The Ghost as a Psychic Phenomenon
Foreword
I write these few introductory words to this collection of essays and
lectures in affectionate memory of their author.
The late H. G. Baynes was my assistant for several years, my travelling companion on our African expedition, and my faithful friend till his all too early death, which has left a painful gap in the circle of his friends and colleagues.
His first published work was his most excellent translation of my book
Psychological Types.
Later he became well known as the author of two important works, Mythology of the Soul and Germany Possessed.
The first of these deals with the daily reality of the psychotherapist, and the second with contemporary events.
In Mythology of the Soul the author uses raw material—such as the
psychotherapist meets with daily in his consulting hours—as a clue to guide the reader through the maze of individual reflections, opinions, interpretations and attempts at explanation which a psychologist gathers in the course of his experience.
The empirical material stimulates such considerations and they are also indispensable in order to integrate it in consciousness.
Germany Possessed is concerned with the great contemporary problems
which form a direct challenge to the psychologically minded doctor.
This book made the author known to a very wide public.
His shorter writings, which have been collected in this present volume, deal
with the complex psychic conditions characteristic of medical psychology.
Psychology is thus a discipline which obliges the medical psychologist to deal with complex psychic factors, for the psychotherapeutic process can only take place on this level. Therefore analytical psychology is also rightly called ‘complex psychology’.
A simplifying theory is naturally exceedingly popular in this highly
complicated field, but the author has wisely resisted any such temptation.
In its place he has drawn from a really remarkable wealth of theoretical and
practical points of view, and has opened up possibilities and connections
worthy of further discussion.
H. G. Baynes left us too soon. May this volume, which he has left to us, become a milestone on the road of psychological research.
~C. G. JUNG ~Carl Jung, Foreword, Analytical Psychology and the English Mind, Page 7-8
It would be not only reckless but unprofitable to embark upon a discussion
of the spirit-world without first circumscribing the terrain.
As a physician approaching the field from the side of medical psychology I find, however, a piece of ground alread cleared. But this claim does not correspond altogether with that of psychical research.
Our psychological investigations have unwittingly quickened an interest in ghosts, because these play a symbolical role in the subliminal dramas with which the psychotherapist has to deal.
Psychical research, on the other hand, tends to pursue its interest in the ghost as an independent phenomenon, existing in and for itself; its relativity in the scheme of general psychic causality being a secondary consideration, if not ignored altogether.
The psychotherapist encounters certain psychoneurotic states which, by
their very nature, compel him to make use of the primitive concept of
possession.
These ghost-effects are very real. A psychoneurotic personality often behaves as though an alien will possessed him.
He also has dreams in which a ghost appears in his room, or in which he is being pursued by a sinister daemonic figure whom he cannot evade.
But, although the effect is alien in character, its causation is intelligible, and the conditions of its appearance are sometimes predictable.
We have the advantage, therefore, of being able to study the natural history
of the ghost from an inside position, whereas the scientific investigator, who has to sift the accounts of a number of excited witnesses who may or may not have seen apparitions or heard strange noises, is in a different case.
For he must needs determine how much or how little should be ascribed to general suggestibility, how much of the experience has been unconsciously trimmed to suit the supposed expectations of the investigator, and, even where a relatively convincing consensus gentium exists, he has to determine where a line can be drawn between the subjective constellation in the witnesses’ psychology and the unknown factor which can be regarded as an external activating force.
In these cases the psychical context, by virtue of which the ghostly appearance would fit into a relatively intelligible sequence of events,
is usually lacking and, therefore, the apparition is left suspended, as it were, in a supernormal or sub-normal unreality.
The question of setting, or frame, or context, is the primary consideration in the understanding of all psychic phenomena.
In the field of natural science we are accustomed to draw certain logical conclusions from the objective aspect and behaviour of the things observed, since natural science proceeds on the assumption that nature is rational.
