19 November 1930 Visions Seminars Lecture VI
This morning we are concerned first with questions about the saint, what kind of figure he is, but we cannot go very deeply into that now.
I will just read you the last paragraph of Dr. Baynes’s remark, where he has really formulated the problem in question, the difference between the shaman, the primitive medicine man, and the saint:
I should like to put the question whether the distinction between the shaman and the saint cannot be referred to the anima relation, namely, that the power of the shaman comes from accepting the rule of the anima as the spirit of his metier, while the saint rigorously excludes the anima; although both are in fact determined by her.
And is it not the effort to exclude the anima relation which forces the saint into his attitude of isolated absolutism?
Whereas the shaman whose metier is rooted in the anima relation is essentially a related and social personage.
This puts the whole question into the right light.
The saint is a product of social and civilized differentiation, while a medicine man is a product of nature; he depends upon nature.
Dr. Baynes puts it as depending upon the anima, but the anima is nature, and the primitive medicine man is enveloped by the unconscious, he is part of it, the unconscious functions through him.
While the saint lifts himself up above the unconscious, he defeats the unconscious.
That is the way one could formulate it, but naturally one can go further and say that the saint also fulfills the unconscious.
That is paradoxical, but that is the nature of the unconscious.
The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea
and nay in itself, two things in one.
So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because
it is and it is not.
That we have come to such an antinomian statement means that we have reached the end of our reasoning powers.
We are ramming our heads into a wall and the wall will not yield, however hard we may try.
That is the antinomy of pure reason-one comes to the borderline where one has to say: It is and it is not.
So the saint is a production of the unconscious and yet he is the overcoming of the unconscious.
One sees this very clearly in the psychology of the Buddhist saint; by every word and every act he is overcoming the
unconscious, overcoming the illusion.
The unconscious is the illusion and he is in a state beyond illusion.
And the Christian saint also overcomes the unconscious, he rises above it; to him the unconscious is the devil and he overcomes the devil.
While the primitive medicine man is, essentially, the power of illusion, he himself is at the same time the subject of the power of imagination and of illusion and is made to work through it.
Therefore most of the primitive shamans are sort of mediums; they get into a trance and work through that, which means, of course, the complete defeat of the human individual in his relationship to the unconscious powers.
But it is true that even the saint is, unconsciously, almost forced by the unconscious.
When you know what the saint is really after and analyze carefully the symbolism in which he believes, it is the unconscious again, the unconscious that tries to overcome itself.
One sees that in another form in analyzing the dreams of people who are definitely insane.
I saw such a case, a woman who had been confined twenty years.
She willingly told me her dreams and I simply took down the series.
There was an absolutely rhythmical development in them.
For instance, say a dream spoke of destruction, a sort of winter dream, where the world was empty and she was almost nonexistent.
Then spring begins and some positive symbols occur, the sun rises perhaps, and the dreams take on almost a lovely aspect, something which you feel right away as living, positive, so that you think, ah, now it is coming.
And then it comes, a beautiful symbol of individuation or of rebirth, and you think, now she must see it.
But she does not see it, she cannot grasp it, and it passes by as a sort of miracle, a lovely vision which happens I don’t
know where, on another star, and she is not touched by it.
The pillar of life passes her by and then comes the winter again, the destruction of the whole thing, a regular cycle.
If she could catch it she would be saved, but she has lost her hands, she cannot catch it, and so the opportunity passes.
Like a lame man who waits on the bank by the healing water: he is unable to jump in so he will never be cured. It is also like that phenomenon in Rider Haggard’ s She, the mysterious pillar of fire where “She” is almost destroyed.
But first “She” attains to something approaching immortal life by passing through the flame.
That is a description of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth which is always revolving in the unconscious.
In the autumnal part of the cycle the unconscious seems to be intent upon destruction, everything is dissolved, everything goes under, so one concludes that the tendency of the unconscious is to bring everything back to the elemental condition and that there is no synthesis in it at all.
But in the spring part of the cycle, one comes to an entirely different conclusion.
Then one sees that the unconscious wants synthesis; everything is built up and there is nothing destructive about it.
It is as if there had never been the will to destroy.
So it depends upon the moment when one observes the unconscious.
At one time it is negative, at another it is positive, it is contradictory in itself.
Otherwise, it would not live, it would not move.
And that contradiction goes as far as the idea of existent nonexistence.
