^{I do not yet know what this blog is to be about, or if indeed it is to become anything at all. But reviewing books seems as good a way as any to start. This post will be a review of Carl Jung’s book, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and an evaluation of its two titular concepts.}

I have been reading Jung lately, as part of a search I am engaged in. I will write up the details later, but the short version is that I’m trying to learn about different models of religious belief and thought, with a particular interest in models that are light on ontological commitments but that aren’t just adulterated materialism. In particular, I want to know if any such model is strong enough, not just to permit, but to motivate things like ritual practice and mythological language. Jung appeared on the list mostly because I know he was a heavy influence on Joseph Campbell, of monomyth fame, and I had a vague notion that both talked about myths as being exterior representations of interior, psychological, experience. That sounded as good a place to start as any, so I poked around on Wikipedia and decided to order The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

Or at least, I assume I did. It was honestly a bit of a surprise when this volume showed up on my doorstep, since I didn’t remember which book I’d ordered, but this one didn’t seem particularly relevant. I suspect my book-ordering past self wanted to get a handle on the weirder bits of Jung, to know whether his ideas about religion were worth considering seriously in the first place. And while this book was not really the most helpful religion-wise (Jung has some much more obviously topical writings on religion around, with names like “Answer to Job”, “The Spiritual Problems of Modern Man”, or Psychology and Religion: West and East), it is at least divided into essays about specific topics, allowing me to get what I needed without too much wading. (Details about the specific essays I read are at the end of this post.) This made it very much the right book for learning about Jung’s two weirdest semi-well-known concepts, the titular “archetypes” and “collective unconscious”.

Take the “collective unconscious”. I’d always understood that it was a kind of deep but culturally-dependent context, in which all statements and stories must be rooted. Or worse, a sort of new-agey “energy” field influenced mythology, by means of which ideas and feelings could travel from one person to another without evidence of communication. Thankfully, it’s much less silly. Jung describes the collective unconscious as:

1) That part of the unconscious, which:
2) Is the same in all humans, owing to our being human

I.e., the collective unconscious is just all the things that human minds have in common that we are not consciously aware of. This isn’t “woo” at all! In addition to the obvious things, like instincts or emotions, you’ve got some optimizations enabling stuff like facial recognition, whatever weirdnesses cause optical illusions, and some crossmodal correspondences like the Kiki-Bouba effect. Cross-culturally valid unconscious thought patterns are perfectly normal and they’re all over the place.

Jung defends the collective unconscious on these grounds, repeatedly insisting that it is an empirical fact, no more mystical than the fact of instinctual behavior. But this defense is only necessary in the first place because Jung gets, well, pretty mystical. Jung claims that the collective unconscious consists mostly of archetypes, where an archetype is a collection of traits, some physical, some behavioral, some psychological, associated with an innate drive or instinct. We cannot observe archetypes directly because they reside in the unconscious – by definition that part of the brain which is not directly observable. However, we can infer their existence by observing that the imagination tends to create patterns even where the conscious mind has minimal input. Places like mythology, folklore, and especially dreams.

Jung’s idea is that there is a rough correspondence between recurring motifs in comparative mythology or dreaming, and instinctual drives, urges, or “knowledge”. And his descriptions don’t exactly sound scientific. He talks about the archetype of the “shadow”, which can cause problems when you face yourself and find things you don’t like. He identifies the “anima”, a feminine notion especially troublesome to men; the “animus”, its male counterpart which troubles women; and others like the “dual descent” and the “earth mother”.

Although these are allegedly manifestations of instincts or innate drives, Jung tends to describe them in near-exclusively mythic and, frankly, quite esoteric terms. It’s hardly surprising that he is charged with mysticism given the way he writes. Consider this passage describing the anima archetype, for example:

142 When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with definite characteristics. This empirical finding does not mean that the archetype is constituted like that in itself. The male-female syzygy is only one among the possible pairs of opposites, albeit the most important one in practice and the commonest. It has numerous connections with other pairs which do not display any sex differences at all and can therefore be put into the sexual category only by main force. These connections, with their manifold shades of meaning, are found more particularly in Kundalini yoga, in Gnosticism, and above all in alchemical philosophy, quite apart from the spontaneous fantasy-products in neurotic and psychotic case material. When one carefully considers this accumulation of data, it begins to seem probable that an archetype in its quiescent, unprojected state has no exactly determinable form but is in itself an indefinite structure which can assume definite forms only in projection.

