Carl Jung on “Self” “Soul” and “Soul Image” - Anthology

[Carl Jung on “Self” “Soul” and “Soul Image”]

Self:

The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche; a transpersonal power that transcends the ego.
As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole. But in so far as the total personality, on account of its unconscious component, can be only in part conscious, the concept of the self is, in part, only potentially empirical and is to that extent a postulate. In other words, it encompasses both the experienceable and the inexperienceable (or the not yet experienced). . . . It is a transcendental concept, for it presupposes the existence of unconscious factors on empirical grounds and thus characterizes an entity that can be described only in part.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 789.]

The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. ["Introduction," CW 12, par. 44.]

Like any archetype, the essential nature of the self is unknowable, but its manifestations are the content of myth and legend.

The self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality," such as a king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc. When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary (arch-enemy, dragon), Faust and Mephistopheles, etc. Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 790.]

The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of unconscious contents over which the ego has no control. This can result in neurosis and a subsequent renewal of the personality, or in an inflated identification with the greater power.

The ego cannot help discovering that the afflux of unconscious contents has vitalized the personality, enriched it and created a figure that somehow dwarfs the ego in scope and intensity. . . . Naturally, in these circumstances there is the greatest temptation simply to follow the power-instinct and to identify the ego with the self outright, in order to keep up the illusion of the ego’s mastery. . . . [But] the self has a functional meaning only when it can act compensatorily to ego-consciousness. If the ego is dissolved in identification with the self, it gives rise to a sort of nebulous superman with a puffed-up ego.["On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 430.]

Experiences of the self possess a numinosity characteristic of religious revelations. Hence Jung believed there was no essential difference between the self as an experiential, psychological reality and the traditional concept of a supreme deity.

It might equally be called the "God within us."["The Mana-Personality," CW 7, par. 399.

Soul:

A functional complex in the psyche. (See also Eros, Logos and soul-image.)
While Jung often used the word soul in its traditional theological sense, he strictly limited its psychological meaning.

I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a "personality." ["Definitions," CW 6, par. 797]

With this understanding, Jung outlined partial manifestations of the soul in terms of anima/animus and persona. In his later writing on the transference, informed by his study of the alchemical opus-which Jung understood as psychologically analogous to the individuation process–he was more specific.

The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate.["The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]


Soul-image:

The representation, in dreams or other products of the unconscious, of the inner personality, usually contrasexual. (See also anima and animus.)
Wherever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image. Since these relationships are very common, the soul must be unconscious just as frequently.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 809.]

The soul-image is a specific archetypal image produced by the unconscious, commonly experienced in projection onto a person of the opposite sex.

For an idealistic woman, a depraved man is often the bearer of the soul-image; hence the "saviour-fantasy" so frequent in such cases. The same thing happens with men, when the prostitute is surrounded with the halo of a soul crying for succour.[Ibid., par. 811.]

Where consciousness itself is identified with the soul, the soul-image is more likely to be an aspect of the persona.

In that event, the persona, being unconscious, will be projected on a person of the same sex, thus providing a foundation for many cases of open or latent homosexuality, and of father-transferences in men or mother-transferences in women. In such cases there is always a defective adaptation to external reality and a lack of relatedness, because identification with the soul produces an attitude predominantly oriented to the perception of inner processes.[Ibid., par. 809.]

Many relationships begin and initially thrive on the basis of projected soul-images. Inherently symbiotic, they often end badly.

Carl Jung: Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized.

Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanized.

Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him.

Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbours a great demon.

Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals.

He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal.

His immediate communication with nature is gone forever. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 95

Divine Madness: Shamanic Dreaming, Dionysus & Pathologizing Soul

Divine Madness: Shamanic Dreaming, Dionysus & Pathologizing Soul

c. 2000 by Maureen B. Roberts, PhD

Some of my most powerful soul retrieval and deathwalking work is done in dreams. In connection with my work with schizophrenia sufferers, many of whom are sensitive, brilliant and artistic young men, I recently had a Monty Pythonish dream in which a terrified teenage boy, who had turned ‘mad’ and run away into a dense tract of forest, was being pursued by a group of white-coated psychiatrists wielding hypodermic needles. They couldn’t see him as he hid in the dense thickets, at which point I offered to find him and calm him down through shamanic intervention. The psychiatrists, out of (what I picked up empathically as) fear and envy, rebuffed the idea and said something like, ‘Who do you think you are, claiming you can do what we can’t?’

I calmly waited at the edge of the forest with an intuition that the boy would eventually come to me, then I adopted a second guise and ventured forth as a Wolf, in order to find and shepherd him toward my waiting human self. The boy, still on the run, eventually came blundering out and ran almost into my arms. He was terrified, wild-eyed with a psychotic stare, and had potentially dangerous claws and a half animal-like appearance. I had to hold his gaze firmly and not waver from it for an instant, as I talked and half sang in a soothing way to the soul cowering in terror behind the stare. (The secret language I used was the Old Gaelic-sounding tongue I always use in shamanic work.) I could feel his pain and held him with compassion, risking the claws, which he didn’t use. Upon seeing that I was as mad as he was and dressed in wolfish animal skins, he calmed down and at last was at peace.

