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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Maggie Hyde
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August 24 - September 5, 2023
“Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was a place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.”
Such recollections were called abreactive, meaning that even physical ailments could disappear once the trauma had been recalled.
Psychotic ideas were an individual’s attempt to create a new vision of the world.
Psychiatry recognized that the unconscious could retain “daily residues”, images seen and forgotten and yet still stored in the subliminal mind, but Jung wondered if it could hold ancient or “archaic residues”. Was the patient’s image of the sun a collective, inherited image, harking back to forgotten mythologies buried in our unconscious?
hero who must undergo a dangerous Nekyia or “night-sea journey”.
In addition to the personal unconscious, he posited a collective unconscious which is formed of two components, the instincts and the archetypes.
Instincts are impulses which carry out actions from necessity, and they have a biological quality, similar to the homing instinct in birds. Instincts determine our actions. Yet in the same manner, Jung suggests that there are innate, unconscious modes of understanding which regulate our perception itself. These are the archetypes: inborn forms of “intuition” which are the necessary determinants of all psychic processes.
As the instincts determine our actions, so the archetypes determine our mode of apprehension. Both instincts and archetypes are collective because they are concerned with universal, inherited contents beyond the perso...
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Jung distinguished the archetype per se from the archetypal image. The existence of the archetype itself can only be inferred, since it is by definition unconscious, whereas the archetypal image intrudes into consciousness and is the way we perceive the archetype for ourselves.
The patient struggling to make sense of a disturbing symbol, an obscure dream or fantasy image, releases the unconscious meaning of the archetypes. Jung calls this the transcendent function, the archetypal process which brings into consciousness a previously unconscious content and restores the psyche to healthy balance.
Jung’s own constructive practice was to reconnect the individual “with the gods” – that is, with the collective archetypes of the unconscious – so that the healing transcendent function could come into play.
Whatever emerges from the unconscious, whether it is an idea, image or an illusion, creates a psychic reality.
Although the Ego is the centre of consciousness, it should not be confused with the Self which is the final goal of the individuation process, the wholeness of the personality.
The psyche is not confined to individuals only, but has a collective nature too, structured in the same way as the individual. The collective psyche forms the “Zeitgeist” or spirit of the age.
The unconscious side of the Persona is the Soul-image. Jung uses the Latin male and female names for the soul, the animus and the anima. The Soul-Image is always represented by the individual’s opposite gender.
For Jung, the image of the unity of self and intelligible cosmos was the mandala (p.65), but the experience of it was in meaningful coincidences.
All religions confirm the existence of “something whole”, independent of the individual ego and whose nature transcends consciousness.
Jung defines the “whole person” as the Self. In the archetypal symbolism of the Mass, Christ represents the Self, and the Mass itself dramatizes the individuation process. The mystery of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who is only a part of himself, into his totality, symbolically expressed by Christ.
In 1950, the Pope declared the doctrine of the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption – her literal “heavenly transportation” and reunion with the Son as the Celestial Bride. Jung saw this as the Church’s unconscious recognition of the “fourth term”. He called it “the most important religious event since the Reformation”.
The Spring Point reached the first star in the tail of Pisces 2 in 1818. We now come to the enantiodromian or “mirror-image opposite” of Christianity, to an era of generally anti-Christian ways of thinking. The “birth of the Antichrist” occurs with the French Revolution, when a statue to the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Anti-Christian materialism would soon be established by Charles Darwin (born 1809) and Karl Marx (born 1818).
Jung believed that alchemy stood as the Shadow in compensatory relationship to Christianity. Christianity’s one-sided dogma and inability to unite the opposites had alienated us from our natural roots in the unconscious.
The slippery nature of mercury with its invisible, poisonous vapours epitomized the dangers, tricks and deceptions of the entire work. The Spirit of Mercurius is the central figure through whom the alchemical union of opposites is made possible. Mercurius is for Jung the image of the collective unconscious itself.
When the Ego unites successfully with the unconscious soul-image, it will produce a new personality compounded of both, the self or union of opposites.
synchronicity to describe an “a-causal connection between psychic states and objective events.”
Most spontaneous “synchronistic” events like this one usually had a direct psychic connection with an archetype.
Jung and Pauli agreed that the trinity of classical physics – time, space and causality – could be turned into a quaternity by adding synchronicity as a 4th term.
The relationship between observer and observed remains confused, giving rise to two understandings of synchronicity. In one version – Synchronicity I – there is already an “interdependence of objective events amongst themselves” (planets and marriage), observed objectively. Yet the second version – Synchronicity II – involves the subjective participation of the observing psyche – the experimenter’s psyche is also involved.
Jung also has to posit the existence of a psychoid level of reality, existing prior to human consciousness. This implies an order and pattern in the cosmos, a transcendental meaning inherent in the collective psyche. Synchronicity postulates a meaning which is a priori to human consciousness and apparently exists outside of man.
Shadow: the inferior, uncivilized and animal qualities repressed by the Ego form a Shadow, which stands in compensatory relationship to the “light” of the Ego. The Shadow is “the thing a person has no wish to be”. It is of the same sex as the individual and can appear in dreams and fantasy if it can be projected.
