At the end of 1913 Carl Gustav Jung separated himself from Freud and the psychoanalytic community. Their prior collaboration served both men crucial interests. Freud, a Jewish intellectual in declining Vienna benefitted from a connection to a center of burgeoning psychiatric research at the Burgholzli in Protestant Zurich. With the help of Jung and Bleuler, Freud was seeking the approval of the scientific world. Jung was fascinated by the analytic process, how seriously Freud took psychological phenomena. But from the beginning he had deep reservations about the theoretical underpinnings of Freud’s approach, especially his sexual theories. Freud’s method of uncovering pathologies or complexes of the mind by free association was for Jung also too reductive. Jung for example saw dreams as an expression of a sovereign subconscious not just as a visual representation of repressed instinctual powers or memories. Where Freud only saw material to uncover the causes for neuroses Jung found traces of a creative imagination, a way to integrate psychic information from a deeper realm.
But Jung didn’t have sufficient therapeutic tools. To uncover and access the subconscious Jung engaged in a 2 year long journey (described in the Red Book and other publications) into this autonomous inner realm, the forgotten half of ourselves that he called spirit of the depth or soul. To do so he called upon phantasies and creative images with which he interacted. “My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you―are you there?”[1] He understood that he knew many learned words for the spirit of the depth, that he had turned them into a scientific object. “I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgement and knowledge; much more are my judgement and knowledge the objects of my soul.” Therefore, he had “to call upon her as a living self-existing being.” With their guidance during many nights[2] he wanders through the desert, enters a cave, and digs into the earth. When he can no longer dig deeper, he tunnels horizontally, comes upon a gallery, and encounters mythic personages with whom he dialogues. Thus starts a process of self-discovery that laid the foundation for much of Jung’s subsequent theories and practices such as active imagination.
Jung argued that scholarliness is insufficient to become a “knower of the human soul.” Instead, he thought one must distance oneself from abstract studies and inquiries and heartfully engage with the world. The map of the world is not the world. In the same way, our conceptual understanding of health and sickness, of the body, diseases, and their causes is only half the world. Gregory Bateson used the term purposive consciousness to describe the realm of the map, what Jung called spirit of the time or what Arny Mindell called consensus reality. The objective, pragmatic, goal-oriented reality has a sister that is subjective, experienced, and lived. Instead, we can ask ourselves what is my relationship to my skeleton, to my heart, my lungs, my liver, my experiences, and symptoms emanating from these organs? And why haven’t I noticed them much? Why haven’t I given them their full credit and gratitude for all the work they are doing for me and the changes they are expressing to me all the time?
Abstract knowledge of the soul, of our diseases and their symptoms is half the world. To the same degree the soul is an existing living being, so are our experiences in our bodies. Our embodied, subjective, lived experiences are animated beings that we must learn to listen to and absorb their language. Jung also said that “God is that which crosses my willful path violently and recklessly.”[3] Our unintended and “pointless” experiences are opportunities to encounter God, the soul, the unspoken Tao, the self. Arny Mindell subsumed all these experiences as secondary processes. They too speak the language of the subconscious and the soul. Night dreams, body symptoms, other unintentional experiences are a collaboration between our conscious and unconscious minds; they are of both worlds the purposeful conscious and pragmatic thoughts and the subconscious images and feelings. It makes a difference if we attend the consensus reality aspects of our bodies, run every day or don’t run every day, what we eat, or what providers we consult. But, in addition, bodies have their own lives and are their own beings. They are process-oriented and share characteristics of a different reality, one that abides by principles of the dreaming world. The concepts about the world are half the world, the images, phantasies and experiences of the world are half the world as well. Nourishing either half only breeds reactions from the other half. Many of us are well trained and skilled in attending the world of practical realities. For many cultural, historical, and personal reasons we have neglected the imaginary realm, our inner worlds and experiences.
“Read myths as newspaper reports by reporters who were there, and it doesn’t work. Reread them as poems and they become luminous,” writes Joseph Campbell in Myths of Light.[4] The same is true for body symptoms and illness experiences. We need to tap into our mythopoetic imagination to reread and reexperience our bodies in their holistic manifestations. This way we reconcile the spirit of this time or consensus reality with the spirit of the depth, the dreaming expressed by our souls. We recover the wisdom of our symptom and Process Minds.[5]
[1] Carl Gustav Jung. The Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani Editor. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, 2009, p. 232.
[2] During that period of intense introspection and self-discovery Jung kept pursuing an active professional and family life.
[3] “Letter to M. Leonard,” 5 December 1959; Letters, II, 525.
[4] Joseph Campbel. Myth of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal. Joseph Campbell Foundation, New York, 2003.
[5] For an example inner work exercise read my previous post: Your mythopoetic symptom dreaming.