Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our present state of mind depends on our history. In each person's past, there are elements of varying value that determine the psychological "constellation". Events that do not trigger strong emotions hardly influence our thoughts or actions; on the other hand, those that evoke strong emotional reactions are of great importance for our later psychological development.
Every emotion generates a more or less far-reaching complex of associations, which I call the "emotional complex".
the true nature of the emotional complex; it is always about desire and resistance. We spend our lives fighting for the fulfillment of our desires. All our actions stem from the desire for something specific to happen or not to happen.
This method is practiced as follows: One chooses a particularly striking part of the dream and then asks the person concerned about associations he or she makes with it. The person is asked to say openly what comes to mind about this part of the dream, whereby any criticism should be eliminated as far as possible. Criticism is nothing other than censorship; it is resistance to the complex and tends to suppress what is most important.
The person concerned should therefore say absolutely everything that comes to mind, without paying any attention to what it is. This is always difficult at first, especially in an introspective interview where attention cannot be suppressed to such an extent that the inhibiting effect of censorship is eliminated. This is because one has the strongest resistance to oneself.
For normal psychology, Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" and "The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious". For the neuroses Breuer and Freud, "Studies on Hysteria"; Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria". For the psychoses Jung, "On the psychology of dementia praecox". The writings of Maeder in the "Archives de psychologie" also give an excellent summary of Freud's ideas.
The term "collective unconscious" was coined by Schopenhauer, not Jung. It was borrowed verbatim because Freud and Jung believed that these elements of the collective unconscious were the source of many of our actions and behaviours.
One of the key concepts Freud borrowed from Schopenhauer is the idea that the unconscious is the primary driver of human behavior. Schopenhauer believed that the will, or the unconscious drive to survive and reproduce, is the source of all human action.
In Freud, Jung and Schopenhauer (as well as in Nietzsche's Apollarian-Dyonysian dichotomy), the collective unconscious consists of the inherited symbolic and archetypal patterns shared by all humanity throughout all time, past, present and future (biological Deep-Time), simultaneously in dynamic interaction. Jung, in his conversations with Einstein, added a temporal element to the definition and expanded the field to include the fractal symbolism of archetypes, which are "living" universal patterns or themes present in the mythology, religion and stories of all cultures.
Jung condemned Nazism much more strongly and became a spy for the Allies. Jung was hyper-Socratic in all his therapeutic aims, seeing the spiritual development of the psyche as the critical factor in the prosperity of future society. War itself, Jung believed, was caused by the sum of individuals not taking the process of shadow integration seriously, and in the aftermath of the First World War he predicted an even greater calamity would befall Western civilization, warning in impressive detail of the impending conflict.
In step with Freud, the budding Nazi movement was what Jung called a psychological disease, a disease he actively worked against by sending psychological profiles of Hitler to Allied intelligence: "The Jewish problem is a complex one... and no responsible physician could bring himself to apply medical methods of obfuscation to it."
He criticized the Adlerian and Freudian schools for not recognizing that they are essentially clergy- the very act of trying to heal neurosis has a religious element because you are making assumptions about the Telos of human life- about meaning, purpose, and destiny. He wanted the field of Psychology to admit that it cannot exist in pure Empiricism- the very act of analysis is preceded by philosophical tenets. He writes: "Just as the discovery of the unconscious shadow-side once forced the school of Freud to deal even with questions of religion, so the latest advance of analytical psychology
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A creed gives expression to a definitive collective belief, whereas the word religion expresses a subjective relationship to a certain metaphysical, extramundane affair, while the meaning and purpose of religion lie in the relationship of the individual to God or the path to salvation/ liberation.
Ritual is a critical factor that Jung emphasizes throughout - the universal must be particularized through mystical ritual or it will never be manifested in the individual. Jung's point here, that belief in the divine is not the same as a relationship with the divine, is also Kierkegaard's central objection to Western Christianity:
The unconscious is a natural part of the human mind- it is neither good nor bad, but simply is. "we" are as much our unconsciousness as our consciousness.
