Jung's central concept is the "collective unconscious." He distinguishes it from the "personal unconscious", which includes, first of all, the representations repressed during the course of an individual's life. Everything suppressed and forgotten is accumulated in the personal unconscious. This dark double of our I (its shadow) was taken by Freud for the unconscious as such. Therefore, Freud focused primarily on the early childhood of the individual, while Jung believed that "depth psychology" should look to much more distant times in history. The collective unconscious is the result of the life of the clan, it is inherent in all people, is inherited and serves as the basis on which the individual psyche grows. Psychology, like any other science, studies the universal in the individual, and this general does not lie on the surface, it must be sought in the depths of the psyche. Based on the observed mental phenomena, we restore the system of attitudes and typical reactions that imperceptibly determine the life of an individual. Under the influence of innate programs are not only elementary behavioral reactions like unconditioned reflexes, but also our perception, thinking, imagination. The archetypes of the collective unconscious serve as a kind of cognitive models: the intuitive grasping of the archetype precedes the instinctive action.
Jung compared archetypes with the system of axes of a crystal, which transforms the latter in solution, being a kind of immaterial field that distributes particles of matter. In the psyche, such "substance" is external and internal experience, organized according to innate patterns. Therefore, in its pure form, the archetype does not enter consciousness; it always unites with some kind of experience, undergoes conscious processing. The closest thing to the immaterial form - the archetype - is the experience of dreams, hallucinations, mystical visions, when conscious processing is minimal. These are confused, dark "archetypal" images, perceived as something eerie, alien, but at the same time experienced as something infinitely superior to man, divine. In his works on the psychology of religion, Jung uses the term "numinous" (numinosum - from the Latin numen, deity), introduced by the German theologian R. Otto. This is the experience of something that overwhelms us with fear and awe, the experience of overwhelming us with its power, but at the same time it is the experience of the majestic, giving us the fullness of existence.
Archetypal images have always accompanied a person, they are the sources of mythology, religion, art. In these cultural formations there is a gradual polishing of dark and eerie images, they turn into symbols, more and more beautiful in form and universal in their content. Mythology was the original way to neutralize the colossal psychic energy of archetypes.
A man of primitive society only insignificantly separates himself from "mother nature", from the life of the tribe, although he is already experiencing the consequences of the separation of consciousness from animal unconsciousness (in the language of religion - "the fall", "knowledge of good and evil"). Harmony is restored with the help of magic, rituals, myths. With the development of consciousness, the abyss deepens, the tension grows. Before a person arises: the problem of adaptation to his own inner world, and more and more complex religious teachings take on the task of reconciling, harmonizing consciousness with the archetypal images of the unconscious.
"All those creative forces that modern man puts into science and technology, ancient man devoted to his myths", seeking to restore the harmony of consciousness and archetypal images.
The human psyche is the integrity of unconscious and conscious processes. It is a self-regulating system in which there is a constant exchange of energy between the elements. The isolation of consciousness leads to a loss of balance, and the unconscious seeks to "compensate" for the one-sidedness of consciousness. People of ancient civilizations valued the experience of dreams and hallucinations as the grace of God, since it was in them that eternal wisdom was revealed. If consciousness ignores this experience, if culture discards initiation rituals and myths that help assimilate the energy of the collective unconscious, then symbolic transmission is impossible, and archetypal images can invade consciousness in the most primitive forms.
With such "invasions" of the collective unconscious, Jung associates not only the growing number of individual mental illnesses, but also the mass psychoses of our time. Racial mythology and "possessed" Nazi leaders, literally reproducing the behavior of the ancient "berserkers", the communist myth about the realization of the "golden age" - all this is childishly naive from the point of view of reason, but such ideas capture millions of people. All of this testifies to the invasion of forces that far exceed the human mind.
And all this collective madness was a natural consequence of European history, its incomparable progress in mastering the world with the help of science and technology. The history of Europe is the history of the decline of symbolic knowledge. The technical civilization is not the result of the last decades, but of many centuries of the "disenchanting" of the world. Symbols and dogmas reveal the sacred to man and at the same time protect him from contact with colossal psychic energy. World traditions contain harmonious "forms of life" that have become alien to most modern Europeans and Americans, who are destroying traditional societies not only at home, but throughout the world. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, the materialism of natural science — these are the stages of the disintegration of the former "forms of life." The symbolic cosmos, decomposed into formulas, became alien to man, and he himself turned into one of the physical forces. Absurd political and social doctrines poured into the resulting vacuum, and catastrophic wars began.
Archetype:
This unconscious content, which changes, becoming conscious and perceived, undergoes changes under the influence of that individual consciousness on the surface of which it appears;
Well-known expressions of archetypes are myths and fairy tales;
The altered archetypes are no longer the content of the unconscious; they have acquired conscious forms, which are transmitted through traditional teaching mainly in the form of secret teachings, which are generally a typical way of transmitting collective contents originating in the unconscious;
An archetype is necessarily both an image and an emotion. The image charged with emotion has sacredness / psychic energy, it becomes dynamic, causing significant consequences. These are pieces of life itself, which through emotions are connected with a living person. This is why it is impossible to give a universal interpretation of any archetype.
Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in the Swiss town of Keswil into the family of a priest of the Evangelical Reformed Church. The Jung family came from Germany: K. Jung's great-grandfather ran a military hospital during the Napoleonic wars, his great-grandfather's brother held the post of chancellor of Bavaria for some time (he was married to F. Schleiermacher's sister). Grandfather - a professor of medicine - moved to Switzerland with the recommendation of A. von Humboldt and rumors that he was the illegitimate son of Goethe. K. Jung's father, in addition to theological education, received a doctorate in philology, but, having lost faith in the powers of the human mind, they will leave the studies of oriental languages and any sciences in general, completely surrendering to faith. Carl Gustav's mother came from a family of local burghers who had become Protestant pastors for generations. Religion and medicine were thus united in this family long before the birth of Carl Gustav.
The family belonged to a "good" society, but could hardly make ends meet. Jung's childhood and especially adolescence were spent in poverty. He will be able to study at the best gymnasium in Basel, where the family moved, only thanks to the help of relatives and the surviving connections of his father. An uncommunicative, introverted teenager, he never made friends for himself (high growth and a fair amount of physical strength saved him from the unpleasant consequences that followed). It was difficult to adapt to the external environment, often faced with a lack of understanding of those around him, preferring to communication immersion in the world of his own thoughts. In short, it represented a classic case of what he himself later called "introversion." If in an extrovert psychic energy is directed mainly towards the outside world, then in an introvert it moves to the subjective pole, to the images of his own consciousness. It was not for nothing that Jung called his memoirs "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" - dreams played a huge role in Jung's spiritual life from early childhood, and later his entire psychotherapeutic practice was based on the analysis of dreams.
Even in adolescence, Carl Gustav came to reject the religious beliefs of his environment. Dogmatism, sanctimonious moralizing, the transformation of Jesus Christ into a preacher of Victorian morality aroused in him sincere indignation: the church "shamelessly talked about God, his aspirations and actions", profaning everything sacred with "hackneyed sentiments." In Protestant religious ceremonies he saw no trace of divine presence; in his opinion, if God once lived in Protestantism, then he left these temples long ago. Acquaintance with the dogmatic works led to the idea that they are "an example of rare stupidity, the only purpose of which is to conceal the truth"; Catholic scholasticism left the impression of a "lifeless desert". Living religious experience stands above all dogmas, the young Jung believed, and therefore Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra turned out to be closer to true religion for him than all liberal Protestantism. “I am reminded of my own father’s preparation for confirmation,” Jung wrote decades later. - The catechism was inexpressibly boring. Once I leafed through this little book to find at least something interesting, and my eyes fell on the paragraphs about the trinity. This interested me, and I began to wait impatiently for when we get to this section in the lessons. When this long-awaited hour came, my father said: "We will skip this section, I myself do not understand anything." This is how my last hope was buried. Although I was surprised at my father's honesty, this did not prevent me from being bored to death from that time on, listening to all the talk about religion. "
The living experience of the divine was manifested by numerous dreams: in a dream, monstrous, terrible, but majestic images appeared. Under the influence of several constantly recurring dreams, doubts about the dogmas of Christianity intensified. Among other arguments of Jung the schoolboy about God (and he methodically indulged in them for two hours a day on the way to the gymnasium and back) the main place is now occupied by the obvious "heresy": God is not all-good, he has a dark, terrible hypostasis.