The Buddhist idea of nirvana is a nonexistent existence, or an existent nonexistence; it is not merely a nothingness.
nirvana is a positive non-being and the unconscious is exactly that, a yea and a nay in itself. It undoes itself to absolute nothingness and creates itself out of nothingness again.
This is the attitude of the gods.
That God created himself and the world out of nothing is the Christian idea.
So our definition of the saint holds good as long as we are moving in a world of more or less superficial phenomena.
But if we go a bit deeper, we see in the saint the unconscious overcoming itself.
The unconscious that wants to dismember everything, to disintegrate everything, to bring everything back into its beginning, is also creating the most beautiful jewel, the essence of synthesis, and that is so paradoxical that one is bewildered.
But if we know that the unconscious is nay and yea, we simply have to settle down to the idea that it is utterly incomprehensible to our mental faculties.
Now I think we will put that problem aside, for our time is short.
We were discussing the first part of the dream last week, and we reached the conclusion that the attitude of saintliness was apparently to be repressed by an actual factor symbolized by the bull, which is a creative force still undifferentiated.
It is comparable to the Mithraic bull, the bull of the beginning, the world bull.
The bull of the beginning would be the blind unconscious creative force, representing in this case a great value because the attitude of saintliness is a culmination, an end.
Anything that is differentiated and has reached its completion is beautiful and respectable and good and noble-and sterile.
It runs dry after a while.
One may admit that it is beautiful, but it doesn’t work any longer.
It is as if it had lost its efficiency, and in such a case the unconscious brings up the contrary, an undifferentiated blind impulse, a spring sign in astrology.
Astrology is the projected psychology of the unconscious, and there we see Taurus the bull as the sign of spring, the creative part of the unconscious cycle.
It is as if the saint were standing in the West or in the autumnal equinox, and then Taurus would be the vernal equinox;
it is now in the Fishes.
It has moved back on account of the so-called precession of the equinoxes.
The next part of the dream, as I said, is not really connected with the first part, which is decidedly mythological.
The second part is about an automobile, and they are driving down a very steep hill.
The dreamer was driving, and there was the fear that the brakes of the car might not hold.
She felt very frightened and impotent, but at last they reached the bottom of the hill in safety.
Now this is a descent, and in the light of what went before, it is perfectly clear.
The culmination, or the good thing, the desired thing, is always thought of as being above and visible.
A town that is built on a mountain cannot remain hidden according to the ancient parable.
But when the situation is such that one should find the creative principle, when the thing above has lower efficiency, naturally one must go down to the blind thing, the dark thing, which is always thought of as being below.
This going down has also the mythological meaning of the nekyia, a Greek word which means the descent to the dead, into Hades.
So whenever there was a difficult situation which could not be solved, or a question which could not be answered by the ordinary means, people went down to the oracular cave, or to a hidden spring, like the spring in the Temple of Delphi from which the prophetic vapors rose.
The idea was that the secret place was below, so initiations often took place below the surface of the earth in a cave.
The caves of Mithra that were excavated in Germany and Italy were only half underground, but the original idea was a real cave.
The fathers of the church often spoke of these spelea as being in rocks; they were natural grottoes.
In some cases they were far below the surface; in a place in Syria there were three hundred and sixty-five steps to go down, which means that the initiate had to go back through a whole year in order to reach the chamber of initiation.
That symbolism influenced religious buildings.
In old Norman churches, for example, there are under-churches or crypts which were the original mystery places; also the sarcophagi containing the dead were there, so it was a sort of Hades below the church.
In the cult of Mithra the ordinary people were not admitted to the crypt; only the real initiates were down below, but there were peepholes through which the people above could look down and get glimpses of the mysterious doings.
In the Catholic church the choir is separated from the people by a screen, often very beautifully decorated.
The community is shut out, excluded from the mystery play that goes on in front of the altar, the priests being the initiates with special prerogatives, equipped with special powers.
The original idea was the mystery underground, of which ordinary people could only catch glimpses.
And the psychological idea is the same, the idea that the creative principle, or the creative forces below, should be faced and assimilated to consciousness.
In order to attain that goal the dreamer must go down to the depths, where she most probably will meet the bull or another creative symbol, the equivalent of the bull.
Now the question is whether the brakes of the car are strong enough, because the descent seems to be very steep and dangerous.
One often encounters that symbolism.
The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well-trodden path and there are many safeguards; it is rather annoying, but
you feel safe because many thousands of people have gone that way already. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped down, so it has a slippery surface, and one finds parts of wrecked cars and trousers and shoes and skeletons, perhaps of people who have gone to smash on that path.
