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March 2 - March 2, 2021
whereas the word ‘mind’ is often used—even by Jung himself— in the restrictive sense of intellect or rational thought, ‘psyche’ has a broader denotation, encompassing not only thought but also intuition, imagination, feeling, emotion, etc.
for Jung and all depth psychologists, the psyche encompasses not only conscious processes, but also unconscious ones.
the psychic is an emancipation of function from its instinctual form … The psychic condition or quality begins where the function loses its outer and inner determinism and … begins to show itself accessible to a will motivated from other sources. (ONP: 108)
Psychic processes, therefore, are those amenable—at least to some extent—to deliberate volition, as opposed to being entirely determined by instinctual urges grounded in physiology.
Jung then extends this notion towards the polar opposite of instinct: with increasing freedom from sheer instinct the [psyche] will ultimately reach a point at which the intrinsic energy of the function ceases altogether to be oriented by instinct in the original sense, and attains a so-called “spiritual” form. (ONP: 109)
This is why spirit (the drive to serve something bigger than oneself) is the opposite of instinct (the drive to act towards of one’s own survival).
Qualitatively, what characterizes the dynamisms of spirit is that, contrary to instinct, they often contain a superior analysis or insight or knowledge which consciousness has not been able to produce. We have a suitable word for such occurrences—intuition. (PR: 49, emphasis added)
Because “primitive mentality finds it quite natural to personify the invisible presence” (ACU: 210) of spirit, Jung sometimes alludes to these spiritual dispositions as daemons —autonomous complexes or agencies with a resolve of their own, which we do not identify with—capable of subjugati...
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The picture we are then left with is of a psyche sandwiched between instinct on the lower end and spirit on the higher. On the lower end, deliberate personal volition cedes control to the automatism of compulsive drives, whereas on the higher end it is subjugated to the impersonal agenda of daemons. This equates the psyche proper with processes under the control of deliberate personal volition (cf. ONP: 110).
“What I would call the psyche proper extends to all functions which can be brought under the influence of a will” (ONP: 110,
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The unqualified term ‘psyche,’ on the other hand, is used less restrictively by Jung: both the spheres of instinct and spirit can be considered ‘psychic’ in a looser, more general sense.
In what sense are instinct and spirit still psychic, given that they transcend deliberate personal volition? What does the qualifier ‘psychic’ refer to in such cases?
the psyche proper is the subjective psyche, whereas the instinctual and spiritual domains are encompassed in what Jung interchangeably calls the ‘ objective psyche’ or the ‘unconscious.’ The qualifier ‘objective’ is meant to highlight that processes in that part of the psyche (a) escape the control of our deliberate volition and (b) are common to multiple individuals, like shared instincts (cf. e.g. PR: 3-4); they are seemingly autonomous, animated by their own impetus, unfolding on their own accord whether we like it or not, and seem to be separate from us.
Although the objective processes in the unconscious escape our introspective awareness and volitional control, we can still experience their effects on the subjective psyche, such as dreams, mystical visions, spiritual callings, sexual libido, etc.
The objective, autonomous activity of the unconscious impinges on our subjective field of awareness, leaving a recognizable imprint on it. This is analogous to how physical processes in the outside world impinge and leave recognizable imprints on our sense organs.
In modern philosophy of mind, the term ‘consciousness’ is usually understood in terms of what Ned Block (1995) called ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ Phenomenally conscious states are experiential in nature—i.e. states in which there is something it feels like to be.
phenomenal consciousness— or, more simply, ‘phenomenality’—entails qualities of experience, which may be perceptual (such as color, flavor, aroma, etc.) or endogenous (such as fear, love, desire, disappointment, etc.).
