Jung’s Depth-Psychological Analysis of Sin and Redemption
God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. (M. Luther)
I could never accept the existence of a personal God. No such Being could possibly endure the suffering of humanity. (W. Pauli to G. Quispel)
Non si può dire che sia servito a molto perché il male dalla terra non fu tolto. (Fabrizio De André “Si chiamava Gesù”)
In the secular and pluralistic approach to human suffering offered by the modern psychotherapeutic paradigm, can there still be place for the Christian notions of sin and redemption?
Freud’s paradigm, as the following quote makes clear, is generally offered as an ‘alternative’ to ‘atonement theology’: [S]everal non-religious accounts of the world – most paliently that of psychologist Sigmund Freud – have led to alternative therapies for approaching many of the human problems traditionally addressed by atonement theology – the experience of guilt, in particular, but also anxiety, depression, and feelings of meaninglessness. (Zahl 2013: 633)
In this section I will be addressing Jung’s analysis of sin and redemption. This should help understand why ‘good’ and ‘evil’, in Jung’s work, are generally found in inverted commas.
One of Jung’s central points is that sin – the moral aspect of evil – is a necessary step in man’s moral development: without sin (evil) there can be no redemption (the turning of evil into good).
In Answer to Job, Jung writes that [t]he guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation [by which Jung means individuation], not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God [by which Jung means the negative polarity of the Self which we call ‘evil’] would find no room. (Jung 1952b: 746)
In the ‘Tavistock Lectures’ (1935) Jung writes that ‘[o]ur sins and errors and mistakes are necessary to us, otherwise we are deprived of the most precious incentives to development’ (Jung 1935: 291-295).
Again, in Answer to Job Jung offers a psychological reading of Satan’s rebellion, of Adam’s fall and of Cain’s crime, which he considers as all belonging to one archetypal pattern: their “evil” and “sinful” actions are interpreted as movements of separation from the morality of the father (Jung 1952b:
618), as attempts to seek individuation beyond ‘paternal approval’ (ibid.), although their ‘progressiveness’ is still marked by ‘moral inferiority’ (ibid.).
Reading these passages, one cannot escape from the impression that Jung feels a considerable degree of admiration towards these figures and their efforts to substantiate an individual ethical approach, which our author, as we have seen, always considered as superior to a merely ‘moral’ stance. As Jung writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis, ‘life itself is guilt’ (Jung 1955-56: 206).
This quote from Leibniz, who discusses and seems to approve the position of the Gallican Church of his time towards sin and redemption, can also be used to describe Jung’s position on the matter:
The illustrious prelates of the Gallican church […] maintain that a sequence of things where sin enters in may have been and has been, in effect, better than another sequence without sin. (Leibniz 1951: 139)
Jung seems to endorse the interpretation of sin as felix culpa which we find in St Paul, according to which sin is the gateway for redemption: ‘where sin abounded, grace did much more abound’ (Romans 5: 21).
Although, interestingly, the culpa which redemption solves, is actually a divina culpa: Jung interprets Christ’s incarnation as God’s answer to Job:
Christ’s […] sacrificial death was a fate chosen by Yahweh as a reparation for the wrong done to Job on the one hand, and on the other hand as a fillip to the spiritual and moral development of man. There can be no doubt that man’simportance is enormously enhanced if God himself deigns to become one. (Jung 1952b: 650)
Here Jung moves within St Anselm’s juridic category of ‘satisfactio’:
Christ is the ‘price to pay’ for Job’s suffering (today most theologians prefer to read redemption as a gratuitous ‘gift’). But this does not mean that, for Jung, the sum of Job’s suffering and of Christ’s Passion is zero. Christ begins to redeem humanity by bringing the ‘light’ of love (as opposed to the morality of law) and is an ally in humankind’s fight against darkness, which includes – paradoxically – the dark side of God, and sin. In psychological terms, the Christian era represents the individuative phase in which we are capable of successfully contrasting the negative influence of our shadow therefore strengthening our ego. Jesus ‘sav[es] the threatened religious community’ (Jung 1952b: 688).
Jesus is a model of perfectionism, not of completeness: he is more divine than human and his Shadow is split off. The problem is that our Shadow has a positive function inasmuch as it connects us to earth, to our instincts and to the feminine side of Western consciousness, in other words to our unconscious.