That is not very encouraging; of course one is afraid.
That slipping down is the fatal mistake one can make in one’s career.
Everybody is at some time in his life threatened by such mistakes, and some are really victims, some really slip and go downhill.
We use all those metaphors, they are many and well known.
This is the path of danger, because one leaves everything which seems to be right and good and recommendable and, above all, safe.
Very often the situation causes certain symptoms.
A patient in that stage told me that things seemed actually to be slipping, she felt as if she might fall.
People do fall in reality; they might even break a leg, as a sort of symbolic action.
Accidents may happen, particularly when there is great unwillingness to go down consciously and intentionally.
Then the unconscious simply takes people by the neck and forces them down, which, of course, may lead to disaster.
It does not necessarily lead to disaster, but it may if one doesn’t help the thing along, if one doesn’t follow the intimations of fate willingly and consciously.
So it is perfectly justifiable that the situation should arouse some fear, particularly the fear that the brakes are perhaps not strong enough; for there is some acceleration in going down that path to the unconscious-the speed has a tendency to increase.
One finds when one takes the downward way that after a while it is almost too easy.
Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body.
But the dream assures her that she has reached the bottom and is safe; that is, she is in relative safety.
This does not exclude the possibility that later on other fears will come, but at all events she has safely reached the
depth that is necessary for the time being.
Now one can rely upon such a dream.
When the unconscious makes a statement, it is unwise to assume that it is a lie or a cheap sort of consolation; she is safe for the time being.
It is like sliding down a steep mountain until you come to a little plateau where you are reasonably safe, though you have not accomplished the whole descent.
At the time she had the dream I did not know it, but I found out a little later that she had here gone so far down into
the strata of the historical mind that she had reached a level where she could objectify her unconscious contents.
I think it is practical and permissible to assume that the mind is built in sort of strata; the top layer would be the actual consciousness, and below would be the historical layers.
The next layer below consciousness would be the consciousness of one’s youth, and then the layer of the parents and grandparents, and farther down the medieval layers.
Then very much farther down would be the layer of the man who did not yet possess his thought, to whom mind was something objective which appeared outside, like the primitive who has no psychology, or only traces of it, like little children. His psychology appears outside of himself.
All the archetypal figures, inasmuch as they are constellated, appear in his surroundings, in animals, in men, in trees, in rocks and so on.
He does not think, it thinks, it speaks; an animal or a bird tells it to him, or he hears the trees whisper together in the night, telling secrets.
All original revelation takes place on that level where the mind is objectified, where it seems not to belong to the person himself, but to be definitely a strange factor.
And the primitive is still alive.
People are always assuming that certain thoughts which really belong to themselves are thought by other people.
They are so convinced of it that they don’t even ask.
For instance, I have had plenty of patients who assumed that I was thinking such and such a thing, that my intention was such and such, never stopping for a moment to consider whether it was true.
Such a thought did not appear in their own head, it appeared in my head-they assumed that it was there in my head.
This is so frequent that I can apply it as a rule. Suppose a patient dreams about a cocoon, for example.
I say: “Now what have you to do with a cocoon?” And she has no idea.
Then I say: “But what do you
think that I think about a cocoon?” “Oh, I know exactly what you think,” and out comes all her own material.
And I did not think it, nor had I the faintest idea of it.
That is the most ordinary phenomenon, so usual that I could build that technical device upon it-what do you think that I
think-and it works.
That is primitive mentality, the objectivation of the mental process, and it is amazingly frequent but naturally quite invisible to the people concerned.
It happens all the time in ordinary practical life that people really behave like primitives; it is not difficult to reach that level where objectivity takes place.
Now in our dreamer’s case it is, of course, a sort of sacrifice.
People often think it is merely technique, a method. It is not.
It needs a particular mental attitude, which cannot be attained without a certain sacrifice of the civilized man.
It seems like sacrilege but there is nothing else to be done about it.
Of course, many people are already on that level, numbers of artistic people, for instance, for whom there is no question of any sacrifice, because they are not yet on the level of civilized consciousness.
But to the person of civilized consciousness it means a sacrifice, an act of devotion, though it is very different from the usual idea of sacrifice.
We have wonderful associations with that word-like the sacrifice of the desires of the flesh-which is all very fine and good.
But to reach the primitive level it is the reverse sacrifice, almost a sort of Black Mass, for it is necessary to give up certain accomplishments.
A man’s highest moral ideal may be his intellectual integrity. His thinking must be pure and true.
