Carl Jung and Freud’s greatest achievement.
[Carl Jung and Freud’s greatest achievement.]
Like an Old Testament prophet, he undertook to overthrow false gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesties and hypocrisies, mercilessly exposing the rottenness of the contemporary psyche.
He did not falter in the face of the unpopularity such an enterprise entailed.
The impetus which he gave to our civilization sprang from his discovery of an avenue to the unconscious.
By evaluating dreams as the most important source of information concerning the unconscious processes, he gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost.
He demonstrated empirically the presence of an unconscious psyche which had hitherto existed only as a philosophical postulate, in particular in the philosophies of C. G. Carus and Eduard von Hartmann.
It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century.
The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was “the true seat of anxiety,” he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition.
Fear of self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength.
No one who strives for self-hood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self the subhuman, or supra-human, world of psychic “dominants” from which the ego originally emancipated itself with enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory freedom.
This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find fulfillment, has still to be confronted by an object.
This, at first sight, would appear to be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished, destroyed, or enjoyed.
But nature herself does not allow this paradisaical state of innocence to continue forever.
There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality.
It is from this profound intuition, according to lamaist doctrine, that the Chonyid state derives its true meaning, which is why the Chonyid Bardo is entitled “The Bardo of the Experiencing of Reality.” ~Carl Jung, Psychological Commentary of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.