Jung defines ‘consciousness’ in a much more specific and restrictive manner. For him, consciousness is a relatively small subset of phenomenality, defined on the basis of three key properties. The first we have already encountered when discussing the psyche proper: only mental states under the control of deliberate personal volition are conscious. But then Jung adds: because of its empirical freedom of choice, the will needs a supraordinate authority, something like a consciousness of itself … Volition presupposes a choosing subject who envisages different possibilities. (ONP: 110, emphasis
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each re-representation constituting a reflection of an experiential content at a higher-level of cognition—the “supraordinate authority” achieves a kind of “consciousness of itself,” as claimed by Jung.
how easy it is for us to have experiences that we aren’t self-reflectively aware of. And although it is simple for us to refocus our attention and re-represent the experience of breathing upon being prompted, other types of experience aren’t re-representable even upon prompting
In Jung’s words, “It is in the nature of the conscious mind to concentrate on relatively few contents and to raise them to the highest pitch of clarity ” (ACU:
In a clinical context, psychologists in Jung’s time could not differentiate between the absence of an experience and the absence of the mere re-representation of the experience. In both cases, patients would not report the experience (not even to themselves). Only since recently—thanks to advances in neuroimaging and the development of so-called “no report paradigms” (Tsuchiya et al. 2015, Vandenbroucke et al. 2014)— can neuroscientists tell the difference. Therefore, it is perfectly understandable that Jung considers meta-cognition a necessary attribute of consciousness. After all, all he had
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Jung adds a third defining property of consciousness. While discussing the progressive development of awareness in children, he says: when the child recognizes someone or something—when he “knows” a person or a thing—then we feel that the child has consciousness. … But what is recognition or knowledge in this sense? We speak of “knowing” something when we succeed in linking a new perception to an already established context … “Knowing” is based, therefore, upon a conscious connection between psychic contents. (MMSS: 100, emphasis added)
there cannot be consciousness without “firmly-knit” (ONP: 118) webs of cognitive associations.
In summary, according to Jung consciousness is a subset of what we today call ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ In addition to being experiential in nature, conscious contents must: (a) fall under the control of deliberate personal volition; (b) be meta-cognitively re-represented or reflected, so as to be introspectively accessible and reportable; and (c) be linked within a firmly-knit web of cognitive associations.
Henceforth, I shall consistently use the term ‘consciousness’ and the qualifier ‘conscious’ in the restrictive sense defined by Jung, and ‘phenomenality’ or ‘experience’—along with the respective qualifiers ‘phenomenal’ and ‘experiential’—when I mean the broader notion of phenomenal consciousness defined by Block (1995).
the activity of the unconscious directly impinges on the psyche proper, in the sense that we can introspectively access its effects without mediation by the sense organs. So the unconscious and the psyche proper must, to some degree, overlap or ‘touch’ each other, which suggests that they are merely different regions of the same psychic ground. In Jung’s words, the unconscious “has according to its effects a psychical nature” (JWL: 83)—i.e. it must have the same essence as that which it directly affects.
Consciousness and the unconscious must both be psychic ; they must have the same metaphysical ground or categorical basis, the difference between them being merely the relative strength of particular properties—namely, self-reflection, volitional control and cognitive association—of the respective contents.
unconscious contents must be experiences with a relative lack of volitional control, re-representation and cognitive association. Commerce of contents between the unconscious and consciousness is possible because these properties can strengthen or weaken over time for any given experiential content—i.e. cognitive associations can form and dissolve over time, contents can enter and leave the field of attention.
The essence of both consciousness and the unconscious is thus experiential, experience being the unifying factor that brings them together as integral parts of the psyche.
to say that something is psychic means to assert its intrinsically experiential nature, whether it’s also conscious or not. The unconscious is psychic because it is experiential.
The psyche is defined by phenomenality : all its contents have an experiential essence or nature. Some of these contents are conscious in that they are controlled by deliberate volition, accessible through self-reflective introspection and linked in a web of cognitive associations. The remaining contents are unconscious. These unconscious contents are objective in the sense of being autonomous from the point of view of consciousness. The activity of consciousness and the unconscious can impinge on each other. When the unconscious impinges on consciousness, we experience the resulting effects
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Jung refers to our ordinary consciousness as ‘ego-consciousness.’
Although some authors claim that ‘ego’ and ‘consciousness’ are synonymous in Jungian psychology, I beg to differ. The ego is the center of a particular web of experiential contents: namely, the one that populates our ordinary waking state. But we know that the psyche can seemingly break up into multiple, disjoint—yet internally connected—webs of conscious contents.