His parents then arrived on the scene and I gently steered the boy back to them and said, “Call me if you need any more help.” The psychiatrists looked on dumbfounded, disoriented, drained in power and embarrassed. (As a note on my unwillingness – in this instance – to deal with the situation unaided; in some dangerous cases of psychosis, it’s risky for shamans to follow alone into the unconscious; part of them needs to keep a healthy distance from the archetypal material – that is, at least one dream or waking personality must – if they’re to avoid draining their energy by having to tackle these destructive forces head-on. This is where shamanic guides, or the power to shapeshift into other forms, are indispensible help and protection.) Interestingly, the night before I had this dream, I dreamed I was taking home orphaned baby orangutans who had nowhere to go.

Facing Wild Dionysus

Generally speaking, in working shamanically with debilitated schizophrenia sufferers you have to be able to meet persecuted Dionysus as Dionysus if you’re to quell the fear, which is all too often the fraternal god Pan running away – in ‘pan-ic’ – from persecuting Apollonian medicine. An insightful friend commented on these two dreams as follows:
First she is taking orphaned orangutans home for temporary protection, much like she protects and tries to heal the schizophrenic patients. With the ‘wild child’ in the second dream, it is she who looks as mad as the child, yet she is the only one who can pull the child out of the forest through her ability to reach the archaic depths.

The same friend – an apprentice shaman whom I’m teaching – soon afterwards had the following dream (which I have permission to share):
My house was on fire. In the dream I cannot find water to put the fire out. After the fire I am looking everywhere for my four cats, hoping that they got out alive. My favourite, whose name is Monkey, comes out of the woods running to me. I am so happy he is OK. I find the three females curled up at the back steps to the house. Next I wake up and feel as if my body is on fire. I decide to get up and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. On my way back to the bedroom, I see a strange light coming from my son’s room. I walk in to find an old Owl lamp has fallen on the floor. The light has melted the shade and the carpet, which is smoking and just short of flaming up. Next to this is a loaf of bread torn into pieces and spread about. This is Monkey’s doing, since he is always dragging the bread off if it is left on the counter.

Animal ‘Lunar-cy’

As an aside comment, like Jung I steer clear of assuming that what he called ‘interpretation on the subjective level’ is the only valid, or useful approach to dreams, hence my emphasis – increasingly nowadays – on the suggestion that the dream simply amplifies, dramatizes, mythologizes, or ‘re-presents’ an actual situation, as indeed I feel the schizophrenia dream did. Dreams as a ‘soul soup’ have no problem with mixing the ingredients of personal, symbolic, mythic and objectively real into one alchemical cauldron.

Reflecting on the dream through tossed in reflections rather than attempts to interpret, there is here a lot of Hellish fire, destruction, dissolution and alchemically transforming heat – perhaps as a prelude to rebirth – in the dream. As well, many animals, such as snake, toad, cat, wolf and bat are habitually relegated to the Devil’s camp, or feared realm of shadow, largely because they’re citizens of rejected Dionysus and the Underworld, the Abyss of impassioned ‘dis-integration’, where we encounter the dark divine.

The dream, as the dreamer and I shared, celebrates the wild, multifarious drama of ‘dis-ordered’ soul and its Dionysian undermining of the opposing tendency toward Apollonian light, order, calm and reunification. Monkey, like the wild child of my dream, comes running out of the woods to the dreamer. The ‘3 sleeping female cats’ outside on the back steps from a straightforward Jungian angle suggest a still unconscious, rejected trinity of feminine Dionysian energy. The Owl lamp suggests the associated need for more nocturnal animal wisdom as the shedding of a more lunar light (note the suggestive play on words here: ‘shedding of light’ as ‘falling lamp’). And ‘lunacy’, of course, comes from ‘lunar’. The loaf torn and spread about by Monkey casts shades of the sacrament of Communion, in which Christ as Dionysus is torn to pieces, dramatizing the explosion of the isolated ego throughout Nature. Bread spread about also feeds the birds, who in shamanic work in turn nurture soul by mediating between Otherworlds and embodied consciousness.

Shamanism & Dionysus

The shaman’s visionary wildness, animal cunning, authority and energy come from having befriended both her demons (the personal shadow) and Dionysian energy, which inflicts – among its other initiations – a rending yet tenderizing sword run through the heart. The shaman thus typically lives at the extreme edge of Western society, given that the latter in privileging the (opposite) Apollonian light of rational ‘civilization’, has patronized, rejected, stigmatized, persecuted, incarcerated, medicated, lobotomized and suppressed its untamable opposite, often in the name of ‘medicine’, though in reality in a frantic and fearful effort to keep Dionysus at a safely sedated distance.