‘[W]hile God in the person of Christ succeeded in incarnating his good side, his evil side continued to be projected onto his creatures’ (Main 2006: 307).
In a letter to Victor White, Jung explains this paradox:
‘When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that was the fatal moment when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut off in order to enable man to become morally conscious’ (letter to Victor White, 10 April 1954, quoted in Stein 1995: 76).
A more complete redemption and ‘continuing incarnation’ can only occur in the ‘era of the Holy Ghost’, where God incarnates in the ‘empirical man’ (Jung 1952b: 755), ‘the natural man who is tainted with original sin’.
According to Jung, ‘the guilty man is eminently suitable […], not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room’ (Jung 1952b: 746)166.
Jung’s developmental account of our ethical capacities, can be looked at through the lens of the human and divine figures of Answer to Job:
Yahweh: the amoral Self for whom the distinction between good and evil is not defined and creative tendencies coexist alongside destructive ones Job: the first development and differentiation of a moral ego (i.e. capable of distinguishing between good and evil), out of an indifferentiated Self Christ: the one-sided strengthening of a moral stance based on love Satan/the Antichrist: the one-sided strengthening of an immoral stance based on power The Holy Ghost: the beginning of ethics, in which the opposites of good and evil (of love and power?) within the Self are reunited at a conscious level.
The way Jung deals with the notion of sin exemplifies the hermeneutical approach which is constantly operative in his work: a religious concept is brought into Jung’s
psychological discourse because of its psychological value – so one could reach the
conclusion that for Jung religion is ‘nothing but’ psychology, or perhaps ‘protopsychology’.
But in fact when Jung is talking about ‘sin’ it would be difficult to trace where the original ‘religious’ notion of sin ends and where Jung’s interpretation of this same concept begins.
It is not that an interpretation subsumes under its categories everything to which it is alien. The point is that the interpreter is already within the horizon of meaning which has been opened by the concept he is looking at.
This is why Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, writes that he ‘moves entirely within a Christian framework’. He is not referring, in this quote, to Christian beliefs, which he may or may not have personally had (a question which I am happy to leave to biographers), but to the cultural legacy which he inherits and which informs his thinking.
Interpretation is akin to psychological growth inasmuch as it is both a movement of separation from a cultural matrix in order to see more clearly and of integration of one’s cultural matrix within oneself in order to understand it from within.
Jung’s aim is not to ‘explain’ (aufklaren), but to ‘understand’ (verstehen) Jung’s ‘psychology of religion’ should be read in the two senses of the grammatical genitive:
as an interpretation of religion through psychology; and as an uncovering of the psychological value of religious thought – the psychology in religion. ~Giovanni Colacicchi, Jung and ethics: a conceptual exploration, Page 165-170
On January 5, 1922, in an active imagination Jung complains to his soul that he is tired, but the soul will not let him sleep (2009, 211). He asks his soul why it is keeping him awake. e soul replies that this is no time to sleep; the great work begins.
soul tells him that the work is di‑cult, and he has been unconscious for too long. soul announces: “To no longer be a Christian is easy. But what next? For more is yet to come . . .” soul goes on to say that Jung has received a revelation that he should not hide. His calling should take priority, and his calling is the new religion and its proclamation.
Jung is startled by this and has no idea how to carry out this task, but the soul says that no one knows it as he does and no one could say it as well as he could. He has the requisite knowledge, and he should publish his material. As the conversation goes on, the problem becomes how to embody this knowledge in daily life. e soul tells him that, rather than being a rational process, “e way is symbolic.” What follows is well known to us. e symbolic manifestations of the soul become a main focus of analytical psychology.
is and other dialogues raise the question of whether Jung’s psychology represents the beginning of a new form of spirituality that is arising alongside our existing religious traditions.1
Jung has often been accused of trying to start a religion, initially by Freudians and more recently by Richard Noll (1997a, 1997b), to whose criticisms I return later. Sonu Shamdasani has shown that Noll’s charge is baseless, but it is typical of the kind of misunderstanding that Jung’s approach engenders (1998). We might see more of this kind of criticism as reviews of e Red Book emerge because of a lack of understanding of the process of active imagination.
Is Jung a Christian?
In what way is Jung “no longer a Christian”? Aer all, a great deal of Christian and biblical imagery appears in e Red Book, and in one of the dialogues, Jung even experiences a momentary identication with Christ.