The result is that, unbeknownst to us—i.e. to our ego- consciousness—other centers of experience may inhabit our psyche along with us. Each of these hidden centers may entail a (deliberating) subject of experience. As such, they may be conscious from their own perspective, their respective experiential contents meeting the criteria for consciousness discussed earlier (although perhaps to a lower degree than ego-consciousness).
Therefore, he “would hardly venture to assume that there is in the unconscious a ruling principle analogous to the ego”
Yet within the “decentralized congeries of psychic processes” there may be islands of consciousness
Jung is basically arguing that, in addition to non-re-represented, autonomous and cognitively isolated phenomenality, the unconscious may also comprise a veritable population ofsomewhatconscious agencies distinct from the ego, each with its own experiential contents.
in Jung’s view the psyche may be an ecosystem of communicating conscious agencies, in which ego-consciousness is merely one of the participants.
for Jung the unconscious comprises: (a) relatively autonomous—‘objective’—experiences outside the control of deliberate personal volition; (b) experiences that, relative to consciousness, lack re-representation and, therefore, are at least less easily accessible through self-reflective introspection; (c) experiences that, relative to consciousness, lack cognitive associations and, therefore, can’t be placed in as wide a cognitive context; and (d) somewhat conscious experiences belonging to internally connected webs of associations, such webs being, however, dissociated from ego-consciousness .
Jung has two motivations for considering the unconscious integral to the psyche: one is that unconscious processes can directly impinge on ego-consciousness and thereby produce introspectively discernible effects ; the other is that at least some unconscious contents can altogether cross into ego-consciousness and be directly inspected. However, if other contents of the unconscious can never cross into ego-consciousness, we lose the latter motivation and cannot be as confident about their psychic nature.
The inconsistency is clear: contents that ostensibly aren’t necessarily psychic—but psychoid instead—are integral to the unconscious. But since “the psyche is a conscious-unconscious whole” (ONP: 131), the unconscious—along with the psychoid— is integral to the psyche! So is the psychoid realm psychic or not? Is it essentially experiential, like the rest of the psyche, or something altogether different, despite its ability to interact directly —i.e. without mediation by the sense organs—with ego-consciousness?
insofar as an implicit philosophical system can be attributed to Jung, such system would collapse if the psychoid weren’t actually—like the rest of the psyche—just psychic.
Unlike Freud, Jung sees the unconscious as an active and creative agency in its own right, not merely a passive repository of repressed or discarded contents of ego-consciousness. As
So for Jung consciousness rests on the unconscious, not the other way around.
Jung posits that the foundations of the unconscious are collective and transpersonal, as opposed to being confined to any individual psyche. As such, the unconscious can be divided into two segments: the personal unconscious—which, like consciousness, is bound to a particular individual—and the collective unconscious. The latter is the foundational segment, older in an evolutionary sense and shared by all human beings. It is also the psychoid segment of the unconscious, in that its contents can never cross into ego-consciousness.
The structure and contents of the collective unconscious are a priori : they predate the rise of both consciousness and the personal unconscious and are independent of conscious experiences. The personal unconscious, on the other hand, corresponds more or less to the Freudian unconscious, consisting of dissociated, repressed, forgotten or otherwise discarded contents that originated in ego-consciousness, and which can return to ego-consciousness under appropriate conditions
structure of the collective unconscious is defined by what Jung calls the ‘archetypes.’ These are primordial, a priori templates of psychic activity. To the degree that they escape the full control of deliberate volition, our emotions, beliefs, thoughts and behaviors unfold according to patterns that mirror these inborn archetypal templates. In two particularly eloquent passages, Jung describes the archetypes as unconscious but nonetheless active-living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions.
These “ideas in the Platonic sense” have effects which have an organizing influence on the contents of consciousness.
Each typical, spontaneous pattern of behavior, feeling, thought and belief in human beings is determined by an archetype. As such, according to Jung these patterns aren’t learned but, instead, inborn ; they correspond to the primordial templates of the collective unconscious as they assert themselves by impinging on ego-consciousness.