And now in order to reach that level of objectivation, he cannot maintain that kind of thinking; he has to sacrifice it, and that is most painful.
So people with differentiated feeling, for example, have to sacrifice that differentiation in order to get back to the primitive level where the mind-or any other inferior function-appears in an objectified form.
And when a person does not succeed, as a rule it will be seen that he was merely too good, too moral.
It is, of course, most regrettable to be forced to give up your moral qualities, yet sometimes such objectivity is reached only by the sacrifice of very good qualities, fine civilized adjustments.
That makes the thing dangerous and difficult, for having once given up such achievements, you are not sure that you will get them back.
There are no walls and no signposts, and you really have the feeling that you may slip down into black eternity.
The proof that the patient had reached the primitive level was that, from that time on, the main progress took place through direct vision; she began to visualize her mind instead of thinking with it, because thinking would have destroyed the creative force, the bull.
She would have been lifted up to that sphere of purity and saintliness where the atmosphere was just dried up, sterile.
You see that thing cannot grow in such a climate.
Therefore she had to go down to the primitive level, where she lost her intellectual grasp.
The intellect is something like a bird of prey; it seizes its object, tears it to pieces, and separates it from its surroundings, in order to acquaint itself with it.
The intellectual processes are really based upon separation; they are based upon endless acts
of cruelty, cutting things down, excluding things.
This distresses the feeling type, because it means dissecting a living thing, tearing it asunder.
Anyone with feeling naturally objects, for he feels the cruelty of such a procedure. In the same way, an intellectual person is distressed by what the feeling type does with the intellect.
He is as rude and cruel and uncouth as the intellectual is with feeling.
But at the primitive level, you see the mind, there is no separation any longer; it is as if you had given up all your assumptions as to the nature of things.
You don’t know what is going to happen, you are below the facts, the facts are passing over you like waves.
You have no standpoint, and your whole mental attitude is transferred into an objectified process which is not yourself.
It is just as if, instead of trying to formulate something for you, I should stop entirely and a voice in the rear should suddenly begin to talk.
Now the advantage of such an exteriorization of the mental process is, as I said, that things then simply happen as they happen; they are no longer dissected and torn asunder, because there is no discerning intellect to tear them asunder.
There is only an eye or an ear to help you to participate.
So you are swayed by facts, as in the dream condition where you are swayed by the psychical process.
That is now beginning with the patient, the psychic facts are flowing along in a continuous stream, everything is still in the original connection with everything else.
And such objectivation is only possible when the subject is depotentiated, when the mind has lost all its qualities of the bird of prey.
I showed you some of the initial visions, those fragmentary, hypnogogic glimpses, and this new vision was more or less the same kind, but with an entirely new element in it: I beheld the head of a ram.
Swiftly and with fearful strength the ram charged and was met full on the forehead by the spear of an Indian.
You see, the new element is that it is no longer a static vision; there is now progress, it is moving by itself.
Before, she still retained her own activity, what you would call her own free will; she had not lent her own power to the contents of the mind.
Therefore they had no power and there was no movement.
This time her dynamis has wandered over into the unconscious objects, the contents of the mind, which are now moving by themselves, naturally with that energy which was formerly her own and which is still her own when she is on another level.
She is still capable of withdrawing from the vision and climbing up to the surface of consciousness, where there is no ram charging, and everything is as it always is.
But at the moment, she gives up her own power, she sinks down, and the contents are moving violently.
The vision goes on: Then the ram vanished. The Indian lay down beside his spear.
Suddenly he leapt to his feet, jumped on his horse, which was black, and galloped over plains and hills until he came to a black pond surrounded by black mountains.
Here the horse refused to go further.
It lay down and died.
The Indian stood on the shore and looked for the sun, but the sun had set, it was twilight.
Suddenly the Indian turned into a Chinaman.
He knelt down beside the black pond and bowed his forehead to the ground three times.
This vision is very much like a dream-but not quite.
What is the difference? What is the criterion?
Mr. Baumann: The dreamer herself is not concerned in the vision.
Dr. Jung: But occasionally you have a dream where you don’t seem to be in it. That is not a criterion.
Prof Eaton: There are none of the contents of ordinary life in it, no automobiles or anything like that.
Dr. Jung: That is a criterion to a certain extent, and obviously there is not one thing in this series of pictures which the dreamer would have encountered in ordinary life.
If it were a dream, what kind would you call it?