One of the challenges that faces us today – as James Hillman so eloquently argues in his The Myth of Analysis – is thus the reclaiming of Dionysian consciousness, supplemented, I suggest, by our openness to embrace and celebrate its bliss, ambivalence, hunger for depth, androgyny, irrationality and divine terror. In this connection, Jung pronounced that ‘the gods have become diseases’, ruling no longer from Olympus but from the Underworld depths of bodily instinct and the unconscious.

Importantly Hillman, like Jung ever seeking the god in the illness, shrewdly spots Dionysus as essentially feminine in hysteria, which in some ways is the extraverted complement of introverted schizophrenia (hence the link between schizophrenia and shamanic initiation). Hillman then cleverly draws on the cultural bias innate in Apollonian medicine’s persecution of Dionysian ‘sickness’, or ‘abnormality’ as a basis for contesting the entire ‘myth of analysis’ – the presumption that pathologizing, or fragmented soul needs fixing up – or band-aiding through drugging, patronizing and reunification.

In a roundabout way, the contesting of this archetypal ‘fantasy’, or lopsidedness thus awakens us to what I explore in detail in my own work: the pivotal link between shamanism, multiple soul and pathologizing Dionysian consciousness. Conversely, positive thinking – as a psychological ‘theory’ – assumes that anything that’s broken, or off-centre (eccentric!), or suffering, or in darkness, depression, neurosis, or metaphoric death needs to be immediately centred, resurrected, unified, or brought into the light of health. This is precisely where, as I have discussed elsewhere, shamans need to discern between needed soul retrieval, called for when the ‘patient’ is genuinely helpless, and the need to honour soul’s need to embody the mythic wound and embrace its cycle of death and rebirth, rather than shun the dark, painful, ‘dis-illusioning’, ‘dis-integrating’, or dangerous phases and faces of the myth.

Bearing these cultural biases in mind, we surely need to take a fresh look from an archetypal perspective at the entire issue of healing, wounding and diagnosis in order to challenge and question the archetypal biases that underly all our pronouncements of normal, sick, sane and healthy to begin with. This is precisely what archetypal psychology is about – what I call ‘reflective deconstruction’ as an alternative to being unwittingly ruled by unstated assumptions based on archetypal biases which we cannot avoid, so might as well try to understand.

Shamanism as Voluntary Psychosis

To start with, is dissociation (therefore) always synonymous with soul loss? Dissociation by definition is a disorder, since the latter means “lacking in order or coherence”, but is disorder – in which Dionysus usually lurks – inevitably, as we usually assume it to be, pathological? Perhaps we have been oversimplifying or unwisely generalising in assuming that dissociation in all situations need to be remedied, hence that from the shamanic angle the mislaid soul fragment always needs to be immediately retrieved.

Shamanism, after all, although it has been written about by Westerners largely with Apollonian reason and reflection, is primarily dissociated, or Dionysian in experience, from schizophrenic initiation through to its practice as a ‘voluntary psychosis’. Accordingly, the reservations I have about much ‘urban’, or Westernized ‘shamanism’ is that it often excludes an appreciation of Dionysian consciousness – which is irrational, ecstatic, emotional, sometimes hysterical, frenzied, disordered, highly energetic and creatively mad – and instead tends to hover within the safer confines of rationality, sober methodology, embodied, calm and single-minded focus. As Jung lamented, our real god is respectability. In other words, Dionysus as an equally valid mode of consciousness is sometimes ousted by what can amount to a diluted, overly sane and respectable distortion of the vivid power, rarity and divine madness of the shamanic vocation.

There’s a huge difference in this sense between talking about Dionysus – from a safe and respectably civilized distance – and meeting the God face to face, then becoming her/his mediatrix. The latter is indeed risky business. Schizophrenics, ‘mad’ artists and shamans embody both Dionysian dispersion and (at other times) Apollonian focus. If you want to observe Dionysus, god of ambivalence, you will therefore find her/him in Dali, Goya, Brueghel, William Blake’s visionary rantings, the dreams and visions and voices of schizophrenics, the drunk’s violent rampage, the hysteric’s frustration at our overly sanitized and patriarchal culture, the Madwoman’s maenadic rage at the rape of Mother Earth, my own ecstatic trance in which I become the drumming pulse of the Cosmos and the animals, stars and stones I am one with.

On the other hand, if you want to actually meet Dionysus face-to-face, you must embody such divine madness yourself. The difference is similar to the distinction between finding out information about an ocean’s currents from reading a map, or from hearsay, and diving in the deep end, then learning to swim – or risking death by drowning. The divinely mad, though, can breathe water in place of air at the dark depths of the ocean, as I often do in dreams. For them, fear of drowning has itself been drowned in the Dionysian wine of symbolic death, embraced in the service of pathologizing soul.