144 The anima is a factor of the utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever emotions and affects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man’s character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted. He is then in a state of “discontent” and spreads discontent all around him. Sometimes the man’s relationship to the woman who has caught his anima accounts for the existence of this syndrome.

Or this one the shadow archetype:

513 Another, no less important and clearly defined figure is the “shadow.” Like the anima, it appears either in projection on suitable persons, or personified as such in dreams. The shadow coincides with the “personal” unconscious (which corresponds to Freud’s conception of the unconscious). Again like the anima, this figure has often been portrayed by poets and writers. I would mention the Faust-Mephistopheles relationship and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale The Devil’s Elixir as two especially typical descriptions. The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly — for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.

Jung’s style is unlike that of modern writers, and also unlike what I’ve read of his contemporaries. Modern writing advice says that a paragraph should essentially be about one idea. Jung’s paragraphs often have single sentences about other topics which deserve their own essay (and probably have one, somewhere). This can be absolutely maddening if you’re looking for something specific, only to see it referenced offhand 40-odd times but never explored in detail. Other times, like the first paragraph above, they start by talking about one concept and veer off on an increasingly diverging series of tangents, returning to the idea in subsequent paragraphs or not at all. Ideas are communicated over 2-3 paragraphs, and bleed into one another in a way that makes them hard to demarcate, and generally depend on context besides. This does at least carry the reader gently from point to point, and on the whole I found it engrossing and pleasantly hypnotic.

The chief effect is to make excerpting difficult. Jung does not have easy pull quotes or pithy statements: If you want to share an insight, you’ll need to quote 2-3 paragraphs, and these will feel naked and dishonest without their surrounding context. This is quite unlike, say, Ayn Rand, who has many bold and interesting one-sentence quotes that get a point across. I’ve never read Rand, but I feel I understand her ideas somewhat from all the powerful quotes I’ve seen. On the other hand, there seem to be many sites and societies devoted to Jung, but little in the way of citations, summary, or outreach. And a search for Jung quotes turns up mostly hippy motivational bits like “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” or “The word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” I think there is a lot of wisdom and insight to be found in Jung’s writings. But don’t expect to have an easy time sharing it with anyone you can’t convince to read an an entire essay or two.

That gets us to the big question, which can be put off no longer: How should we interpret Jung’s insight? What level of reality do his archetypes describe? Specific details about archetypes are given near-exclusively in the language of myth, and Jung certainly has value if you are interested in myth, or in the salience myth has to psychology. But Jung casts himself as an empiricist, forced to adopt his views by the observations of his clinical practice. This is quite at odds with the popular view of psychoanalysis, in which early psychologists are generally accused of just making up whatever unempirical and unfalsifiable nonsense they felt like.

I think these specific criticisms–unempirical, unfalsifiable, nonsense–are probably too strong. While it would certainly fair to call him un-experimental, Jung formed his theories on the back of decades of clinical experience, treating patients, and seeing commonalities. And it’s the archetypes are well-enough defined to provide falsifiable, testable, claims: The anima is feminine, wild, mysterious, erotic, and associated with water and secret intuition. Archetypes manifest most strongly in places where conscious rationalization is the least involved. Etc. If you were to discover some previously uncontacted people, and learn that their myths associated wildness, mystery, and eroticism with femininity, but their dreams about water or secret intuitions always involved male figures, that’s strong evidence against Jung’s anima theory. (I don’t want to oversell this point as I expect most Jungian practice to involve a heavy helping of hindsight bias. But in principle, and in sufficiently careful practice, the theory is a testable one.)