However, Jung points out that we cannot Christianize the unconscious because the unconscious is autonomous (1938/1969, CW 11, ¶¶40–44); it spontaneously produces numinous imagery that may or may not take traditional Judeo-Christian forms (Corbett 2006). James Hall points out that when our authentic spirituality is repressed, perhaps because it is too unusual or idiosyncratic, it may emerge in dream imagery in a form that is radically different than our expectations (1993).
For example, Ulanov reports a dream in which a man sees himself worshiping a giant pig (1986). When numinous imagery is linked to our psychological structures in this kind of way, religion becomes personal, internal rather than external, and no longer projected onto outer savior figures. divine is no longer located purely in a transcendent realm; it is now found deeply within our subjectivity.
No longer is everything we need found in the Bible and the Church. e fact that the Self or the transpersonal levels of the psyche produce novel, personally relevant numinous imagery is particularly important for people for whom the Judeo-Christian tradition no longer contains much emotional power.
If the sacred manifests itself by means of the unconscious—in dreams, visions, and synchronistic events—we have direct contact with it, with no need for liturgy or prayer books or a Church hierarchy. Jung is, therefore, not a traditional Christian, although in a 1959 letter he said, “I think of myself as a Christian, since I am based entirely upon Christian concepts” (1975, 524).
Jung interprets the Christian story in his own way. For example, according to Jung, we can no longer load everything onto Christ; every person has to carry God; the descent of spirit into matter is complete:
“We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment . . . we must live out our own vision of life . . .
When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man . . . then only does God become man in ourselves” (McGuire and Hull 1977 97–98). is sounds like theology, but in this interview, Jung goes on to deny that he is a religious leader, saying he has no message or mission but speaks as a philosopher who just tries to understand what he observes.
Jung may have found some justification for his reinterpretation of the meaning of Christ in his Red Book conversation with the anchorite Ammonius, who points out that we do not know the hidden meaning of the Gospels; their meaning is yet to come: “Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent” (2009, 272).
Religion proceeds in stages, and we only know the meaning of the previous stage when we are in the new stage.
Jung would oen deny that he was doing theology, insisting that he was simply an empirical observer of the psyche. But perhaps Jung is being too modest, because he makes statements that are incompatible with traditional notions of a transcendent divinity. Consider comments like this: “It was only quite late that we realized (or rather are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. is realization is a millennial project” (1939/1954/1969, CW 11, ¶631).
Most radically, as Dourley points out, the defining characteristic of Jung’s approach is that he recalls the gods back to their origin in the psyche (2009). So, unlike Rudolph Otto (1958), for whom the divine is wholly other, for Jung the experience of the numinous is immanent, located within the psyche. Jung’s description of numinous experience is intended to be psychological and not metaphysical (1955–56/1970, CW 14, ¶781).
He insists he is not talking about the nature of the divine itself. He is talking about people’s experience, and he is not trying to impose a metaphysical system.
eologians are oen not happy with Jung’s vision of the numinous as radically immanent because they want to preserve the notion of a divinity that is transcendent and accessible only by means of the sacraments or rituals of a particular institution and priesthood.
For example, as John Dourley points out, the Vatican does not approve of Jung; in a document titled Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life,2 Jung is explicitly mentioned and rejected as a founding member of so-called New Age spirituality (2009, 6).
Various elements of Jungian psychology are said to be incompatible with Christianity.
Jung is in good company; this Vatican document does not approve of William James or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin either. In fact, I believe that Jung is a greater threat to the religious establishment than Freud; Freud said that religion is based on projection and illusion, whereas Jung not only insists that religion is important, but he also seems to oer an alternative to established traditions.
In Jung’s e Red Book, dialogues with the soul often contrast the spirit of the depths (SD) with the spirit of the times (ST). e ST is a system of rational thought that began with the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason, followed by the development of positivist science.
One of the main points of e Red Book dialogues is that the ST, or an excessive emphasis on rationality, alienates us from symbolic thinking.
Jung points out that although traditional religious symbols are derived from the archetypallevel of the psyche and were originally emotionally powerful, today religionmeans collective consciousness or mass-mindedness, which is dangerous to humanity (1916/1969, CW 8, ¶426). only counterweight to this is to attend to the SD, the objective psyche, and the process of individuation, which is a spiritual journey.
Traditional collective religions have lost the deepest meaning of their symbols by making them literal and historical.