Text c. 2000 Maureen B. Roberts
from Re-Visioning Soul Retrieval: Creative Bridges Between Shamanism & Archetypal Psychology Not to be reproduced whole or in part without the author’s permission.

Maureen Roberts, PhD is an initiated Celtic shaman, artist, musician and Jungian therapist who practices in Adelaide, South Australia. She guides Vision Quests, runs a Schizophrenia Crisis Helpline and is Facilitator of the Centre for Jungian & Shamanic Studies.

Sky and Psyche: Heaven and Soul by Nicholas Campion

Sky and Psyche: Heaven and Soul by Nicholas Campion

(This is the text of Campion, Nicholas, ‘Sky and Psyche: Heaven and Soul’, in Nicholas Campion and Patrick Curry (eds.), Sky and Psyche: the Relationship between Cosmos and Consciousness, Edinburgh: Floris Books 2006, pp. 9-14.)

The chapters in this book are based on lectures delivered at two conferences held in Bath in 2005, and associated with Bath Spa University’s Sophia Centre: ‘The Alchemical Sky’ on 1 May, and ‘Sky and Psyche’ on 1-2 July. Both events were
designed to address the question of the relationship, as the title of the second event suggests, between sky and psyche – in their broadest sense.

Psyche, in particular has a double meaning as soul and mind. Until the seventeenth century the two were indistinguishable; soul was that part of mind which could communicate with, travel to and/or unite with, God. Alchemical Sky, meanwhile, points to the possibility of transmutation – or transformation’; that the psyche’s ability to reflect on the heavens necessarily involves what we might nowadays call an evolutionary process.

The question of the relationship between the soul and the stars been central to cosmology for thousands of years. The belief in the soul’s journey to the stars permeated Egyptian thought. It appeared amongst the Greek Orphics, perhaps under Egyptian influence, from where it made its way into Plato’s teachings in fourth century BCE Athens. Thanks to Plato’s impact on the Church Fathers, his theories became a persistent, if controversial, part of Christian theology. In fact, one could argue that the entire Christian notion of soul is pagan. The belief that the soul could embark on a celestial journey draws attention to the cosmos as a real, physical space, if one in which morality varies with the region within which one finds one’s self. For medieval Christians, Heaven, the soul’s natural home, was located above the earth – beyond the stars.

If I could paraphrase Rob Hand, who spoke at the ‘Sky and Psyche’ conference, the relationship of soul to stars was the central problem in cosmomology during the centuries when Christian theology was being formulated and was fighting for supremacy over its pagan and heretical rivals. Did the soul come from the stars? If so, how did it return? Could it even return? Did it even want to? These were the sort of questions that pervaded discussions of humanity’s relationship with the divine. While much modern psychology has become almost entirely dissociated from psyche in its original sense, the reaction to such ideas began with Jung in the 1910s and has found a home in the various schools of post-Jungian and transpersonal psychology.

Plato’s idea of the rational mind, that part of the psyche which was in
contact with the divine, survives in various forms. His Idealism, which presented mind as independent of matter, flourishes, unrecognised in a world in which most academic disciplines take materialism as their starting point. Plato’s cosmic order though, survives in one other significant area apart from depth psychology, and that is pure mathematics. John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University and one of the originators of the anthropic principle, in which the universe and human life are to one degree or another, mutually dependent, discussed
‘mathematical Platonism’, which he considered ‘almost religious in the sense that it provides an underpinning necessary to give meaning to life and human activity’.

Roger Penrose is another mathematical Platonist. Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, he shared the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking.

Penrose’s explanation for the manner in which mathematics allows for intellectual inquiry is instructive:

How is it that mathematical ideas can be communicate in this way? I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts…when one ‘sees’ a mathematical truth, ones; consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it (‘accessible via the intellect’).

Psyche as soul may not survive in Penrose’s formula, but psyche as collective mind certainly does, and is not so far from Jung’s collective unconscious. Penrose’s notion of the individual mind connecting with the world of ideas is certainly an exact replica of the communication that takes place between Plato’s human rational soul and the world-soul, the anima mundi. Plato laid the foundation of Penrose’s opinion in the Phaedrus:

Now the divine intelligence, since it is nurtured on mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving that which befits it, rejoices in seeing reality for a space of time and by gazing upon truth is nourished and made happy until the revolution brings it again to the same place.

Plato’s use of the world revolution, of course, is a reference to the revolution of the heavens, of the stars and planets.

