Carl G. Jung:
The Elusive Unconscious

Chapter 4 on his theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Jung's theories, as well as their application to mythology and religion, raise questions that his voluminous writing does not answer clearly or adequately. Mostly with his claims, we are to trust his words without further proof than that he speaks from a long therapeutic experience.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

First and foremost, he bases his whole psychology on the existence of an unconscious, hidden from and unreachable by the conscious mind. But is there such a thing in the brain?

It is a strange idea that the brain should have compartments isolated from one another, as if the left hand really doesn't know what the right one does. You would think that this takes something like a lobotomy. Certainly, there are lots of mental activities that need no conscious initiative, such as reflexes and instincts.

We dream at night, inventing complicated stories full of details without any scriptwriting, which is something Jung connects to the unconscious. But we daydream when awake, if we let our minds go, which indicates that the mental process might very well be similar to dreaming asleep. And when we wake up from dreaming, we are usually able to follow its tracks backwards at least partially. We can even surmise how the dream will move forward if we close our eyes and let it. So, neither dreams nor daydreams are completely out of reach of the conscious.

Furthermore, there is the hypnagogic state, right before falling asleep, when we can use our conscious imagination to direct at least the start of the dreaming process.[1] Its counterpart is the hypnopompic state, when waking up from a dream and still aware of it.[2] Another term for dreaming while being consciously aware of it is lucid dream.[3]

Jung was aware of both hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, as well as the works of those introducing the terms. He regarded them as expressions of the same phenomenon, i.e., the imagination taking over as conscious reasoning fades towards sleep. He also recognized their ability to influence dreams:

It is highly probable that hypnagogic pictures are identical with the dream-pictures of normal sleep — forming their visual foundation.[4]

Dreaming seems not to be a definite isolated state, but an ability of our brain not only when it is completely unconscious. It is the same with other so-called unconscious processes. They need not be. Reflexes can be controlled and conditioned to change. Instincts can be suppressed. We are even quite able to consciously alter something as fundamentally unconscious as our breathing.

So, solid borders between the conscious and the unconscious might not be that easy to find.

Another example is automaticity, the automatic behavior we can go through without consciously focusing on it, which can sometimes be quite complex. Every driver has experienced driving a familiar route without being aware of it until reaching the destination. It even has a name: highway hypnosis.[5]

This state of mind is similar to daydreaming. The mind wanders off, while the body completes the task. But the conscious mind is never shut off. As soon as something out of the ordinary happens on the way, the conscious control is back in an instant. It was never really gone.

The above examples don't suggest a separate entity in the mind, isolated from the conscious, but a multi-tasking consciousness that is able to move its focus between tasks, though never completely losing contact with any of them. It is less comparable to a team of individuals with separate tasks, than to the ability of the eyes to focus on separate parts of the view. We take it all in, but vary effortlessly what we give our attention.

And we are quite aware of what makes our focus shift. It is according to importance. What we regard as the most important at the moment is what catches our attention, and it can differ from one second to the next. The shift is instant.

Although the grading of importance is complex, its mechanics are evident in instances of drastic change of focus. For example, while driving the car we snap out of any daydream, whatever its topic may be, immediately when we perceive the threat of an imminent accident.

We do the same when conversing with passengers in the car. They have our attention only between the moments when safety demands that we focus on the driving. Self-preservation overrides just about everything else.

But these priorities of importance go the whole scale, from lethal to just a trifle uncomfortable. It is not even sure that threats always have a priority over pleasures, or Romeo would never have gotten his Juliet.

The computing involved is impressive, though not infallible. When we have trouble focusing on a certain task for any amount of time, it may be because we fail to see its superiority over other simultaneous influences. But we are never unable to figure out the reason for our lack of concentration when we examine the circumstances. It all makes sense to us, even when our choices are questionable. We can even sort of negotiate with ourselves and force our attention on something less attractive or threatening, for very conscious reasons.

Our conscious is never really out of charge, except for momentarily — before it notices the dilemma.

Surely, like the eyes never stop seeing, the mind is never a blank, but keeps going with or without conscious attention to it. But is it possible for some of the thinking to hide when we consciously search for it? And if so, wouldn't we at least be aware of that border? Freud and Jung, the latter in particular, would answer yes to the first question and no to the second. What we know about the structure and workings of the brain suggests the opposite answers.

Notice that I speak of an unconscious completely out of reach for the conscious mind, and not the simple fact that a lot of thinking can go on in our minds without us being consciously aware of it. There is a huge difference between a part of the mind to which the conscious is denied access and not even aware of, and one that we can reach by conscious effort but otherwise does its thing more or less unnoticed.

The difference can be described by grammar. The unconscious of Freud and Jung is a noun, representing an entity separated from other parts of the mind. But there is also an adjective unconscious, as in unconscious action or unconscious thought. That is temporal unconsciousness, which might or might not be noticed by the conscious. We have plenty of those, as exemplified above. Similarly, there is the adverb unconsciously. We do indeed frequently think or act unconsciously. Again, though, this is accessible to the conscious and not hidden from it. We need only to put our attention to it.

So, what I discuss here is Freud's and Jung's idea of a separate hidden unconscious, and not all those more or less unconscious thoughts and actions that we have plenty of every day.

The writings of Freud and Jung indicate a view of the mind as something different in nature from the biochemistry of the body, including its brain. That is in line with the traditional conception of the psyche, since long before the two analytical psychologists. It was believed to differ in essence from everything carnal, as if made of other stuff. Something spiritual, ruled by laws different from those of the physical. That view was also advocated in Schelling's and Eduard von Hartmann's pioneering works on the unconscious, mentioned earlier.

When the psyche is regarded as something basically different from the substance it occupies, then it can easily be postulated to have different entities or processes isolated from one another. Such a psyche does not need to obey any physical law, whereas thinking done only by synapses and such in the brain must. But the brain, as we know it, shows little support for the traditional view. It is part of the body, and made of the same stuff. So, the idea that a very important and decisive part of it should be hidden from the rest is in dire need of substantial evidence, given by neither Freud nor Jung.

There are additional problems with the concept of a separate unconscious. Freud and Jung define it so that it becomes inaccessible to prove or disprove. They really try neither. Instead, they just make a number of claims that can at best be called speculations. What they say could be true or not. There is no way of deciding. That is, to them, a consequence of the nature of the unconscious as something hidden and impenetrable.

But can something unprovable exist — outside the world of religion? The unconscious of Freud and Jung is a matter of belief instead of evidence. All their examples reveal it. They never show how their interpretation surpasses alternative explanations. They have even defined the unconscious so that it rejects comparison to other models. Actually, they never try any other explanation, as if none were fathomable.

