The Creation of Consciousness: Jung's Myth for Modern Man (Studies in Jungian Psychology) Paperback – February, 1984

Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts #14

by Edward F. Edinger

Seminal work by the author of Ego and Archetype, proposing a new world-view based on the creative collaboration between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the religious search for meaning.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Mythology, Nonfiction, Religion, Mysticism

Unknown Binding

First published February 1, 1984

About the author

Edward F. Edinger was a medical psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and American writer.
Edward F. Edinger Jr. was born on December 13, 1922, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, earning his Bachelor of Arts in chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington and his Doctor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine in 1946. In November 1947, as a first lieutenant, he started a four-week Medical Field Service School at the Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. He became a military doctor in the United States Army Medical Corps and was in Panama. In New York in 1951, he began his analysis with Mary Esther Harding, who had been associated with C.G. Jung.
Edinger was a psychiatrist supervisor at Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York, and later founder member of the C.G. Jung Foundation in Manhattan and the CG Jung Institute in New York. He was president of the institute from 1968 until 1979, when he moved to Los Angeles. There he continued his practice for 19 years, becoming senior analyst at the CG Jung Institute of Los Angeles.
He died on July 17, 1998, at his home in Los Angeles at age 75, according to family members due to bladder cancer.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot packed into this short book, which I think could serve as a general introduction to Jungian psychology for the reader who is unfamiliar with it. It took me altogether probably a few hours to get through. It serves as a pretty succinct compendium of some of Jung's core ideas. Unfortunately, I think Edinger's prognostic judgement of depth psychology as the "new dispensation" for mankind falls incredibly short and has aged like milk. Not only are the religions which maintain anything remotely close to a symbolic virility totally opposed to incorporating Jung's insights (many of which are outright heretical, e.g. the idea that God has an unconscious shadow) but the inheritors of Jung themselves are either grifter quacks like Jordan Peterson or woo-woo post-New Age midwits. It has been my experience that, while Jung himself very much was something approximating an "epochal man," as Edinger calls him, his epigones add an astonishingly slim amount to the theoretical edifice they are attempting to build off, and that it is always more worthwhile to read Jung or his contemporary pupils themselves. More controversially, I'd say the democratization of psychology has done more to quell the mainstream credibility of Jung, which is effectively null, than bolster it. There are many persons, but there will always be very few individuals. To the extent that the individuation process is arduous and painful, requiring a brutal confrontation with the most elemental and unforgiving parts of the human psyche, we should not expect that it will be a path that most can follow through to the end, let alone begin. The basic fact of repression within the psychoanalytical framework actually suggests that people don't want to get better mentally--to get over this hurdle is itself enough to bar most people from even realizing that they should do something as simple as keep a dream journal.

Anyways, I digress, there is a lot to be gleaned from this book. Here is a little bit of what I got out of it, which I may add to later, should I find the time.

The unprecedented loss of a mythic & symbolic structure of universal referability in western society has thrown it into a ceaselessly apocalyptic scenario. This of course is obvious to anyone. But for Jung, the proportions of this were much more dire: the disaster is primarily unfolding at the level of the human psyche, meaning the most devastating, metamorphic, and potentially terminal shift to ever occur in human civilization is occurring almost entirely unconsciously. For whatever sociopolitical effects we may be able to point out, for whatever depth our analysis regarding such things may have, the most intelligent and the most powerful among us remain completely unaware of this. It cannot be overstated how little this problem benefits from a merely existentialist, individualist formulation i.e. it is not simply a matter of "meaning" as that is generally understood when a person interrogates whether or not their life is meaningful--most do not take this question to the limit. The real question is whether being as such--the very fact that anything exists--bears a cosmological significance in which the human is inherently situated; whether the total history of, not just human, but cosmic evolution, and the symbolic forms through which humanity has come to understand this process, are ultimately expressive of a structure that binds every moment of time--from the Big Bang, to now, to the end of the universe. The question is whether any dimension of our existence participates in something eternal. The very fact that this is a problem at all suggests that the ability to answer it within the parameters of current religious thought is not possible, yet there is also no possibility of answering it independently of such structures. Rather, their symbols must be interpreted in the light of the discovery of the collective unconscious.