To turn to the title of the second, two-day, conference, it deliberately used the word ‘psyche’ rather than soul; while it is true that psyche is often directly translated as soul, as in English versions of Claudius Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, it is also the root of our modern word psychology – the study of mind. The confusion comes about because, for many in the classical world, God was ‘Mind’ (nous in the Greek), and the human mind, with a small ‘m’, was an attribute of each individual’s divine consciousness and a means of contacting the Divine. The mind in the modern secular world is viewed as, at best, a set of complexes, at worst as a mere bi-product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, a complicated computer. Many academic and clinical psychologists regard mind as a mere epiphenomenon, an accidental consequence of the brain’s physical processes. The word psyche therefore, in modern
terms, deliberately confuses the spiritual and psychological, reminding us that, for much of western history until the modern period, the two were intimately related. Astronomy, meanwhile, struggles with its origins in celestial religion. When a NASA spokesman describes his reaction to the return of the ‘Stardust’ mission as ‘incredible thrill, very emotional’

How does this relate to the space program’s overwhelmingly technical logic? When Patrick Moore, the UK’s most effective populariser of astronomy, discussed the 1964 solar eclipse he simultaneously dismissed ancient beliefs about their power, but preserved the notion of the sky as a source of numinous awe:

Solar eclipses caused great alarm in ancient times; the Chinese used to believe that the Sun was in danger of being eaten by a dragon. No terror is now associated with them, except in very undeveloped countries. But they remain perhaps the most awe-inspiring phenomena in all nature. Nobody who has been fortunate enough to witness a total eclipse of the Sun is ever likely to forget it. Somehow, astronomy can never quite discard that residual impulse which drew humanity to search the sky for meaning and inspiration.

We should turn to Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at Adelaide University, for illumination:

An increasing number of scientists and writers have come to realise that the ability of the physical world to organise itself constitutes a fundamental, and deeply mysterious, property of the universe. The fact that nature has creative power, and is able to produce a progressively richer variety of complex forms and structures, challenges the very foundation of contemporary science. ‘The greatest riddle of cosmology’, writes Karl popper, the well-known philosophers, ‘may well be … that the universe is, in a sense, creative’.

The award of the Templeton prize to John Barrow in March 2006, highlighted, again, such prominent opinions on the extent to which the universe is essentially organised and that, therefore, the relationship between consciousness and matter is an integral part of this organisation.

The relationship between mind and matter may even be purposeful if it is argued that consciousness has developed precisely in order to allow human beings to reflect on the cosmos. News reports of Barrow’s award gave renewed
prominence to his ideas:

Life as we know it would be impossible, he and others have pointed out, if certain constants of nature – numbers denoting the relative strengths of fundamental forces and masses of elementary particles – had values much different from the ones they have, leading to the appearance that the universe was ‘well tuned for life,’ as Dr Barrow put it.

In a news release, the prize organizers said of Dr Barrow’s work:

‘It has also given theologians and philosophers inescapable questions to consider when examining the very essence of belief, the nature of the universe, and humanity’s place in it.’

Asked about his religious beliefs, Dr Barrow said he and his family were members of the United Reformed Church in Cambridge, which teaches ‘a traditional deistic picture of the universe,’ he said.

Even atheism is no escape from the sky-psyche problem. A recent, ambitious atheist proposal, Frances Crick’s ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’, according to which, as Crick put it, ‘your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules’,

singularly fails to provide a reasonable answer. One might ask whether, if every particle of matter in our bodies has already passed through three stars, including our sun, since the Big Bang, and if, as Crick argues, consciousness is a property of matter, at what point in this process does matter develop the ability to inquire into itself? As John Gribbin argued, Life begins with the process of star formation. We are made of stardust. Every atom of every element in your body except for hydrogen has been manufactured inside stars, scattered across the universe in great stellar explosions, and recycled to become part of you.

So, to repeat the question, at what stage between star and human do the relevant combinations of Crick’s nerve cells and molecules begin to think?

The speakers at the two conferences came from a range of backgrounds. Their brief was to address the topic from whatever was their chosen perspective, personal or professional, academic or practitioner, psychological or spiritual. This variety is reflected in the diversity of the chapters in this book. The intention was not to come up with conclusions but exchange ideas for, as none of us know exactly what we mean by soul, or even how the mind works, or whether one is a form of the other, the only solution is uncertainty. The universe is a closed system. We are inside it and can never be in the position of impartial, external observers: in reflecting on the cosmos, we are reflecting on ourselves.