In Jung's dreams of that time, another motive is important: he observed the image of an old man endowed with magical powers, who was, as it were, his alter ego. In everyday worries lived a closed, timid young man - personality number one, and in dreams there was another hypostasis of his "I" - personality number two, even having his own name (Philemon). Already completing his studies at the gymnasium, Jung read "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and was even frightened: Nietzsche also had "personality No. 2" named Zarathustra; it supplanted the personality of the philosopher (hence the madness of Nietzsche - so Jung believed in the future, despite the more reliable medical diagnosis). Fear of such consequences of "dreaming" contributed to a decisive turn towards reality. And the need to study at the university at the same time, to work, knowing that you have to rely only on your own strength, led you away from the magical world of dreams. But later, in the doctrine of two types of thinking, Jung's personal dreaming experience will also be reflected. The main goal of Jung's psychotherapy will be the unity of the "external" and "internal" person in patients, and the mature Jung's reflections on the themes of religion will to some extent only be a development of what he experienced in childhood.
When clarifying the sources of this or that doctrine, the word "influence" is often misused. It is obvious that influence is not an unambiguous determination: “to influence” in the true sense of the word, when it comes to great philosophical or theological teachings, is possible only on the one who represents something by himself. Jung in his development proceeded from Protestant theology, while assimilating at the same time the spiritual atmosphere of his time. He belonged to German culture, which has long been characterized by an interest in the "night side" of existence. At the beginning of the last century, romantics turned to folk tales, mythology, "Rhine mysticism" by Eckhart and Tauler, to the alchemical theology of Boehme. Schelling doctors (Carus) have already tried to apply the doctrine of the unconscious mental in the treatment of patients. Jung combined Goethe's pantheism with Schopenhauer's "world will", with the fashionable "philosophy of life," with the works of vitalist biologists. Before Jung's eyes, the patriarchal way of life in Switzerland and Germany was breaking up: the world of villages, castles, small towns was leaving, in the very atmosphere of which, as T. Mann wrote, “something of the spiritual makeup of people who lived, say, in the last decades of the fifteenth century , - the hysteria of the outgoing Middle Ages, something like a hidden mental epidemic ", with a latent mental disposition to fanaticism and madness.
In the teachings of Jung, the spiritual tradition of the past and the present collide, the alchemy of the 15th-16th centuries. and natural science, gnosticism and scientific skepticism. Interest in the distant past as something constantly accompanying us today, preserved and acting on us from the depths, was characteristic of Jung in his youth. It is curious that at the university he most of all wanted to study to be an archeologist. "Depth psychology" in its method is somewhat reminiscent of archeology. It is known that Freud repeatedly compared psychoanalysis with this science and regretted that the name "archeology" was assigned to the search for cultural monuments, and not to the "excavation of the soul." “Archee” is the beginning, and “depth psychology”, removing layer by layer, moves to the very foundations of consciousness.
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K.G. YUNG. ARCHETYPE AND SYMBOL
Series "PAGES OF WORLD PHILOSOPHY"
The creative heritage of the Swiss scientist, founder of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung is of increasing interest in our country. The Renaissance Publishing House has published this one-volume edition of the works of this author in the series Pages of World Philosophy. We regard this book as a prologue to the Collected Works of K.G. Cabin boy. to work on which our publishing house has already begun. It is supposed to publish 12 volumes, which will include all the main works of Jung, his program articles, journalism. The first two volumes will be published in 1992.
We express our sincere gratitude for the help and assistance in preparing such a serious publication to the President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, Mr. T. Kirsh, the family of K.G. Jung, as well as the translator, a subtle connoisseur of Jung's work V.V. Zelenskiy "whose active participation made the implementation of this project possible.
V. Savenkov, director of the Renaissance publishing house.
JV "IVO-CD N. Sarkitov, editor-in-chief of the publishing house
ISBN 5- 7664- 0462- X © Renaissance Publishing House JV "IVO-CD", 1991
LIFE AND VIEWS K.G. CABIN BOY
Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in the Swiss town of Keswil into the family of a priest of the Evangelical Reformed Church. The Jung family came from Germany: K. Jung's great-grandfather ran a military hospital during the Napoleonic wars, his great-grandfather's brother held the post of chancellor of Bavaria for some time (he was married to F. Schleiermacher's sister). Grandfather - a professor of medicine - moved to Switzerland with the recommendation of A. von Humboldt and rumors that he was the illegitimate son of Goethe, K. Jung's father, in addition to theological education, received a Ph.D. either it was sciences in general, completely surrendering to faith. Carl Gustav's mother came from a family of local burghers who had become Protestant pastors for generations. Religion and medicine were thus united in this family long before the birth of Carl Gustav.
The family belonged to a "good" society, but could hardly make ends meet. Jung's childhood and especially adolescence were spent in poverty. He got the opportunity to study at the best gymnasium in Basel, where the family moved, only thanks to the help of relatives and the surviving connections of his father. An uncommunicative, introverted teenager, he never made friends for himself (high growth and a fair amount of physical strength saved him from the unpleasant consequences that followed). It was difficult to adapt to the external environment, often faced with a lack of understanding of those around him, preferring to communication immersion in the world of his own thoughts. In short, it represented a classic case of what he himself later called "introversion." If in an extrovert psychic energy is directed mainly towards the outside world, then in an introvert it moves to the subjective pole, to the images of his own consciousness. It was not for nothing that Jung called his memoirs "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" - dreams played a huge role (pages 6-7 are skipped - see the book).
... psychology "by its method is somewhat reminiscent of archeology. It is known that Freud repeatedly compared psychoanalysis with this science and regretted that the name" archeology "was assigned to the search for cultural monuments, and not to" excavation of the soul. " "depth psychology", removing layer by layer, moves to the very foundations of consciousness.
However, archeology was not taught in Basel, and Jung could not study at another university - a modest scholarship could only be paid to him in his hometown. Today, the demand for graduates of the natural sciences and humanities of the university is great, but at the end of the last century the situation was different. Only well-to-do people could professionally engage in science; theological, legal and medical faculties guaranteed a piece of bread. Jung was completely foreign to jurisprudence, Protestant theology was disgusting, while the medical faculty, along with a profession that allowed him to get out of poverty, also provided a tolerable science education.
As in the gymnasium. Jung did an excellent job at the university, surprising his fellow students by the fact that, in addition to his academic disciplines, he devoted a lot of time to studying philosophy. Until the last year of his studies, he specialized in internal medicine, he had already been secured a place in a prestigious Munich clinic. In the last semester he had to take psychiatry, he opened the textbook and read on the first page that psychiatry is a "science of personality." “My heart suddenly pounded,” Jung recalled in his old age. “The excitement was extraordinary, because it became clear to me, as in a flash of enlightenment, that the only possible goal for me could be psychiatry. Only in it the two streams of my interests merged. there was an empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I searched everywhere and did not find anywhere. Here the collision of nature and spirit became reality. " The human psyche is a meeting place for science and religion, the conflict between them can be overcome on the path of true self-knowledge. A decision was immediately made that surprised everyone - psychiatry was considered the most prestigious occupation for a physician, if only because all the successes of medicine in the 19th century. have not led to noticeable results in the treatment of mental illness. After graduating from university, Jung moved to Zurich and began working at the Burgholzi clinic, run by the prominent psychiatrist E. Bleuler.
Basel and Zurich had symbolic significance for Jung as the two poles of European spiritual life. Basel is a living memory of European culture.
The university did not forget about Erasmus, who taught there and Holbein, who studied; professors who knew Nietzsche personally taught at the Faculty of Philology. Jung's interest in philosophy could have caused bewilderment among physicians, but philosophy was considered a necessary aspect of culture in Basel. In Zurich, on the contrary, it was considered an impractical "excess". Who needs all this old book knowledge? Science was seen here as a useful tool, valued for its applications, effective use in industry, construction, trade, medicine. Basel was rooted in the distant past, while Zurich aspired to an equally distant future. Jung saw in this a "split" of the European soul: the rational industrial-technical civilization consigns its roots to oblivion. And this is natural, for the soul has become ossified in dogmatic theology. Science and religion came into conflict precisely because, Jung believed, that religion has broken away from life experience, even as science leaves the most important problems, it adheres to carnal empiricism and pragmatism. “We have become rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom,” he will soon write. In the picture of the world created by science, a person is only a mechanism among other mechanisms, his life loses all meaning. It is necessary to find the area where religion and science do not contradict each other, but, on the contrary, merge in search of the primary source of all meanings. Psychology became for Jung the science of sciences - it is she, from his point of view, that should give modern man a holistic worldview.