I don’t think the whole idea is total nonsense, either, or even too implausible. It’s pretty clear that some psychological features are innate–a preference for symmetrical features in a mate for example, or the shape-sound correspondences of the Bouba-Kiki effect. It’s also clear that people tend to ascribe human motivations to animals, natural forces and inanimate objects. The anima is effectively these two ideas stuck together: That some collection of traits associated with femininity and sex exists deep inside the unconscious mind (but especially the minds of men and lesbians), which can brought to the conscious surface in disturbed individuals and be ascribed an agency and life of its own. The general idea is not totally far-fetched.

Jung also seems to be very aware of the pitfalls of ungrounded theorizing and the wrong conclusions it can draw. He does this in generalities, but also offers specific examples. For one of Freud’s analyses of a da Vinci painting, Jung offers a debunking so complete and merciless it might have come from a New Atheist. His own method for identifying archetypes is much more careful; the following (long) passage describes the identification of a “divine wind” archetype based on clinical experience, medieval art, and ancient religious ritual, and he considers it a relatively straightforward case:

105 About 1906 I came across a very curious delusion in a paranoid schizophrenic who had been interned for many years. The patient had suffered since his youth and was incurable. He had been educated at a State school and been employed as a clerk in an office. He had no special gifts, and I myself knew nothing of mythology or archaeology in those days, so the situation was not in any way suspect. One day I found the patient standing at the window, wagging his head and blinking into the sun. He told me to do the same, for then I would see something very interesting. When I asked him what he saw, he was astonished that I could see nothing, and said: “Surely you see the sun’s penis — when I move my head to and fro, it moves too, and that is where the wind comes from.” Naturally I did not understand this strange idea in the least, but I made a note of it. Then about four years later, during my mythological studies, I came upon a book by the late Albrecht Dieterich, the well-known philologist, which threw light on this fantasy. The work, published in 1910, deals with a Greek papyrus in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Dieterich believed he had discovered a Mithraic ritual in one part of the text. The text is undoubtedly a religious prescription for carrying out certain incantations in which Mithras is named. It comes from the Alexandrian school of mysticism and shows affinities with certain passages in the Leiden papyri and the Corpus Hermeticum. In Dieterich’s text we read the following directions:

106 It is obviously the author’s intention to enable the reader to experience the vision which he had, or which at least he believes in. The reader is to be initiated into the inner religious experience either of the author, or — what seems more likely — of one of those mystic communities of which Philo Judaeus gives contemporary accounts. The fireor sun-god here invoked is a figure which has close historical parallels, for instance with the Christ-figure of the Apocalypse. It is therefore a “representation collective,” as are also the ritual actions described, such as the imitating of animal noises, etc. The vision is embedded in a religious context of a distinctly ecstatic nature and describes a kind of initiation into mystic experience of the Deity.

107 Our patient was about ten years older than I. In his megalomania, he thought he was God and Christ in one person. His attitude towards me was patronizing; he liked me probably because I was the only person with any sympathy for his abstruse ideas. His delusions were mainly religious, and when he invited me to blink into the sun like he did and waggle my head he obviously wanted to let me share his vision. He played the role of the mystic sage and I was the neophyte. He felt he was the sun-god himself, creating the wind by wagging his head to and fro. The ritual transformation into the Deity is attested by Apuleius in the Isis mysteries, and moreover in the form of a Helios apotheosis. The meaning of the “ministering wind” is probably the same as the procreative pneuma[a Greek word meaning both wind/breath and spirit], which streams from the sun-god into the soul and fructifies it. The association of sun and wind frequently occurs in ancient symbolism.

108 It must now be shown that this is not a purely chance coincidence of two isolated cases. We must therefore show that the idea of a wind-tube connected with God or the sun exists independently of these two testimonies and that it occurs at other times and in other places. Now there are, as a matter of fact, medieval paintings that depict the fructification of Mary with a tube or hose-pipe coming down from the throne of God and passing into her body, and we can see the dove or the Christchild flying down it. The dove represents the fructifying agent, the wind of the Holy Ghost.