Mrs. Baynes: A mana dream, a dream from the collective unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, what the primitives call a great dream, a dream of far reaching importance. Now that is a criterion.
If a series of pictures do not contain the ordinary stuff of life, automobiles, relatives, aunts and so on, it is at all events very unusual and, therefore, quite probably a vision.
But have we other criteria besides the absence of the stuff of everyday life? That is a sort of unconscious criterion, that is negative. Have we any positive evidence?
Mrs. Leon: The photographic quality.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. There is something very peculiar about this vision.
The sequence is exceedingly objective; it excludes the personal participation, while in a dream you would probably find more emotional interference, and it would be less clear in its sequence.
The person is not so much excluded-one is there even if it is only as an onlooker.
For instance, often when I ask you about some happening in your dream where you don’t seem to figure yourself, you say: “Oh, I just knew it, somebody told me.”
There is no subject, you are apparently not in the dream, but emotional contents of your own are there, so you are really in it.
Whether our dreamer said she was very sorry that the horse died, or that the Indian was sorry when the horse died, would make no difference, it would be her own emotion; but there is nothing of the kind, there is no feeling in the whole thing.
So you get a strange impression, as if it were a series of snapshots or a film. Why is that?
Mr. Baumann: All the feelings are in the figures themselves.
Dr. Jung: The dreamer’s inferior function is feeling, of course.
So you assume that the stuff these figures are made of is feeling?
You would say, for instance, that the ram that is killed or that leaps so swiftly has a feeling origin? Or that the Indian standing on the shore of the black lake among the black mountains is a feeling?
Mr. Baumann: No, that is the function of the dreamer.
Mrs. Crowley: Is it not just what you have been describing, the depotentiation of the individual, assimilated into the constituents of the dream?
Dr. Jung: Absolutely. But the question is: is it really feeling, or mere energy?
Do you recognize anything in the nature of feeling in these pictures?
I cannot see it here; later on we shall see it, but to me it is obvious that these pictures are devoid of it.
Of course we cannot deny that the feeling is somewhere, it is in her unconscious, but so disguised
that we cannot see it; the interesting fact is that these pictures do not show it.
In theory we arrive at the conclusion that this Indian and the ram must express feeling, since that is the inferior function, but it is not evident.
If I read that vision to anyone who had not a great deal of analytical knowledge, he would not detect it.
Now how is that unfeeling character explained?
Mrs. Crowley: By her conscious attitude.
Dr. Jung: That is true, and that is a positive criterion for the fact that this must be a vision.
Her dreams were full of feeling, she was afraid, excited, she played music.
In that last dream of the graveyard in France there was an intense feeling atmosphere.
But this series of images is completely devoid of it, which can only come from the fact that this vision is not the exclusive work of the unconscious; otherwise there would be a mood in it.
Her conscious attitude excludes her feeling, and from that fact you can see how these fantasies are produced.
It is first of all her unconscious that operates; she does not know what is going to happen.
If I asked her what she was going to see next, she would not have the faintest idea; the images that appear are sudden and unexpected, which proves the activity of the unconscious.
But the unconscious, as we have seen from her dreams, is very emotional, it is full of feeling.
And the reason that does not appear is that another factor is operating, her consciousness; since her conscious attitude is intellectual, that extinguishes the feeling.
So the original picture which the unconscious is trying to bring up is peculiarly denaturalized by the searchlight of the intellectual consciousness, and what you see is a sort of compromise between the unconscious and the conscious functions.
Mind you, she is not consciously blotting out the feeling, because she is in the primitive condition where she only perceives things.
Her conscious thinking is still there, but it is exteriorized; it is as if she had left her intellectual apparatus outside in the night somewhere, and somebody else were now playing upon it.
It is apparently left to the guidance of the unconscious, and the two together make a series of pictures of a peculiarly
unfeeling nature, in spite of the emotional unconscious being its main substance.
Prof Demos: Isn’t the distinguishing mark of a vision that, like a work of art, a certain discipline has been imposed upon the emotional material?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but in this case it is surely the intellect because she is not artistic.
Prof Demos: This happens to be an intellectual person, but if you were giving a general criterion, would you not say it was the idea of discipline imposed upon nature?
Dr. Jung: Exactly. It is the motif of separation, the motif of things excluded, which gives that peculiar character to the visions and also to the artistic vision.
Dr. Baynes: One could say selection as well?
Dr. Jung: Yes, a sort of selection.
This first dynamic vision still shows the characteristics of the conscious attitude, as is often the case with first visions.