Jung was not alone in his quest for the "inner man." Many thinkers of the late XIX - early XX centuries. we find the same negative attitude towards the dead space of natural science, and towards the church, and towards religion. Some of them, for example Tolstoy, Unamuno, Berdyaev, turn to Christianity and give it the most unorthodox interpretation. Others, having experienced a mental crisis, create philosophical doctrines that are sometimes called "irrationalistic" for good reason - this is how James' pragmatism or Bergson's intuitionism appear. Neither the evolution of living nature, nor the behavior of the most primitive organism, let alone the world of human experience, can be explained by the laws of mechanics and physiology. Life is eternal becoming, Heraclitus' stream, "impulse" that does not recognize the law of identity. And the eternal sleep of matter, the circulation of substances in nature, and the heights of spiritual life are only two poles of this irrepressible stream.
In addition to the "philosophy of life" Jung also touched the fashion for the occult. For two years he took part in seances, got acquainted with the vast literature on astrology, numerology and other "secret" sciences. These hobbies of student years in many ways
determined the nature of Jung's later studies. From the naive belief that mediums communicate with the spirits of the dead, he soon departed. The very fact of communicating with spirits, by the way, is also denied by serious occultists. Astral bodies do not take part in earthly life, mediums come into contact only with peculiar "shells", "psychic sheaths" that preserve individual features of the personality inhabiting them, which by this time had already left the astral world and passed into a higher dimension. These shells have only the appearance of life, they are revived by the psychic energy of the medium who has fallen into a trance (or, during the table-turning, by the energy of its participants). Therefore, in involuntary writing, in the speeches of the medium, some remarks of the deceased may appear, but there can be no talk of genuine communication with spirits, since only some fragments of this "shell" materialize, combined with the ideas and impressions of the medium.
The medium was Jung's distant relative, a semi-literate girl who was not prone to acting and cheating. The trance states were genuine; This was evidenced by at least the fact that a girl who did not graduate from the gymnasium, being in a trance, switched to literary German, which in her usual state she did not speak (the Swiss dialect is very different from the literary High German). Like most of the messages of the "spirits", this did not go beyond what was available to the consciousness of the medium: at an unconscious level, she could speak literary German. The "spirits" turned out to be, as it were, the "splinter" parts of her personality that lay outside the limits of consciousness. However, there was one important exception. The illiterate girl clearly did not know anything about the cosmology of the 2nd century Gnostic Valentinians. AD, she could not come up with such a complex system, but in the message of one of the "spirits" this system was described in detail.
These observations formed the basis for K.G. Jung's "On the psychology and pathology of the so-called occult phenomena" (1902). This work has still retained a certain scientific significance - Jung gives in it a psychological and psychiatric analysis of the mediumistic trance, compares it with hallucinations, darkened states of mind. He notes that prophets, poets, mystics, founders of sects and religious movements have the same conditions that a psychiatrist encounters in patients who came too close to the sacred "fire" - so that the psyche could not stand it, a split of the personality occurred. The prophets and poets often mix with their own voice, as it were, of another personality coming from the depths, but their consciousness manages to master this content and give it an artistic or religious form. They also have deviations of all kinds, but they have an intuition "far superior to the conscious mind"; they catch certain "proto-forms". Subsequently, Jung called these proto-forms the archetypes of the collective unconscious. They appear at different times in the minds of people, as if they emerge independently of the will of a person; praforms are autonomous, they are not determined by consciousness, but are capable of influencing it. The unity of the rational and the irrational, the removal of the subject-object relationship in intuitive insight, distinguishes trance from normal consciousness and brings it closer to mythological thinking. The world of preforms opens to each person in dreams, which turn out to be the main source of information about the mental unconscious.
Thus, Jung came to the main provisions of his own doctrine of the collective unconscious even before his meeting with Freud, which took place in 1907. By that time, Jung already had a name - first of all, the verbal-associative test, which allowed him to experimentally reveal the structure of the unconscious, brought him fame. In the laboratory of experimental psychopathology created by Jung in Burgholzi, the subject was presented with a list of words to which he had to react immediately with the first word that came to mind. The reaction time was recorded using a stopwatch. Then the test was complicated - with the help of various devices, the physiological reactions of the subject to various stimulus words were noticed. The main thing that was discovered was the presence of words to which the subjects could not quickly find a response, or the time for selecting a word-reaction was lengthened; sometimes they fell silent for a long time, "switched off", stuttered, answered not in one word, but in a whole speech, and so on. At the same time, they did not realize that the response to one stimulus word, for example, took them several times longer than to another. From this, Jung concluded that such disturbances in response are associated with the presence of “complexes” charged with psychic energy - as soon as a stimulus word “touch” such a complex, the subject showed traces of a slight emotional disorder. Later, this test contributed to the emergence of numerous "projective tests", widely used both in medicine and in the selection of personnel, as well as the appearance of a device so far from pure science as a "lie detector". Jung believed that this test reveals in the psyche of the subject some fragmentary personalities located outside of consciousness. In schizophrenics, personality dissociation is much more pronounced than in normal people, which ultimately leads to the destruction of consciousness, the disintegration of the personality, in the place of which a number of "complexes" remain. Subsequently, Jung distinguished between the complexes of the personal unconscious and the archetypes of the collective unconscious. It is the latter that resemble individuals. If earlier insanity was explained by "demonic possession" that came into the soul from outside, then Jung found that their entire legion was already contained in the soul, and under certain circumstances they could prevail over "I" - one of the elements of the psyche. The soul of every person contains many personalities, and each of them has its own "I"; from time to time they declare themselves, come to the surface of consciousness. The ancient saying: "The undead do not have their own appearance, they walk in disguises" could be applied to Jung's understanding of the psyche - with the proviso that psychic life itself, and not "undead", takes on various kinds of masks.
Of course, these ideas of Jung were associated with more than just psychiatry and psychological experimentation. They were "in the air". K. Jaspers wrote with alarm about the aestheticization of various kinds of mental deviations - this is how the "spirit of the times" expressed himself. In the works of many writers, there was a growing interest in the "legions of demons" inhabiting the dark depths of the soul, in doubles, in the "inner man" radically different from the outer shell. Often this interest, like Jung's, merged with religious teachings. Suffice it to mention the Austrian writer G. Meyrink, whose novels Jung sometimes referred to (Golem, Angel in the West Window, The White Dominican, etc.). In Meyrink's books, occultism, theosophy, and oriental teachings served as a kind of frame of reference for opposing the metaphysical-miraculous reality to the world of ordinary common sense, for which this reality is "insane." Of course, both Plato and the Apostle Paul knew such an opposition ("Didn't God turn the wisdom of this world into madness?"); it was also present in European literature at the time of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calvderon, was characteristic of all German romanticism, the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky, many writers of our century. However, here the perspective of vision changed, the coordinate system was turned over: the divine, the sacred began to be sought in the abyss of the unconscious, in the darkness. Jung wrote in his memoirs that in "Faust" he was attracted not by the image of the protagonist, but, firstly, by the famous "Mothers" from the second part, and secondly, by Mephistopheles, who declared that he was part of the force that always " does good, desiring evil for everything. " The difference between Jung and any kind of decadence that glorifies evil is beyond doubt: the synthesis of vitalism and spiritualism, Schopenhauer and alchemy, scientific psychology and "secret" sciences could not be stable.
The meeting with psychoanalysis cannot be called accidental, as well as the later break with Freud. Although Jung owed a great deal to Freud, his interpretation of the unconscious differed from Freud's from the outset. He considered his teachers E. Bleuler and P. Janet.