As a science, this is a dead-end. If it can't be proven or disproven, it cannot be advanced. It is just a list of claims, which can be extended but not meaningfully revised and improved. Essentially, it is nothing more than a "what if?"

So, how about this what if? Does it still have value worth exploring? Things don't need to be true to be interesting, even in some way rewarding. This, some would say, makes a case for religion. And it is definitely true about fiction, as our fascination with it through the ages has shown.

Indeed, there is something intriguing, even spooky, about the idea of the human mind held captive by a greater hidden mind, like an island surrounded by the deep sea. It would be a good premise for the start of a horror story. And it has its modern parallel in the persistent myth of us using only 10% of our brain — or just not knowing what the other 90% is up to. This misconception might have been inspired by the iceberg metaphor of the mind being 90% unconscious and 10% conscious, falsely accredited to Freud. It was expressed by Stefan Zweig in his 1931 book Die Heilung durch den Geist, published in English the following year.[6]

We are all excited by a wondrous mystery, whether we find it likely or not. Like Aristotle said about a good story, "Things probable though impossible should be preferred to the possible but implausible."[7]

It is not at all implausible that we should have secret compartments in our minds, steering us away from catastrophe — or towards it. Just like we often feel victims of our emotions, a hidden influence on our conscious can seem real when what pops up in our minds bewilders us. Such a circumstance would have the wonderful attraction of suggesting that there is more to us, much more, than what we normally perceive.

In a sense, it would make us mythological.

It would also be a wonderful excuse when we acted otherwise indefensibly. The idea of the free will is much more of a burden on our responsibility than, say, that of an angel whispering in one ear and a devil in the other. The unconscious is within us, but still not us. So, we are not really to blame for what it makes us think or do.

But what might appear from that unknown sea of the unconscious is upon examination not much of a surprise to the conscious. As Miss Frank Miller concluded about her fantasies and poetry, discussed in Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, their strange ingredients were really easy to trace as earlier memories and such. Nothing hidden, nothing invented in some secret corner of her mind, just impressions her conscious had come across before and already regarded as significant.

Just the Will

Since the existence of a separate unconscious is doubtful, this leads to a need to examine if the conscious is also misconceived. Without an unconscious counterpart, what is really so conscious about the conscious mind?

The psyche is a heap of things constantly going on simultaneously. There are new and old memories appearing and disappearing, countless impressions from the five senses in need of interpretation, instincts struggling to act while restraint is struggling to stop them, diverse or even opposite emotions bubbling in the body, thoughts colliding and competing — all in a veritable chaos. It is a wonder that our minds can make any sense of it all.

In Zen, a major object is to calm down this calamity of the mind, ideally so far as to reach what is called empty mind, a stillness wherein no thought grabs control of our attention. In zazen, seated meditation, one should learn to think about nothing. Not an easy task.

I had a Japanese aikido teacher who explained how to accomplish this. He said that there is no point struggling to keep thoughts off. They just become more persistent. But when you sit there and a thought appears, just acknowledge this, and tell yourself that it is not important right now, so you can let it go. When another thought comes, do the same, and so on and on and on. The thoughts will become less intrusive and the distance between them will increase, until finally they cease completely. But that, he admitted, takes years and years.

Although difficult to follow, it is good advice. The key is the importance. The less important we regard our thoughts, the less they bother us. Our attention is the decisive factor.

That brings a clue to what the conscious might be at its core: the will. It is by will we navigate the chaos of the mind and make some sense of it. Without this will, the noise of the mind produces all kinds of impressions and impulses, making us either erratic or apathetic.

The will is an intriguing concept that has attracted the attention of philosophers through the ages, sometimes calling it desire. It is the prerequisite for action. Without it nothing happens.

That is why ancient thinkers regarded it as the initial impulse in the very creation of the world. It is what Aristotle points to in his principle of the prime mover, the first cause in the never-ending chain of cause and effect, "something that moves without being moved."[8] It is also suggested by the "Let there be" formula of creation in Genesis I of the Bible. God creates by wishing it. Plenty of other creation myths indicate the same. The world would not be if no one willed it.

In human beings it is obvious: we do what we will to do, or we do nothing. We think what we will to think, or our thoughts take us nowhere.

The body moves a lot inside itself without the impulse of our will, with blood flowing through our veins, air inhaled and exhaled, heart beating, and so on. But it takes our will to stand up and walk somewhere. Similarly, the mind is constantly doing a lot of thinking, noticing, learning, probably even deductions in some way, all on its own. But it is by will that we become aware of it and make use of it. Wisdom without willful access to it is not different from ignorance.

Of course, our will is not any first cause in the sense of stemming from itself only, nothing preceding it. Any theory of a first, in psychology as well as cosmogony, runs into the problem of the chicken or the egg. This was pointed out already by Plutarch in the first century CE:

Which was first, the bird or the egg? And my friend Sylla, saying that with this little question, as with an engine, we shook the great and weighty question (whether the world had a beginning), declared his dislike of such problems.[9]

What we will depends on just about all that moves around inside our brain, and how it relates to the outside world. It is not one single will, marching steadily towards one goal. Instead, it changes on a whim by impulses from what we have experienced, what we crave or fear, how we relate to our ever-changing surroundings. The will may take charge of the chaos of the mind, but it is still a victim of all that goes around in there.

The mind is thereby an example of the utter difficulty to decide cause and effect in complex interaction. The cause is not uninfluenced by the effect, and the effect is not just a passive servant of the cause. In the brain, the effect can be the cause and the cause can become an effect. It is a spiral process, where the effects are the causes of following causes.

That means the existence of the will can also be questioned. At least, it can't really be seen as an entity, a noun, any more than the unconscious can. It exists when it appears and not when it doesn't.

It is not the constant I of the human being, in charge of all the rest. It is merely one of the ingredients interacting with the others, among them instead of above them, but with the ability to take charge at times.

It is nothing but the ability to take charge of the being.

The I

So, next we have to ask if there is an I of the human being, and what that might be if there is. We certainly experience one, some of us even more than one at times. We have names and regard ourselves as individuals, unique from all the other individuals. No psychological theory would make any sense if that were not the case. But how to define it? Who or what am I?

Examining our own minds, we are not likely to come up with more than that we recognize a sense of identity, of being me, whatever that encompasses or originates from. As is indicated by the classic statement of Descartes — "I think, therefore I am" — there is something that thinks about being, and that something, whatever it is, must in some sense be.

Since this is reasoning, what must exist according to Descartes is reason.

He also finds it to be a proof of the existence of god:

And the total force of the argument lies therein that I would recognize that it cannot happen that I would exist of such a nature of which I am, namely, having the idea of God in me, unless God did also really and truly exist.[10]

God of the Old Testament had something similar to say when asked by Moses about his name:

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.[11]

In modern Bible translations God says, "I am what I am."