Collective religion has now become part of the ST, either a matter of believing in some kind of dogma or reading a book about what happened to someone else a long time ago—what William James called secondhand religion. In this way, collective religion has severed people from their depths.
Jung is in the tradition of writers such as William James who find the sources of religion in personal experience. Jung was most concerned with individual experience of the numinosum because he had seen from his father’s difficulties that a focus on belief, doctrine, and dogma alone leads nowhere. Numinous experiences are usually very relevant to the psychology of the individual, and they oen have a healing effect—hence Jung’s letter of 1944 in which he says that his theory of therapy is based on contact with the numinosum (1973, 377).
For Jung, healing in psychotherapy requires a religious attitude but not necessarily adherence to a particular tradition. this attitude means paying attention to spontaneous numinous experience. ~Lionel Corbett, Jung’s e Red Book Dialogues with the Soul Herald of a new Religion? Page 63-66
Archetypes, in Jung’s thought, are analagous to instincts a “given disposition to behave in a certain way in particular circumstances : they can also be thought of (as Jung suggests) as the abstract ‘lattice-structure’ of crystals, i.e. the pre-determined pattern which is common to all the possible varieties of the actual concrete crystals of any particular crystalline substance.
Archetypes bear a similar relationship to the symbols which are their manifestation, and from which their existence is inferred.
A symbol is not deliberately thought out like an allegory : a consciously contrived device designed to ‘symbolize something is better called a sign or an emblem.
A genuine symbol cannot be completely rationalized ; because of its very nature its roots are in the unconscious: in fact, the extent to which a symbol is capable of being rationalized seems to be inversely proportional to its subsequent effectiveness in awakening a response in many people this raises the whole problem of the use of ancient symbols in modern worship, a topic to which we shall return. As we have seen above, the Fish, in an early Christian context, is a remarkable symbol which represents simultaneously many different levels of existence and experience past, present and future; historical and metaphysical; religious and seasonal; eucharistic and post-mortal.
For a variety of reasons, in our contemporary culture the Fish is no longer a symbol of this sort: in some areas of our society the Fish might be taken to mean Trying Tonight’ !
In his book The Origins and History of Consciousness Erich Neumann discusses the function of symbols as ‘stepping-stones’ in the historical development of human thought-processes:
‘Generally speaking the symbol works in opposite ways for primitive and modern man. Historically, the symbol led to the development of consciousness, to reality-adaptation and the discovery of the objective world. It is now known, for instance, that sacred animals came “before” stockbreeding, just as in general the sacred meaning of a thing is older than its profane meaning. Its objective significance is only perceived afterwards, behind its symbolic significance.
In the dawn period the rationalizable component of a symbol was of crucial importance, since it was at this point that man’s view of the world passed from the symbolic to the rational.
The Psychological Types advance from prelogical to logical thinking likewise proceeds via the symbol, and it can be shown that philosophic and scientific thinking gradually developed out of symbolic thinking by progressively emancipating itself from the emotional-dynamic components of the unconscious’.
Symbols are also very important Energy-transformers’ linking the unconscious and the conscious : by means of them we are able to orientate our attention and focus our abilities in both customary and new directions.
By means of religious and national symbols a peaceable carpenter can, in time of war, be persuaded to accept training which will convert him into an efficient destroyer of his fellow men the appeal to reason is only a part (often a small part) in the achievement of this kind of metamorphosis.
As Erich Neumann write :
ln early cultures, everyday habit is simply the unconscious existence of primitive man, the habitual clinging of his libido to the world in participation mystique, in which state his natural life is spent.
Through the symbol, the energy is freed from this attachment and becomes available for conscious activity and work.
The symbol is the transformer of energy, converting into other forms the libido which alone enables primitive man to achieve anything at all.
That is why any activity of his has to be initiated and accompanied by a variety of religious and symbolic measures, whether it be farming, hunting, fishing or any other “unaccustomed” work not done every day.
Only with the help of the fascinating, libido-catching, and ego-absorbing effect of the symbol can the “unaccustomed activity” be undertaken.’
Many different objects can become symbols of the same archetypal figure. Motherhood, for instance, suggests such processes as sheltering, enclosing, containing, preserving, nourishing, supporting, etc., so that typically feminine symbols include valleys, walled gardens, wells and springs, vessels and ships, caves and rock-clefts, houses and cities, cradles and coffins, trees, fruits and certain flowers.
