In the psyche there is nothing that is just a dead relic
This is a lame analogy, like all analogies, for in the psyche there is nothing that is just a dead relic.
Everything is alive, and our upper storey, consciousness, is continually influenced by its living and active foundations.
Like the building, it is sustained and supported by them.
And just as the building rises freely above the earth, so our consciousness stands as if above the earth in space, with a wide prospect before it.
But the deeper we descend into the house the narrower the horizon becomes, and the more we find ourselves in the darkness, till finally we reach the naked bed-rock, and with it that prehistoric time when reindeer hunters fought for a bare and wretched existence against the elemental forces of wild nature.
The men of that age were still in full possession of their animal instincts, without which life would have been impossible.
The free sway of instinct is not compatible with a strongly developed consciousness.
The consciousness of primitive man, like that of the child, is sporadic, and his world, like the child’s, is very limited. Indeed, in accordance
with phylogenetic law, we still recapitulate in childhood reminiscences of the prehistory of the race and of mankind in general.
Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most closely became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful.
I say “seem” because what seems to us the most important thing psychically is not necessarily the most important, or at least need not remain so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 55
Carl Jung: Man in my view is enclosed in the psyche (not in his psyche).
To Joseph Goldbrunner
Dear Herr Goldbrunner, 14May 1950
Permit me, as one who is, in a manner of speaking, both known and unknown to you, to express my best thanks for your objective and sympathetic exposition of my psychology.
There are indeed few authors, as you yourself have probably observed, who could wring from themselves an objective evaluation of my work.
So much the more reason for me to be sincerely grateful to you for your achievement.
I would gladly content myself with an unqualified appreciation of your book but for a few points which seem to me to require clarification.
You rightly emphasize that man in my view is enclosed in the psyche (not in his psyche).
Could you name me any idea that is not psychic?
Can man adopt any standpoint outside the psyche?
He may assert that he can, but the assertion does not create a point outside, and were he there he would have no psyche.
Everything that touches us and that we touch is a reflection, therefore psychic.
That my psychology is wholly imprisoned in the psyche is a fact that cannot be otherwise.
You would not, presumably, object that geology treats of nothing but the earth, or that astronomy only circles round the starry sky?
Psychology is, strictly speaking, the science of conscious contents.
Its object therefore is not metaphysical, otherwise it would be metaphysics.
Does one hold it against physics that it is not metaphysics?
It is self-evident that all objects of physics are physical phenomena.
Why should psychology be the only exception to this rule?
Everything that man conceives as God is a psychic image, and it is no less an image even if he asseverates a thousand times that it is not an image.
If it were not, he would be unable to conceive anything at all.
That is why Meister Eckhart says, quite rightly, “God is pure nothing.”
As an empirical science, psychology can only establish that the unconscious spontaneously produces images which have always been spoken of as “God-images.”
But as the nature of the psyche is wholly unknown to us, science cannot establish what the image is a reflection of.
We come here to the “frontier of the human,” of which G. von Le Fort says that it is the “portcullis of God.”
In my private capacity as a man I can only concur with this view, but with the best will in the world I cannot maintain that this is a verifiable assertion, which is what science is all about in the end.
It is a subjective confession which has no place in science.
It is equally out of place to say that individuation is self-redemption.
This is precisely what it is not.
As you yourself have described so beautifully, man exposes himself to all the powers of the non-ego, of heaven and hell, of grace and destruction, in order to reach that point where he has become simple enough to accept those influences, or whatever it is we call “God’s will,” which come from the Unfathomable and whose source lies behind those same psychic images which both reveal and conceal.
How one could see through this “hoarding” is, frankly, beyond my comprehension.
How can one see, think, or conceive that which is non-psychic?
Even if I aver that it is not psychic, it is still my conception standing before the unknowable fact; and if it is non-psychic then it cannot be conceived at all.
We take it for granted that images are reflections of something.
In so far as this something is supposed not to be psychic, it is necessarily inconceivable-even the spectacular blue of the sky does not exist in physics but is expressed by the mathematical concept of wave-lengths.
Am I, then, to declare that because I see blue, blue exists in itself and is not psychic?
That would be against my better knowledge and therefore immoral.
I am deeply impressed by man’s proneness to error and self-deception.
I therefore deem it a moral command not to make assertions about things we can neither see nor prove, and I deem it an epistemological transgression if one nevertheless does so.
These rules hold good for empirical science; metaphysics holds to others.
I recognize the rules of empirical science as binding upon myself.
Hence no metaphysical assertions will be found in my writings, and, n.b., no denials of metaphysical assertions.
Hoping that these explanations may perhaps be of service to you,
I remain,
Yours very sincerely, C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 555-557
But what, actually, is the psyche?
But what, actually, is the psyche? Materialistic prejudice explains it as a mere epiphenomenal by-product of organic processes in the brain.
Any psychic disturbance must therefore be an organic or physical disorder which is undiscoverable only because of the inadequacy of our present methods of diagnosis.
The undeniable connection between psyche and brain gives this point of view a certain weight, but not enough to make it an unshakable truth.
We do not know whether there is a real disturbance of the organic processes in the brain in a case of neurosis, and if there are disorders of an endocrine nature it is impossible to say whether they might not be effects rather than causes. Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 11., Paragraph 14.
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