But as soon as we cross over into the field of so-called psychic phenomena, a purely objective account of the phenomena is found to be inadequate.
For example, an objective record of Saul’s critical journey to Damascus, including the subject’s account of the divine apparition in heaven and his subsequent change in character and attitude, savours of the miraculous only because the full subjective context is lacking.
If this be added, we can get a glimpse of that split-off subliminal personality which was gradually assimilating the Christian spirit, while the conscious personality was fanatically over-compensating his own doubt by drastic persecution of the Christians.
We might be able to detect certain signs, as the nascent Christian complex waxed in power in the unconscious subjective hinterland, until it finally broke through the threshold of consciousness, throwing Saul to the ground and declaring its superior energy-content by its apparitional manifestation in an aura of white light.
From now onwards the previous conscious personality and standpoint is repressed as an unworthy antithesis to the victorious Christian thesis, finding only a spasmodic pathological expression in the guise of epileptiform fits.
The very fact that we are able to make this fairly intelligible reconstruction
of what seemed to our forefathers a miraculous occurrence does not mean that we have, thereby, explained the overwhelming impression of a genuine
religious experience.
But it does mean that we are able to rescue a large tract of human experience from the realm of magic and mystery, and to bring it within the province of understanding.
Instead of viewing an isolated disjuncted marvel in the skies, we are able to piece together an orderly sequence of events which reveals an inherent purposiveness.
This has been made possible by carrying the agnostic spirit of scientific inquiry into the realm of psychic events.
In psychological practice we frequently encounter facts that seem scarcely
credible; facts that appear at first so irrational that we almost despair of
embracing them in a scientific corpus.
But in so far as the living individual, who alone is able to provide the psychic context of these strange events, is sitting solidly before us, the lamp of reason refuses to be extinguished, and with it we are sometimes enabled to find the rational thread of continuity.
The hypothesis which has supplied the golden thread in the labyrinth of the
psyche is the conception that all psychic activity is purposive.
This golden thread of purposive activity is, however, rarely supplied by the patient’s conscious account of his experience.
The clue is usually found in his dreams or fantasies. These spontaneous products of the mind reveal the unconscious causal nexus which makes the conscious history intelligible.
The unconscious is merely a term which comprises everything that exists,
that has existed, or that could exist beyond the range of this individual
consciousness.
It is therefore a relative condition, since what is unconscious
to-day may be conscious to-morrow, and vice versa. So long as consciousness, as in the early days of last century, was limited by the concept of miraculous or divine creation, the continuity of the evolutionary process was an unconscious content, but it was none the less a fact. And in so far as general consciousness to-day still regards the mental process as synonymous with consciousness, it must necessarily regard every projection of unconscious psychic activity as aspects of objective reality.
For if the continuity between the emergent form and its antecedent germination in the unconscious is not perceived by consciousness, it is held not to exist.
And when this continuity is demonstrated, it frequently happens that the individual concerned feels that in some way his faith has been undermined.
Very few can tolerate the truth that what is attributed to fate represents the sum of unconscious psychic motivations, and that the all-embracing paternal image is a condensation of inherited experience.
I believe everyone resents these psychological explanations, because in the West the concept of the psyche has been cheapened by a whole host of opinion-pedlars and wisdom-mongers who offer cheap explanations with the air of a scientific pundit.
A cheap explanation explains things away, whereas our best scientific theory merely removes one veil from the muffled figure of truth. We use the term psyche as though the name gave us power over the thing named.
But in fact we cannot even locate the psyche, while its contents and activities are, to a large extent, unknown to us and beyond our conscious control.
When science invades the province that hitherto has been guarded by religious taboo, it has to tread warily; for it is sacred ground.
In certain Eastern countries, or amongst savage peoples, the voices of the
insane are regarded as the utterances of a spirit, and arouse veneration and
awe.