Bleuler wrote about cases of split personality, about "autistic thinking", which was opposed to "realistic", introduced the term "schizophrenia" (ie splitting, split personality) into psychiatry. From Janet, he inherited the energy concept of the psyche: the reality of the surrounding world requires a certain amount of psychic energy, and together with the weakening of its influx, there is a "lowering of the level of consciousness" (abaissements du niveau mental). In dreams, hallucinations, visions, there is the same material that fills the psychotic delirium. Janet also wrote about the dissociation of personality (into two or more), and only one of them is the bearer of consciousness ("I"), others were considered an expression of unconscious forces. However, while it was about the methods of psychotherapeutic treatment, Freud's influence was decisive: although Jung was and remains the first "heretic" from the point of view of orthodox psychoanalysis, his technique of treating patients differed slightly from Freud's. And the differences that existed in psychotherapy were the result of significant differences of views both in the field of psychology and in the philosophical vision of man. For the creator of psychoanalysis, in the first place was the conflict of consciousness with drives repressed into the unconscious, which were predominantly of a sexual nature. Jung's departure from "pansexualism" ("desexualization of the libido") was associated not with puritanical hypocrisy, as the Freudians imagined, but with the rejection of nineteenth-century naturalism and determinism. Positivism and physiological materialism proved unsuitable as the foundation of psychotherapy. Jung's appeal to mythology, religion, art was not a whim. Jung was one of the first to come to the idea that in order to understand the human personality - healthy or sick - it is necessary to go beyond the formulas of natural science. Not only medical textbooks, but the entire history of human culture should become an open book for the psychiatrist. Only an insignificant part of mental illnesses can be attributed to biochemical and physiological disorders. A person is ill, which, unlike the organism, can only be understood through consideration of its socio-cultural environment, which has formed values, tastes, ideals, and attitudes. Individual history merges into the life of this or that community, and then of all mankind. Realizing this, Jung was against reducing all the difficulties of an adult to his early prehistory, childhood. The family is the first instance of introducing a child to the human world, and a lot depends on it, including mental health. But to understand the norm and pathology, it is necessary to go to the macro-processes of culture, the spiritual history of mankind, in which the individual is included and internalized. Unfortunately, Jung understood this story in the spirit of vitalism; essentially cultural traits turned out to be biologically inherited. In addition, from the entire social world, Jung chose the area of religious and mythological representations, isolating them from other aspects of human history. The difference from Freud was also in the general philosophical understanding of "life". If Freud's psyche and life as a whole are a field of struggle of irreconcilable opposites, then Jung is talking more about the lost initial unity. Consciousness and unconsciousness complement each other - the Chinese symbols of Yin and Yang, the Androgyne of alchemists constantly serve as illustrations for Jung's psychological works.
Jung's central concept is the "collective unconscious." He distinguishes it from the "personal unconscious", which includes, first of all, ideas repressed from consciousness; there accumulates everything that has been suppressed or forgotten. This dark double of our "I" (its Shadow) was taken by Freud for the unconscious as such. That is why Freud paid all his attention to the early childhood of the individual, while Jung believed that "depth psychology" should look to much more distant times. The "collective unconscious" is the result of the life of the clan, it is inherent in all people, is inherited and is the basis on which the individual psyche grows. Just as our body is the result of the entire evolution of man, his psyche contains both instincts common to all living things, and specifically human unconscious reactions to the phenomena of the external and internal worlds constantly renewing throughout the life of a kind. Psychology, like any other science, studies the universal in the individual, i.e. general patterns. This common does not lie on the surface, it should be sought in the depths. This is how we discover a system of attitudes and typical reactions that imperceptibly determine the life of an individual ("all the more effectively that imperceptibly"). Under the influence of innate programs, universal patterns are not only elementary behavioral reactions like unconditioned reflexes, but also our perception, thinking, imagination. The archetypes of the "collective unconscious" are peculiar cognitive models, while instincts are their correlates; intuitive grasping of the archetype precedes action, "pulls the trigger" of instinctive behavior.
Jung compared archetypes to a system of crystal axes, which transforms a crystal in solution, being a kind of immaterial field that distributes particles of matter. In the psyche, such "substance" is external and internal experience, organized according to innate patterns. Therefore, in its pure form, the archetype does not enter consciousness; it is always connected with some representations of experience and undergoes conscious processing. These images of consciousness ("archetypal images") are closest to the archetype itself in the experience of dreams, and, mystical visions, when there is no conscious processing. These are confused, dark images perceived as something creepy, alien, but at the same time experienced as something infinitely superior to man, divine. In his works on the psychology of religion, to characterize archetypal images, Jung uses the term "numinous" (numinosum from La-tiv. Numen - deity), introduced by the German theologian R. Otto in his book "The Sacred" (1917). Otto called numinous the experience of something overwhelming with fear and awe, omnipotent, overwhelming with its power, before which a person is only "mortal dust"; but at the same time it is an experience of the majestic, giving fullness of being. In other words, Otto is talking about the perception of the supernatural in various religions, primarily in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in the specifically Luther's understanding of the "fear of the Lord." Otto specifically emphasized that the numinous experience is the experience of the "completely different" (ganz andere), the transcendental. Jung is skeptical that we know nothing and cannot know anything about the transcendent God. “Ultimately, the concept of God is a necessary psychological function, irrational in nature: it has nothing in common with the question of the existence of God. For this last question will never be answered by the human intellect; serve as any proof of the existence of God. " The idea of God is archetypical, it is inevitably present in the psyche of every person, but from this it is impossible to conclude about the existence of a deity outside our soul. Therefore, Jung's interpretation of the numinous is much more reminiscent of Nietzsche's pages when he writes about the Dionysian principle, or Spengler, when he talks about fate, but with one significant difference - psychologically, the idea of God is absolutely reliable and universal, and this is the psychological truth of all religions.
Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in the Swiss town of Keswil into the family of a priest of the Evangelical Reformed Church. The Jung family came from Germany: K. Jung's great-grandfather ran a military hospital during the Napoleonic wars, his great-grandfather's brother held the post of chancellor of Bavaria for some time (he was married to F. Schleiermacher's sister). Grandfather - a professor of medicine - moved to Switzerland with the recommendation of A. von Humboldt and rumors that he was the illegitimate son of Goethe. K. Jung's father, in addition to theological education, received a doctorate in philology, but, having lost faith in the powers of the human mind, they will leave the studies of oriental languages and any sciences in general, completely surrendering to faith. Carl Gustav's mother came from a family of local burghers who had become Protestant pastors for generations. Religion and medicine were thus united in this family long before the birth of Carl Gustav.
The family belonged to a "good" society, but could hardly make ends meet. Jung's childhood and especially adolescence were spent in poverty. He will be able to study at the best gymnasium in Basel, where the family moved, only thanks to the help of relatives and the surviving connections of his father. An uncommunicative, introverted teenager, he never made friends for himself (high growth and a fair amount of physical strength saved him from the unpleasant consequences that followed). It was difficult to adapt to the external environment, often faced with a lack of understanding of those around him, preferring to communication immersion in the world of his own thoughts. In short, it represented a classic case of what he himself later called "introversion." If in an extrovert psychic energy is directed mainly towards the outside world, then in an introvert it moves to the subjective pole, to the images of his own consciousness. It was not for nothing that Jung called his memoirs "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" - dreams played a huge role in Jung's spiritual life from early childhood, and later his entire psychotherapeutic practice was based on the analysis of dreams.
Even in adolescence, Carl Gustav came to reject the religious beliefs of his environment. Dogmatism, sanctimonious moralizing, the transformation of Jesus Christ into a preacher of Victorian morality aroused in him sincere indignation: the church "shamelessly talked about God, his aspirations and actions", profaning everything sacred with "hackneyed sentiments." In Protestant religious ceremonies he saw no trace of divine presence; in his opinion, if God once lived in Protestantism, then he left these temples long ago. Acquaintance with the dogmatic works led to the idea that they are "an example of rare stupidity, the only purpose of which is to conceal the truth"; Catholic scholasticism left the impression of a "lifeless desert" 1. Living religious experience stands above all dogmas, the young Jung believed, and therefore Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra turned out to be closer to true religion for him than all liberal Protestantism. “I am reminded of my own father’s preparation for confirmation,” Jung wrote decades later. - The catechism was inexpressibly boring. Once I leafed through this little book to find at least something interesting, and my eyes fell on the paragraphs about the trinity. This interested me, and I began to wait impatiently for when we get to this section in the lessons. When this long-awaited hour came, my father said: "We will skip this section, I myself do not understand anything." This is how my last hope was buried. Although I was surprised at my father's honesty, this did not prevent me from being mortally bored from that time on, listening to all the talk about religion ”2.