They are very much under the influence of the conscious premises, hampered by the conscious attitude.
Therefore the vision has a character which it should not have, that photographic character where there is also something rather blurred and distant.
It is as if she were just looking at a film, as if the pictures were perfectly detached from herself, there is no participation.
That is, as I said, the influence of the conscious attitude, and that is the criterion for the difference between the dream
and the vision.
In the dream she could not hinder the natural feeling, but in the vision she can blot it out.
Now there has been some doubt as to the nature of feeling.
We discussed it in our summer seminar but there still seems to be great confusion concerning the feeling function.
Unfortunately the word feeling is used for everything under the sun.
For instance, one of the communiquesof President Wilson during the war began: “The President has a feeling.”
In English you could say that, though it doesn’t denote feeling exactly-as little as when you say you have a funny feeling in your toe.
In French, of course, no educated person would mix up feeling and sentiment and sensation, but in German even great poets like Schiller and Goethe constantly mix up feeling and sensation, which means that in the German language the word feeling is still contaminated with the concept of sensation.
If feeling and sensation are I contaminated so that the two expressions are interchangeable, it would be represented by the darker part on this diagram.
That would be the unconscious sphere where one cannot see, where one cannot distinguish between black and white.
The pairs of opposites are mixed up and differentiation is only in the conscious.
Then you may be sure that the spirit of such a nation is their thinking or intuition or both. In Germany there is a wonderful term for intuition, Ahnung, that word has been used there for a very long time.
An educated German knows exactly what Ahnung means.
But if you use the word intuition to an Anglo-Saxon he is not necessarily interested; in late years the word has found a place in Bergson’s so-called intuitive philosophy. Intuition has been recognized there as a secondary function beside
the intellect, but it is a rather recent acquisition.
While in Germany the word Ahnung has a domicile, an existence as a separate thing, no German ever would mix up the word Ahnungwith thought; he knows it to be absolutely different.
Exactly as the Frenchman would never mix up sentiment and sensation.
And in English no educated man in writing would mix up sentiment and sensation.
Of course in vulgar language you can speak of a feeling in your toe, as in German anybody would use it like that, not excluding Goethe.
So in French as well as in English a differentiation has taken place between these two functions.
All this is leading up to that word feeling.
You see, the fact that in English it is possible to interchange the word feeling with sensation, and that in German it is quite certainly done, accounts for the misunderstandings in the use of it.
The word is obviously not clearly differentiated, the concept is not clear.
So when I tried to find a definition for feeling I encountered no end of difficulties and resistances.
Generally people know all about psychology.
We really know very little, but since psychology is always the thing that is closest to us, therefore everybody knows best. For instance, when we try to explain something to the relatives of psychiatric patients, something perfectly obvious and clear, they always know better.
We have been preoccupied with those cases, we have thought about them, but they know better, and so it is generally with psychology.
The question is: What is the definition of feeling?
Naturally you can approach it from many different angles, so you must have a point de depart, a means of orientation, as, for instance, in geography, you take the zero meridien of Paris or the zero meridien of Greenwich.
But you must say which you take, otherwise no one knows what your statement means, to what place you are referring.
So my idea about feeling is that, taken as a differentiated function, it is a function of values.
Feeling states what the thing is worth to you-whether it is valuable or not, agreeable or disagreeable, and so on-and that is a rational function; feeling values are rational values.
Now as soon as I say that, a whole crowd is against me.
“Feeling is not that, my feelings are absolutely irrational!”
Of course your feelings are irrational, because your feelings are inferior.
Anybody who is intellectual has irrational feeling; because their feeling is repressed, it is therefore an inferior function.
A differentiated mind excludes differentiated feeling.
But that doesn’t mean, as you assume, that feelings are never differentiated, that they are naturally irrational.
The feeling type also is against me because he is unable to think; he doesn’t understand it, it is much too intellectual when I put it like this.
For when the function of feeling, which means the function of values, is not differentiated, then the values are not differentiated and the feeling has an irrational quality.
So a man with irrational feeling will show peculiar symptoms, such as liking things which nobody else could possibly like; he cherishes certain things, and no one can understand why he should cherish them.
He is forced by emotions which other people know nothing about, and therefore he gives the impression of being moved or motivated by irrational values.
That is inferior feeling.
The ordinary idea is that inferior feeling is weak and that differentiated feeling is strong, which is nonsense.
Inferior feeling is very much stronger than differentiated feeling, and it has a far more upsetting emotional character.
