Modern Man In Search of a Soul by by Leezee Lee ( Georgiana L. Nicolae)
In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.
This book is a collection of lectures delivered by Carl Jung and selected for their themes in relation to the title. What I’ve done here is select some interesting ideas from each of the essays to give prospective readers a sense of the discussion and how it relates to the subject matter. Any summary would be next to impossible due to the depth and breadth of his ideas.
DREAM ANALYSIS IN ITS PRACTICAL APPLICATION
This essay was a good reminder of the reality of dreams. Even though nobody has experienced any dreams but their own, we all believe everyone else when they share the fact that they experience them. There is no place we can go look up and view the dreams of our past, but yet, we treat dreams as if they are an integral part of our humanity and accept that they can even change our moods.
“Perhaps we may call the dream a façade, but we must remember that the fronts of most houses by no means trick or deceive us, but, on the contrary, follow the plan of the building and often betray its inner arrangement.”
About one-third of our lives are spent in a state of unconsciousness we call sleep. During that time our brains produce images that have no respect for the rational conjectures of our modern minds. Many report having great breakthroughs in their psychic health by using their dreams to help them see past their prejudices and expectations when solving problems.
More than one-hundred years ago, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan used to write down mathematical functions from his dreams that he knew worked but could not explain exactly how. Modern mathematicians are just now finding out that he was correct and are solving those problems.
Regardless of how we choose to interpret dreams, they exist and have a purpose. And like Jung writes here, “we do not conquer thirst by repressing it.”
PROBLEMS OF MODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
Jung starts this essay by discussing what psychoanalysis is. According to its creator, Freud, it refers to a very specific theory of “explaining psychic symptoms in terms of certain repressed impulses.” However, we now use the term to describe any “endeavor to probe the mind by scientific methods.”
A modern issue Jung points out here is in part that modern people can become so firmly and stubbornly rooted in their conscious mind that they fail to have the capacity to even imagine that there can be unconscious reasons for psychic problems which manifest themselves. They believe the problems can rationally understood and solved. The centering of science as the only of knowing is likely a part of this phenomenon.
We have forgotten that not only do we spend a great many hours every day in a state of unconsciousness, but that consciousness itself grew literally and figuratively out of an unconscious mind and still bears the fruits of that development.
AIMS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
This essay had a very key insight for me, likely because it spoke directly to me. It’s this question: At what point does treatment cease and development set in?
Psychoanalysis seems to be very focused on understanding and then treating neurosis of one sort or another. But what of the person who isn’t suffering from any diagnosable problem and still feels like something is missing?
“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. It seems to me however, that this can well be described as the general neurosis of our time.”
It’s as if all psychic study is focused on those with problems being “normal” but once a person is “normal,” how do we approach psychic development beyond that? As we are saturated with science and reason being our north stars in guiding our minds, there is an “over-valuation of consciousness” which can blind us to meaning and purpose that is beyond our ability to rationally understand.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF TYPES
This essay was much more about the manner in which we understand the psyche as opposed to what types of psyches there are amongst people.
Just the idea that there is a psyche, or a mind, as if it is something separate from our bodies is challenged, as no such distinction exists in nature. There is no actual separation or fine line that differentiates the two. Only a creature that can abstract existence would even be able to conceptualize that such a separation exists.
One thing I truly value learning when reading Jung is his appreciation for the mind of ancient humans. Instead of dismissing them as superstitious relics, he seeks to understand the process of their thought and you begin to see how similar we are to them and how far we have come.
The example he uses in this essay relates the ancient cosmological scheme which is a projection of what is unknown about our minds into the unknown realm of the night sky, which evolved into a physiological type-theory in Greek theories called the four humors.
As arbitrary and undeveloped as these categories were and are, they are just as arbitrary and undeveloped as our modern theories. But just like the points on a compass, they are all arbitrary in their own ways, but indispensable when navigating the land and our minds as we need some sort of orientation device.
FREUD AND JUNG
Here Jung contrasts some popular ideas about his ideas as they relate to Freud’s. You can tell that he is very fond of and has great respect for Freud, even as he lays out his disagreements, in this as well as other essays.
The key difference Jung points out is that Freud’s “is not a psychology of the healthy mind.” Like in the previous essay, Aims of Psychotherapy, Jung often encounters people without any neurosis but still lacking direction who feel aimless. Jung believes that Freud has “taken as the truest expression of his own psychic make-up” in creating his psychoanalytic theory, but over-emphasizes the “pathological aspect of life” and focuses on man as a set of defects.
THE STAGES OF LIFE
In this essay Jung discusses the psychic stages of life. What I found most interesting was how he looks at it as a development first of recognizing psychic problems as the differentiation between not only man and animal but child and adult. Only when a human can recognize problems is he or she forming a human consciousness.
A child, like an animal, has no problems, only instincts. They react to a situation instinctually because that is all they can do. Having a problem requires that you have a choice to make. You can only recognize that there is more than one way to deal with a problem if you can imagine or abstract out the future in terms of dealing with the problem and imagining the different consequences.
Once you can imagine more than one choice and more than one outcome, you have developed the consciousness unique to humanity which differentiates us from our ancestors, our children, and our fellow creatures. This is where human stress comes from. “What should I do?” Animals don’t face those choices. They just react.