Both Descartes and Yahweh may have spoken the truth, but it's not of much help. Our sense of an I is still an enigma. When we make an inward search to find the answer, we discover nothing but new questions. Maybe the real object of empty mind in Zen and Nirvana of Buddhism is to finally put that question to rest and just be, without worrying why. It might also be at the core of monotheism: I don't know what I am, but god does. He is.

We find it so much easier relating to others and who they are. Each person is what fills that particular body, and nothing outside of it. We don't know them enough to read their minds, but that doesn't matter much. Whatever goes on in their heads is meaningless to us. What counts is what they express — their words and deeds. So, that is how we perceive them. They are what they do.

Returning to Aristotle and his Poetics, he compares the functions of the plot and the characters, repeatedly stressing the superior importance of the former. The tragedy (drama)[12] is about action and not persons. Characters make a difference because of how they act, not how they are: "It is in virtue of character that people have certain qualities, but through their actions that they are happy or the reverse." The characters are included in the play for the sake of their actions. Aristotle also points out, "Without action there could be no tragedy, but without character there could be."[13]

As for what he means about character, Aristotle says:

Character is that which reveals moral choice — that is, when otherwise unclear, what kinds of things an agent chooses or rejects (which is why speeches in which there is nothing at all the speaker chooses or rejects contain no character).[14]

In other words, it is only by action a character is revealed and makes a difference. It is doubtful that Aristotle meant this to be true outside the stage as well as on it, but the comparison is not uncalled for. As Shakespeare famously had one of his characters say: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."[15]

We perceive others very much like Aristotle's players in a drama. They are what they do and what their actions lead us to believe they might do next. We may be curious about why they do what they do, but such speculation, again, is mainly to understand or predict their actions. We don't hope to discover how they perceive themselves as individuals, what they believe is the nature of their I, and it is not something bothering us much.

As for how we look at ourselves, though, it is far more complicated. It is a constant itch in our minds that we are unable to complete Yahweh's I am what I am, but reach only halfway through, making it a question: I am what?

Along with Aristotle's claims above, we are often left to read ourselves the way we read others — by our actions, which often come as surprises to us. In particular, we tend to be frustrated by what we do not do, although it would make more sense to us. We make choices, but the reasons for them are frequently only accessible in hindsight.

But the reasons for our choices are accessible, and upon examination show to have been predictable. We can know the traits of our behavior without knowing what it is that we are. We read ourselves by what we do. Like Aristotle's characters, that's what we are.

So, the answer to the question is: I am what I do. There is no fixed personality. We change constantly as our actions affect us. The famous Heraclitus quote about the river is equally true about human beings:

Heracleitus is supposed to say that all things are in motion and nothing at rest; he compares them to the stream of a river, and says that you cannot go into the same water twice.[16]

The Heraclitus principle that everything flows, panta rhei, is as true for the human mind as it is for the cosmos. Everything changes — certainly the mind, by what flows through it. Just as the unconscious is more adequately described as an adverb or an adjective than as a noun, this is just as true about the whole mind and any aspect of it. There are mental aspects and processes that can be comprehended, but they don't reveal the complete nature of the mind — they don't even confirm that there is one.

Strictly speaking, it is about verbs rather than nouns. Instead of asking what is, we should ask what is happening. If nothing happens there is nothing to consider.

But we tend to favor the idea of things that are presumed to somehow stay the same while going through events — as if the brain had any significance even without its myriad of processes, as if a human being had a personality without ever expressing it.

Freud and Jung claimed that there are fixed patterns in the human mind, regardless of who or when or where. To them, the psyche is a machine, which forever works in the same way whenever it is turned on, like a tram stuck to its tracks. It would be more adequate to liken the psyche to the passenger of the tram, stepping off at any point to take a walk, or get into a car, or sit down at a café and get involved in a conversation with some strangers there.

Our thinking is not significant for what rules by which it might be bound, but for what rules it breaks. The remarkable thing about it is not what stays the same, but how much it always changes. The mind continuously reinvents itself. It is never what it is, because in a moment that is merely what it was.

So, a psychology searching for what in the mind stays the same will see but a fraction of it, and that fraction is most likely obsolete immediately after being observed.

The Collective Unconscious

What is said above about the unconscious is even truer for Jung's idea of a collective unconscious, which carries the traits of an illusion within an illusion. It supposes another secret entity within the psyche, even less accessible to the conscious and therefore also to empirical study.

Of course, this goes for Freud's similar idea of the archaic heritage, too.

To Jung, the collective unconscious is the domain of the archetypes. His idea of archetypes hidden and yet remaining in the human mind through generations, independently of time and place, calls for an explanation similar in kind to Freud's theory of an archaic heritage. Freud compared it to animal instincts and claimed that events being significant enough and happening often enough would be added to the archaic heritage.

That was also what Jung started with, but he continued by developing a solution of his own — the collective unconscious, which is not that different at all from Freud's concept.

According to Jung, each person has an unconscious, part of it very personal indeed and part of it is the same for all human beings. The latter is the collective unconscious, where the archetypes are stored. It is simply the part of the unconscious, which does not come from personal experience. The personal unconscious contains such material as actual personal memories and experiences that have been forgotten or repressed. The rest belongs to the collective unconscious.

Jung did not see this as any sort of telepathic dimension with the ability to reach outside a person's mind.[17] To him it was more like an imprint, something inherited by all, along the line of animal instincts — just like Freud explained the archaic heritage.

The instincts progress and adapt in animals, as they change by evolution and their needs alter according to changes in their environment. Otherwise, their instincts would soon be their doom instead of their support in survival. Therefore, some kind of evolution of instincts must be mandatory. Jung imagined a similar development of the human brain, as the means by which the collective unconscious appeared and was filled with archetypes. To Jung, the complexity of the human mind allows for that additional and more refined set of instincts which is the collective unconscious.

The hypothesis of the collective unconscious is, therefore, no more daring than to assume there are instincts.[18]

The archetypes give examples of this, since many of them obviously relate to phenomena that all people have in common — such as the mother, the child, life, and death. Jung insisted that archetypes are shared by all, and not just by people of one culture or one time period. Therefore, he must have meant that what cannot be grasped or recognized by every human being is not an archetype.

So, the idea of the collective unconscious creates a definite border for what are archetypes and what are not. They must relate meaningfully to all human beings. That is not so obvious with some of the archetypes Jung specified — they are rather limited to his own European and Christian background. Still, if he made mistakes in applying his theory, it does not necessarily mean that the theory is faulty.

To Jung, the collective unconscious had little else to do than store the archetypes, which are the instruments for any person to reach self-realization in the individuation process. Archetypes are essentially all of what the collective unconscious consists. Everything kept there is in the form of archetypes, which suggests that it is the way for the collective unconscious to code itself.