Also the assumption that differentiated feeling must be nothing but a glowing sunshine day and night is nonsense.
And so it is often assumed that a differentiated intellectual type is a radiant light.
But intellect is a cold sword, a differentiated tool for dissecting things; it is no radiant light, it has no wonderful metaphysical quality.
Any intellectual type flatters himself that his mind is a light; he would never deny that, but the truth is that the intellect is just a cold knife.
Though of course it may be helpful, like a surgical tool, or the knife you use to cut your bread.
And differentiated feeling is a cold proposition.
We expect it to be wonderful and lovely, but as a matter of fact, it is just correct feeling, feeling which can be used for one’s own ends, as the thinker uses his intellect.
It is also a weapon, a tool sharpened for one’s own purposes, which are not necessarily unselfish.
Dr. Baynes: The use of the term “feeling” in Wilson’s pronunciamento was surely equivalent to saying: “I have a valuable idea.” I think in English “feeling” is often made use of for diplomatic reasons. It invites a sympathetic reaction.
Dr. Jung: I am not an expert in the English language, but I have a sort of feeling that the Prime Minister in the Foreign Office in England would never issue such a manifesto, he would never have such a feeling.
I think that is American.
Prof Demos: Just as there is an objective side to feeling, is there not a strongly subjective side to it, in the sense that feeling coils itself around the subject?
Dr. Jung: It all depends upon what you call feeling. I call it a function of values that can be objectified.
There are objective values, but they may also be extremely subjective; that is a matter of differentiation.
A differentiated feeling type carefully observes the differentiated objective values, and he attaches his feeling to them as much as possible, as the intellectual always conforms to the objective rules of the game.
Prof Demos: Would you say that thinking values are rather weighted on the side of the objective, and feeling weighted on the side of the subjective?
Dr. Jung: I would say that if a man finds that feeling is a function that has more to do with the subjective than with the objective, it is because his feeling has a subjective character; while his intellect has an objective character, he has more of an intellectual trend.
As for instance, a feeling type might say that thinking had always a subjective character.
The intellectual is very particular about his feeling; he says, I feel what I feel, he believes in feeling being subjective.
Prof Demos: But the artist insists on the subjectivity of feeling.
Dr. Jung: Artists are not necessarily differentiated people; very often they are awfully primitive, the least differentiated.
For that very reason they are sort of idols to differentiated people, who get perfectly dry and sterile and are really craving for the artist, as the artist is craving for differentiation.
He is like the primitive man whose mind is in objects.
Therefore the artist, not only in his creation, but also in his life, in his conduct, is very often an absolute victim of his unconscious, which cannot be said of the differentiated man.
The artist is something like the primitive medicine man, while the civilized man, the man of culture, is more like the saint.
Now when the President says, “I have a feeling,” he really means, “I guess,” it is a guess and he depends upon his audience to interpret it in that way.
A Frenchman would then naturally feel somewhat under an obligation to listen, because somebody has a feeling.
The German would laugh.
In Switzerland we would be mildly amused and think, well, he is in the White House and might have feelings.
Naturally the American nation would not see it at all. Italy would be enthusiastic because a feeling is something to get a kick out of, they would shout: “Evviva! The President has a feeling!”
So we can’t quite make out really what that feeling is, because it is a different thing in different languages.
In translating it for a French or a German ear, I think it would be better to say, the President guesses, or the President has a hunch, or suggests; then one would produce about the right effect.
So the question of feeling, the psychological problem, is hampered by the difficulties of these word concepts.
That is one of the reasons why I detest all concept philosophy.
It is words and words, and nothing but words.
I always question what the substance may be, the experience behind those concepts.
You see, I want to limit, to describe, that experience which we call feeling, and obviously we can label many things as
feeling, like the pain in your toe, the feeling the President has about a certain political situation, the feeling of a mother for her child, or that there is a wintry feeling in the air, etc.
And in German you can make endless combinations with the word feeling, it goes on to infinity.
Therefore we are simply forced to boil that whole thing down to some simple and tangible experience, and my choice was values, the energic intensities of psychological experience.
That is of course a very intellectual expression, because it was a preoccupation of my intellect first.
But couched in terms of values, it might reach even the ear of the feeling type, for the word value suggests worth, and worth appeals to the feeling.
Worth to the mind means astonishingly little; it might mean a number for instance.
To the intellectual a valuable thing means something exceedingly restricted, perhaps to a particular line of research-the information, for instance, that a certain species of lice, which occurs in some corner of a forest in Venezuela, has a reddish color.