The living experience of the divine was manifested by numerous dreams: monstrous, terrible, but majestic images appeared in a dream. Under the influence of several constantly recurring dreams, doubts about the dogmas of Christianity intensified. Among other arguments of Jung the schoolboy about God (and he methodically indulged in them for two hours a day on the way to the gymnasium and back), the main place is now occupied by the obvious "heresy": God is not all-good, he has a dark, terrible hypostasis.
In Jung's dreams of that time, another motive is important: he observed the image of an old man endowed with magical powers, who was, as it were, his alter ego. In everyday worries lived a closed, timid young man - personality number one, and in dreams there was another hypostasis of his "I" - personality number two, even having his own name (Philemon). Already completing his studies at the gymnasium, Jung read "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and was even frightened: Nietzsche also had "personality No. 2" named Zarathustra; it supplanted the personality of the philosopher (hence the madness of Nietzsche - so Jung believed in the future, despite the more reliable medical diagnosis). Fear of such consequences of "dreaming" contributed to a decisive turn towards reality. And the need to study at the university at the same time, to work, knowing that you have to rely only on your own strength, led you away from the magical world of dreams. But later, in the doctrine of two types of thinking, Jung's personal dreaming experience will also be reflected. The main goal of Jung's psychotherapy will be the unity of the "external" and "internal" person in patients, and the mature Jung's reflections on the themes of religion will to some extent only be a development of what he experienced in childhood.
When clarifying the sources of this or that doctrine, the word "influence" is often misused. It is obvious that influence is not an unambiguous determination: “to influence” in the true sense of the word, when it comes to great philosophical or theological teachings, is possible only on the one who represents something by himself. Jung in his development proceeded from Protestant theology, while assimilating at the same time the spiritual atmosphere of his time. He belonged to German culture, which has long been characterized by an interest in the "night side" of existence. At the beginning of the last century, romantics turned to folk tales, mythology, "Rhine mysticism" by Eckhart and Tauler, to the alchemical theology of Boehme. Schelling doctors (Carus) have already tried to apply the doctrine of the unconscious mental in the treatment of patients. Jung combined Goethe's pantheism with Schopenhauer's "world will", with the fashionable "philosophy of life," with the works of vitalist biologists. Before Jung's eyes, the patriarchal way of life in Switzerland and Germany was breaking up: the world of villages, castles, small towns was leaving, in the very atmosphere of which, as T. Mann wrote, “something of the spiritual makeup of people who lived, say, in the last decades of the fifteenth century , - the hysteria of the outgoing Middle Ages, something like a hidden mental epidemic ", with a latent mental predisposition to fanaticism and madness 3.
In the teachings of Jung, the spiritual tradition of the past and the present collide, the alchemy of the 15th-16th centuries. and natural science, gnosticism and scientific skepticism. Interest in the distant past as something constantly accompanying us today, preserved and acting on us from the depths, was characteristic of Jung in his youth. It is curious that at the university he most of all wanted to study to be an archeologist. "Depth psychology" in its method is somewhat reminiscent of archeology. It is known that Freud repeatedly compared psychoanalysis with this science and regretted that the name "archeology" was assigned to the search for cultural monuments, and not to the "excavation of the soul." “Archee” is the beginning, and “depth psychology”, removing layer by layer, moves to the very foundations of consciousness.
However, archeology was not taught in Basel, and Jung could not study at another university - a modest scholarship could only be paid to him in his hometown. Today the demand for graduates of the natural sciences and humanities of the university is great, but at the end of the last century the situation was different. Only well-to-do people could professionally engage in science; theological, legal and medical faculties guaranteed a piece of bread. Jung was completely foreign to jurisprudence, Protestant theology was disgusting, while the medical faculty, along with a profession that allowed him to get out of poverty, also provided a tolerable science education.
As in the grammar school, Jung did an excellent job at the university, surprising his fellow students by the fact that, in addition to his academic disciplines, he devoted a lot of time to studying philosophy. Until the last year of his studies, he specialized in internal medicine, he had already been secured a place in a prestigious Munich clinic. In the last semester he had to take psychiatry, he opened the textbook and read on the first page that psychiatry is a "science of personality." “My heart suddenly beat fast,” Jung recalled in his old age. - The excitement was extraordinary, because it became clear to me, as in a flash of enlightenment, that the only possible goal for me could be psychiatry. Only in her two streams of my interests merged together. There was an empirical field, common to biological and spiritual facts, which I looked everywhere and did not find anywhere. Here the collision of nature and spirit became a reality ”4. The human psyche is a meeting place for science and religion, the conflict between them can be overcome on the path of true self-knowledge. A decision was immediately made that surprised everyone - psychiatry was considered the most prestigious occupation for a physician, if only because all the successes of medicine in the 19th century. have not led to noticeable results in the treatment of mental illness.
After graduating from university, Jung moved to Zurich and began working at the Burghoelzi clinic run by the prominent psychiatrist E. Bleuler. Basel and Zurich had symbolic significance for Jung as the two poles of European spiritual life. Basel is a living memory of European culture. The university did not forget about Erasmus, who taught there and Holbein, who studied; professors who knew Nietzsche personally taught at the Faculty of Philology. Jung's interest in philosophy could have caused bewilderment among physicians, but philosophy was considered a necessary aspect of culture in Basel. In Zurich, on the contrary, it was considered an impractical "excess". Who needs all this old book knowledge? Science was seen here as a useful tool, valued for its applications, effective use in industry, construction, trade, medicine. Basel was rooted in the distant past, while Zurich aspired to an equally distant future. Jung saw in this a "split" of the European soul: the rational industrial-technical civilization consigns its roots to oblivion. And this is natural, for the soul has become ossified in dogmatic theology. Science and religion came into conflict precisely because, Jung believed, that religion has become divorced from life experience, while science is moving away from the most important problems, it adheres to carnal empiricism and pragmatism. “We have become rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom,” he will soon write. In the picture of the world created by science, a person is only a mechanism among other mechanisms, his life loses all meaning. It is necessary to find the area where religion and science do not contradict each other, but, on the contrary, merge in search of the primary source of all meanings. Psychology became for Jung the science of sciences - it is she, from his point of view, that should give modern man a holistic worldview.
Jung was not alone in his search for the "inner man." Many thinkers of the late XIX - early XX centuries. we find the same negative attitude towards the dead space of natural science, and towards the church, and towards religion. Some of them, for example Tolstoy, Unamuno, Berdyaev, turn to Christianity and give it the most unorthodox interpretation. Others, having experienced a mental crisis, create philosophical doctrines that are sometimes not without reason called "irrationalistic" - this is how James' pragmatism or Bergson's intuitionism appear. Neither the evolution of living nature, nor the behavior of the most primitive organism, let alone the world of human experience, can be explained by the laws of mechanics and physiology. Life is an eternal becoming, a Heraclitean stream, a "impulse" that does not recognize the law of identity. And the eternal sleep of matter, the circulation of substances in nature, and the heights of spiritual life are only two poles of this irrepressible stream.
In addition to the "philosophy of life" Jung also touched the fashion for the occult. For two years he took part in seances, got acquainted with the vast literature on astrology, numerology and other "secret" sciences. These hobbies of student years largely determined the nature of Jung's later studies. From the naive belief that mediums communicate with the spirits of the dead, he soon departed. The very fact of communicating with spirits, by the way, is also denied by serious occultists. Astral bodies do not take part in earthly life, mediums come into contact only with peculiar "shells", "psychic sheaths" that preserve individual features of the personality inhabiting them, which by this time had already left the astral world and passed into a higher dimension. These shells have only the appearance of life, they are revived by the psychic energy of the medium who has fallen into a trance (or, during the table-turning, by the energy of its participants). Therefore, in involuntary writing, in the speeches of the medium, some remarks of the dead may appear, but there can be no talk of genuine communication with the spirits, since only some fragments of this "shell" materialize, which are also combined with the ideas and impressions of the medium.