Endnotes

1 Barrow, John, Pi in the Sky: Counting, thinking and being (London: Penguin 2002) p, 259.
2 Penrose, Roger, The Emperor’s New Mind: concerning computers, minds and the laws of physics (London: Vintage 1991) p.554.
3 Plato, Phaedrus, trans H.N. Fowler (Cambridge Mass., London: Harvard University Press 1914) 246D, p. 477.
4 BBC Radio 4, ‘Today Programme’, 15 January 2006.
5 Moore, Patrick, Observers Book of Astronomy, London (Frederick Warne and Co. 1964) p. 158.
6 See the various discussions in Campion, Nicholas (ed.), The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Steward Observatory, Arizona, Magdalen College, Oxford, 3-9 August 2003 (Bristol: Cinnabar Books 2005).
7 Davies, Paul, The Cosmic Blueprint: Order and Complexity and the Edge of Chaos, (London: Penguin 1995) p. 5, citing Popper, Karl and John Eccles, The Self and its Brain (Berlin: Springer International 1977) p. 61.
8 Barrow, John and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). For reports and comment on the award of the Templeton prize to Barrow see Radford, Tim, ‘The gods of cosmology’, The Guardian, 21 March 2006, p. 33.
9 Overbye, Dennis, ‘Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award’, New York Times, 16 March 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/science/16prize.html?ex=1143176400&en=e587191ce01d41a0&ei=5070&emc=eta1.
10 Crick, Frances, The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul (London: Simon and
Schuster 1994) p. 3.
11 Gribbin, John, Stardust: the cosmic recycling of stars, planets and people (London: Penguin 2001) p. 1.

Carl Jung on Psyche and Soul

Carl Jung wrote much of his work in German. Difficulties for translation arise because the German word Seele means both psyche and soul. Jung was careful to define what he meant by psyche and by soul.

I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797)

[The translation of the German word Seele presents almost insuperable difficulties on account of the lack of a single English equivalent and because it combines the two words “psyche” and “soul” in a way not altogether familiar to the English reader. For this reason some comment by the Editors will not be out of place.]

[In previous translations, and in this one as well, psyche– for which Jung in the German original uses either Psyche or Seele– has been used with reference to the totality of all psychic processes (cf. Jung, Psychological Types, Def. 48); i.e., it is a comprehensive term. Soul, on the other hand, as used in the technical terminology of analytical psychology, is more restricted in meaning and refers to a “function complex” or partial personality and never to the whole psyche.

It is often applied specifically to “anima” and “animus”; e.g., in this connection it is used in the composite word “soul-image” (Seelenbild). This conception of the soul is more primitive than the Christian one with which the reader is likely to be more familiar. In its Christian context it refers to “the transcendental energy in man” and “the spiritual part of man considered in its moral aspect or in relation to God.” . . . –Editors.] (Jung, 1968: note 2 par. 9)

Carl Jung: People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic text from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Thus the soul has been turned into a Nazareth Gradually From Which Nothing good can come.

Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth – the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy , Page 99

The Earth has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life

“Matter in the wrong place is dirt.

People get dirty through too much civilization.

Whenever we touch nature, we get clean.

You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature.

He considered natural life to be the “nourishing soil of the soul.

Who has time for a natural life these days? What would it look like if we did?

Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance.

Jung shows the knowledge of an historian who understands how the dissociation from nature came about; he reaches out with the empathy of a healer who shares our plight; and he advises with the common sense of a country doctor how to live “in modest harmony with nature.”

Jung addresses not only the individual but also our culture as a whole, as an entity that itself is suffering and in need of help.

The title of the book, “The Earth Has A Soul” is taken from a 1958 letter in which Jung refers to “the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul.

We find that Jung uses the words soul, spirit and psyche somewhat interchangeably.

“Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself.

In the Visions Seminars that he gave in the early 1930s, Jung remarked that “the earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own.”

Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect.

Jung’s main contribution is restoring to Nature its original wholeness by reminding us that “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.”

A brief anecdote illustrates Jung’s apperception of the living spirit within Nature:

I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on solid familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet.

It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact.”

Historical eras oscillate between an orientation toward matter or spirit.

We are living in a period when the material aspect of Nature is emphasized; it is often said that we are materialistic.

But this is not quite the case, since matter actually receives very little respect due to its having been robbed, as Jung notes, of its spirit –
“The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept.

How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”

In a 1923 seminar, Jung identified four elements that have undergone the most severe repression in the Judeo-Christian world: nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, which tends to be mistakenly conflated with instinct or sexuality.

It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven.

Our loss of connection with Nature is thus neither a practical nor a psychological problem but a religious one, as this statement by Joseph Henderson emphasizes:

“Nature has lost her divinity, yet the spirit is unsure and unsatisfied. Hence any true cure for the neurosis…would have to awaken both spirit and nature to a new life. The relevance of this theme for us today may be that it is a problem we are still trying to solve on too personal, psychological a level, or on a purely cultural level without fully realizing it is at bottom a religious problem and not psychological or social at all.” Shadow and Self, page 279.

Jung grew up (b.1875) in conditions largely unchanged since the Middle Ages and lived to see the emergence of the techno-industrial age (d.1961)…

Although there are others today who offer clarity about how our ruptured relationship with Nature could be repaired, I believe that only Jung speaks in both the discursive voice of a modern doctor who is able to explain, and the mythic or poetic voice of a tribal healer, who is able to enchant. By incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, Jung reaches not only our modern mind but also the aspect of our being that he termed archaic, natural, primordial, or original

This unusual capacity to span both the archaic and the modern arose from his actual background with its deep roots in his ancestral lineage and certain significant experiences such as his seminal dream at age 34 about our species’ phylogenetic history.

