the unconscious is merely the remnants of older material.
The collective unconscious is the part of the psyche that is not a personal acquisition and has not been acquired through personal experience. Its contents have never been in consciousness – they are not repressed or forgotten – and they are not acquired but owe their existence to a form of heredity.
My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. (Jung 1936:
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CW 9i
he says, the archetypes are analogous to the instincts.
The collective unconscious consists of ‘primordial images’ and ‘mythological motifs’ and Jung concludes that our myths, legends and fairy tales are carriers of a projected unconscious psyche. Jung analogises this process to the way in which humans have projected meaningful images onto the stars and ‘constellated’ them in forms which are then named.
He disagrees with the functionalist argument that early man sought to explain natural events by anthropomorphising them. Instead, Jung argues that over millions of years, the psyche, like the body, has adapted to physical events in the environment and produced the mythological material out of a participation mystique where the separation of subject and object is not distinct. And it is not the physical phenomena – the thunder or clouds or earthquakes – that remains in the psyche but ‘the fantasies caused by the affects they arouse’ (Jung 1927: par. 331; my italics).
CW 8 estructura y dinamica de la psique
Bodily functions like hunger and sex similarly produce engrained fantasy images as do dangers, sickness and death. But, above all, it is the most ordinary, everyday events, ‘immediate realities like husband, wife, father, mother, child … which are eternally repeated, [and] create the mightiest archetypes of all, whose ceaseless activity is everywhere apparent even in a rationalistic age like ours’ (Jung 1927: par. 336).
So, the collective unconscious is a record in, and of, the psyche of humankind going back to its remotest beginnings just as we still have ancestral traces in our body morphology and our ‘reptilian brain’. But it is far from being, a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways … the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume. From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creat...
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While being just as relevant for the individual as the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious is, therefore, even more important to take into account when Jung considers the psychological as...
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Freud even went as far as rooting the Oedipus in his own fantasy reconstruction of the father-murdering sons of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912–1913),
Jung points out that since archaic times, the collective unconscious has found its relation with, and expression in, consciousness through various forms of philosophy and religion. But when these forms degenerate under the pressure of rationalism and the epistemological restrictions of science – especially since the end of the medieval period – psyche has fewer and fewer symbolic or ritual ways in which it may be expressed and then tends to get projected collectively as and where it will.
‘Since neuroses are in most cases not just private concerns, but social phenomena, we must assume that archetypes are constellated in these cases too’ (Jung 1936: par. 98).
CW 9i
They once functioned for humans and the psyche but have now lost their power to connect consciousness to its roots in the psyche’s instinctual base and thus retain for humans a link to Nature and the rest of the (non-human) world.
Niko Tinbergen found what he calls ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ in animals especially when it comes to the relationship between parents and their young. John Bowlby took this up in his theory of attachment. Noam Chomsky’s ideas of ‘deep structures’ in the brain which give humans the potential for a universal grammatical structure
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology both argue for adaptive psychic structures produced over millennia of evolution which sound very much like what Jung meant by the archetypes of the collective unconscious: ‘specialized learning mechanisms that organize experience into adaptively meaningful schemas or frames’ (Cosmides 1985, quoted in Walters 1994).
Stevens also notes how Paul Maclean (1976) demonstrated that mammalian and reptilian parts of the human brain still function in modern human beings.
Lakoff and Johnson in their book Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) have used studies in neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and neural modelling to conclude that ‘most of our thought is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but in the sense that it operates beneath the level of cognitive awareness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be focused on’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 10).
The reason that Jung and Freud became world famous (and Carus did not) seems to lie with the fact that psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are methods of treatment.
Much like Nietzsche before him, Jung emphasises how on the one hand, modern consciousness has evolved in a specialised way thus enabling the greatest manipulation of the world humans have ever seen. On the other hand, however, neglect of the unconscious has resulted in great losses to humanity in the way that the creative potential of the psyche is, at best, ignored in favour of an assumption that progress may be achieved through the application of conscious rationality alone.
I have linked postmodern philosophical and social critique with Jung’s psychology in the sense that in both the validation of subjective experience is able to stand authentically and pluralistically beside the claims of the dominant epistemologies that have relied on ‘objectivity’ alone (Hauke 2000).
(Samuels 1995, 2001) also
politics in the couch
Carus, C.G. (1846/1975) Psyche. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Ellenberger, H. (1970/1994) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. London: Fontana.
