C. G. Jung

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Or Freud, or Adler.

Psychoanalysis of all its flavors is bogus crapola.

ruveyn

Well if we can see that we can figure out what he's talking about and be more humane to him. He was obviously feeling pain over something. Let's not have a system that makes people who are as ill as he is.

The soul is just the aura of social pretense that one carries about them. The mind is the cunning one uses to produce it which originates in the nerve-sack or brain.

I am a body. I am a meatbag with feelings!

Interesting idea.

In the absence of Cat scans etc., is 'mind' not at least a useful term to denote the centre of our subjective experience as subjective experience, (as opposed to objectively, empirically, verifiablly and physically existant)?

This.

I like Jung because he said,"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being," and that's just cool.

Jung also got me interested in the Tarot--a great (and fun) tool for self analysis.

i liked Jung so much i read his complete works when i was in college.

despite his prose.

he's much more friendly to artists than Freud. his ideas about psychological type have been refined to the point they can almost be considered scientific, though i think that instead of 16 Myers-Briggs categories we might be better served by 64--or 256.
the more mystical side can best be thought of as poetry, & stimulates like poetry with its intuitions & imagery. it's not the sort of thing you can educe evidence for, or proof. finally you just have to ask: does your experience of the world make more sense to you this way?

i guess i have moved on, though, after thirty years or so. my dreams are not so close to my waking life, which is full of busyness & trivial worries. it takes a lot of leisure time to follow this path.
Robert Bly's A Little Book on the Human Shadow is first-rate "applied Jung"; i see another follower in Doris Lessing; Rilke anticipates a lot of it, too. there's value to encountering Jung, as long as you don't assume he has the last word on anything. for this reason Jungians to me are generally tiresome. give me someone who has read (& digested) The Jungian Senoi Dreamwork Manual anyday.

that's the only magic that's real magic.

I think you have that backwards. From my reading of Jung I see him as saying that the collective unconscious provides the foundation for religion, mythology, art, poetry, literature, and many other human concepts. But his work is not all about the collective unconscious. His work in personal psychology is pretty amazing. I've gained a lot from reading his writings as well as those of his associates - interpreters who are much easier to understand.

I've been studying Jungian ideas for some time, on my own, most intensively for about four years now, Learning his method of dream interpretation has been a breakthrough for me. I'm a much happier person as a result. That alone is enough for me to keep studying and to consider that he was onto something important. But he is difficult to read and widely misunderstood.
This is true! I've only been able to develop an intense interest and do my personal inner work since retirement.

Hpw then would you describe the formation of the collective unconscious. how did it come to be that religions are all pretty much the same and that no on actually believes in the deific aspect? Was it the workings of intelligence campaigns or foreign politics on the world that created it? How was it that it all came to be in your opinion?

BTW what did you do for work?

I worked as a technical writer-editor for a long time. Retired from a supervisory position.

The formation or basis of the collective unconscious was not addressed by Jung, as far as I know, if by basis you mean its source or origin. But remember that he was raised by a father who was a pastor and he later expressed an affinity for gnosticism but with a pagan slant. He was also a scientist (a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry), so he was aware of the existence of DNA, and he knew something about neurology, though it wasn't his specialty (a lot more has been learned about the brain since his time, though). He wrote a lot about instinctive memory, and the archetypes as instinctive patterns. My own sense of this is that the collective unconscious contains the collective symbolic pattern of human existence, so perhaps it is related to the human instinctive pattern or the DNA. But I also wonder about its connection to spirit. What is the spirit if not the psyche? If you observe a "lower" animal's instinctive patterns, where do you suppose they come from? What's their source? Evolution and DNA? Spirit? Where do we come from? I think you would have to answer those questions before you could answer where the collective unconscious comes from, what is its foundation or basis. And we aren't likely to answer those questions definitively anytime soon.

As a theory, it is older than Jung, I know that. He gave it the name collective unconscious - as far as I know - but there have been other names for it, or at least for things that in my mind resemble it, mostly from spiritual and mythological sources, such as the Akashic Records, which is a Theosophical term derived from Hinduism, and there's the Book of Thoth, or Book of Life, and so forth. These may be what we think of as religious concepts, but where did those concepts come from? The answers are lost in the mists of time, and in the collective unconscious itself. Perhaps some day when all is known that can be known about the brain and DNA, we'll find a connection.

Probably one of the best ways to learn more about the collective unconscious is to read Joseph Campbell (http://www.worldchanges.com/myth.html).

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 22 Apr 2012, 2:16 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I agree with what you said here, and want to thank you for your mention of the Jungian Senoi Dreamwork Manual. I went on a search for it after reading your post and just received my copy. Great book, from what I've seen of it so far. Thanks!

Edited to add: I've not made it through his complete works yet - that is an accomplishment! Yes, his prose is difficult. I like to intersperse my reading of Jung himself with what you call "applied Jung." I've gotten a lot from reading books here and there by Robert A. Johnson, Barbara Hannah, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, and Joseph Campbell. There are a lot more interpreters of his theories that I hope to try out soon.

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 22 Apr 2012, 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Havent studied the specifics of his ideas but the general idea that there could be a species wide memory buried in our unconscious is seductive.

Jung talked about water and dreams about water as symbolizing birth. He suggested it was a racial memory of us having evolved in the sea (though I think it has more to do with the fact that we all spend nine months in a water filled womb).

But one time I got turned on to reading about fossils and came up with my own Jungian influenced theory about the prevalence of dragons in human culture- and why they resemble dinosaurs.

To make a long (300 million year) story short: the mammal like reptiles dominated the planet for fifty million years of the Permian, but then the dinosaurs ascended and drove the mammallike reptiles to extinction.
The only way our ancestors could survive was to cross the line into becoming true mammals.

The first mammals were tiny nocternal insectovors (like modern shrews). These shrew like creatures were the only mammals and they lived the shadows of the dinosaurs for 130 million years. So for over a hundred million years our early mammal ancestors became hardwired to avoid being eaten by big upright lizardlike creatures. So in the brief 65 million years since dinosaurs have been absent and we mammals have been free to take over the planet- the one mammal that produces art story and song is driven to express this instinctive fear and awe of upright walking lizards by weaving tales of dragons. So humans have an unconscious "racial" or species memory of dinosaurs.
Or not.
Its hard to prove or disprove but its still a pet theory of mine.

i don't know much about Jung's writings and work. my kid is somewhat enamoured with his ideas, so she was very pleased to see that New York has a C.G.Jung institute or something. we spent a solid hour in their bookstore. it was totally worth it. she plans to be a psychologist. i am interested in what people have discussed in this thread

Maybe you have something there. I've often wondered about dragon imagery and myth, and how common it is to so many cultures. The collective unconscious could also, in view of your theory, explain Edgar Cayce's vision of man and dinosaurs co-existing. If one forgets about time, which supposedly doesn't exist in the collective unconscious (James Hillman writes about this in his work on dreams), and if human instinctive memory can indeed reach back that far through our evolutionary journey....

There's also an ancient Greek notion that artistic "genius" is inspired by daemons. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about it in her TED Talk on creativity (http://youtu.be/86x-u-tz0MA). That, as I see it, is a classic example of the collective unconscious at work. Which is why, as graywyvern wrote, Jung's theories are so friendly to artists.