Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Sunday. On January 27, Jung met with Moltzer. On February 2, Alphonse Maeder gave a presentation at the Association
for Analytical Psychology.
Judging from the discussion that followed, his talk overlapped with a presentation he gave in Geneva in the autumn that dealt with the parallels between Dante’s Commedia and the “intimate experience of psychoanalysis.”
See Maeder, Guerison et evolution dans la vie de l’ ame. La psychanalyse, son importance dans la vie contemporaine (Zurich: Rascher, 1918), pp. 22-38.
In the discussion, Maria Moltzer stated: “Does one do justice to the conflicts of our time, if one bestows upon them images of former times?
Maeder does justice to spiritual development- but not to emotional development. One cannot bypass hell, instead one must experience a part of it and accept God in the depths and the fight with the evil.”
Jung then followed with a lengthy intervention:
“The parallel with Dante is very good as an educational introduction to analysis: The Inferno and Purgatorio are the place below- the repressed unconscious.
Once purified through knowledge one is freed from the compulsive conditions of the ucs. = the ascent to the mountain of salvation, = the union with the soul = the liberated individual can accept his essence (his soul). /
But for us, does the soul correspond to Dante’s Beatrice?
Through the incorporation of the hitherto repressed components, the individuated man becomes different from his former person (which had been a compromise formation between the environment and his own, and a possibility for a good adaptation with repression).
But together with the repressed elements collective elements emerge from the ucs. as well.
When the union with the soul arises, man is also united with the unconsciously mirrored cosmos. Hence he becomes godlike and not concrete.
The individual aspect is felt, but man is not differentiated from the world, in mystical participation with it. / At first the soul is a collective content- the figure that comprises the collective psyche into one.
Since in the medieval understanding the collective psyche (God) is beautiful, it is the soul at first.
But we see from that, that God is a duality. Luther speaks from the deus manifestus and the deus absconditus, who is entirely different
from the other.
God is a daimon in the collective psyche, beyond good and evil. / The manifestation of the collective psyche confronts us in the form of the concept of the soul, which is daimonic for the primitives.
Only in the Christian understanding does it becomes beautiful (because God imputes the attributes of the summum bonum).
When we discover the image of the soul in analysis, it might have sublime features – or its opposite.
(In Spitteler’s Prometheus the soul is a sublime woman- and a tiger at the same time, and Pr.’s connection with his soul is not a state
of paradise, but of torture.)
This is where the parallel with Dante can cause misunderstandings.
The initial union of the individual with the collective psyche is a sublime moment- but also a torture and danger as the psychological
reality is equally real as the outer world- even more so for the primitive.
The collective psyche is a real power as is the external world.
The coll. ucs. appears to us at first as projected on to the external world.
Thus the identity with the coll. ucs. is an identity with the surrounding world. The relatedness is a pantheistic feeling (a mystical feeling).
But for contemporary man the loss of the I is so vast, that he cannot bear it. (The Indian solution of Tat-Tvam-Asi [Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7: “That you are”], expressing the identity of the self and ultimate reality is no solution for us.)
The sensation of a universal connectivity is a paralysis and asks for contestation.
Otherwise we are in Heimarmene.
Already the meaning of the ancient mysteries intended to free oneself from it. – This is why the usage of a new function is necessary.
The problem is: in relation to the world the restoration of the persona appears ( the former compromise formation) but- in front of itself- differentiated from it. In relation to the coll. ucs. there must also be a differentiating and connection function- the ucs. – persona: the soul.
/ The question of the Christian view in practical analysis: for the l. part of analysis the psychology of the Christian view is useful.
At later stages we encounter the problem of a one-sided definition of the concept of God.” Heimarmene is the Stoic concept of fate.
In 1944, Jung described this as “the dependence of character and destiny on certain moments in time” (Psychology and Alchemy, CW I2, § 40). ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 170, fn 57