Modern Man in Search of a Soul

by C.G. Jung

Modern Man in Search of a Soul is the classic introduction to the thought of Carl Jung. Along with Freud and Adler, Jung was one of the chief founders of modern psychiatry. In this book, Jung examines some of the most contested and crucial areas in the field of analytical dream analysis, the primitive unconscious, and the relationship between psychology and religion.

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Published August 18, 2011

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[alexanderalava]

CONTINUED REVIEW, PART 3

[THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF AN INITIAL REVEW, RAN OUT OF WORD COUNT]

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

My weakness here is likely the simple fact that I am writing this review for myself, and my primary objective is to remind myself of the importance of what I've read and the details I found most relevant within the written work. Thus, I want to note down the many passages that moved me within Jung's work and unfortunately that is contrary to the intended purpose of the GoodReads review text box and I run out of word count pretty quickly. Nonetheless, I press on.

IX: THE BASIC POSTULATES OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Jung discusses essentially his 'thesis' (don't get mad at me for using that word) regarding his approach to psychology in a way which makes clear his perspective and thrusts forward introspection which ignites the soul.

Notes:

"It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance .• Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a "psychology without the soul. t Under the influence of scientific materialism, everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics. Nothing was considered "scientific" or admitted to be true unless it could be perceived by the senses or traced back to physical causes."

"Other-worldliness is converted into matter-of-factness; empirical boundaries are set to man's discussion of every problem, to his choice of purposes~ and even to what he calls" meaning." Intangible, inner happenings seem to have to yield place to things in the external, tangible world, and no value exists if it is not founded on a so-called fact. At least, this is how it appears to the simple mind."

"The spirit of the age cannot be compassed by the processes of human reason."

"To grant the substantiality of the soul or the psyche is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy."

"We have now discovered that it was intellectually unjustified presumption on our forefathers' part to assume that man has a soul ; that that soul has substance, is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent in it which builds up the body, supports its life, heals its ills and enables the soul to live independently of the body;"

"What or who, indeed, is this all-powerful matter ? It is once more man's picture of a creative god, stripped this time of his anthropomorphic traits and taking the form of a universal concept whose meaning everyone presumes to understand."

"Yet there is not one modern psychology-there are several. This is curious enough when we remember that there is only one science of mathematics, of geology, zoology, Dotany and so forth. But there are so many psychologies that an American University was able to publish a thick volume under the title: Psychologies 01 1930. I believe there are as many psychologies as philosophies, for there is also no one single philosophy, but many. I mention this for the reason that philosophy and
psychology are linked by indissoluble bonds which are kept in being by the inter-relation of their subject-matters. Psychology takes the psyche for its subject-matter, and philosophy-to put it briefly-takes the world. Until recently psychology was a special branch of philosophy, but now we are coming to something which Nietzsche foresaw-the ascendance of psychology in its own right. It is even threatening to swallow philosophy. The inner resemblance of the two disciplines consists in
this, that both are systems of opinion about subject matter which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be comprehended by a purely empirical approach."

"The modern preference for physical grounds of explanation leads, as already remarked, to a "psychology without the psyche"-I mean, to the view that the psyche is nothing but a product of biochemical processes."

"The ancient view held that spirit was essentially the life of the body, the life breath, or a kind of life-force which assumed spatial and corporeal form at birth or after conception, and left in itself was considered as a being without extension, and because it existed before taking corporeal form and afterwards as well, it was considered as timeless and hence immortal."

"[Soul] is moving force, that is, life force."

"It is quite evident that, since breath is the sign of life, breath is taken for life, as are also movement and moving force. According to another primitive view the soul is regarded as fire or flame, because warmth also is a sign of life. A very curious, but by no means rare, primitive conception identifies the soul with the name. The name of an individual is his soul, and hence arises the custom of using the ancestor's name to reincarnate the ancestral soul in the new-born child."

" We are unable, for example, to suppress many of our emotions; we cannot change a bad mood into a good one, and we cannot command our dreams to come or go. The most intelligent man may at
times be obsessed with thoughts which he cannot drive away with the greatest effort of will."

"However preposterous the idea of the immortality of the soul may seem to us, it is nothing extraordinary to the primitive. After all, the soul is something out of the common. While everything else that exists takes up a certain amount of room, the soul cannot be located in space. We suppose, of course, that our thoughts are in our heads, but when it comes to our feelings we begin to be uncertain ; they appear to dwell in the region of the heart. Our sensations are distributed over the whole body."