Jouvet, M. (1975) ‘The function of dreaming: a neurophysiologist’s point of view’, in M.S. Gazzaniga and C. Blakemore (eds) Handbook of Psychobiology. New York: Academic Press.
Jung, C.G. (1906a) ‘Psychoanalysis and association experiments’, in CW 2: pars. 660–727. ——— (1906b) ‘Association, dream and hysterical symptom’, in CW 2: pars. 793–862. ——— (1909) ‘The association method’, in CW 2: pars. 939–998.
Revisar estas referencias paea los experimentos de asociación de palabras
——— (1913) ‘The theory of psychoanalysis’, in CW 4: pars. 203–522.
——— (1936) ‘The concept of the collective unconscious’, in CW 9i: pars. 87–110.
Malik, K. (2000) Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Phoenix.
Nietzsche, F. (1878) Human, All Too Human, trans. H. Zimmern and P.V. Cohn, quoted in Jung, CW 5: par. 27.
Samuels, A. (1995) The Political Psyche. London: Routledge.
——— (2001) Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. London: Profile.
Stevens, A. (1995) ‘Jungian psychology, the body, and the future’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 40: 353–364.
Habla de la vuelta a las estructiras innatas en biología, psicología y neurociencias
Walters, S. (1994) ‘Algorithms and archetypes: evolutionary psychology and Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious’. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 17(3): 287–306.
Whyte, L.L. (1960) The Unconscious before Freud. New ...
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Virtually alone among depth psychologists of the twentieth century, he rejected the tabula rasa theory of human psychological development, wholeheartedly embracing the notion that evolutionary pressures had determined the basic structures and functions of the human psyche. Jung wrote: [It is] a mistake to suppose that the psyche of the newborn child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. Insofar as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any
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CW 9i
There is no human experience, nor would experience be possible at all, without the intervention of a subjective aptitude. What is this subjective aptitude? Ultimately it consists of an innate psychic structure which allows men to have experiences of this kind. Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrate, etc. The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise,
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CW 7
‘All these factors, therefore, that were essential to our near and remote ancestors will also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited organic system’ (Jung 1928/1931: par. 717).
CW 8
Jung held that a truly scientific psychology must start from what human beings had in common before the study of individual differences
This inevitably brought him into conflict with Sigmund Freud. Whereas Freud insisted that the unconscious mind was entirely personal and peculiar to the individual and made up of repressed wishes and traumatic memories,
Support for this notion came from the studies Jung conducted with his colleagues at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich into the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenic patients. They were able to demonstrate that these contained motifs and images that also occurred in myths, religions, and fairy tales from all over the world (Jung 1956).
the archetypes of the collective unconscious provided the basic themes of human life on which each individual worked out his or her own sets of variations.
The intuition that there is more to the psyche than individual experience could possibly put there began in Jung’s childhood when it struck him that there were things in his dreams that came from somewhere beyond himself – for example, the very first dream he could remember, which occurred when he was 3, of an underground phallic god (Jung 1963: 25–26).
RSP loc 292 primer sueño de Jung. el dios falico
Jung first referred to these universal structures as ‘primordial images’ in 1912 – a term he borrowed from Jakob Burckhardt – and later, in 1917, as ‘dominants of the collective unconscious’. His first use of the term ‘archetype’ is in his essay ‘Instinct and the unconscious’ originally published in 1919 (1929: par. 270).
This change of nomenclature occurred because, with time, Jung recognised that the manifestations of the universal dominants were not restricted to images but occurred in ideas, feelings and experiences as well as in characteristic patterns of behaviour. As a result, ‘archetype’ gradually supplanted ‘primordial image’ in his writings, though for some years he tended to use both terms interchangeably.
‘Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action’ (1936: par. 99; Jung’s italics).
CW 9i
it was not until the publication of his essay ‘The spirit of psychology’ (1947; revised in CW 8 as ‘On the nature of the psyche’, 1954) that he finally freed himself of the Lamarckian taint, making a clear distinction between the deeply unconscious and therefore unknowable and irrepresentable archetype-as-such (similar to Kant’s das Ding-an-sich) and the archetypal images, ideas and behaviours that the archetype-as-such gives rise to.
It is the archetype-as-such (the predisposition to have certain experience) that is inherited, not the experience itself.
the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a ‘pattern of behaviour’. This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology. (Jung 1949: par. 1228)
CW 18
Such statements clearly link archetypes with instincts and Jung fully acknowledged this relationship, describing archetypes as the source of the instincts, ‘for the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume’ (1927/1931a: par. 339).