Jung's own grappling with mythlessness, in Edinger's view, serves as a paradigm for a new mode of mythic existence. Jung's revelation of the "new myth," came to him in 1925 while travelling through an African savanna. He walked away from his group and, alone, surveyed the plains.
"There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me...Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. [An] act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules." The universe is created at the same moment as consciousness. Schopenhauer expresses this, as I recall, in a non-anthropocentric way, saying that the existence of the world is dependent on the first eye to have ever opened. The world only comes into existence when it is seen as the world. It begins anew as something quite different when it is not just seen, but known, when one is conscious of the fact that they are conscious of it, and begin to relate to the world in this way. Without man, the life on earth would have been "unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end."

Man's destiny is thus to become more conscious, to develop further the contents of nature which surge upwards through the unconscious. In doing this, man not only relates the content of nature with itself, but also creation with God: the contradiction between God and creation, reconciled through man, becomes the reconciliation of opposites within the God-image itself, rendering the incarnation of God in a human being--the teaching of Christianity--necessary. God becomes more like God in becoming man and man becomes more like man in becoming like God, in bearing the second creation consciously.

The purpose of life is the creation of consciousness. The psychic has substance, it is objectively real. The process whereby psychic contents refract through an ego and generate the substance of consciousness is called the process of individuation. The most important feature of this process is alchemical, i.e. it unites opposites. The knowing subject is united with the object of its knowledge, but also recognizes itself as an object of its own unconscious and the God-image therein. God is not a psychic invention, but a psychological experience in which one finds themselves to be already known by a Self greater than them, within them. The most intimate part of ourselves is unknown to us; it is not us, precisely because it is a transpersonal subject of which our ego is an object. If you ever have a dream where you feel as though you are being watched, or are exposed, remember this. In growing in awareness of the Self, the Self grows in it's awareness of itself: this is the divine service which man renders in grappling with the unconscious.

Consciousness, con-scire, literally means "knowing-with." It is relational. A Logo-Erotic function. The fact that the word for having sex in the Bible is "to know" is not a coincidence. That does not mean that the development of consciousness is sexually oriented, but it is why unconscious psychic factors are most notably represented in sexuality. The most intimate possible connection we can have with another human being, in which we know and are known, is a biological analogue to an inner process of coming into relation with the God-image; with the Self. Most people go throughout their lives only understanding one side of this, projecting their undeveloped psychic relation and the repression therein on their partners. This is why marriage is sanctified and why in Christianity we have the symbol of Christ and church as bridegroom and bride; it is a concrete, transpersonal symbol which is, ideally, reproduced at the level of the individual.

God is, in this view, neither a metaphysical entity nor a farcical projection of the unconscious. God is a psychic reality. God and the gods are not dead, only unconscious. What is unconscious is not thereby unreal. On the contrary, it is often what has the most reality. The death of god is a motif which is not exclusive to Christianity, although its full symbolic potency may be in the Passion of Christ. The death of God, then, far from being an actual elimination, is an archetypal web of unimaginable change. The catastrophe at hand is fundamentally not a transformation of human civilization, it is a transformation of God. Our consequent suffering in these latter days, if it is to have any meaning, will find its reason in the renewed realization of God, who will again step out of the darkness of the unconscious. But only if those who are able are up to the task.

[Hira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am (more than) halfway through this, so I'll write a detailed review for this later, I enjoy it so far for its clarity on some of the very core aspects of jungian thought, for bringing to the fore certain things that I have been thinking & reading about but could not articulate perfectly as a coherent story for myself, this helped me do that. However, I am also slightly iffy about all the christian symbology, so it is slightly a mixed bag for me.

[John A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great ideas, however, I felt like the presentation of information was slow and boring. Reading it feels like an endless series of summaries based on a wide accumulation of sources; with most of the text being quotations and very brief paragraphs connecting the information together. It is more like reading through someone's notes instead of a profound idea. Therefore, it is hard to really compound personal associations and experiences into it. There isn't enough depth or volume to it.

[Nick Mather]

Good companion to Jung's Answer to Job.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars

[Salvatore Familia]

Seminal work by the author of Ego and Archetype, proposing a new world-view based on the creative collaboration between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the religious search for meaning.