Myths, according to Jung, are born out of the collective unconscious, and therefore they are made up of archetypes. The myths are expressions of that part of the psyche. He regarded the whole of mythology as a kind of projection of the collective unconscious.

Dreams, on the other hand, come from the personal unconscious, and cannot become myths, because of their personal nature. While the personal unconscious is unable to influence the collective unconscious, the reverse is possible:

The collective unconscious influences our dreams only occasionally, and whenever this happens, it produces strange and marvelous dreams remarkable for their beauty, or their demoniacal horror, or for their enigmatic wisdom — "big dreams," as certain primitives call them.[19]

Methods of Proof

Such "big dreams" are the main evidence Jung presents for the existence of archetypes hidden in all our minds. Not all dreams, though, and not all the content in them. He explains in a short chapter with the title "Method of Proof" in an edited 1936 text from a lecture he gave in English:

We must look for motifs which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet behave functionally in his dream in such a manner as to coincide with the functioning of the archetype known from historical sources.[20]

But how to decide that those archetypes are inherited and not learned, especially if they are known from historical sources? And how to decide that they are not known to the dreamer? Jung does not say.

The second method he mentions has the same problems. He uses "active imagination," by which he means fantasies seeming significant to the patient, explored by conscious effort. He points out that it is not to be compared to Freud's "free association" in dream-analysis. Then Jung wards off any further inquiry by stating: "This is not the place to enter upon a technical discussion of the method."[21] So much for proof.

He also finds sources of archetypal material "in the delusions of paranoiacs, the fantasies observed in trance-states, and the dreams of early childhood, from the third to the fifth year."[22] Then he gives an example of a paranoid schizophrenic he met in 1906, and wrote about already in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido from 1912, published in English 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious.

The patient claimed to see the sun's penis, and four years later Jung found an ancient mythological reference to something similar, "hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube."[23] Jung goes on with somewhat similar imagery in medieval paintings of Mary being fructified by a tube from God's throne. Jung is aware that as evidence his example is weak, to say the least. His defense is not convincing:

I mention this case not in order to prove that the vision is an archetype but only to show you my method of procedure in the simplest possible form.[24]

He continues by sketching how such research should be done — mainly by examining a series of a few hundred dreams to follow the development of "typical figures" in them, which must mean just a single patient examined. As for the figures, "You can select any figure which gives the impression of being an archetype by its behaviour in the series of dreams or visions."[25]

So, you prove the existence of archetypes by searching for figures that give the impression of being archetypes. Well, that way you are sure to find what you are looking for, if just persistent enough and lenient enough about what seems like what you are looking for.

Jung ends his text by pointing to another text of his: "I have described the method of investigation elsewhere and have also furnished the necessary case material."

The text he refers to is an essay with the title "Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation," which was originally published in German in 1936. There, Jung examines the process of individuation through following how one archetype, the mandala, develops over ten months through 400 dreams and daydreams of a "youngish" man who is scientifically educated in history, philology, archaeology, and ethnology. Still, Jung claims, "The bearing of his dreams upon the subject matter of these fields was almost wholly unknown to him."[26]

Then Jung gives a number of examples of those dreams in comprised forms, spending significantly more words explaining their meanings. So doing, he allows himself a tremendous amount of far-fetched speculation. For example, this is how he explains the first dream in which the dreamer is simply putting on another hat than his own:

What is the significance of this dream? To begin with, the hat, as the covering of the head, has in general the meaning of something comprising the head. As in the act of subsuming we "bring all ideas under one hat," so the hat, like a universal concept, covers the whole personality and shares its meaning. Coronation lends to the ruler the divine nature of the sun, the mortarboard bestows the dignity of a scholar, a strange hat imparts a strange nature. Meyrink employs this theme in The Golem, where the hero puts on the hat of Athanasius Pernath and, as a result, is translated into a strange experience. It is clear enough in The Golem that it is the unconscious that entangles the hero in fantastic experiences. (Let me call attention right here in a hypothetical way to the significance of the Golem parallel: it is the hat of an Athanasius, of an immortal, of a timeless being, by which we are to understand a universally authentic, perpetually existent human being in contradistinction to the individual who happens but once and is, so to speak, accidental.) The hat, which embraces the head, is round like the sun-disk of the crown and therefore contains the first allusion to the mandala. The ninth mandala dream, discussed on page 132, will confirm the attribute of imperishable duration, and the thirty-fifth, given later on page 179, the mandala nature of the hat. As a general result of the exchange of hats, then, we may perhaps expect in this case a development similar to that in The Golem, namely, an emergence of the unconscious. The unconscious with its figures already stands like a shadow behind him and presses into consciousness.[27]

Or it could just mean that the patient dreamed about putting on the wrong hat.

The dreams that follow become increasingly odd and seemingly symbolic, for the most part, which is of no surprise. Over the ten months with hundreds of dreams recorded, the patient would have had a hard time avoiding increased complexity. That is how the mind works, whether unconsciously or not. It is like a total novice by the piano, gradually playing more elaborate patterns, searching for melodies.

To Jung, proof of the mandala appearing in the dreams is mostly nothing more than that there are round objects in them — like the hat. That persists to the 59th and last of the cited dreams, which Jung calls a "great vision," indicating that it is more of a daydream or fantasy:

There is a vertical and a horizontal circle, having a common centre.
This is the world-clock. It is supported by black birds. The vertical circle is a blue disk with a white edge, divided into 4X8=32 parts. On it revolves a pointer. The horizontal circle consists of four colours. Upon it stand four little men with pendulums, and around it lies the ring that was formerly dark and is now golden (previously carried by the four children).
The "clock" has three rhythms or beats:
The small beat: The pointer of the blue, vertical circle advances 1/32.
The middle beat: A complete revolution of the pointer.
At the same time the horizontal circle advances 1/32.
The great beat: 32 middle beats make a revolution of the golden ring.[28]

The dreamer described it as an "impression of the greatest harmony." Jung calls it a three-dimensional mandala, "one, therefore, that has attained substantiality and realization." The doctor-patient privilege hinders Jung from revealing the details, but assures us that the realization did take place.

As usual with Jung, the bottom line is that we have to take his word for it.

Stone Age Mind

So, Jung's collective unconscious is an inherited part of the psyche, a fundamental driving force, a container of great truths, and the only trustworthy guide to self-realization. Yet, it is hidden in the depth of the mind, unknown to man. Dreams and myths are the instruments to discover and to utilize it.

Jung's theory raises many questions, several of which have been treated above. Apart from the questionable idea of an unconscious completely out of reach of the conscious mind, already discussed, Jung states about the collective unconscious that its content is identical for all mankind. That is problematic in several ways.

