How do they know that the unconscious is “lower” and not “higher” than the conscious?
The great advantage of scientific abstraction is that it gives us a key to the mysterious processes enacted behind the scenes, where, leaving the colorful world of the theatre behind us, we enter into the ultimate reality of psychic dynamism and psychic meaningfulness.
This knowledge strips the unconscious processes of all epiphenomenality and allows them to appear as what our whole experience tells us that they are autonomous quantities. Consequently, every attempt to derive the unconscious from the conscious sphere is so much empty talk, a sterile, intellectual parlor game.
One suspects this wherever writers cheerfully talk of the “subconscious,” without apparently realizing what an arrogant prejudice they are presuming to express.
How do they know, forsooth, that the unconscious is “lower” and not “higher” than the conscious?
The only certain thing about this terminology is that consciousness deems itself higher-higher than the gods themselves.
On day, let u hope, its “god-almightiness” will make it quiver and quake”! Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Para 670.