Whereas with us, who know that the state of insanity means to be in the
grip of irrational ideas, no heed is given to what issues from the mouths of the possessed, unless one happens to be a Dostoievsky or a Jung.
Psychological explanation is a scientific attempt to make the sequence of
psychic events intelligible.
But a purely rational account is never satisfactory because the nature of unconscious activity is primitive and therefore nonrational in character. Our best hope, then, is to make use of the non-rational symbol-language of the unconscious, even though a symbol can never be completely transposed into intellectual terms.
Our experience of our underlying primitive psychology consists at times of ghosts, demons and other mythological denizens.
During the experience these things are our reality.
Hence our conscious reaction to these experiences must take into account the non-rational, dynamic character of the pure experience.
And yet, because the ruler of consciousness is the reason, our account must also be essentially reasonable.
Our worst danger is to use our scientific intellect as a defence against the experience of the primordial unconscious.
Science is knowledge, and to experience ourselves must involve a certain responsibility concerning the knowledge we have gained.
If I know, for instance, that certain so-called accidents which befall me, or certain bad effects I see in my children or my household, have their source in my unconscious psychology, I must choose between making my children my scapegoats or taking responsibility for my own psychology.
I cannot any longer assume that I don’t know.
Now this is the situation in which the problem of the ghost has placed us.
There is not one of us who is free of responsibility concerning the ghosts of
the past.
We imagine we have bought off fate by our superior education, but
actually we are haunted by bewildered and dissatisfied spirits.
Ancestorworship is to be found wherever culture has spread. Gifts and food and funerary rites, as are to be seen in China to-day, did not spring solely out of veneration for the honoured dead.
Originally they were the means of satisfying the ghosts, in order that they should not afflict the living with their ghostly craving for life.
When Dr. Jung and I were camping among the Elgonyi on Mount Elgon, we frequently came across little ghost-houses by the side of the path leading to a house or village.
The little houses had two or more rooms, and milk and corn and other attractions were placed in them, so that the spirits might stay there and not go on to the village and make people sick.
The ghosts of dead relatives and ancestors are particularly to be feared as
the cause of illness.
The most difficult and responsible office of the shaman among Siberian tribes, or of the laibon in East Africa, is literally the cure of souls. Healing the sick is considered to be a relatively elementary art.
Shamans of the lower grades can undertake doctoring, but only the highest
grade of shaman can shepherd the souls of the dead. In Lamaism, also, the
ultimate store of traditional wisdom is reserved for instructing the dead.
The spirits have to be enticed or led away from the habitations of the living to the place where they can dwell in safety. In Uganda we were allowed to see one of these houses to which the ghosts are led.
They are really churches.
Often a considerable amount o f art and devotion has been given to these ghost-houses where the spirits of the ancestors are housed.
The churches of our English shires, standing in consecrated ground among the graves of the dead, are really ghost-houses.
From this point of view God would be the great ancestor-spirit who must
be very securely housed, lest
He should wander into the village and make people mad or sick.
The act of consecration is a magical ritual designed to set apart this special plot of ground in which the ghosts of the dead are magically contained.
We have lost sight of the original psychological necessity which set
apart the Gottesacker with its graves and spirit-house as a piece of consecrated ground; but comparison with the primitive homologue shows us that in spite of our ideal superstructure, the ground-plan of our civilized religious structure is identical with the primitive conception.
Mr. John Layard tells me that in Malekula, an island of the New Hebrides,
the most pressing need in every person’s life is to have a pig or pigs which, in the event of death, can be sacrificed to placate the bad female ghost Lehevhev, so that the soul may travel safely to the volcano where the ancestor-spirits dwell.
At the end of the great Sumerian epic, Gilgamish, we find the closing
stanzas concerned with the description of the ghosts found in the underworld by Enkidu’s spirit, and how their fate is determined by the way they died and the way in which they are remembered by their surviving relatives ~H.G. Baynes, Analytical Psychology and the English Mind, Page 159-164