"Our theory is that the seat of consciousness is in the head, but the Pueblo Indians told me that Americans were mad because they believed their thoughts were in their heads, whereas any sensible man knows that he thinks with his heart."

"We can easily understand why higher and even divine know1edge was formerly ascribed to the psyche if we remember that in ancient cultures, beginning with primitive times, man always resorted to dreams and visions as a source of information."

"The unconscious perceives, has purposes and intuitions,
feels and thinks as does the conscious mind."

"A wider range of " memory" is artificially acquired and consists mostly of printed paper."

"The collective unconscious, moreover, seems not to be a person, but something like an unceasing
stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind. "

"Consciousness is a late-born descendant of the unconscious psyche"

"We must never forget that everything spiritual is illusion from the naturalistic standpoint, and that the spirit, to ensure its own existence, must often deny and overcome an obtrusive, physical fact ... And if I hold exclusively to a spiritual interpretation, then I shall misunderstand and do violence to the natural man in his right to existence as a physical being. "

" This is undoubtedly the danger of the coincidentia oppositorum-of intellectual liberation from
the opposites. How should anything but a formless and aimless uncertainty result from giving equal value to contradictory postulates?"

"The conflict of nature and mind is itself a reflection of the paradox contained in the psychic being of man. This reveals a material and a spiritual aspect which appear a contradiction as long as we fail to understand the nature of psychic life. Whenever, with our human understanding, we must pronounce upon something that we have not grasped or cannot grasp, then-if we are honest
we must be willing to contradict ourselves, and we must pull this something into its antithetical parts in order to deal with it at all. The conflict of the material and spiritual aspects of life only shows that the psychic is in the last resort an incomprehensible something. "

"If I change my concept of reality in such a way as to admit that all psychic happenings are real-and no other use of the concept is valid-this puts an end to the conflict of matter and mind as contradictory explanatory principles."

"In [the primitive man's] world mind and matter still interpenetrate each other, and his gods still wander through forest and field."

"Since there is only one earth and one mankind, East and West cannot rend humanity into two different halves."

"Without this idea it is unavoidable that we should explain our psychic experiences in a way that
does violence to a good half of them, while with it we can give its due to that side of psychic experience which expresses itself in superstition and mythology, religion and philosophy. And this aspect of psychic life is not to be undervalued. Truth that appeals to the testimony of the senses may satisfy reason, but it offers nothing that stirs our feelings and expresses them by giving a meaning to human life. Yet it is most often feeling that is decisive in matters of good and evil, and if feeling does not come to the aid of reason, the latter is usually powerless. Did reason and good intentions save us from the World War, or have they ever saved us from any other
catastrophic nonsense? Have any of the great spiritual and social revolutions sprung from reasoning-let us say the transformation of the Greeco-Roman world into the age of feudalism, or the explosive spread of Islamic culture?"

[CASE OF "HIGHLY INTELLIGENT YOUNG MAN WHO HAD WORKED OUT A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF HIS OWN NEUROSIS AFTER A SERIOUS STUDY OF MEDICAL LITERATURE" -> "HIS WANT OF CONSCIOUSNCE WAS THE CAUSE OF HIS NEUROSIS, AND IT IS NOT HARD TO SEE WHY SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING FAILED TO HELP HIM."]

"How often have I heard a patient exclaim: "If only I knew that my life had some meaning and purpose, then there would be no silly story about my nerves !" Whether the person in question is rich or poor, has family and social position or not, alters nothing, for outer circumstances are far from giving his life a meaning. It is much more a question of his unreasoned need of what we call a spiritual life, and this he cannot obtain from universities, libraries, or even churches. He cannot accept what these have to offer because it touches only his head, and does not stir his heart."

"General conceptions of a spiritual nature are indispensable constituents of psychic life. We can point them out among all peoples whose level of consciousness makes them in some degree articulate. Their relative absence or their denial by a civilized people is therefore to be regarded as a sign of degeneration."

X: THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEMS OF MODERN MAN

Essay on the "Modern Man," essentially discussing the human result of the contradiction between our suppression of soul for reason and what it will take, perhaps rather what will be forged through such conditions, for a man to be truly 'modern' and thus propel himself beyond the unconscious suppression of self which society has wrought on humanity. Extremely thought provoking.

"It must be clearly understood that the mere fact of living in the present does not make a man modern, for in that case everyone at present alive would be so. He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present."

"The man whom we can with justice call .. modern" is solitary. He is so of necessity and at all times, for every step towards a fuller consciousness of the present removes him further from his original " participation mystique" with the mass of men-from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means an act of tearing himself loose from that all-embracing, pristine unconsciousness which claims the bulk of mankind almost entirely."