109 Now it is quite out of the question that the patient could have had any knowledge whatever of a Greek papyrus published four years later, and it is in the highest degree unlikely that his vision had anything to do with the rare medieval representations of the Conception, even if through some incredibly improbable chance he had ever seen a copy of such a painting. The patient was certified in his early twenties. He had never travelled. And there is no such picture in the public art gallery in Zurich, his native town.

110 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. If we had only such cases, the task of investigation would be relatively easy, but in reality the proof is much more complicated. First of all, certain symbols have to be isolated clearly enough to be recognizable as typical phenomena, not just matters of chance. This is done by examining a series of dreams, say a few hundred, for typical figures, and by observing their development in the series. The same method can be applied to the products of active imagination. In this way it is possible to establish certain continuities or modulations of one and the same figure. You can select any figure which gives the impression of being an archetype by its behaviour in the series of dreams or visions. If the material at one’s disposal has been well observed and is sufficiently ample, one can discover interesting facts about the variations undergone by a single type. Not only the type itself but its variants too can be substantiated by evidence from comparative mythology and ethnology. I have described the method of investigation elsewhere and have also furnished the necessary case material.

I think the effort Jung is putting in here to rule out alternate sources of causation does a lot to show that he’s not just, in his words, a charlatan. He seems to be seriously interested in establishing the truth of the matter. However, it’s striking that his concern only extends to lines of causality that specifically link the three sources. It could be that common culture causes all three examples: The connection between wind and spirit is certainly ancient enough to have influenced Mithras-worshippers[1]. Meanwhile, the upward or heavenly position is effectively part of the definition of divinity, and tube-looking rays of light peeking through the aren’t even a matter of culture, but of weather. The notion of a divine wind blowing down through a tube from heaven is a pretty natural one given the circumstances.

Jung sort of addresses this, or at least alludes to it in a few places. I find this passage extremely interesting, though not not very convincing:

116 Although common prejudice still believes that the sole essential basis of our knowledge is given exclusively from outside, and that “nihil est in intellectu quod non an tea fuerit in sensu,” it nevertheless remains true that the thoroughly respectable atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus was not based on any observations of atomic fission but on a “mythological” conception of smallest particles, which, as the smallest animated parts, the soul-atoms, are known even to the still palaeolithic inhabitants of central Australia.[2] How much “soul” is projected into the unknown in the world of external appearances is, of course, familiar to anyone acquainted with the natural science and natural philosophy of the ancients. It is, in fact, so much that we are absolutely incapable of saying how the world is constituted in itself — and always shall be, since we are obliged to convert physical events into psychic processes as soon as we want to say anything about knowledge. But who can guarantee that this conversion produces anything like an adequate “objective” picture of the world? That could only be if the physical event were also a psychic one. But a great distance still seems to separate us from such an assertion. Till then, we must for better or worse content ourselves with the assumption that the psyche supplies those images and forms which alone make knowledge of objects possible.

117 These forms are generally supposed to be transmitted by tradition, so that we speak of “atoms” today because we have heard, directly or indirectly, of the atomic theory of Democritus. But where did Democritus, or whoever first spoke of minimal constitutive elements, hear of atoms? This notion had its origin in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were never reflections of physical events but are spontaneous products of the psychic factor. Despite the materialistic tendency to understand the psyche as a mere reflection or imprint of physical and chemical processes, there is not a single proof of this hypothesis. Quite the contrary, innumerable facts prove that the psyche translates physical processes into sequences of images which have hardly any recognizable connection with the objective process. The materialistic hypothesis is much too bold and flies in the face of experience with almost metaphysical presumption. The only thing that can be established with certainty, in the present state of our knowledge, is our ignorance of the nature of the psyche. There is thus no ground at all for regarding the psyche as something secondary or as an epiphenomenon; on the contrary, there is every reason to regard it, at least hypothetically, as a factor sui generis, and to go on doing so until it has been sufficiently proved that psychic processes can be fabricated in a retort. We have laughed at the claims of the alchemists to be able to manufacture a lapis philosophorum consisting of body, soul, and spirit, as impossible, hence we should stop dragging along with us the logical consequence of this medieval assumption, namely the materialistic prejudice regarding the psyche, as though it were a proven fact.