In the Church many of these symbols are associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary (derived mainly from the Song of Songs), and the Church itself (often with boat-shaped buildings) is thought of as our Mother and the Bride of Christ.
Conversely, the same symbol can refer to opposite poles of experience:
thus, the snake symbolizes both death and resurrection, disease and healing, Satan and Christ.
Further, as distinct from symbols which have the same kind of significance for everybody (because of their connection with the archetypes of the unconscious), we all tend to acquire a number of personal symbols and what is almost a private mythology: some objects have a symbolic significance for us individually because they are associated with experiences which have made impressions in the personal unconscious.
Hence the difficulty of interpreting dreams, i.e. of knowing whether a particular dream-symbol belongs to the collective or to the personal unconscious.
Archetypes, as the choice ofname implies, are also analogous, in a way, to what Plato called ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’; but whereas the Platonic ‘form’ is, as it were, a divine archetype wholly light and eternal, the Jungian archetype is a temporal human form’ having a ‘dark side* as well as a light side. (In his Answer to Job Jung goes so far as to write of the ‘shadow side’ of God’s consciousness as it is revealed in his dealings with Satan and Job.)
The principal archetypal matrices are connected with the primordial, universal and inescapable experiences of mankind birth and death, mother and father, day and night, light and dark, summer and winter, drought and water, eating and mating, adolescence and senescence, danger and escape.
Such archetypes of the collective unconscious ‘crystallize* in many different myths and symbols, they are enacted in a variety of rituals, and they arise in a multitude of images in dreams and visions.
In The Psychology of C. G. Jung Jolande Jacobi writes:
‘The number of archetypes is relatively limited, for it corresponds to the “possibilities of typical fundamental experiences”, such as human beings have had since the beginning of time.
Their significance for us lies precisely in that “primal experience” which they represent and mediate.
The themes of the archetypal images are the same in all cultures, corresponding to the phylogenetically determined portion of the human constitution.
We find them repeated in all mythologies, fairy tales, religious traditions and mysteries. What else is the myth of the night sea-voyage, of the wandering hero, or of the sea-monster than our timeless knowledge, transformed into a picture, of the sun’s setting and rebirth?
Prometheus, the stealer of fire, Hercules, the slayer of dragons, the numerous myths of creation, the fall from Paradise, the sacrificial mysteries, the virgin birth, the treacherous betrayal of the hero, the dismembering of Osiris, and many other myths and tales portray psychic processes in symbolic-imaginary form.
Likewise the forms of the snake, the fish, the sphinx, the helpful animals, the World Tree, the Great Mother, and no otherwise the enchanted prince, the puer aeternus, the Mage, the Wise Man, Paradise, etc., stand for certain figures and contents of the collective unconscious.
In every single individual psyche they can awaken to new life, exercise their magic power and become condensed to a kind of “individual mythology” that forms an impressive parallel to the great mythologies handed down from all peoples and times, and helps to render their source, essence, and meaning concrete, so to speak, displaying them in a clearer light.’
The theory of archetypes is, of course, not just a theory’ it is the basis of practical treatment for the mentally ill. There are, as it were, centres of mental energy which seem to be associated with the archetypal patterns and which operate in a way analogous to the behaviour of physical organs : if we disregard the ‘rules’ which govern the digestion of food we are liable to suffer from flatulence, ulceration, constipation, diarrhea or some other alimentary condition:
it would appear that there are certain analogous mental conditions which arise as though ‘laws’ governing the activity of archetypes had been ‘broken’, and conversely, when these ‘laws’ are understood and observed the result is likely to be mental good health.
To continue the above quotation:
‘The sum of the archetypes signifies thus for Jung the sum of all the latent potentialities of the human psyche an enormous, inexhaustible store of ancient knowledge concerning the most profound relations between God, man and the cosmos.
To open this store to one’s own psyche, to wake it to new life and to integrate it with consciousness, means therefore nothing less than to take the individual out of his isolation and to incorporate him in the eternal cosmic process.
It is in this spirit that the remainder of this book is written: it is an attempt to apply some of these ideas to the study of the Scriptures and of Christian worship in the hope that we may be helped to find a way out of the present impasse in religion. ~Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church, Page84 -88
[The god] appears at first in hostile form, as an assailant with whom the hero has to wrestle. This is in keeping with the violence of all unconscious dynamism. In this manner the god manifests himself and in this form he must be overcome. The struggle has its parallel in Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the ford Jabbok. The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power. ~C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transfornwtion
LECTURE I -¢- PARAGRAPHS 1-83
Tonight we beginour study of Symbols of Transformation.