"To be .. unhistorical " is the Promethean sin, and in this sense modern man lives in sin. A higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt. But, as I have said, only the man who has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past and has amply fulfilled the duties appointed for him by his world, can achieve a full consciousness of the present. To do this he must be sound and proficient in the best sense-a man who has achieved as much as other people, and even a little more. It is these qualities which enable him to gain the next highest level of consciousness."

"He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative abil· ity for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past."

"Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil. This is a painful fact. Now there is the danger that consciousness of the present may lead to an elation based upon illusion: the illusion, namely, that we are the culmination of the history of mankind, the fulfilment and the end-product of countless centuries.

If we grant this, we should understand that it is no more than the proud acknowledgement of our destitution: we are also the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages. Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian ideals followed, instead of by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, by the World War among Christian nations and its barbed-wire and poison-gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth!"

"Agreements to outlaw war leave us sceptical, even while we wish them all possible success. At bottom, behind every such palliative measure, there is a gnawing doubt. On the whole, I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that modern man has suffered an almost fatal shock, psychologically speaking, and as a result has fallen into profound uncertainty."

"The current flows backward to its source; the inner man wants something which the visible man does not want, and we are at war with ourselves."

"[Archaic life] no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one's own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth."

"Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror."

" It is, however, true that much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious, as it is also true that with increasing insight we can combat this evil at its source in ourselves."

"The various forms of religion no longer appear to the modern man to come from within-to be expressions of his own psychic life; for him they are to be classed with the things of the outer world." (interest in psychic phenomena, spiritualism, astrology, etc,reflective of lacking tools to seek inner self)

"The passionate interest in these movements arises undoubtedly from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete forms of religion. For this reason such movements have a truly religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific."

"These attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect-almost as suspect as politics and world-reform."

"I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns his attention to the psyche with very great expectations; and that he does so without reference to any traditional creed, but rather in the Gnostic sense of religious experience."

"The modern man abhors dogmatic postulates taken on faith and the religions based upon them. He holds them valid only in so far as their knowledge content seems to accord with his own experience of the deeps of psychic life. He wants to know-to experience for himself."

"The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance to the Western world-rather like the hewing down of Wotan's oak by the Christian missionaries. For then, as at the Revolution, no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down."

"The gods whom we are called to dethrone are the idolized values of our conscious world."

"The unexpected result of this spiritual change is that an uglier face is put upon the world. It becomes so ugly that no one can love it any longer-we cannot even love ourselves-and in the end there is nothing in the outer world to draw us away from the reality of the life within." (contradiction, dialectical)

"It is no wonder, then, in my opinion, if the modern man falls back upon the reality of psychic life and expects from it that certainty which the world denies him." (MARIATEGUI!)

"I have a Red Indian friend who is the governor of a pueblo. When we were once speaking confidentially about the white man, he said to me: "We don't understand the whites; they are always wanting something, always looking for something. What is it? We don't know. We can't understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy." "

"Whether from the intellectual, the moral or the aesthetic viewpoint, the undercurrents of the psychic life of the West present an uninviting picture. We have built a monumental world round about us, and have slaved for it with unequalled energy. But it is so imposing only because we have spent upon the outside all that is imposing in our natures-and what we find when we look within must necessarily be as it is, shabby and insufficient."

"At first we cannot see beyond the path that leads downward to dark and hateful things-but no light or beauty will ever come from the man who cannot bear this sight. Light is always born of darkness, and the sun never yet stood still in heaven to satisfy man's longing or to still his fears. "

"Along the great highroads of the world everything seems desolate and outworn. Instinctively the modern man leaves the trodden ways to explore the by-paths and lanes..."

"What did a cultivated Roman think of Christianity when he saw it spreading among the people of the lowest classes ? ...One kind of believer holds the other an ignoble heretic, to be pitied and tolerated if he cannot be changed." (MARIATEGUI!!!)"

"When Keyserling sarcastically singles out the chauffeur as the culture·hero of our time, he has struck, as he often does, close to the mark." (taxi)

"We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit."

"Danger itself Fosters the rescuing power."

[NO MORE CHARACTERS]

XI: PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

[James Worthington · Rating 4 out of 5]

My dive into the psyche, which I have not done from this point of view before. Lots to chew on, because the insights into the mind of the human is taken seriously, as a science. This implies a possibility to know, or at least approach an understanding, of the inner workings of the mind. I am contemplating the collective unconscious, to see if there is any meat there for the healing of the mind.