I recently stumbled upon an insightful interview featuring Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. I hadn’t realized he possessed such joie de vivre and spoke like a man deeply connected to and immersed in the world, expressing himself with abundant ease. I shouldn’t have assumed that all psychoanalysts were rare, fossilized forms of craggy old goats!
Jung attempted to bridge the notions between psychology and spirituality to transcend and had an exhaustible knowledge of mythology and religion; also he thought humans experienced the unconscious through symbols such as dreams, art and religion.
While Jung apprenticed under Freud and shared an interest in the unconscious, their opinions often clashed. In the interview I watched, it was evident that Jung greatly admired Freud; he remained loyal, but eventually, his own brilliant ideas stood on their own.
The interviewer mentioned that while Freud settled on something, Jung often harboured doubts. Freud lacked philosophical education, unlike Jung, who studied Kant. This disparity led them to grow apart. Jung had deep affection for Freud but described him as having a ‘complicated nature.’
Jung disagreed with Freud about sexuality and he thought the libido wasn’t just sexual energy, but instead generalized sexual energy.
Jung travelled to India and immersed himself in spiritual practises.
He and Freud exchanged dreams, which the presenter in the documentary called face-to-face. The interviewer asked Jung, ‘Can you tell us about Freud’s dreams?’ and he replied, ‘It’s rather indiscreet to ask, there is such a thing as a professional secret, the interviewer said, but he has been dead so many years and Jung simply replied ‘but these regards last longer than life’ I love that quote.
Jung went on to say that ‘he found it problematic that Freud’s disregard of the historical conditions of man, we are shaped through education, historical ideas, dominance and that is a most decisive factor of psychology’.
‘We are not of today, or tomorrow but of an immense age’
Freud and Jung regarded the psyche as made up of several separate interacting systems, and the three main systems were the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.
Jung also talks about 4 levels of consciousness, these were Persona, Shadow, Anime/Animus and The Self.
I want to write a brief detail of these.
The persona
The best version of ourselves we present to the world, the obedience to expectation, playing the role we think we should play
The shadow
The shadow is everything we have denied in ourselves and cast into oblivion, or the ego has refused to associate with. It embraces all those sins, dark thoughts, and moods for which we feel guilt and shame. Jung said it can appear in dreams, and visions or may take a variety of forms.
The Anima or Animus
Jung describes the animas as the unconscious masculine side of a woman and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, each transcending the personal psyche. Jung believed that male sensitivity is often lesser or repressed and therefore considers the anima one of the most significant autonomous complexes. You have to embody these opposite parts for, men and women. For a man, an example would be to develop compassion, closeness to emotions, closeness to nature, relationship to our inner selves and then to spirituality.
The self
After one has overcome the persona, integrating the shadow and the aspects of the anima and animus archetypes into one’s character, then one can enter into the deepest and highest reaches of the psyche, which Jung named ‘the self’.
Henry J. Stead described ‘the self’ as encompassing everything we are, were, and could potentially become—a symbol of the god within us.
‘The self then is the sum of everything we are now, and everything we once were, as well as everything we could potentially become; it is the symbol of the god within us, that which we are a totality’.
Henry J Stead
Jung believed a great change in our psychological attitude is imminent, that is certain because we need more…. more psychology and understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. ‘We are the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil’.
He worked in one of the first mental hospitals, and after 9 years working, as a physician, Jung suffered a period of severe chronic depression and experienced visions. During that period, he experienced continuous dreams filled with images from the unconscious, but as he suffered through his depression, his work kept him grounded to reality, but what a reality!
Reports suggest Jung experienced what we might call today a form of psychosis at 38, haunted by visions and voices. Although concerned about his mental state, he continued seeing patients and seemed to have a unique ability to summon and control his unconscious mind. Generally, schizophrenic patients can not control their experiences or actions without medication, so it felt that schizophrenia wasn’t a direct fit for Jung, and the diagnosis remains somewhat a mystery.
One of the most fascinating facts, he wrote a diary called Liber Novus (the red book) which means liberty of freedom. It was written in 1913, just at the end of World War I, when he was working as a doctor and psychiatrist in Switzerland.
During the war, Switzerland to set up military camps for people who had deserted the battlefields. Jung spent 2 years working as a physician in these military camps with men from the frontline who had severe physical injuries and PTSD and wrote his diary called Liber Novus (the red book) whilst at these camps.
It was described as a ‘wizard’s book’ and was a raw private record of Jung’s trip into his own dreaming mind or unconscious. He took a series of waking dreams, wrote about them, adding calligraphy and illuminated artworks.
He was deeply disappointed by humanity and brutally sceptical of the rational science of his time, and this book was a window into his dreams.
He delves into his unconscious and is also full of his illustrations. It took 16 years for him to write, and it was kept hidden for decades. It took 3 years to convince his family to release it and another 13 years to translate it. It is not a traditional diary but a psychedelic voyage through his own mind, through the light and the dark, conscious and the unconscious and to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows, at one point in the book, even the devil criticizes Jung as ‘hateful’.
It was described by some as the work of a ‘psychotic’ and Jung himself was concerned that because of these explorations, in his book, people would think he was mad.
Despite concerns about his sanity due to the explorations within ‘The Red Book,’ former patients understood its purpose. They recalled his advice to capture experiences beautifully in a book, which would serve as a sacred space for spiritual renewal.
‘I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can – In some beautifully bound book. When these things are in some precious book, you can go to the book and turn over the pages, and for you, it will be your church, your cathedral, the silent place of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them, then you will lose your soul, for in that book is your soul’
You have to wonder, so much of his life studying the mentally ill, illuminating so many spiritual and otherworldly factors, studying under Freud, pressing his hands firmly in prayer towards Kant, was he too filled with a mixture of light and madness? He came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
‘The sexuality of man goes towards the earthly, the sexuality of woman goes towards the spiritual. Man and woman become devils to each other if they do not distinguish their sexuality.
Carl Jung (from The Red Book)