There is a lot going on here, and I hope to deal with some of it in a future post when I write about Jung’s views on religious belief. For now, I’ll just note that there is not this is not actually an argument against archetypes being communicated through tradition.

Jung also completely fails to argue against the possibility that this is just a bunch of coincidences that we’re reading too much into. Given that the cited examples span 2,000 years of history, is it even surprising if this vaguely similar notion was produced thrice independently by total coincidence? I cannot help but think here of the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation, the final rite of initiation into the church, where the priest anoints your forehead with oil and invites the Holy Spirit into your body, that God might work through you to produce good in the world. Is this an example of the archetype? There is no tube involved. This isn’t a huge problem for me, since I don’t actually Jung’s archetypes are wholly coincidental. But it seems important that this possibility be addressed if we are to take him seriously, and the fact that Jung writes, “It must now be shown that this is not a purely chance coincidence of two isolated cases,” and then doesn’t even make a token effort at doing it is a little frustrating.

The inability to dismiss these possibilities is a substantial flaw in the archetypes-as-instinct model. Jung’s method is just not as rigorous as a modern reader needs in order for us to accept something as non-scientistic as his ideas. His belief in some form of ESP is another blemish on his credibility–and I say “blemish”, not “serious blow”, because there is no hint that ESP is supposed to be involved in any way with the collective unconscious or the archetypes. The existence of ESP is referenced only once, in passing, as part of an aside complaining about dogmatic materialists. In the end, however, these are ultimately doubts that the archetypes represent something innate and genuinely universal across the whole of humankind. I do not seriously doubt the existence of recurring psychic motifs, or the efficacy of their use in therapy.

Jung archetypal reasoning in his clinical practice for decades to the success of many. And in more modern times Jordan Peterson, whatever else you may think of him, has used Jung’s theory of the psyche to give a sense of life and purpose to many thousands of people. As far as I’m aware, all methods of therapy are approximately equally effective: If there’s one true model of the psyche, then either we do not have it, or it hasn’t led to greater success in helping people. In the meantime, we may as well stick with a variety of therapeutic approaches. I know that therapists sometimes assign homework in the form of cognitive-behavioral therapy workbooks. I suspect that, at least for some people, assigning some Jung to read might be just as effective. Maybe there are psychologists already doing this? I’m not exactly in tune with the therapeutic methodology scene.

I would recommend reading Jung to anyone interested in mysticism, shamanism, alternative spiritualities, or the esoteric tradition, and also to anyone like neopagans who creates or revives spiritual practices, especially rituals. This recommendation isn’t exactly new information to most of these folks. If there’s a modern mystical practice that Jung isn’t at the foundation of, then he’s certainly present as a citation or influence. But I think he’s really worth reading in the original. there are a couple of specific reasons why I think Jung is worth reading in the original.

Firstly, rigor. I know I just got done complaining about Jung’s faults as a experimentalist, but The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is still a rigorously empirical work. Jung draws material from his patients’ dreams and delusions, and from folklore and comparative mythology. When he says anything that isn’t obvious, there’s a citation or two to indicate that the connections he describes have been made by others first, and the fact has documented. Even if you don’t think archetypes are human universals or narrowly predictive, you can at least trust that they occur broadly and that the particular details are not due to the author’s fancy, or a quirk of this or that person’s psychology. This is a scholarly work, and it comes with a lengthy bibliography.

And secondly, wisdom. I mentioned above that this book is full of tangents and brief asides in a way that makes excerpting hard. I believe that this is a good thing for the subject matter. Nothing is without context, and this seems to be extra true for psychic phenomena: You can’t pull out a thought and reproduce it, the way you can reproduce a kinetic effect or an electric current. Jung gives his subject matter the context and connections it needs to be a sensible whole, and he mixes it with advice that I believe encourages healthy personal growth and development. Ultimately, I can’t evaluate whether his wisdom is good except by checking it against my own storehouse; but it looks good to me, and he displays casual familiarity with things I have only come to understand recently, after much thought. There is objective reason to think he knows what he’s talking about: He had the direct experience of decades helping troubled people in clinical practice, as well as much indirect knowledge about humanity from studying religious and folkloric traditions. Overall, I got the strong impression that following Carl Jung’s advice and using his models for practical things and self-development will not steer you wrong, and this seems like a valuable thing in spiritual writing.