1 This is a wonderful book, packed with riches. Hilde I<irsch2 once said she read it cover to cover at least once a year. It is the kind of book that can sustain a good many readings, and it has a very interesting personal history connected with it.
Originally written in 1912, it is a prelude to Jung’s descent into the unconscious, which began in December 1913.
He talks about this descent in what is now published as Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925.3 On page 23 of this seminar, Jung describes a big dream he had shortly before writing the book:
I dreamed I was in a medieval house, a big, complicated house with many rooms, passages, and stairways. I came in from the street and went down into a vaulted Gothic room, and from there into a cellar.
I thought to myself that now I was at the bottom, but then I found a square hole. With a lantern in my hand I peeped down this hole, and saw stairs leading further down, and down these I climbed. They were dusty stairs, very much worn, and the air was sticky, the whole atmosphere very uncanny.
I came to another cellar, this one of very ancient structure, perhaps Roman, and again there was a hole through which I could look down into a tomb filled with prehistoric pottery, bones, and skulls; as the dust was undisturbed, I thought I had made a great discovery. There I woke up.
On page 24, Jung goes on to say:
Slowly out of all this came the Psychology of the Unconsciousl4l [that was the title of the English translation of this book published a few years later], for in the midst of it I came upon the Miller fantasies, and they acted like a catalyzer upon all the material I had gathered together in my mind . I saw in Miss Miller a person who, like myself, had mythological fantasies, fantasies and dreams of a thoroughly impersonal character.
Their impersonality I readily recognized, as well as the fact that they must come from the lower “cellars,” though I did not give the name of collective unconscious to them. This then is the way the book grew up.
Jung started studying the Miller fantasies, together with the attendant mythological material. On page 27, he writes:
It took me a long time to see that a painter could paint a picture and think the matter ended there and had nothing whatever to do with himself. And in the same way it took me several years to see that it, the Psychology of the Unconscious, can be taken as myself and that an analysis of it leads inevitably into an analysis of my own unconscious processes.
Difficult as it is to do this in a lecture, it is this aspect I would like to discuss, tracing out especially the ways in which the book seemed to forecast the future.
As with all books I discuss, I like to start with the title. This book was originally written in 1912; the original title, translated from the German, is Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. In 1916, the English translation by 4 C. G. Ju ng, Psychology of the Unconscious, CW.Vol. B, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Beatrice Hinkle was published as Psychology of the Unconscious, which was not Jung’s title but the English publisher’s.
In 1952, when Jung was 77 years old (he was 37 when he wrote it originally), he revised it extensively, adding a good bit of material. When he wrote the original, Jung was still about one-third Freudian.
That revision was called Symbols of Transformation; he left the word libido out. However, t11e word libido is still a ghost in the title. If you ask yourself, “Transformation of what?” the answer is transformation of libido.
This is an important matter in understanding the book because one of its central issues is the whole concept of libido. It was that issue on which Jung and Freud had their main disagreement, namely the nature of libido and of how psychic energy, the motive power of the human psyche, is to be understood.
Jung thought it was to be understood in a much broader way than Freud did, and this book explores that idea. Basically, the issue is thinking of the human psyche as an energy mechanism.
I want to emphasize that particular conception. Another thing I pay special attention to when I start looking at a book is the first few sentences. Like the initial dream in analytic work, they are apt to carry in summary the basic themes for the whole process. In this instance,
it is really a very beautiful beginning. Jung speaks about reading Freud’s The In terpretation of Dreams and Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex.
He says:
The impression made by this simple remark [concerning Oedipus] may be likened to the uncanny feeling which would steal over us if, amid the noise and bustle of a modern city street, we were suddenly to come upon an ancient relic – say the Corinthian capital of a long-immured column, or a fragment of an inscription. A moment ago, and we were completely absorbed in the hectic, ephemeral life of the present; then, the next moment, something very remote and strange flashes upon us, which directs our gaze to a different order of things. We turn away from the vast confusion of the present to glimpse the higher continuity of history.
Later on in the same long paragraph:
By penetrating into the blocked subterranean passages of our own psyches we grasp the living meaning of classical civilization, and at the same time we establish a firm foothold outside our own culture from which alone it is possible to gain an objective understanding of its foundations.