It concerned a multi-storied house in which the furnishings and construction style of each level represented different historical periods.

The top floor was the present, the level below the 16th century, the first floor below ground the Roman era, and in the deepest level was a dusty cave containing bones, shards and tools from a neolithic culture.

He came to view the dream as an objective picture not only of European history but of the historic composition of the human psyche, the stories signifying successive layers of consciousness. This interior opening… provided Jung with access to the various stages of consciousness, including what he came to call “the primitive within myself”.

Consciousness: the blessing and curse of humankind.

We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness – our Promethean conquest – may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature. Collected Works,8, par 750)

Jung contended that Nature herself deigned to produce consciousness because without it things go less well.

Though we tend to prize it as a fine achievement, Jung impolitely reminds us that consciousness is also our own worst devil because it helps us invent “every thinkable reason and way to disobey the divine will. Letters I, Page 486.

Jung sets the loss of connection with Nature in the overall context of the development of consciousness over the millenia.

To describe how it evolved, he drew on the analogy of the multi-storied house from his 1909 dream.

The floors above ground represent recent historical periods; its foundations, the phylogeny of our species.

To the latter he applied the awkward term the collective unconscious.

He observed that people today often leave the whole of their lives to the direction of consciousness, thereby forgetting that it is merely the visible surface over the immense living foundation below.

The analogy of a multi-storied house is very useful in understanding how it is that we can go against Nature if we forget that we are also part of Nature.

In 1952, Jung was interviewed by Ira Progoff, who asked if individuation didn’t always involve consciousness.

Jung replied, “Oh, that is an overvaluation of consciousness” and explained that individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human; he said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it.

Jung felt that Western consciousness was seriously one-sided in that it has expanded in the spatial dimension but not in the temporal, for we do not have a sense of living history.

Consciousness is a very recent acquisition, still quite fragile and easily disrupted.

Jung pointed out that, in the West, consciousness has been developed mainly through science and technology—not through art, social interaction, cultural development, or spirituality.

The unconscious has been left behind, and is thus in a defensive position. (Letters II, Page 81)

“We in the West have come to be highly disciplined, organized, and rational.

On the other hand, having allowed our unconscious personality to be suppressed, we are excluded from understanding primitive man’s civilization.

The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries. (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 397)

The cloning of life forms, the development of nuclear and laser weaponry, the surgical alteration of genders, and the genetic modification of food are some of the most recent “diabolical” discoveries we have come up with—without adequate consideration of their moral or psycho-social repercussions.

By focusing almost singularly on developments in the outer physical world, what we have neglected is ourselves, our own inner nature.

As Jung poignantly put it, “Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychic processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatsoever.”
C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 304)

We now witness increasingly unfortunate accidents that illustrate all too well the points Jung made about the dire consequences neglecting our own unconscious foundation can have: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Valdez spill were caused by individuals suffering from sleep deprivationgoing against Nature.

When Jung warns that the unconscious may rebel suicidally if it is put in an inhuman position, we need only think of these instances and the devastating consequences they have had.

Consciousness is a gift and could be used to go along with Nature, were we to align it in that direction.

Jung’s concern was that, as a very young species, we have an inflated idea of our own importance…

conclusion was that we have reached the limit of our evolution and can go no further until we attend not to the development of more consciousness, but to an unbiased understanding of all that we are:Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”(Letters, I, Page 537)

Human a Symbol of the Soul ~Carl Jung

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul.

In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: “I am the servant of a child.”

Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need. ~Carl Jung [Red Book; Page 234]

Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death

Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death

I have often been asked what I believe about death, that unproblematical ending of individual existence.

Death is known to us simply as the end. It is the period, often placed before the close of the sentence and followed only by memories of aftereffects in others. For the person concerned, however, the sand has run out of the glass; the rolling stone has come to rest.

When death confronts us, life always seems like a downward flow or like a clock that has been wound up and whose eventual “running down” is taken for granted.

We are never more convinced of this “running down” than when a human life comes to its end before our eyes, and the question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living.

How different does the meaning of life seem to us when we see a young person striving for distant goals and shaping the future, and compare this with an incurable invalid, or with an old man who is sinking reluctantly and without strength to resist into the grave!

Youth — we should like to think — has purpose, future, meaning, and value, whereas the coming to an end is only a meaningless cessation.

If a young man is afraid of the world, of life and the future, then everyone finds it regrettable, senseless, neurotic; he is considered a cowardly shirker.

But when an aging person secretly shudders and is even mortally afraid at the thought that his reasonable expectation of life now amounts to only so many years, then we are painfully reminded of certain feelings within our own breast; we look away and turn the conversation to some other topic.