The medium was Jung's distant relative, a semi-literate girl who was not prone to acting and cheating. The trance states were genuine; This was evidenced by at least the fact that a girl who did not graduate from the gymnasium, being in a trance, switched to literary German, which in her usual state she did not speak (the Swiss dialect is very different from the literary High German). Like most of the messages of the "spirits", this did not go beyond what was available to the mind of the medium: at an unconscious level, she could speak literary German. The "spirits" turned out to be, as it were, the "splintered" parts of her personality that lay outside the limits of consciousness. However, there was one important exception. The illiterate girl clearly did not know anything about the cosmology of the 2nd century Gnostic Valentinians. AD, she could not come up with such a complex system, but in the message of one of the "spirits" this system was described in detail.
These observations formed the basis for K.G. Jung's "On the psychology and pathology of the so-called occult phenomena" (1902). This work has still retained a certain scientific significance - Jung gives in it a psychological and psychiatric analysis of the mediumistic trance, compares it with hallucinations, darkened states of mind. He notes that prophets, poets, mystics, founders of sects and religious movements have the same conditions that a psychiatrist encounters in patients who came too close to the sacred "fire" - so that the psyche could not stand it, a split of the personality occurred. The prophets and poets often mix with their own voice, as it were, of another personality coming from the depths, but their consciousness manages to master this content and give it an artistic or religious form. They also have deviations of all kinds, but they have an intuition "far superior to the conscious mind"; they catch certain "proto-forms". Subsequently, Jung called these proto-forms the archetypes of the collective unconscious. They appear at different times in the minds of people, as if they emerge independently of the will of a person; pra-forms are autonomous, they are not determined by consciousness, but are capable of influencing it. The unity of the rational and the irrational, the removal of the subject-object relationship in intuitive insight distinguishes trance from normal consciousness and brings it closer to mythological thinking. The world of preforms opens to each person in dreams, which turn out to be the main source of information about the mental unconscious.
Thus, Jung came to the main provisions of his own doctrine of the collective unconscious even before his meeting with Freud, which took place in 1907. By that time, Jung already had a name - first of all, the verbal-associative test, which allowed him to experimentally reveal the structure of the unconscious, brought him fame. In the laboratory of experimental psychopathology created by Jung in Burgholzi, the subject was presented with a list of words to which he had to react immediately with the first word that came to mind. The reaction time was recorded using a stopwatch. Then the test was complicated - with the help of various devices, the physiological reactions of the subject to various stimulus words were noticed. The main thing that was discovered was the presence of words to which the subjects could not quickly find a response, or the time for selecting a word-reaction was lengthened; sometimes they fell silent for a long time, “switched off,” stuttered, answered not in one word, but in a whole speech, and so on. At the same time, they did not realize that the response to one stimulus word, for example, took them several times longer than to another. From this, Jung concluded that such disturbances in response are associated with the presence of “complexes” charged with psychic energy - as soon as a stimulus word “touch” such a complex, the subject showed traces of a mild emotional disorder. Later, this test contributed to the emergence of numerous "projective tests", widely used both in medicine and in the selection of personnel, as well as the appearance of a device so far from pure science as a "lie detector". Jung believed that this test reveals in the psyche of the subject some fragmentary personalities located outside of consciousness. In schizophrenics, personality dissociation is much more pronounced than in normal people, which ultimately leads to the destruction of consciousness, the disintegration of the personality, in the place of which a number of "complexes" remain. Subsequently, Jung distinguished between the complexes of the personal unconscious and the archetypes of the collective unconscious. It is the latter that resemble individuals. If earlier insanity was explained by "demonic possession" that came into the soul from outside, then Jung found that their entire legion was already contained in the soul, and under certain circumstances they could prevail over "I" - one of the elements of the psyche. The soul of every person contains many personalities, and each of them has its own “I”; from time to time they declare themselves, come to the surface of consciousness. The ancient saying: "The undead do not have their own appearance, they walk in disguises" could be applied to Jung's understanding of the psyche - with the proviso that mental life itself, and not "undead", takes on various kinds of masks.
Of course, these ideas of Jung were associated with more than just psychiatry and psychological experimentation. They were "in the air." K. Jaspers wrote with alarm about the aestheticization of various kinds of mental deviations - this is how the “spirit of the times” expressed himself. In the work of many writers, there was growing interest in the "legions of demons" inhabiting the dark depths of the soul, in doubles, in the "inner man", radically different from the outer shell. Often this interest, like Jung's, merged with religious teachings. Suffice it to mention the Austrian writer G. Meyrink, whose novels Jung sometimes referred to (Golem, Angel in the West Window, The White Dominican, etc.). In Meyrink's books, occultism, theosophy, and oriental teachings served as a kind of frame of reference for opposing the metaphysical-miraculous reality to the world of ordinary common sense, for which this reality is “insane”. Of course, both Plato and the Apostle Paul knew such an opposition (“Didn't God turn the wisdom of this world into madness?”); it was also present in European literature at the time of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, was characteristic of all German romanticism, the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky, many writers of our century. However, here the perspective of vision changed, the coordinate system was turned over: the divine, the sacred began to be sought in the abyss of the unconscious, in the darkness. Jung wrote in his memoirs that in "Faust" he was attracted not by the image of the protagonist, but, firstly, by the famous "Mothers" from the second part, and secondly, by Mephistopheles, who declared that he was part of the force that was always " does good, desiring evil for everything. " The difference between Jung and any kind of decadence that glorifies evil is beyond doubt: the synthesis of vitalism and spiritualism, Schopenhauer and alchemy, scientific psychology and "secret" sciences could not be stable.
The meeting with psychoanalysis cannot be called accidental, as well as the later break with Freud. Although Jung owed a great deal to Freud, his interpretation of the unconscious differed from Freud's from the outset. He considered his teachers E. Blsylsra and P. Janet. Bleuler wrote about cases of split personality, about "autistic thinking", which was opposed to "realistic", introduced into psychiatry the term "schizophrenia" (ie splitting, split personality). From Janet, he inherited the energy concept of the psyche: the reality of the surrounding world requires a certain amount of psychic energy, and together with the weakening of its influx, there is a "lowering of the level of consciousness" (abaissements du niveau mental). In dreams, hallucinations, visions, there is the same material that fills the psychotic delirium. Janet also wrote about the dissociation of the personality (into two or more), and only one of them is the bearer of consciousness ("I"), others were considered an expression of unconscious forces. However, while it was a question of the methods of psychotherapeutic treatment, the influence of Freud was decisive: although Jung was and remains the first "heretic" from the point of view of orthodox psychoanalysis, his technique of treating patients did not differ significantly from Freud's. And the differences that existed in psychotherapy were the result of significant differences of views both in the field of psychology and in the philosophical vision of man. For the creator of psychoanalysis, in the first place was the conflict of consciousness with drives repressed into the unconscious, which were predominantly of a sexual nature. Jung's departure from "pansexualism" ("desexualization of the libido") was associated not with puritanical hypocrisy, as the Freudians imagined, but with the rejection of nineteenth-century naturalism and determinism. Positivism and physiological materialism proved unsuitable as the foundation of psychotherapy.
> Jung's appeal to mythology, religion, art was not a whim. Jung was one of the first to come to the idea that in order to understand the human personality - healthy or sick - it is necessary to go beyond the formulas of natural science. Not only medical textbooks, but the entire history of human culture should become an open book for the psychiatrist. Only an insignificant part of mental illnesses can be attributed to biochemical and physiological disorders. A person is ill, which, unlike the organism, can only be understood through consideration of its socio-cultural environment, which has formed values, tastes, ideals, and attitudes. Individual history merges into the life of this or that community, and then of all mankind. Realizing this, Jung was against reducing all the difficulties of an adult to his early prehistory, childhood. The family is the first instance of introducing a child to the human world, and a lot depends on it, including mental health. But to understand the norm and pathology, it is necessary to go to the macro-processes of culture, the spiritual history of mankind, in which the individual is included and internalized. Unfortunately, Jung understood this story in the spirit of vitalism; essentially cultural traits turned out to be biologically inherited. In addition, from the entire social world, Jung chose the area of religious and mythological representations, isolating them from other aspects of human history.