Excluding, as Jung does, a telepathic explanation, the content of the collective unconscious would have been formed in some manner similar to our instincts and how they evolve. That is also what Jung suggests — the content of the collective unconscious must be biologically inherited. But then, if it is globally identical, the same for all of us, it must have been completed in the time of our most recent common ancestor.

That would suggest the time of Mitochondrial Eve, around 150,000 years ago in Africa, who was the earliest common matrilinear ancestor found so far. The corresponding Adam is generally assumed to be older. But DNA is reproduced through both sexes and finds its way between them in a manner sort of similar to how information flows through the World Wide Web — there are many alternative routes.

Therefore, the true most recent common ancestor for humankind is considerably less ancient. Research with mathematical models suggests this ancestor might be as recent as 3,000 years ago. There is also the concept of the identical ancestor point, before which all our ancestors are exactly the same. That, too, might be no longer ago than 5,000 to 10,000 years.[29]

Of course, this does in no way mean we are identical to these distant ancestors. Genes mix and transform in the process of reproduction. But it can't be stated that human capacities present at the identical ancestor point were not transmitted to the following generations. A lot of them certainly were, such as instincts and numerous mental abilities. Some sort of collective unconscious could, theoretically, be one of them.

But if identically shared by all mankind, such a collective unconscious cannot contain material more recent than some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago — and it would be a marvel if things of that specific era could have been genetically included in the following generations. Genes don't work that fast. It would be much more plausible with remnants of experiences far older than that. A plausible collective unconscious would consist of Stone Age experiences and hardly anything closer to our time.

That era spanned millions of years, when people's lives were pretty much the same hunter-gatherer reality all through. That must be enough to make its mark in the genes. So, any kind of common collective unconscious content would just about exclusively be formed by human experiences of the Stone Age. And only to the extent that people all over the world share the same experiences, can additional content ever be added to the collective unconscious while keeping it identical for all humankind.

In the past century or so, the human world has started to become as homogenous as it was in the Stone Age, due to industrialization, global communication, and world politics. Still, human life is far from as conform as it once was, and it is unlikely that it ever can be. The complexity of modern society opens for so much unforeseen diversity. Also, genetics takes its time programming future generations with new inherited codes, especially if they are to be identical in us all. Homogeneity comparable to that of the Stone Age probably cannot ever be repeated.

So, a collective unconscious of the kind Jung describes can only contain material which was relevant to people of the Stone Age. Since Jung stated that the content of the collective unconscious is nothing but archetypes, they all have to be such that they had significant meaning to those distant ancestors of ours.

Certainly, several of the archetypes he suggested would be relevant also in the Stone Age. It is true for the ones he regarded as the most important — anima and animus, i.e., the female and the male entities in the human mind. Our genders and their significance have been with us since long before the Stone Age. This is equally true for the mother and the father, as well as the child, an archetype Jung has written extensively about.[30] They have forever been with us and always been of great importance.

The same might be said about the archetype of the hero. There were tremendous challenges and ordeals that Stone Age people had to face, demanding both courage and commitment of heroic kind. Another central archetype is the sage (the old wise man), who may very well have been a frequent figure in society — at least since methods to express wisdom, by language or any other means of communication, were developed.

Celestial symbols, like the sun and the moon, were of course present all through our history, and human fascination with them is documented as far back as we have any sources. They also had crucial functions in human life, one bringing daylight and warmth, and the other giving some visibility to the dangerous night. They would need to be archetypes.

Jung regarded several animals as archetypes, each with its symbolic meaning in the collective unconscious. All of those animals were certainly around in Stone Age days, and maybe others that have become extinct since. Even trees, rivers, mountains, and other parts of nature have been with us all through the existence of our species.

But Jung has mentioned other archetypes, who were not that obviously relevant to Stone Age life. The trickster is a character popping up in many myths, but would that be a recognizable character in the Stone Age? In myths preserved by hunter-gatherer societies today, the trickster often appears. That does not necessarily indicate a Stone Age origin, but it shows that the trickster can be a familiar concept within such a culture.

The maiden, the chaste young woman, on the other hand, is something that would probably have little relevance to the Stone Age. It is an ideal of much later date. On the other hand, if we see it simply as a prepubescent girl, then our distant ancestors could relate to the concept.

The important figure of the king was unheard of in Stone Age times, though a leader of the tribe was not, and that might be sort of the same in an archetypal perspective.

So, applying generous criteria, the bulk of Jungian archetypes could probably fit the Stone Age mind.

It should also be noted that Jung was persistent in pointing out that the words and images used to describe the archetypes are not the actual archetypes, but representations of them. The actual ones should be understood as symbolical principles, which need to take concrete forms in order for us to perceive and relate to them consciously. Accordingly, the child archetype is a representation of childhood as such, with its combination of innocence and potential. The anima is not the woman, but the concept of the female quality, whatever that is. And so on.

Seeing by Symbols

It is not by these archetype representations Jung commits an anachronism. It is by how he describes the underlying principles of the archetypes, what they are supposed to really mean. There, he is alarmingly stuck to his own European Christian background of the late 19th and early 20th century, as several examples earlier in this book show.

Still, that is no ground for dismissing his theory. He may be right about his basic principle, although he is mistaken when applying it.

It is Jung's claim of universality of the content of the collective unconscious that is the foremost weakness of his theory. If he allowed for the collective unconscious and its archetypes to be evolving and changing over time as well as in different cultures, like so much else of the human mind, his theory would be much more readily applicable. It would also open for alternative explanations to mechanisms behind it.

What he sees, which also the rest of us can observe, is a tendency in the human mind to make symbols out of significant experiences and pass them on, often making these symbols commonly recognized by the community we live in — sometimes shared by a whole civilization. It may be essential to how our minds work. We translate perceptional input into elements that tend to be generalized into symbols. Without this ability, we would drown in the constant flood of details from our senses. It is our way of sorting the world.

We can't meaningfully relate to every degree on the thermometer, but tend to divide temperatures into categories that worked already before the thermometer was invented — from freezing cold, through could, cool, warm, hot, to burning hot. We have always observed that there is a multitude of different animals in the world, but we grouped them according to our needs into pets, livestock, game, predators, and so on. As for other people, we have called them family or tribe or strangers.

No doubt, a primary intent with these generalizations has always been to identify useful and useless, and quickly decide what is harmless or harmful. We still show this behavior like a reflex, in the midst of our technologically complex society: is this useful or not, is it harmful or not? In children already at infancy, we see reactions based on experiences of pleasure and pain, or security and fear.

From these fundamental opposites, complexity has by time increased, but the basics remain — pain or pleasure, threat or asset. The symbols we create and share may be ever more numerous and varied, but that is still at the core.