This experience of discovering an ancient relic in the midst of a busy, modem street is identical to our experience in working with dreams containing archetypal images that belong to the level of the collective unconscious, rather than the personal unconscious.
Once you are familiar with this dimension of the psyche, you are in a position to analyze dreams from an archetypal perspective.
Chapter 2 deals with two kinds of thinking: directed thinking and fantasy thinking. Directed thinking is linear, ego thinking, problem-solving kind of thinking; fantasy thinking is spontaneous -natural musings that are effortless as far as the ego is concerned.
What these two aspects indicate is that there are two centers of volitional activity in the psyche. The ego is the center of directed thinking; the Self, the center of the unconscious, is the volitional source of fantasy thinking. Jung uses the word thinking here in a very general sense; not in the sense of the thinking function, but rather as the functional aspect of psychic attention. It is attentional effort that he is referring to, whether it be directed thinking or fantasy thinking. I think we can say that there is also a third mode of thinking that is a combination of these two.
There are two aspects to this third kind. One aspect would be what I would call “monitored imagination,” in which the imaginative fantasy process is allowed to proceed, but is watched at the same time. It takes a certain amount of effort to watch it (if you lapse off into a reverie you will not quite remember what was going on when you wake up).
It is still a relatively passive process, so it could also be called “passive imagination, ” at least in contrast to the more rigorous state that we call “active imagination. ” With this technique, not only does one monitor the imaginative process, one also talks back to it.
This requires still another level of attention, as a dialogue with the unconscious is hard work Active imagination is the mode of psychic function that brings about the reconciliation between the modes of fantasy thinking and directed thinking.
In paragraph 26, Jung says:
These considerations tempt us to draw a parallel between the mythological thinking of ancient man and the similar thinking found in children, primitives, and in dreams . . .. The supposition that there may also be in psychology a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis therefore seems justified.
Ontogeny refers to the developmental process of the individual, while phylogeny refers to the developmental process of the race. The formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is used in embryology because it is well established that the human embryo goes through certain stages that correspond to the evolutionary stages of development of the race. For example, each embryo has
gills at one stage of its development. It is a fish.
This formula is quite helpful in making connections between cultural and anthropological history on the one hand, and individual psychological development on the other.
The outstanding example of this is Erich Neumann’s The Origins and His tory of Conscinw;ness,5 which Jung alludes to in his preface.
Miss Miller has made several references to the theater.
In paragraph 48, Jung writes: “One might describe the theater, somewhat unaesthetically, as an institution for working out private complexes in public.” Very apt, indeed.
We have great opportunities for increasing our self-knowledge by noticing what it is we identify with, and the theater is a wonderful opportunity to make those observations.
People do not all identify with the same things by any means, and the particular dramatic events that most move some people can leave others cold, because different complexes are struck.
I urge you to take this remark of Jung’s very seriously. We are barraged with dramatic images everywhere, not only on the stage, but in the movies and television.
Whenever we note what particular theme or dramatic event moves us, we are collecting a part of our own dispersed psyche. Our psyche does not start on the inside. Our psyche begins in identification with the world, with the environment; it is spread out everywhere.
The theater offers us a chance to notice what it is we respond to. If we are psychologically motivated, we can recognize this as a piece of our own psyche and withdraw the projection.
Then it is no longer just a quality of the play, but it belongs to oneself. Jung points out that Miss Miller identifies with Christian, the victim in the Cyrano de Bergerac play. This informs us that she has a victim psychology, a characteristic that will play itself out as the material unfolds.
In paragraph 61, after a little bit of information about Miss Miller’s sea trip, we are told that a poem came to her out of a dream. I will read the “more exact ” version:
When the Eternal first made
Sound
A myriad ears sprang out to hear,
And throughout all the Universe
There rolled an echo deep and
clear:
“All glory to the God of Sound!”
When the Eternal first made
Light,
A myriad eyes sprang out to look,
And hearing ears and seeing eyes,
Once more a mighty choral took:
“All glory to the God of Light!”
When the Eternal first gave Love,
A myriad hearts sprang into life;
Ears filled with music, eyes with
light,
Pealed forth with hearts with
love all rife:
“All glory to the God of Love!”
This poem, says Jung, is a reaction to an unconscious animus projection, i.e., the officer singing in the night.
The animus projection, operating outside awareness, manifests as an image of divine creation. It is a pretty big jump. Jung points out that the psychological sequence is: animus, leading to father-imago, leading to God.