The difference from Freud was also in the general philosophical understanding of "life". If Freud's psyche and life as a whole are a field of struggle of irreconcilable opposites, then Jung is talking more about the lost initial unity. Consciousness and unconsciousness complement each other - the Chinese symbols of Yin and Yang, the Androgyne of alchemists constantly serve as illustrations for Jung's psychological works.
Jung's central concept is the "collective unconscious." He distinguishes it from the "personal unconscious", which includes, first of all, the representations displaced from consciousness; there accumulates everything that has been suppressed or forgotten. This dark double of our “I” (its Shadow) was taken by Freud for the unconscious as such. Therefore, Freud paid all his attention to the early childhood of the individual, while Jung believed that "depth psychology" should turn to much more distant times. The "collective unconscious" is the result of the life of the clan, it is inherent in all people, is inherited and is the basis on which the individual psyche grows. Just as our body is the result of the entire evolution of man, his psyche contains both instincts common to all living things, and specifically human unconscious reactions to the phenomena of the external and internal worlds constantly renewing throughout the life of a kind.
Psychology, like any other science, studies the universal in the individual, i.e. general patterns. This common does not lie on the surface, it should be sought in the depths. In this way, we discover a system of attitudes and typical reactions that imperceptibly determine the life of an individual ("all the more effectively that imperceptibly"). Under the influence of innate programs, universal patterns are not only elementary behavioral reactions like unconditioned reflexes, but also our perception, thinking, imagination. The archetypes of the "collective unconscious" are peculiar cognitive models, while instincts are their correlates; intuitive grasping of the archetype precedes action, "pulls the trigger" of instinctive behavior.
Jung compared archetypes to a system of crystal axes, which transforms a crystal in solution, being a kind of immaterial field that distributes particles of matter. In the psyche, such "substance" is external and internal experience, organized according to innate patterns. Therefore, in its pure form, the archetype does not enter consciousness; it is always connected with some representations of experience and undergoes conscious processing. These images of consciousness ("archetypal images") are closest to the archetype itself in the experience of dreams, hallucinations, mystical visions, when conscious processing is minimal. These are confused, dark images, perceived as something eerie, alien, but at the same time experienced as something infinitely superior to man, divine.
In his works on the psychology of religion, to characterize archetypal images, Jung uses the term “numinous” (from the Latin for “deity”), introduced by the German theologian R. Otto in his book The Sacred (1917). Otto called numinous the experience of something overwhelming with fear and awe, omnipotent, overwhelming with its power, before which a person is only "mortal dust"; but at the same time it is an experience of the majestic, giving fullness of being. In other words, Otto is talking about the perception of the supernatural in various religions, primarily in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in the specifically Luther's understanding of the "fear of the Lord." Otto specifically emphasized that the numinous experience is the experience of “something completely different,” transcendental. Jung is skeptical that we know nothing and cannot know anything about the transcendent God. “Ultimately, the concept of God is a necessary psychological function, irrational in nature: it has nothing in common with the question of the existence of God. For to this last question the human intellect will never be able to provide an answer; to an even lesser extent, this function can serve as any kind of proof of the existence of God ”5. The idea of God is archetypal, it is inevitably present in the psyche of every person, but from this it is impossible to conclude about the existence of a deity outside our soul. Therefore, Jung's interpretation of the numinous is much more reminiscent of Nietzsche's pages when he writes about the Dionysian principle, or Spengler, when he talks about fate, but with one significant difference - psychologically, the idea of God is absolutely reliable and universal, and this is the psychological truth of all religions.
Archetypal images have always accompanied a person, they are the source of mythology, religion, art. In these cultural formations, there is a gradual polishing of confused and eerie images, they turn into symbols that are more and more beautiful in form and universal in content. Mythology was the original way of processing archetypal images. A man of primitive society only to a small extent separates himself from "mother nature", from the life of the tribe. He is already experiencing the consequences of the separation of consciousness from animal unconsciousness, the emergence of a subject-object relationship - this rupture in the language of religion is interpreted as a "fall from sin" ("you will become like gods", "knowledge of good and evil"). Harmony is restored with the help of magic, rituals, myths. With the development of consciousness, the gap between it and the unconscious deepens, tension grows. A person faces the problem of adapting to his own inner world. If mythology barely distinguishes between external and internal, then with the advent of science, such a division becomes a fait accompli. Adaptation to the images of the unconscious is being undertaken by increasingly complex religious teachings, still resting on the intuitive experience of the numinous, but introducing abstract dogmas.
According to Jung, there are two types of thinking - logical and intuitive. Logical thinking is characterized by a focus on the outside world, this provides an adaptation to reality. Such thinking proceeds in judgments and inferences, it is always verbal, requires efforts of will and tiresome. This focus on the outside world requires education, upbringing - logical thinking is a product and tool of culture. It is primarily associated with science, technology, industry, which are instruments of control over reality. Logical thinking is also associated with the experience of archetypes, but this is a mediated connection. Religious symbols first become plastic philosophical concepts of the ancient Greeks, then Plato's "eidos" become scholastic concepts, Cartesian "innate ideas", Kantian a priori categories, until finally they turn into instrumental terms of modern natural science. Jung hypothesizes that medieval scholasticism was a kind of "training" for the European mind - playing with abstract entities prepared the categorical apparatus of science.
In traditional societies, logical thinking is much less developed. Even in India, a country with a long tradition of philosophical thinking, it is not, according to Jung, entirely logical. The Indian thinker “rather perceives thought, in this respect he is like a savage. I am not saying that he is a savage, but that the process of his thinking resembles the way of generating thought inherent in a savage. The savage's reasoning is basically an unconscious function, he only perceives the result of its work. The same should be expected from any civilization that had a tradition that has hardly been interrupted since primitive times ”6. Europe followed the path of the development of extraverted logical thinking, all forces were turned to the conquest of the outside world; India is a classical civilization of introverted inward thinking, oriented towards adaptation to the collective unconscious.
Such thinking does not proceed in judgments, it appears as a stream of images and does not tire. As soon as we relax, we lose the thread of reasoning, moving on to the natural play of imagination for a person. Such thinking is unproductive for adapting to the external world, since it moves away from reality into the realm of fantasy, dreams, dreams. But it is necessary for artistic creation, mythology and religion. “All those creative forces that modern man puts into science and technology, ancient man devoted to his myths” 7. Introverted thinking balances the forces of the unconscious.
The human psyche is the integrity of unconscious and conscious processes, it is a self-regulating system in which there is a constant exchange of energy between elements. The isolation of consciousness leads to a loss of balance, and the unconscious seeks to "compensate" for the one-sidedness of consciousness. People of ancient civilizations valued the experience of dreams, hallucinations as the grace of God, since it is in them that we come into direct contact with the collective unconscious. If consciousness no longer takes into account the experience of archetypes, if symbolic transmission is impossible, then archetypal images can invade consciousness in the most primitive forms.
"Invasions" of the collective unconscious lead not only to individual, but also to collective psychoses, all kinds of false prophecies, mass movements, and wars. Jung himself experienced similar states, which he interpreted as such an "invasion." In 1912, after the publication of the book "Metamorphoses and Symbols of Libido" and the break with Freud, a prolonged mental crisis began. According to Jung himself, he was close to insanity, his mind was literally overwhelmed with nightmarish images. Here is one of them: the whole of Europe is flooded with blood, the streams of which approach the Alps, rise along the slopes of the mountains, the stumps of human bodies float in the blood, the whole world is flooded with blood. The nightmarish visions ceased in August 1914, when the bloody delirium became a reality. Jung saw in this confirmation of the theory of the collective unconscious: his consciousness was only a medium for the deep forces that lurked in the psyche of all Europeans. Demons came to the surface, materialized, and with the beginning of the worldwide dance of death, his mental crisis ended.
Jung's major psychological writings were written between the two world wars. The classification of psychological types and functions, the development of the theory of the collective unconscious, the problems of psychotherapy and developmental psychology, however, constitute only an insignificant part of Jung's corpus of writings. The theory of the collective unconscious extends to an ever wider range of phenomena, Jung's teachings are increasingly acquiring the features of a philosophical doctrine. He seeks confirmation of his hypotheses not only in the experience of psychotherapeutic practice, the whole culture becomes the subject of analytical psychology. From Jung's point of view, everything in the human world is subject to the laws of psychology, "the soul of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the soul of an individual." Socio-political crisis of the 20-30s. is explained by the invasion of archetypes. The racial mythology of the Nazis, the communist myth about the realization of the "golden age" - all this is childishly naive from the point of view of reason, but these ideas are capturing millions of people. Torchlight processions, mass ecstasy and feverish speeches of all kinds of "leaders", the use of archaic symbols (the same swastika) testify to the invasion of forces that far surpass the human mind.