Among Jung's archetypes is a hero but also a villain, a sage and a trickster, a self and a shadow. Jung often allows them to have both beneficial and detrimental traits, but this division is just another example of the basic need to sort the world into assets and threats.

When he speaks about their function as one of promoting a person to self-realization, he is jumping past the primary function of self-preservation. Everything instinctual, be it a bodily or a mental reflex, is first of all aimed at survival. Anything else can be regarded as a luxury in comparison, and must therefore be secondary.

Of course, by time the secondary can swell both in quantity and importance. That is one more reason for the need of allowing the content of Jung's collective unconscious not to be fixed, but evolving. Everything about every living creature is affected by the mechanics of evolution.

New Symbols Learned

One thing remains, though. Jung showed no convincing evidence for the archetypes being genetically inherited instead of adapted in social interaction. Except for a number of instincts governing bodily survival and procreation, what moves in our mind is what it learns from the surroundings and the experiences gained through life. There is no reason to assume that the archetypes were created in another way, far back in the past.

If we allow for significant symbols to be learned instead of inherited — as both Jung and Freud admit they had to be in the very beginning — there is no anomaly in the fact that we continue to adapt new such symbols as the world around us changes.

We have had a bundle of new symbols since the Stone Age ended, such as the prophet, the king, the martyr, the knight, the maiden, the executioner, the philosopher, the lawyer, the tyrant, and the genius, to name but a few. Also, non-animate symbols like the castle, the throne, the sword, the prison, the tomb, money, the temple, the tower, and the bridge. We keep on adding symbols filled with meaning, like the bomb, the robot, the rocket, the space alien, the celebrity, the oligarch, the terrorist, the expert, the laboratory, the morgue, the detective, the computer, and so on.

The way we relate to these post-Stone Age symbols is in no significant way different from how Jung described the influence and functions of the archetypes. Actually, many of the archetypes Jung mentioned in his writing connect more readily to agrarian society, even specifically to Medieval Europe, than to the Stone Age.

Certainly, several of the symbols introduced after the Stone Age can be described as merely new forms of old archetypes. For example, the king is a larger version of the tribal chief. The prophet, the philosopher, the genius, and the expert can be called versions of the sage. The martyr, the knight, and the detective are easily compared to the hero. But there are significant differences between the ancient archetypes and the later versions.

Compared to the tribal chief, the king is elevated on his throne, far away from his subjects, almost as a god of sorts. That would be unfathomable to the members of a Stone Age tribe.

And to the tribe, the sage would be the one with sound advice for anyone so wishing, whereas the prophet demands departure from the ways of the present, the philosopher becomes all but incomprehensible and drifts away from reality into theory, like the expert, and the genius has no interest in either giving or receiving advice, consumed instead with whatever quest that person's talent suggests.

Although the sources to the later symbols might be found also in Stone Age reality, the differences are often so extensive that it is hardly meaningful to treat them as identical. And several of the later symbols simply do not have any counterparts in the Stone Age, such as the prison, money, the robot, the bomb, and the computer.

Obsolete Archetypes

Now, if there are new archetypes appearing as the world changes, the question that follows is if old ones disappear from our minds. If archetypes losing their meaning to us fade away, then the obvious conclusion must be that they are learned instead of genetically inherited.

It is hard to test, though. The world has indeed changed since the Stone Age, but by adding and not by subtracting. There is still the cyclic shift between night and day, with the moon and the sun parading in the sky. There are still women and men and children, people we know and those who are strangers, trees and seas and mountains. The world seen in the Stone Age is still here, though covered to a large extent by things our ancestors could never have imagined.

None of the archetypes Jung mentioned in his writing have become completely obsolete. Our minds can still relate meaningfully to them. That is in itself no surprise. Jung could not have mentioned archetypes no longer relevant at the time of his writing, or he would by that have contradicted his own thesis. He would not make that mistake, but if he had made it, his theory would have been dismissed and soon forgotten.

So, to test Jung's claim of the archetypes being forever planted in our minds, which means they must be transmitted genetically, we should search for symbols not mentioned by Jung, but significant enough to Stone Age humans to qualify as Jungian archetypes. Such symbols would be the anomalies in Jung's paradigm.

As discussed above, the most obvious ones would be those that dealt with longings or fears, assets or threats. Symbols of those kinds would have been the most deeply engraved in Stone Age minds, and therefore unquestionable archetypes. And of the two, symbols connected to fear would have been the most insistent, since they represented imminent threats to survival — real or imagined.

Some fears we definitely share with our Stone Age ancestors, such as those of natural catastrophe, big predators, or the outbreak of fire. They are still dangerous to us. But we have new fears, unimaginable in the Stone Age, and there are things we have stopped fearing due to measures eliminating the threats or to learning that they were no threats to begin with.

The Chapman University conducts an annual survey on the fears of USA inhabitants. More than a thousand adults are asked to grade each item on a long list of different kinds of fear. The results vary considerably from year to year. Comparing 2015 results to those of 2020-2021, shows this clearly.[31]

At the top of both is the fear of corrupt government, but only 58% of Americans held that fear in 2015, whereas 80% did so in 2020-2021. After that, the lists have little in common. In 2015, several of the top fears dealt with Internet threats to integrity and personal economy, whereas the list of 2020-2021 to no surprise is topped by health fears related to Covid-19. The fear of global warming rose from 31% to 49%.

In the 2015 list, a fear that would have been recognized and shared by people of the Stone Age, that of illness, comes at the 14th place (feared by 34%). Already at the 2^nd place in the later survey, is a fear known also in the Stone Age — that of loved ones dying (59%), surely due to the pandemic. The 2015 survey lacks this alternative, but in 2017 it was on the 17th place with 40%. The fear of one's own dying rose modestly from 22% in 2015 to 29% in 2020-2021.

People worry about their health more than their death, but they worry significantly more about the health of their loved ones. Human beings are compassionate, which is something far too often underestimated or even ignored.

Although we will definitely all die, the risk of it happening before old age is so reduced that the Reaper is nowadays a figure of comedy rather than horror. But it would be vastly premature to dismiss death and its symbolic representation as an obsolete archetype. When we are reminded of it, it speaks to us loud and clear — as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the 2020-2021 survey, apart from the health-related issues, fears that would have been recognized in the Stone Age include those of heights (31%), reptiles (25%), spiders and other insects (23%), strangers (11%), and animals (5%). Percentages might have differed in the Stone Age, but these fears were definitely not absent back then. The question here, though, is what fears of that distant past have disappeared since.

To find completely obsolete fears of the Stone Age, we must look for threats that we have eliminated or those that were based on superstition.

In the latter category, there is one spectacular celestial phenomenon that terrified our ancestors, but does not worry us in the least — the solar eclipse. Historically, it was seen as an ill-boding omen, and before that it must have created a sense of imminent doom. Nowadays, it is merely an amusement.

