C. G. Jung

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I'm currently taking an interest in his ideas. What do others make of Jung? I'm interested in his idea if Individuation and Projection of unconscious contents. Apparantly there is a lot of Jung's influence in contemporary psychotherapy generally, moreso than Frued, even. Has anyone ever visited a Jungian analyst?

You'd have to be crazy to go to a Jungian analyst!

Seriously, I think highly of psychology, but I am skeptical of Jung. I wouldn't rule out some of his ideas, but I don't see the evidence to believe in things like the collective unconscious, for example.

Taken as allegory Jung's work can be seen as very true. I remember being taught that he eventually spent years staring out a lake in back yard and neglected his wife. He was a very depressed man and either a seeker of a true god, or one who seemed to be stuck in the system of religion at one point who was possibly so hurt by it that he never recovered.

I'd like to visit a Jungian analyst, the problem is that there aren't any. There may be some who masquerade, but Jung's work illustrates Atheism very well and looking back at it, I think he might have been trying to dissolve religion and faith or fully explain how the system works.

Jung was religious, or at least, very spiritual. I think some of his work was actually meant to help reconcile science with religion. (ie. syncronicity)

I like Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. I've found, in my own life, that the unconscious isn't necessarily restricted to my own, physical brain, and that there may be a realm, below the conscious, that all people share between them. From some of my own experiences with synchronicity and dream relics, I've been left to wonder if the brain is more of a receiver of consciousness than a generator of it.

I too struggle with the idea of the collective unconscious. However, I'm not sure what it is meant to be. I havn't read Jung on this. I have heard others talking about it recently and it seems it might not be such a far-out thing. There is at least one reasonable possible aspect of the idea:

That we all share a physical brain that is basically the same physical piece of kit, and so we would tend all to have a similar kind of consciousness as one another. If you then say that this is in some sense a 'shared consciousness' (and from there, 'collective conscious/unconscious') it can start to sound like much more than just a sort of consciousness that we all participate in. But I'm not sure you have to make that leap on the premise that we share the same brain or consciousness generating piece of kit. Thinking about it, I don't know why Jung doesn't posit a 'collective conscious' on this basis. Perhaps it is because in collective unconscious he is meaning more than a shared type of psychological experience.

Perhaps he has in mind something that comes from the evolutionary history of our development into humans. Here the idea might be that the unconscious is the more primal us, something that we share in much more deeply as now hidden undercurrents to our psychological way of being.

We can certainly relate to one another as conscious individuals, and we can all have the same unconscious themes going on deep within us, but I don't see how from this there has to be some kind of substantial collective entity (the collective unconscious) through which we do that relating and have that commonality.

Perhaps he is talking about our cultural heritage rather than our biological one. I think Jung ( a self-identified INT(P), I think?) had a tendency to place mind before matter in his introverted metaphysics and so it would follow, anyway, that he would tend to see mind as a universal disembodied entity in which particualar material organisms with the capacity to share in it would share in it. i suppose for me, I'm not ready to adopt that kind of metaphysical idealism.

What do you take the idea to be?

Allegory to what? Something that is unconscious, unknowable, perhaps?

In what sense is this realm shared and in what sense is it a realm?

How would this 'receiving' of consciousness work?

I'm interested in these ideas but I'm looking for a better understanding of what they actulually refer to.

His work is an allegory to the complexity and similarities of religion and how they affect the minds and perception of the neurodiverse. It is about how every action of some people affected by religion reveals their inner most secrets because their world has been given to them as a lie and without ever grasping the truth, they unknowingly continue their lives in loss. Loosing each day they live to ignorance. It is truely a cruel fate for some to have learned religion as the bible even states. What Jung and psychoanalysis hoped to accomplish in it's early days IMO was to create another option outside of religion that didn't torture those who wound up stuck in religion. It is very likely that he was seeking true freedom of thought outside the systemized expectations and assumptions we all have due to religions. Perhaps even the fact that he was staring out at a lake is an allegory. Just looking over the waters. To the disappointment of those seeking a true creator Religions really are just a maze and the cover of "Man and His Symbols" suggests. Though it's been a really long time since reading these... about 10 years.

I know a chick who works at a mental hospital and one of her patient's thinks he is Elijah. They feed him BS to allow him to believe his delusion so he never wakes up... They want to know what he'll come up with, so they use his materials to create history for religious perspectives and feed it to the next generation. It's pretty cruel IMO to use a life in such a way. Esp. for those in the medical profession. They should be ashamed.

Pay attention to what people say. They are probably saying more than you think. You receive consciousness by listening and paying attention to them. So there is much more to receive than can be generated by one mind. That's all it is. No magic, no mystery, but it takes commitment to understand it all. It's retraining your mind, not the easiest thing to do without someone telling you.

Thats one way of looking at it.

I dont think thats what NathanK meant.

And I dont think what NathanK meant is quit what Jung meant.

Nathank's concept of "collective uncouscious" seems to be akin the "universal mind" idea.

That we are all transistor radios walking around and recieving "the mind" and precieving that as being our own "mind".

Carl Jung was talking about our brains having evolved so that we as a species have the same hardware, and that this common hardware fosters similiar unconscious software- ( ie parralell myths, and dreams, and artistic motiffs).

What I'm saying though is that Jung was saying more than some people recognize him as saying. He was saying that religion created the collective unconscious which was a universal understanding of what religion does to people. The roots of religion also seem to be very cross pollinated, each leaving a mark on the rest, they are all one in the same and all do thing like make people monks and priests and generally cut people out of the gene pool. They are very genocidal for the most part. Maybe a few of them aren't, but for the most part, they are.

I have read some of his work. What I perceive is a smart, intelligent, and yet mentally ill man. I don't think we can take him all too seriously. I don't care how popular or smart or scholarly he was. I believe he was mentally ill and so therefore I don't take this writings all to seriously. Trust me, I know a mentally ill person when I read one.... it takes one to know one.

You are all making a mistake. You think humans have minds. There is no such thing. Minds do not show up on CAT scans, PET scans or MRIs. Do you know why? It is because they do not exist. We have brains and nerves, not minds.

ruveyn

I agree no one has souls. We are all secretly gingers

Synchronicity and collective unconscious. pfft. I have no need for Jung.