That information is exceedingly valuable, but no feeling type ever would think it was valuable except for that particular mental pursuit.
To people who are not especially interested in the colors of lice, it is rather preposterous, almost ridiculous, to use the word value in such a connection; yet of course to any scientific man it is perfectly obvious what it means.
Usually the word value means the recognition-what we call a feeling-that a thing is worth something, that it has a certain value.
For instance, something is imposing, or something is frightening, or something is likable meaning I love it, or I hate it.
If you ask me why I hate such and such a thing, and I say, oh, because it has no value, or it has a negative value, or
it has a poisonous quality, I am translating my activity into the terms of the object.
That is what people usually do when they love or hate; they understand it by the quality of the object.
So feeling is really a function of quality or of values.
Of course you could say that we must reserve the use of the word feeling to certain processes of the mind, as a German
philosopher has used the word, the feeling of imminent danger, for instance, or the feeling of a certain atmosphere, or a feeling that the weather is going to change; he includes all that in the term, and makes his concept of feeling out of such experiences.
But I would take those as guesses. I would place them as intuitions.
To me they have nothing to do with what I call feeling.
So you see we must understand whether we are speaking from the standpoint of the zero meridien of Greenwich or of Paris.
I am talking of the function of values, and when I speak of the feelings of our patient I mean an inferior function.
Since she is intellectual in the conscious, her feeling is therefore inferior and contaminated with another inferior
function in the unconscious, where they form an indistinguishable mass.
The feeling that appears in dreams is usually a mixture of feeling and sensation; it is by no means differentiated.
People often think when they detect the first movements in the unconscious, ah, now the feeling!
They think that sort of emotional stuff which comes up is feeling.
It is no more feeling than the revelation of a primitive caveman is thought.
To him a vision would be air substance; naturally he has no language to call it that, but he would mean something equivalent to it, a kind of spirit.
One could not call his revelation thinking.
So the vision of Daniel, or of John in the Apocalypse, are not thoughts, those are visions; yet it is thought substance which on a higher level of development will become thinking.
The thinking faculty has been developed out of vision-what has been vision later becomes thinking.
You see that in the development of the gods. The Greek gods were simply personified emotional conditions.
They called a god Mars, for instance, and then later it became a moral concept of anger or fury.
Venus became the psychological concept of love. At first those gods appeared to man as apparitions, revelations.
Then at a later stage of development we made them into concepts.
We dissolved that semi-reality character of the gods, and so they degenerated, one might say, into concepts.
We denaturalized the mind.
We have separated the mind from all those primitive conceptions, from its connection with nature; we have drawn it into ourselves as a collection of images of former revelations.
There are interesting examples of the way the primitive mind appears outside in objects in Osborne Dennett’s book,
At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind.
It is very difficult to read because he stayed so long in the Congo that he went a bit black himself, so his representation is very blurred, but there are some excellent things in it.
For instance, he quotes the speech of a primitive chief, who was elected king by vassal chiefs, and had to deliver a speech to them at his coronation.
He talked of rivers and hills and groves and fruits, and one would think it was perfectly mad stuff, but then Osborne Dennett explains what it really was.
The chief was pointing to the “invisible whale”; he was really speaking of moral and religious concepts.
Suppose, for instance, that all our ideas of justice and law were completely identical with the Law Court, with the building itself.
We would then suppose that law and justice were in that building, or that that building was the law, was justice, and that outside that building there was nothing of the kind, the building was the embodiment of it.
So let us say that there is a certain river and a certain grove, with which may be associated also a kind of fruit, a special vegetable, or an animal, and at the same time they express an idea, perhaps an idea of truth or of loyalty.
Such concepts are considered as being in a certain place on the map, so the grove might contain justice and the
river contain truth.
Therefore, instead of saying: “I wish you to be loyal to the king and I shall always be true to you,” the chief would say: “The Limmat flows into the lake and on Zurichberg is a wood.”
Of course nobody would know that that wood harbors loyalty and the river harbors truth.
Though you might say it was like the way the German papers speak of Wilhelmstrasse, or the English papers of Downing Street, and of course Wall Street is absolutely identical with a very important function.
Now that is the primitive mind.
They never think with the head; they think with the heart or, more certainly, the belly.
Those people have
their ideas in the woods, so that primitive country is the mind, they are
identical.
Our mind evolved out of rivers, trees, hills, fruits, and we slowly brought it together by the process of abstraction. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89-106
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