The eclipse has lost just about all of its ghastliness, which was considerable in the past. Celestial phenomena left people in awe, since they were as incomprehensible as they were spectacular. The latter they still are, as entertainment we are prepared to travel long distances to experience. The archetype of it is not extinct, but it has lost all its potency. We keep it as sort of a museum piece, reminding us of the fear out of ignorance it induced in our ancestors.

To a lesser extent, this might also be said about lunar eclipses.

The comet, though, is a different story altogether. Its appearance frightened our ancestors and continued to do so into modern times. As late as 1910, Halley's Comet created quite some panic when spectroscopic analysis found that its tail, which the earth passed through, contained toxic gas. The New York Times reported that the French astronomer Camille Flammarion was "of the opinion that the cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet."

The article also mentioned that most astronomers did not agree with him.[32]

Comets still induce awe in us as visible reminders of the many meteors, hidden in the dark space, which may collide with earth and really "snuff out all life." This is a possible catastrophe that science has discovered, which was unknown in the Stone Age. The superstition has become real.

As for celestial phenomena closer to the ground, such as thunder and lightning, they can be scary today, too, but not to the extent they were before we found their explanations. They still function as archetypes, symbols to which we attach a lot of meanings, but they have lost their ability to terrify us like in the past, and therefore also most of their symbolic significance. Dark clouds covering the sky do not make us crouch, thunder is no overture to doom, and lightning is diverted by a rod. Today, most threats that appear in the sky are man-made.

Returning to the subject of death, there is one alternative suggested by the folklorist James George Frazer — the fear of the dead. He devoted a book to it in 1933, where he claimed that this fear was a prime source in primitive religion.[33]

Its importance can be discussed, but as Frazer shows in his book there are numerous indications in mythology and ancient beliefs, especially those of hunter-gatherer cultures, of the dead being highly revered and also feared. Ancestor worship was widespread.

As Sigmund Freud suggested, it might even have been the beginning of the belief in deities. He claimed it to be the result of guilt feelings after a patricide, but that addition is not necessary. With or without such a drama, the dead were very much present in the minds of our ancestors.

To what extent this should be primarily regarded as a fear is another matter, but it is frequently occurring in mythologies, old and new, that the ones worshipped should be feared for what they might cause if not pleased. The worship often had the character of being a manner of pleasing the deities in order to appease them. Sacrifices and such were acts of fear instead of adoration.

Ancient attitudes towards the dead were similar in many cultures. Deities or not, they were to be feared. Maybe that might even have been a reason for burying them, which was practiced already in the Stone Age. It could have been an effort to imprison the dead, so that they could not hurt the living. The funeral pyres of some cultures might have had the same original intent. That is, of course, pure speculation.

But the fear of the dead has been persistent. We know it in the Western world as fear of ghosts, which still remains with a few of us. In the Chapman University survey discussed above, it holds the 88th position with 9% confessing to it. The fear also has a modern version in the zombie of Haitian folklore, popularized in fiction. It has the same percentage as that of ghosts. Nowadays, though, fictional zombies tend to be created by biological warfare or some kind of plague, rather than by waking the dead.

It is still safe to say that the fear of the dead, indicated by ancient mythology and rituals, is something we have left behind. Wandering skeletons, ghosts, and roaming undead have joined the solar eclipse in becoming entertainment. The archetype of the dead, which would most definitely have fit Jung's concept not that very long ago, has lost its gravity and thereby also its significance — at least for most of us.

The above is not evidence solid enough to dismiss Jung's theory of genetically inherited archetypes, but the variation of fears through time very strongly suggests that symbols of them are upheld and communicated consciously by people, and not rooted in a hidden and inaccessible unconscious. It is a solution closer at hand, and supported by observable facts.

Stone Age Individuation

Jung's collective unconscious and its content of archetypes have a defined purpose — that of individuation, which is self-realization. Although this unconscious is explicitly collective, the definitions of the archetypes zoom in on the personal. Within each psyche they speak to that particular individual.

This focus on the personal makes Jung's psychological cosmos very individualistic indeed. The human being may share fundamental parts of the psyche with all the others of the species, but its function is to extract and define what is individual — it works to strengthen the sense of I as opposed to we.

But would that be relevant and desirable, even at all understandable, to people of the Stone Age?

A common present-day strife is to be unique, but also to belong. Our names are clear symbols of this. We have a first name, which is given us by our parents but still points out our personal uniqueness, and a family name, showing that we belong to a defined group. It creates a basis for our two-sided worldview — the inner identity with its continuous processing of emotions and thought, and the outer environment to which we relate but are still always separate from. Each modern human is at the very center of their own universe.

Jung's model speaks relevantly to this perception of existence. We can relate to the principle of examining ourselves in order to define our uniqueness, i.e., the needs and abilities of our own personalities, not to get lost in what is expected of us and thereby becoming little more than identical puppets, as if we were all clones from the same genetic donor.

But Jung's claim that the content of the collective unconscious is constant and shared by all demands that this individualistic urge was true already in the Stone Age. Otherwise, it would have been irrelevant at the time of its formation, and could hardly remain. Evolution is not clairvoyant.

It is hard, maybe impossible, to prove if Stone Age people had a strong individualistic urge or not. At least it is rather safe to assume that in the tribal life of the hunter-gatherers of that era, belonging was far more important than standing out.

Again, the instinct of self-preservation gives a hint. In those days, the individual had little chance of survival outside the group. Exposed to all the life-threatening dangers in the surroundings, the tribe was a much better protection than anyone could muster on his own, no matter how capable and fierce. Also, hunting was not easily done alone.

If we assume that Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies were similar to those studied in our time, the strength of the collective was expressed in the structure of tribal life. A major example of this is the habit of reciprocity, the equal sharing of food and other necessities. It is almost universally present in hunter-gatherer societies.[34] Those who deviated from the reciprocal sharing, the freeloaders, were despised and cast out if they persisted.

Given the vital importance of individual adaption to the tribe in Stone Age life, it would be more likely for the content of a collective unconscious formed in those times to lead the individual towards higher identification with others, increasing the sense of belonging, than the opposite. Individuation, as a path of differentiation from fellow humans, would have been detrimental to the chance of survival. So, it would have little chance of being inherited in humankind.

It also means that an instinctual behavior towards blending and identifying with others to increase a mutual sense of belonging is likely. Certainly, also our modern world shows many signs of it.