The optimism with which we judge the young man fails us here.

Naturally we have on hand for every eventuality one or two suitable banalities about life which we occasionally hand out to the other fellow, such as “everyone must die sometime,” “one doesn’t live forever,” etc.

But when one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but the thoughts which add and subtract the years, and the long row of disagreeable facts which remorselessly indicate how far the hand of the clock has moved forward, and the slow, irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, possess, wish, strive, and hope for — then all our profundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding place, and fear envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket.


Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death (in: The Meaning of Death, Herman Feifel, editor)

Carl Jung on “Self” “Soul” and “Soul Image”

[Carl Jung on “Self” “Soul” and “Soul Image”]

Self:

The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche; a transpersonal power that transcends the ego.
As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole. But in so far as the total personality, on account of its unconscious component, can be only in part conscious, the concept of the self is, in part, only potentially empirical and is to that extent a postulate. In other words, it encompasses both the experienceable and the inexperienceable (or the not yet experienced). . . . It is a transcendental concept, for it presupposes the existence of unconscious factors on empirical grounds and thus characterizes an entity that can be described only in part.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 789.]

The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. ["Introduction," CW 12, par. 44.]

Like any archetype, the essential nature of the self is unknowable, but its manifestations are the content of myth and legend.

The self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality," such as a king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc. When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary (arch-enemy, dragon), Faust and Mephistopheles, etc. Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 790.]

The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of unconscious contents over which the ego has no control. This can result in neurosis and a subsequent renewal of the personality, or in an inflated identification with the greater power.

The ego cannot help discovering that the afflux of unconscious contents has vitalized the personality, enriched it and created a figure that somehow dwarfs the ego in scope and intensity. . . . Naturally, in these circumstances there is the greatest temptation simply to follow the power-instinct and to identify the ego with the self outright, in order to keep up the illusion of the ego’s mastery. . . . [But] the self has a functional meaning only when it can act compensatorily to ego-consciousness. If the ego is dissolved in identification with the self, it gives rise to a sort of nebulous superman with a puffed-up ego.["On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 430.]

Experiences of the self possess a numinosity characteristic of religious revelations. Hence Jung believed there was no essential difference between the self as an experiential, psychological reality and the traditional concept of a supreme deity.

It might equally be called the "God within us."["The Mana-Personality," CW 7, par. 399.

Soul:

A functional complex in the psyche. (See also Eros, Logos and soul-image.)
While Jung often used the word soul in its traditional theological sense, he strictly limited its psychological meaning.

I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a "personality." ["Definitions," CW 6, par. 797]

With this understanding, Jung outlined partial manifestations of the soul in terms of anima/animus and persona. In his later writing on the transference, informed by his study of the alchemical opus-which Jung understood as psychologically analogous to the individuation process–he was more specific.

The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate.["The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]


Soul-image:

The representation, in dreams or other products of the unconscious, of the inner personality, usually contrasexual. (See also anima and animus.)
Wherever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image. Since these relationships are very common, the soul must be unconscious just as frequently.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 809.]

The soul-image is a specific archetypal image produced by the unconscious, commonly experienced in projection onto a person of the opposite sex.

For an idealistic woman, a depraved man is often the bearer of the soul-image; hence the "saviour-fantasy" so frequent in such cases. The same thing happens with men, when the prostitute is surrounded with the halo of a soul crying for succour.[Ibid., par. 811.]

Where consciousness itself is identified with the soul, the soul-image is more likely to be an aspect of the persona.

In that event, the persona, being unconscious, will be projected on a person of the same sex, thus providing a foundation for many cases of open or latent homosexuality, and of father-transferences in men or mother-transferences in women. In such cases there is always a defective adaptation to external reality and a lack of relatedness, because identification with the soul produces an attitude predominantly oriented to the perception of inner processes.[Ibid., par. 809.]

Many relationships begin and initially thrive on the basis of projected soul-images. Inherently symbiotic, they often end badly.

Carl Jung on the “Soul.” - Anthology

Above all, we know desperately little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.

Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God.

Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word.

Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposi- tion to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it. The view that the psyche is a spirit is implicit in this.
When therefore something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit.

But if anything psychic happens which seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a
possession.

The spirit in the first case corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to public opinion, to the time-spirit,
or to the original, not yet human, anthropoid disposition which we also call the unconscious. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38 The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem.
Above all it is a fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism.

The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence.

Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum. Carl Jung, CW, Para 948.

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.

But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.

It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than myself experiences me. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 45.

Neurosis—let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.”

It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357

A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is also something positive.

Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by a narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked this fact.

In reality the neurosis contains the patient’s psyche, or at least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends, the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, he would have gained nothing but would have lost something very essential to him.

That is to say, he would have lost as much as the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of his temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear.

To lose a neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its point and hence its meaning. This would not be a cure, it would be a regular amputation. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355