Anyway, that’s the upshot The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: The Collective unconscious is a boring and unobjectionable idea, archetypes are cool and probably useful, if a little questionable as scientific entities, and both are compatible with materialism if that’s something you care about. Unexpectedly, neither concept was very relevant to my primary reason for reading this book, namely, religion and belief. This is one case where it seems better to dive right in to what you want to learn, without seeking background first.

—–About the book—–

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is volume 9, part 1 in Jung’s collected works. (I thought “volume” meant “physical book”, so don’t ask me why it’s in two parts.) It contains a series of essays and lectures, most of which are also printed elsewhere. I read a majority of them for this review, which I estimate works out to ~65% of the book by word count. They were:

**Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
*The Concept of the Collective Unconscious
*Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept
**Concerning Rebirth
Psychological Aspects of the Kore
The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales
**Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation

A * indicates that the essay was useful for understanding archetypes and/or the collective unconscious as a concept; ** indicates further that I found the essay helpful on the topic of religion. The unmarked essays focused on particular archetypes and how/when they come up, and so were not much help for my purposes. There were five other essays I didn’t read, most of them on the smaller side, because they did not seem useful to me:

-Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype
-The Psychology of the Child Archetype
-Of the Psychology of the Trickster Figure
-A Study in the Process of Individuation
-Concerning Mandala Symbolism

I might go back and reread some of these later though, when I’m no longer on a specific mission. The archetype-studies are fun and remind me a bit of meditations on major arcana tarot cards, only with citations and better research.

My translation was by R.F.C. Hull, part of the Bollingen Series published by Princeton University Press; I ordered it from Amazon for $28. The Paperback is quality and has Jung’s name in large print on the cover, which can be a decent conversation-starter if you take it places or leave it out when friends visit. It looks impressive on a bookshelf, and it contains pictures of pretty mandalas on glossy photopaper. Most of the texts were not too hard to find publicly available online, but I won’t link them here because I’m not sure about the book’s the copyright status. The paragraph numbers reproduced in the quotes count up from the beginning of the book, and do not reset to 0 between essays.

[1] Respire and spirit both trace to the same Latin word, spiritus, which itself meant breath, divine wind, vigor, or character/disposition.In translations from early Christian writings in Greek, Spiritus was the Latin rendering of Greek pneuma, which itself possessed both of these senses. That puts the connection firmly as far back as Mithraic rituals, which is enough to make my point here, but I do not know how much further the connection might go. The Greeks incorporated much into their mythology from Near Eastern cultures, and perhaps this link was among them. Genesis had God breathing life into Adam in c. 400-1000 B.C, and the story certainly predates its commitment to parchment.

Or it might not be borrowed from Semitic cultures. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces spiritus and pneuma back respectively to PIE roots *(s)peis, to blow, and *pneu, to breathe. The Porto-Indo-Europeans’ chief god was a sky-father who controlled the weather, and they lived on a steppe: A place where the sky is huge, the climate dry, the temperature alternates harshly between extremes, and the wind can tear across the plains with tremendous speed prior to vigorous storms. In such circumstances, the idea of a divinity sending down some blessing or vigorous power in the form of wind is quite a natural one.

On the other hand, if the mythological connection springs from the collective unconscious as a part of human nature, then its origin being lost in the mists of time is exactly what we would expect.

[2] I was curious and did a bit of web searching for information about “soul-atoms”, but couldn’t turn anything up. Jung cites two books on this matter, which I do not intend to investigate, but I include the citations here for the reader’s interest:

Spencer, Sir Walter B., and Gillen, Francis James. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London, 1904. “pp.331 and elsewhere.”

and

Crawley, Alfred Ernest. The Idea of the Soul. London, 1909. pp. 87f.