ARCHAIC MAN
This was one of my favorite essays simply because I am fascinated by ancient ways of thinking. The idea that people of the past had much of the same mental capabilities but processed things so wildly differently speaks to how important our underlying presumptions are, and how important ideas are.
A great example Jung uses to display the similarity between archaic and modern man is one that took me by surprise.
Most of us have likely heard that ancient people believe animal spirits inhabit humans, or vice versa. Jung describes instances where a European kills an animal, and soon thereafter, a local tribal member dies. The tribal elders proclaim that there was a connection between the animal and their now dead tribal member, and demand some type of reimbursement from the Europeans. This is just one way in which animal and human spirits are transferred back and forth.
We still do this in the modern world but have a much more modern way of describing it. This transfer of spirits is now called “projection.” It’s the same process that archaic man partakes in but we “merely give it another name, and as a rule deny that we are guilty of it.”
Whatever darkness lurks in our hearts, we find in our neighbor and castigate him for it. No longer do we burn them at the stake, but instead, we “injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction. What we combat in him is usually our own inferior side.”
Our own spirit of darkness is transferred outside of ourselves much like ancient man merged animal spirits within themselves.
PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERATURE
Here Jung starts with outlining how psychologists may experience literature differently from the general public. For example, a “psychologic novel” may seem to be of interest to a psychologist, but the writer has already gone through the process of identifying the neurosis as part of the story, and the psychologist can do no more than critique the diagnosis or expand upon it.
More importantly, and helpful to see how it plays out for modern man, is our tendency to critique literature or any art by “reducing it to personal factors” of the creator. Some see literature and art as if they cannot be separated from the identity of the creator. Jung states that this means of critique “takes us away from the psychological study of the work of art, and confronts us with the psychic disposition of the poet himself.”
Although the creator’s psyche for sure influences the art, the work of art exists as something in its own right and “may not be conjured away.” Today, we have gone even further and attached immutable characteristics — identity — to the evaluation and promotion of art, which are categories even more shallow than the psyche of the creator.
By doing this we lose countless opportunities to examine the purpose of quality art and literature by reducing it to a psychic evaluation or search for identity, looking for pathologies as opposed to the universal psychological truths embedded in them.
THE BASIC POSTULATES OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
This essay was exactly what I expected from the title of the book, but not the essay itself. Jung discusses the shift in mindset from the Gothic Age through the Reformation, outlining the different frameworks which confine our ideas today.
“Consciousness ceased to grow upward, and grew instead in breadth of view, as well as in knowledge of the terrestrial globe. This was the period of great voyages, and the widening of man’s ideas of the world by empirical discoveries.”
I appreciated the concept of expanding our minds horizontally as opposed to vertically. The idea is that as we go through the Reformation and Enlightenment, with a new emphasis on only identifying as true what we can sense and rationalize, we shift our value of knowledge to what is Earth bound and cease to look up towards psychic development and spirituality.
We can see this as so many in our cultures move away from spirituality and towards a secular view of the world that looks for only rational articulation and material description without a valuation of meaning and purpose.
Important to remember about the nature of our minds is that rational processing is done consciously and the conscious mind developed out of the unconscious mind, which still exists and holds the knowledge of millions of years of successful evolution. We cannot and should not simply conjure away the secrets it still holds.
THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN
Loneliness, or the atomization of the individual is a theme that I’ve seen pop up many times in discussions around the development of totalitarianism, and Jung discusses it here.
“The man whom we can with justice call ‘modern’ is solitary. He is so of necessity and at all times, for every step towards a fuller consciousness of the present removes him further from his original ‘participation mystique’ with the mass of men — from submersion in a common unconsciousness.”
The totalitarianism connection is that people who feel disconnected from other humans and the natural world seek out that connection and can often find it in the wrong places. But they are so desperate for it that they will sacrifice logic and reason to gain acceptance to a group of humans regardless of how absurd or cruel its actions are.
Likely because we cannot share the vastness of our conscious minds with other people, abandoning the unconscious world inhibits our ability to share and connect with other humans. The unconscious is beyond our tinkering. It is what it is and we can not rationally understand nor change it. But that also makes it something was can all share a pursuit of.
PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY
To first understand which to go to, psychotherapists or the clergy, we have to understand Jung’s perspective on the both. Specifically, how they differ.
In earlier essays in this text Jung describes modern psychotherapy as psychology without the psyche. In modern man’s pursuit of rationalism he has constructed a mind that can only be understood and treated by rational means but ignores the unconscious, irrational roots from which it evolved and within which it is still contained. He believes that these “rational methods of treatment…actually hinder the realization of meaningful experience.”
Whereas a psychotherapist can understand pathologies and help bring a patient back to normal, rational behavior, any development beyond that which includes exploration of the unconscious and a connection to all of humanity, today and past, cannot be done in purely rational terms.
What psychotherapy today is missing, purpose and meaning, they are finding in theology.
CLOSING
It feels as if this complete text is aimed at psychotherapists seeking to understand a completeness of their patients not born out by the over-rational scientific methods of modern scientific approaches to psychology.
Not being a psychologist, it took some effort to push through but the gems along the way were well worth the work. I come away from this text having a much better understanding of where we are as a species and how we have and likely will continue to develop.
I hope this short introduction can help you decide if it’s something you too would like to read. If you have read it, let me know what you thought and what kind of ideas it sparked for you.