What Jung describes as the individuation process is much more relevant to the last few centuries, especially in the Western world, than ever before. The idea of the genius is an illustration of this. The present meaning of the word genius for an individual talent, standing out remarkably from others, appeared in the 18th century. The Encyclopédie writes this about the genius in 1757:

The man of genius is he whose soul is more expansive and struck by the feelings of all others; interested by all that is in nature never to receive an idea unless it evokes a feeling; everything excites him and on which nothing is lost.[35]

What follows is a long praise of the uniqueness and exceptional ability of the genius, and it ends with this humble remark by the writer:

Its definition is best left to the person himself to speak of himself and this article which I should not have written should have been the work of one of these extraordinary men who honor this century and to recognize genius would only have had to look at himself.

The word existed long before the days of the Enlightenment, but it did not stress a difference of one individual from all others. There was no sense of humans at the very core of their being standing out from others. Rather, it was seen as a resource or ability within all. The Roman origin of the term is mythological, signifying a generative and protecting spirit of which every man had one from birth. Women had the counterpart Juno.[36]

In German Romanticism of the 19th century, the concept of the genius as someone outstanding, elevated above normal human capacity, was adapted and propagated. The major inspiration to this view was Immanuel Kant. In his book Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft) from 1790, he described the character and modus operandi of the genius. It is not hard to see how his description attracted the German romantics.

According to Kant, only artists can be geniuses. Not scientists, since they are bound by reason, and anything they conclude can be explained completely to others, as can the process to that conclusion. The genius, on the other hand, "does not know himself how he has come by his Ideas." The genius needs to be free of boundaries. It is even Kant's primary definition, "genius is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given."[37]

Kant states firmly that "beautiful Art is only possible as a product of Genius." Such art cannot be repeated by others, not even completely appreciated by anyone but another genius. This was also what the text in the Encyclopédie humbly admitted.

Such conditions separate the genius all but completely from the rest of humankind. It does, though, approach Jung's idea of the individuation process of finding oneself and one's own uniqueness, no matter what social norms dictate. Jung showed in his writing a fondness for larger-than-life characters that would qualify as geniuses. Two stand out: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, especially his Faust, and Friedrich Nietzsche, especially his Also sprach Zarathustra. They are mentioned and discussed numerous times in many of Jung's texts, always with profound praise.

He also expressed a view on the genius particularly interesting in this context:

One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.[38]

Clearly to Jung this is a tragedy. The individual succumbs to the herd. Jung would have it the other way around, which is precisely what his individuation process is supposed to accomplish. But it would be just about as far as one could get from the Stone Age mind.

Notes

The term hypnagogic was introduced by Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury in an 1848 text about hypnagogic hallucinations. Maury, "Des hallucinations hypnagogiques ou erreur des sens dans l'état intermédiaire entre la veille et le sommeil," Annales médico-psychologiques, Paris 1848, volume XI, pp. 26-40. ⟰
The term hypnopompic was introduced by the psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers in a book published 1903, two years after his death. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, volume I, New York 1903, p. xvii. ⟰
The term lucid dream was introduced by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913. Eeden, "A Study of Dreams," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, volume 26, Glasgow 1913, pp. 431-461. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, London 1916, p. 62. ⟰
The term highway hypnosis was introduced in 1963 by the psychologist Griffith Wynne Williams, "Highway Hypnosis: An Hypothesis," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, volume 11:3, Philadelphia 1963, pp. 143â€“151. Already in 1921, though, the phenomenon was discussed as road hypnotism in a Literary Digest article (volume 69, pp. 56-57). Griffith Wynne Williams & Ronald E. Shor, "An Historical Note on Highway Hypnosis," Accident Analysis and Prevention, volume 2:3, New York 1970, p. 223. ⟰
Stefan Zweig, Mental Healers: Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud (Die Heilung durch den Geist. Mesmer, Mary Baker-Eddy, Freud, 1931), transl. Eden and Cedar Paul, New York 1932, p. 292. ⟰
Aristotle, Poetics, 1460a, transl. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb 199, London 1999, pp. 123f. ⟰
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1998, 1072a, p. 373. ⟰
Plutarch, Essays and Miscellanies, volume 3, transl. William W. Goodwin, Boston 1909, p. 242. Plutarch's answer to the question (pp. 245f) is the bird: "For we never see an egg formed immediately of mud, for it is produced in the bodies of animals alone." That is debatable, too. ⟰
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, transl. George Heffernan, Notre Dame, Indiana 1990 (originally published in Latin 1641), p. 149. ⟰
Exodus 3:13-14, King James Bible. ⟰
Aristotle reasoned about only two forms of plays â€“ the tragedy and the comedy, but his rules for the former would apply to any drama. His text about comedy is lost to us, as made famous by Umberto Eco's 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. ⟰
Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a, transl. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb 199, London 1999, p. 51. ⟰
Ibid., 1450b, p. 53. ⟰
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II scene VII. ⟰
Plato, "Cratylus," 402, The Dialogues of Plato, volume I (of 5), transl. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford 1892 (first edition 1871), p. 344f. ⟰
Not that Jung was opposed to the possibility of ESP, extrasensory perception, "which medical psychology should on no account ignore." He regarded the phenomenon of ESP as one of the very few established psychological facts. Carl G. Jung, Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy, quoted in Segal, Jung on Mythology, pp. 65f. ⟰
From a lecture in London 1936. Carl G. Jung, "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious," The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, volume 9 part 1, Princeton 1969, p. 44. ⟰
Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Education," The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 17, transl. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton 1970, p. 117. The original German text was published in 1946. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious," The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, volume 9:1, Princeton 1969, p. 49. ⟰
Ibid. ⟰
Ibid., p. 50. ⟰
Ibid., p. 51. ⟰
Ibid., p. 52. ⟰
Ibid., p. 53. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation," The Integration of the Personality, transl. Stanley Dell, London 1940, p. 97. ⟰
Ibid., p. 102. ⟰
Ibid., pp. 189f. ⟰
Douglas L. T. Rohde et al., "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans," Nature, volume 431, London 2004, pp. 562-566. ⟰
For example, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Collected Works of C. J. Jung, volume 9 part 1, transl. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton 1968, pp. 151-181. The original text is from 1940. ⟰
The Chapman University Survey of American Fears, chapman.edu, 2015 and 2021. ⟰
"Comet's Poisonous Tail," The New York Times, 1910 (nytimes.com). ⟰
James George Frazer, The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion, London 1933, p. v. ⟰
Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge 1999, p. 4. ⟰
Jean-François de Saint-Lambert (ascribed), "Genius," The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, transl. John S.D. Glaus, Ann Arbor 2007 (umich.edu). From Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, volume 7, Paris, 1757, pp. 582-584. ⟰
The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, volume XI, New York 1910, pp. 594f. ⟰
Immanuel Kant, Kritik of Judgment, transl. J. H. Bernard, London 1892, p. 189. ⟰
Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 16. ⟰

Carl G. Jung on Myth and Religion

Jungians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined, from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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Carl G. Jung:The Elusive Unconscious