And all this collective madness is a natural consequence of European history, its incomparable progress in mastering the world with the help of science and technology. The history of Europe is the history of the decline of symbolic knowledge. The technical civilization is not the result of the last decades, but of many centuries of the "disenchantment" of the world. The more beautiful and grandiose the image conveyed by tradition, the further it is from the individual numinous experience. Symbols reveal the sacred to a person and at the same time protect him from direct contact with the colossal psychic energy of archetypes. In the church, symbols acquire a dogmatic character: dogmas bring the sacred into the human world, organize it, give form to inner experience. Jung places the dogmatic experience above the mystical. Mysticism becomes widespread precisely in times of crisis, when dogmas ossify, when it is already difficult to convey numinous experience with their help, when the stronghold of the church is shaken. The mystic has lost the ordered divine cosmos, he experiences chaotic visions, an abyss is found behind the cosmic order. Medieval Catholic mysticism formulated the experience of visions with the help of dogmas, and therefore it did not have the tragic and terrible character of mysticism of the 15th-16th centuries. Jung extremely highly placed the "Catholic form of life" - church rituals permeate all human activity, many symbols and rituals of Catholicism date back to hoary antiquity, reproduce the ancient mysteries.
Today, Jung notes, this "form of life" is completely alien to most educated Europeans, and is destroying traditional societies around the world. However, this destruction did not begin with modern science or the writings of atheists. Throughout history, mankind has erected a protective wall of symbols "against the terrible vitality lurking in the depths of the soul." This wall began to be destroyed by Protestantism. The authority of the church was undermined, it turned into a house with collapsed walls, into which "all the troubles and hardships of the world broke into." The history of Protestantism is a chronicle of the storming of the sacred walls. Protestantism replaced the church with the authority of Scripture, but gave everyone the opportunity to interpret the Bible in their own way. Philological and historical criticism, the efforts of hermeneutics were required to establish the exact meaning of Revelation, this criticism contributed to the further impoverishment of the symbolic universe, the split of Protestantism into hundreds of denominations.
Protestantism became the reason for the rapid development of capitalist industry and technology. The psychic energy that had previously been spent on the construction of protective walls "freed itself and moved along the old channels of curiosity and acquisitiveness, and therefore Europe became the mother of demons that devoured most of the Earth" 8. The Reformation was followed by the Enlightenment, followed by the materialism of natural science. The symbolic cosmos decomposed into formulas has become alien to man, who has turned into one of the physical forces. Absurd political and social doctrines poured into the resulting vacuum, and catastrophic wars began.
Jung compared the Europe of his day with that of late antiquity. After the cry: "The great god Pan is dead!" Was heard, the ancient religion lost all significance. The Divine was revealed to the Greek in a plastic-sensual form; space for him was governed by measure, harmony. At the end of antiquity, the order of the world was already perceived as a demonic force. A person found himself in the grip of impersonal fate - his symbol was the starry sky, which aroused enthusiastic reverence several centuries earlier as a symbol of the harmony of the world. "Although equally powerful, but also not close to him, the stars have become tyrants - they are feared, but at the same time despised, for they are lower than man." Plotinus wrote about the Gnostics that they consider the soul of even the most insignificant person immortal, but they deny this to the starry sky and even the world's soul itself.
Greeks and Romans turned to Middle Eastern religions in an attempt to make up for the loss of sacred symbols. The result of the struggle of a number of Eastern religions was the victory of Christianity, which borrowed a lot from its rivals and restored the protective wall of symbols. Today, when Europe is experiencing the collapse of Christianity, the current search for symbols and religions in the East seems justified. However, the treasures of Eastern wisdom turn out to be completely unsuitable for Europeans: they are so saturated with "someone else's blood" that they cannot enter the symbolic universe of a European and can even harm him. A European cannot put on them as a ready-made foreign dress - Jung compared the Theosophists with beggars dressed up in princely clothes. By borrowing carefully designed systems of ideas and meditation practices, the European only aggravates his contradictions. For a Hindu, yoga is an excellent means of mental self-regulation; for a European, it turns out to be an additional tool for suppressing the forces of the collective unconscious. From Jung's point of view, in the Western version, Eastern teachings either acquire the features of primitive religious movements, or become "psychotechnics", "gymnastics." No borrowing from the East will help the Europeans; they need to remember their own religious tradition.
Jung called his own analytical psychology now "Western yoga", now "alchemy of the 20th century." In the dreams of his patients, Jung constantly came across symbols that were incomprehensible not only to patients who did not have an appropriate historical background, but also surprised Jung, who spent many years studying religious and mythological concepts. For some unknown reason, images characteristic of the Hellenistic religions, hermeticism, and gnosticism were reproduced in dreams again and again. Since Jung believed that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, the emergence of symbols of a past era on the surface of consciousness meant for him the return of the unconscious to this moment in the development of the collective soul.
Jung's research was helped by his acquaintance with alchemy - in the 30s he began to study the works of European alchemists, and since then it is alchemy that has been in the center of his attention. Alchemy acts for Jung as a kind of natural philosophy of Gnosticism, it is a bridge between Gnosticism and modernity. In the symbolism of the Holy Grail and in the alchemical search for the "philosopher's stone" we are dealing with a tradition that for centuries existed in the shadow of Christianity, which exterminated the Gnostics, then the Cathars, but did not completely destroy this heresy. Any religion "is a spontaneous expression of certain dominant mental states," Christianity "formulated the state that prevailed at the beginning of our era and was significant for many subsequent centuries." But Christianity expressed only one thing - the then dominant state, all the rest were suppressed and repressed. As soon as the influence of Christianity weakened, other psychic forces began to surface.
The unconscious lives its own life, the work that began many years ago continues in it. The historical roots of modern symbols are found in Gnosticism. At the same time, Jung has in mind not so much the complex cosmology of Valentine and Basilides, as the ideas of Simon the Magus and Carpocrates about the feminine principle, the deification of human flesh. In the unconscious of today's Europeans, the Trinity is replaced by a quadruple. The earthly, dark, feminine principle - the fourth element - was excluded from the creed of Christians and cast down "into outer darkness." Now he is returning, a new religious state arises. The Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, adopted by the church in 1854, the dogma of her bodily ascension in 1950, the constant appearances of her to believers throughout our century - all these, according to Jung, are signs of deification of the earthly principle. These ideas were then developed by Jung into a complete theological doctrine in which alchemical and astrological concepts play a significant role.
Jung's doctrine of mythology and religion has been criticized many times, since these spiritual formations are literally dissolved by him in individual and collective psychology; they become the expression of either biologically inherited archetypes or of a kind of "world spirit." But the interest in Jung's teachings among many serious researchers of mythology and religion is still not accidental. To accusations of mysticism and irrationalism, Jung usually replied as follows: “The fullness of life is natural and not natural, rational and irrational ... Psychology that satisfies only the intellect is never practical; for the integrity of the soul is never captured by the intellect alone ”11. If archetypes are understood as unconsciously reproducible schemes that manifest themselves in myths and hallucinations, fairy tales and works of art, then there is nothing mystical in such an understanding of them. The human psyche is not a "blank slate", and the tasks of a psychologist may well include the study of a priori prerequisites of experience. What is the relationship between genetically inherited patterns of behavior, perception, imagination and those inherited through cultural and historical memory - this is a question that ethnologists, linguists, psychologists, ethnographers, historians approach from various angles. Accepting Jung's teaching on archetypes, we can disagree with either his alchemical and astrological speculations, or with many specific interpretations of cultural phenomena.
Jung continued to work actively into old age. At the age of eighty he managed to complete a book on alchemy, on which he worked for more than thirty years (he died at his estate Kusnacht on June 6, 1961 after a long illness).
This volume contains those works in which the problems of mythology and religion are posed in the most general form, in connection with certain provisions of Jung's analytical psychology. They give an idea of the culturology (or historiosophy) that was developed by the Swiss scientist on the basis of his theory of the collective unconscious.