Only extreme ignorance or arrogance can lead to believe that one fully controls one’s behavior. To begin with, we are alive beings, and we don’t know what life is: scientists can describe its parts or modify its working, but they cannot explain life. What I am going to discuss here is Carl Gustav Jung’s basic ideas on the unconscious, and you may agree with them or not, but one fact is already undeniable: the unconscious exists.
Jung defines the unconscious as a natural mechanism of regulation. It is there to send us messages (and not only while we are sleeping) about how we manage. To warn us about excesses or defects in our behaviour. It is an additional safeguard, a guarantee, a “guard angel” provided by mum nature. Jung states that we can never gain access to it (“the unconscious is really un-conscious”, as he puts it), we can only design approximative models. As examples of unconscious mechanisms in nature, he mentions the fixated way in which birds have built their nests for centuries: birds do not have a conscious memory, they cannot keep information, compare the past and the present, or learn from each other: such ability is thus in-built, so to say. Or an even better example: bees. How the hell does an animal without a central nervous system manages to work in team and build complex constructions like hives?
A force does not need to be conscious to exist and act (otherwise we wouldn’t have heartbeats unless we would think about them), and, you will agree, a human being is quite more complex than a bee.
What I like most about Jung is that there is nothing esoteric about his theories. His method was rigorously scientific: he compared thousands of dreams and myths from different persons, cultures and ages, and found common factors, universal to all the human species. Maybe an Eskimo tale from the XVIIIth century told about a giant walrus who kidnapped a kid, and in a Southern African myth it was a giant Lion and a damsel, and in a Hungarian traditional tale it was a big bird and a shoemaker, and in a biblical story a giant whale and a bearded patriarch, but the fact is that the structure in all the narrations, and the role played by each character, showed fixed patterns in peoples who had not had the least contact, nor even existed during the same period. Conclusion: those features were common to the whole human kind, fixated in the same way as the construction of bird nests is.
It is important to remark, too, the important differences between Jung and Freud, legitimate inventor of psychoanalysis. Freud lived all his life in Vienna, and his patients were all members of Vienna’s middle-class in an age of conventionalism and sexual repression; that’s certainly why his theory considers sexual impulse as the sole “engine” of unconscious activity. On the other hand, Jung, while agreeing with Freud on the importance of the sex drive in our behavior, considers it only one of many others factors: food, power… Like I said above, Jung’s opinion is better grounded because he traveled around the world for years, studied different ages and mythologies, compared, weighted… Freud was the one who “discovered” the unconscious, but his exploration was limited to the Vienna of his time.
Jung warns that the unconscious cannot be directly known… but it must be noticed. Otherwise, it becomes inflamed. It is a part of us, alive and changing just like we are, and it asks for its share of attention. Its warnings are set there for our survival, just like many other resources developed by evolution along thousands of years.
Dreams are the privileged vehicle for those warnings, but not the only one: repressing those messages can also cause psychosomatic illness, making us say inconvenient things… The unconscious exists 24 hours a day, just like we do. It is a very jealous lover, but there is no reason to fear: it is set there for our protection, and it usually knows better than we do: in contrast to our tiny 1-100 years of individual experience, it offers more than 15 million years of collective experience accumulated by the species.
Western culture has been traditionally more “extroverted”, more interested in the outer world than in our complex (and beautiful) inner landscapes. I’d like to think that things are slowly changing, that we’ll improve in the management of a power that belongs to us and which, uncontrolled, violently released, has lead to irrational violence and disgrace many times through history. This blog, among other things, intends to be my modest contribution to such a change.
Master Jung would probably be agitated in his grave if he could read such a condensed summary (wise as he was, he always remarked that his theories were mere approaches to a vaster reality, because the unconscious is really un-conscious. The best introduction to his work is “Man and his symbols”, a compilation arranged by him and his collaborators short before he died). I hope that he will forgive me because of the love I have towards his ideas, and the need for their spreading that I feel in nowadays’ world. He had the misfortune of becoming fashionable in the 60’s, so now he has become sort of “outdated”. Such a shame that the world of ideas is also submitted to the tyranny of novelty. Naturally, more posts on the issue will follow…
So let’s go hunting. Any story of a very “rational” person who one day says or does something really childish, even suicidal? Any “coincidence” or disaster that obscurely, in a way, seemed makes sense? Any “congratulations” slipped by mistake in the middle of a funeral?
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