He alludes to this in paragraph 63:
We may suppose that something similar has happened to Miss Miller, for the idea of a masculine Creator-God is apparently derived from the father-imago, and aims, among other things, at replacing the infantile relation to the father in such a way as to enable the individual to emerge from the narrow circle of the family into the wider circle of society.
Paragraph 64:
In the light of these reflections, the poem and its prelude appear as the religiously and poetically formulated product of an introvert’s lion that has regressed back to the father-imago….The operative impression was the handsome officer singing in the night-watch – “When the morning stars sang together” . . . . Jung does not use the word animus here because he had not yet discovered it, but it is clear to us that this is what he is referring to.
We are immediately led to the whole question of how the animus figure is related to the father-imago and the God-image.
Working from the ego down, I would distinguish four separate entities: animus, father-imago, father archetype, and God-image, which is synonymous with the Self.
If I were listing them developmentally from infancy to adulthood, I would reverse the sequence; begin with the God-image, move to the father archetype, then to the father-imago, and finally to the animus.
Let me say a word about what the father-imago refers to, because we do not always use that term. It’s a term that is a little bit out of fashion. Imago is the Latin word for image and was used in the early years of psychoanalysis.
There is, of course, the mother-imago, too. The father-imago refers to the psychic residue that is deposited in the individual as a result of personal experiences with a father or surrogate father figures.
It is not quite the same as father image; it is sometime equated with that but the distinction is that the father-imago is the deposit. We may encounter certain father images that do not leave any deposit.
If a person constellates the father archetype at an important point in another’s life, then that person becomes an incarnating agent for the father archetype. To some extent, the result of experiencing
that incarnating agent is that it leaves a certain deposit of father experience in the psyche. The father-imago is a kind of personalization or incarnation of the father archetype, a humanized version that will take on specific qualities.
If it is particularly negative, then the negative qualities will be emphasized; if it is particularly positive, the positive ones will be emphasized. It will be one-sided as all human beings are one-sided and will not totally reflect the archetype, but will embody it partially.
The female individual starts out largely at one with the God-image, which very gradually begins to differentiate.
It differentiates first into male and female and then further into personal components, moving from God-image to father archetype to father-imago. Then with the onset of puberty, the masculine entity differentiates still further and starts to approach her own age, taking on something approaching a peer nature as opposed to a parental nature.
This development proceeds with a lot of complicated inner and outer factors that I cannot hope to do justice to, but with these four entities we can at least differentiate the components of the experience.
If we have a poorly coagulated personality, which we have in the case of Miss Miller, the constellation of a powerful animus projection can open up the pathway all the way back to the God-image.
That she produces a cosmogonic poem concerning the creative deity is made all the more likely because her animus projection has taken place unconsciously.
This is the essential feature of this whole body of material. It starts out with an unconsciously constellated animus projection that opens the psyche all the way back to the primal deity. As her fantasies unfold, they present to us a type of tragic animus drama.
It is tragic because, based on the material we have, no insight ever comes. This drama plays itself out solely on the unconscious level; consciousness does not penetrate or alter it.
An important item is found in paragraph 78, note 18.
This is a good example of Jung’s distinction between psychological analysis and psychological synthesis. He remarks that analysis “dissolves these unconscious combinations back into their historical determinants.”
This is one aspect of the analytic process, the reductive aspect, that works on the child’s historical dimension of a given situation. He goes on to say:
Just as memories that have long since fallen below the threshold are still accessible to the unconscious, so also are certain very fine subliminal combinations that point forward, and these are of the greatest significance for future events in so far as the latter are conditioned by our psychology.
But no more than the science of history bothers itself with future combinations of events, which are rather the object of political science, can the forward-pointing psychological combinations be the object of analysis; they would be much more the object of a refined psychological syntheticism6 that knew how to follow the natural currents of libido.
The idea expressed here is that the latent movements of the libido in the unconscious are pointing to the future.
If we study the unconscious, the future casts its shadow backwards, so to speak, and we can get some glimpse of what the future is.
That is one of the important aspects of dream analysis. We pick up intimations of the future and suggest to the patient that it looks as though such and such is likely to happen, and that gives the future a little nudge.
Or alternatively, if it is a negative future, we say that this is where the future is inclined to go if you do not wake up and change your direction. ~Edward F. Edinger, Transformation of Libido, Page 9
